***
The boxing ring, such as it was, that she shared with Major Malinovsky was now in Gudermes, Chechnya’s second city and the focus of fighting now that Grozny was more or less pacified. But it was such a world to itself that it could have been anywhere. It had four corners, demarcated by buckets. When she stepped into it, when the lesson began and the fear abated, she found herself in a place of floating sensations. When she sparred with him, time did not exist in any ordinary sense. It slowed down at one level, accelerated at another. She saw what they did with great slowness, sometimes watched their combat develop so slowly she was able to understand what he was teaching her. Sometimes she was able to react before she heard his clear, even tenor telling her how and when to hit, telling her what to do with her feet. She had once read a thriller that described boxing not as a sweet science, there was nothing scientific about it, but entirely art—the holy trinity of hitting, timing, and footwork. That writer was correct and wrong. It was a trinity and it was also holy. But it was also a sweet and holy science. Science as knowledge, and knowledge, and the means of acquiring it, as holy.
The simple fact was that Malinovsky liked to hit people, a lot—but only if there were rules and only if they could hit back, hard and effectively. He had never had the slightest interest in hitting people who couldn’t hit back. So he had begun very gently, as a man working with a woman, as a teacher working with a new student. He never forgot that he had the advantage of thirty kilos of muscle, a quarter of a century of experience, and no serious injuries over someone who had been horribly hurt and permanently damaged. He had quickly realized that she was far more afraid of hurting him than he was of her. At first he thought it absurd, ridiculous. And then he had realized, seeing her scars, watching her move, how tightly she was braced in her lower spine and pelvis, that she knew more about pain than he could imagine. So he began hitting her sooner and harder than he expected. Still, he pulled his punches; he would never hit her with full force. But he also realized that the only way to get her to hit him with conviction was to hit her hard enough to get her attention, then teach her how to discipline her anger and aggression.
By mutual consent, they refused full-power shots at each other’s heads. Olivia avoided low blows, Malinovsky avoided high blows. He had, of course, been worried about her breasts, even though Suslova had helped her find a chest protector in Moscow. Breasts mattered to him. She looked like few women he’d ever seen but she also didn’t look like anything else, either. It could be unnerving.
Malinovsky hit low, a body blow, and Olivia deflected it lower. She watched his gloved fist impact her right hip, had a fraction of a second to prepare herself for appalling pain, and instinctively relaxed hard. The sound of her pelvis and lower spine being jarred loose from each other, the sudden impact of the blow breaking the compression of that ligament, was obscenely loud, like a pistol shot. The pain was there and it was intense, but to Olivia’s surprise, it wasn’t horrible. She could feel the deep heat of blood being able to circulate freely, rather than the sensation of her body being torn apart and set on fire.
For a moment, Malinovsky struggled with the fear that he’d broken bone, possibly even rebroken her hip. Then Olivia backed away, got her right leg under her, feeling the sharp tingles of long-impaired circulation resuming. She let out her breath, circled to the right, then the left. Malinovsky could see the new flexion in her lower back, buttock and upper thigh, could see for the first time the power starting to come up her thighs into her lower back as it should.
“Nice hit,” she said, beginning to breathe normally again.
“Continue?” he asked shakily through his mouth guard.
“Please.”
A few minutes later, Olivia led with her nose into one of Malinovsky’s sharper jabs. The result was inevitable, the bleeding profuse. Fortunately, her nose was not broken, merely…rearranged a bit.