My mother was baffled when she looked at my advanced marksmanship certificate. “What is such a thing good for, malyshka?”
“It taught me not to miss,” I said honestly.
“At targets?”
“At anything.”
That is my secret, if you’re curious. You are, aren’t you? Everyone is, when they first meet me. Even Eleanor Roosevelt wondered, when we met later on the steps of the White House in the August of 1942. I could see it in her eyes: How does a girl like me—a mother, a student, an aspiring historian—become a sniper and kill three hundred and nine men in war? What’s her secret?
Hardly anyone comes right out and asks me. Partly they’re afraid I’ll be annoyed, and add them to my tally—but it’s more than that. People love war heroes, but such heroes are supposed to be clean, honorable, white-cloaked. They fight in the open, in the sunlight, face to face with their enemies. They deal death from the front. When someone (especially a woman) earns their stars as I have done, people shiver. Anyone who walks in the night, melts into shadows, looks through telescopic sights at an unwary face—at a man who doesn’t know I exist, even as I learn that he nicked himself shaving this morning and wears a wedding ring—when I learn all that, and then pull a trigger so he is dead before he hears the report…
Well. Anyone who can do that over and over again, and still manage to sleep at night, must surely have a dark side.
You are not wrong to think that.
But you are wrong about who has such a dark side, waiting to be tapped. You think that surely someone like me is a freak of nature, gnawing a rifle in her cradle, hunting at five and killing wolves at eight, emerging from the wilds of Siberia (it’s always Siberia) fully formed. Americans especially loved to imagine me that way—one of those icy Russian women of dark myth, crawling with bloodied teeth and bloodied hands from some snowbound hell-scape: a killer born.
Then you meet me: little Mila Pavlichenko with her wide smile and her bag crammed with books, a student from Kiev only too happy to tell you how she wants to be a historian someday and show you pictures of her adored, chubby-cheeked son—and you are crestfallen. This is Lady Death? This is the girl sniper from the frozen north? How disappointing.
Or…and this is your second reaction, the one you won’t ever voice…how unsettling. Because if a twenty-six year-old junior librarian has such a dark side to her moon, who else does?
I don’t know.
I only known that mine awoke when I realized there was no room in my life for mistakes. When I realized I could not miss, not ever. When I heard a rifle sing in my hands as I buried a bullet through the neck of a bottle and sent the base flying into diamond shards…and realized who, and how, I could be.
Excerpt from THE DIAMOND EYE by Kate Quinn. Copyright © 2022 by Kate Quinn. Used with permission by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
