Designated Targets

He supposed he should have wondered at her presence. What with everything that had happened. But the closest he came to curiosity was a very brief, almost preconscious moment of trying to recall what the letters HMS stood for in the name HMS Vanguard. He read that on a small cloth tag on her uniform as they passed. It reminded him vaguely of the initials VMN, standing for the “Highest Measure of Punishment.” Somewhere in Lubianka there was a file with those letters written next to his name, probably in Stalin’s own hand.

By the time the executioner fired a single round into the back of his head half an hour later, Nikita Khrushchev had forgotten all about her.

Natalya found her father in a remarkably good mood for a change. She could not tell him, for to voice her fears would be horribly unpatriotic, but she had been very worried about him. He had lost so much weight in the months after the Nazis invaded that sometimes, coming upon him by surprise in their bare, small four-room apartment, she didn’t recognize him for a second. Not until his haunted, sunken eyes lit upon her. Then they lost that hooded darkness and became the same kind, honey-gold color that she remembered from so many happy days at the dacha, or friendly meals here in their modest apartment.

Papochka was teasing her again, flicking orange peels into her soup bowl, laughing as she squealed in delight. It was a game he often played, one she remembered from the earliest days of her life. He was wont to flick whole scoops of ice cream at her sometimes, even when her friends were at dinner. If fact, especially when her friends visited. He seemed to revel in the embarrassment his childish behavior caused her. But even blushing furiously and wishing he would not tease poor Martha so, she could not help but love him. The same way she adored his hugs and kisses, even though his mustache bristle scratched her skin, and he always smelled of foul tobacco.

He had been so kind since mother died. As she grew into her teenage years, Natalya came to understand how hard that time must have been for him, with so many responsibilities to take him away from the family.

“Papochka, will we have a holiday this year?” she asked.

Her father waved over their housekeeper, Valechka, to clear away the dishes. “You do not like it here?” he mocked his daughter gently. “You would have me send you away again?”

“No, but we have not been on holiday since the war started. And you have sent all of my books away. The apartment is very dark, and it always feels so empty. Can’t we go to the seaside, like we used to? The fascists have gone, haven’t they?”

“Da, my little sparrow,” he said, suddenly looking tired again. “They have gone, but they will come back again. And you would want your papochka to be ready for that, wouldn’t you? We must all be ready for them.”

Natalya was reaching the age when she would soon be able to fight, just like her brother—well, hopefully better than her brother, who was a hopeless lout and a drunk, from all she’d heard. But she knew better than to broach that subject with her father. Since the news of the miracles, he swung between periods of black depression and unrestrained bouts of fevered joy. She worried that it was another symptom of his weariness with the war. He had even turned his legendary temper on her once, storming into the apartment one evening, slapping the homework from her hands, and shaking her violently, shouting, “What were you thinking? What were you thinking, you stupid little girl?”

She had no idea what he was talking about, but the outburst terrified her. So many of their friends and relatives had disappeared that she feared she may have said something irresponsible or ill-considered, something that might have been overheard by a zealous informer. Her father’s rage seemed tainted with a fear that she had never known before, and like the little girl she had once been, she found her parent’s terror infectious. Within minutes, she was shaking and blubbering and begging him to tell her what she’d done. The fire had gone out of his eyes immediately, and he’d collapsed into a chair, awkwardly pulling her down with him, onto his lap, where she had sat for so many hours as a child. He’d held her tightly to him, wiping her hot tears away.

They had never spoken of the incident again.

Her father’s eyes clouded over now as he spoke about the Germans, and she wished she hadn’t mentioned them. He held a piece of black bread in his hands, which he had probably been meaning to throw into her soup. Now it seemed forgotten.

“I received a very good mark for my essay on The Lower Depths,” she ventured, but his mind was gone from the room.

A phone rang, and was answered by Valechka. She said a few words and hung up. “They have called for you,” the housekeeper reported.