***
Later that night, Suslov was feeling pleased with his accomplishments—three very chastened conscripts still alive, bedded down, as it were, under the watchful eye of his best group commander, the well-seasoned Lieutenant Aushan, and no dead Chechen civilians. Then he returned to seek his chief of reconnaissance and found him working out with the American boffin. Whether or not this pleased him, he was not ready to consider. After some minutes, he realized he could no longer evade the question.
Boxing is best described as fighting while dancing. Like Malinovsky, Suslov was a Ryazan graduate, and also like most Ryazan graduates, he’d boxed. He occasionally sparred with Malinovsky, usually to a good-natured no-decision. If he wasn’t in the Jew’s class as a boxer, very few people were. Suslov knew what he was seeing as he watched them. It was immediately, glaringly obvious that the American boffin—Suslov noted with some amusement that he was deliberately avoiding thinking of Olivia by name—could not dance. She was stiff and awkward, moving as though her lower body had been smashed and then been put back together, badly. This meant that, as strong as she was, she did not have, might never have, the hitting power needed to box well. Certainly, she did not yet have the cardiovascular capacity. The running helped and the kettle bell weights, which built both power and flexibility, helped more. But neither was boxing.
Olivia, sweating and breathing hard, was glaring at the man moving in front of her. A massive bull of a man, Malinovsky was also light on his feet. Very light and very agile. Olivia was an engineer. She knew how to build things. She also knew how to destroy them. She could make one small moving object hit another, barely larger. But she could not figure out how to hit the man in front of her, much less hit him hard enough for him to notice.
They were not even close to sparring yet. Malinovsky was just beginning to teach her the basics of footwork and hitting. Olivia had never felt so outclassed in her life and it was a feeling she instinctively abhorred. And yet she liked what she was doing; it felt profoundly right. She found herself wanting very badly to spar, to learn to take a punch and deliver one.
After an hour of work with her, Malinovsky knew what she needed, where her strengths and weaknesses were. Aggression was not something he would have to teach her. And she was horrifyingly tolerant of pain.
“Not bad for an old woman,” he jibed. That was not true at all. Even with all the damage she had clearly sustained, he would have been delighted if most of the soldiers in the brigade were as fit as she was. Age be damned. Sex, also. But he needed to be able to bait her.
“You do know, I have to make you pay for that.”
“I hope you do. I mean that.” He looked at her steadily. “If you meant what you said, I’ll teach you. But you have to be serious. You have been injured, you live with pain.”
“True.”
“How do you control it?”
“Usually, a mixture of codeine and valium which is very light for this level of pain because what is adequate deadens my brain even more than the pain does. Also exercise.”
“Clearly. But now you are looking to take a final step.”
“Yes. I thought it would be running again.”
“No.” The feral smile Malinovsky offered her was also entirely innocent and shockingly sweet. “This is.”
Olivia returned his smile exactly. “Yes.”
“Well then, if you will not see this through, come what may, I have no time to waste, and neither do you. So do not start. If you start, understand me, I will not let you stop, short of actual physical damage.”
“I understand you, Major.”
“You are going to hurt very badly for a long time.”
“Whatever I do, I hurt. So I would rather my pain accomplish something, that my suffering be conscious and purposeful.”
“Then I think at the end you can gain some real relief, both physical and psychological. Although until then, you may hate me.”
“I doubt it, but I understand you, Comrade Major.”
“Then I will see you at 1800 tomorrow night.”
Suslov had kept his distance, watching, listening, saying nothing, until Olivia moved past him, her eyes meeting his. He saw her nostrils flare. She was smelling him, he realized, for the scent of expended ammunition and blood. Not tonight, Doctor. This night has been good to us all, he found himself thinking.
Malinovsky rinsed his mouth out with water.
“Where will you find equipment for her?”
“You might let her use yours.”
It was, Suslov realized, a very intimate idea and he knew it showed in his face. “Why mine?”
“You match well for size,” Malinovsky responded. “And you are already hers, even if you will not trouble her with that knowledge.”
“She carries enough of a burden, without having to worry about what I might want from her as a woman. Are you trying to play matchmaker, Vladimir Alexandrovich?”
“The Shulkhan Arukh says that everyone should be married, unless you are studying Torah, in which case, you can put it off forever. Unless you’re a yeshiva bokher who specializes in the wives of lesser Jews.”
Malinovsky’s recent divorce, Suslov knew, was still a raw wound. People dealt with the shattering of the Soviet world in many ways. His ex-wife, also Jewish by birth, had become increasingly interested in the faith. Malinovsky naively assumed that meant recreational religion classes or, God forbid, folk dancing. Instead, it had meant shaving her head, which he could have gotten used to. After all, his wife was quite pretty and Major Suslova, who was very beautiful, preferred to wear her hair short. But his wife had covered her shaved head, which he had realized was actually quite elegant and was increasingly allowing himself to find erotic, with a wig. To be precise, an ugly wig. Then, at a time when pay was months in arrears and food was closely rationed, she fell into lunacies like separate dishes for meat and milk and a ban on sausages. Then everything had to be strictly Kosher, a financial impossibility even if a Kosher butcher could be found. It seemed they’d all moved to Israel, or at least enough of Russia’s Jews had so that Kosher butcher shops were no longer profitable enterprises.
Disgusted, hoping somehow his wife would come to her senses, Malinovsky had packed and moved into the barracks, finding a spare rack and an empty wall locker, that night. The next morning, she’d made it clear to him that the will of HaShem required that he come to his senses. She would lead him, in accordance with the will of HaShem, or file for divorce and move to Israel.
And that is what came to pass, although his wife emigrated in the company of a yeshiva bokher with whom she had—whether before or after the divorce, remained unclear—taken up. Fine by me, Malinovsky had concluded. The Russian Kosher butcher shops are now in Israel. Also the Jewish Russian psychiatrists. May she enjoy patronizing them all.
“What, me, play match-maker?” asked Malinovsky in mock chagrin. “Let us consider the operational aspects. First, she’s a Jewess. You were married to a Jewess, I was married to a Jewess. We’re both divorced, although only me because my ex-wife is a Jewess. Second, I always wanted a little sister. I have three younger brothers who are all ugly like me. You have a sister. Counting your brother’s widow, you have two. Both wonderful women, neither blessedly possessed of any urge to follow the will of HaShem. This one’s mine. She’s sane. And she’s not little. Third, I really don’t want to fuck her. I want to hit her, fairly hard and fairly often, to the end of teaching her to hit back, very hard indeed. The idea of hitting a woman I fuck makes me sick, and I doubt I could ever fuck a woman I’ve hit.”
“I am reassured that you like to keep your sex and your violence separate.” Suslov’s voice was shaking with the effort to contain his laughter. “Don’t teach her to box, Vladimir Alexandrovich. Teach her to fight. She knows too well how to bear pain. Teach her to use pain to inflict it. Make her stronger and better than she is now.”
“Count on it, my friend.”