by Kate Quinn
“Aren’t you tired of it, Nina? The dark, the jitters, the bad dreams?”
Never, Nina thought. She was heartsick and grief-sick and staggering with exhaustion; she had the usual postflight headache, and a ferocious crash coming when her Coca-Cola tablets wore off—but she already wanted to get back in the air.
Back to the hunt.
“HOW IS IT?” Galina asked anxiously, passing Nina her tea. She really did look about twelve.
“What do you mean how is it? It’s airdrome tea; it’s ice cold and tastes like gasoline.” Nina signed off on the release the mechanic had stood on the wing to thrust under her nose.
“Can we give her a name?” Galina gave their U-2 a pat as she climbed into the navigator’s seat. “Some pilots do.”
“She’s just a U-2. Take the stick when we reach altitude, we’ll give you some practice—” and off they were, following Yelena and the Rusalka up into the clouds. “Light touch, don’t yank . . .”
They were flying missions over the peninsula all that month, coming back to barracks near Krasnodar. Not even a repurposed shed this time but dugout trenches with plank beds, lines strung up so wet underwear and stockings could dry above the mud. Nina took to sleeping on the airfield under old plane covers, arm thrown over her eyes to block the light, hoping Yelena could join her. Long days and lack of proper barracks meant fewer places they could meet alone.
“I’m being sent out on detail,” Yelena said in August, looking bleak. “Eight crews are joining the Black Sea Fleet battalions.”
Nina’s heart clutched. “When will you be back?”
“When we take Novorossiysk.” Yelena kissed her, soft and reassuring, but Nina wasn’t reassured. That was rough flying between sea and mountains, storms blowing off the water . . . she pulled Yelena to her fiercely, burying her face in that delicate collarbone. Promise you’ll come back, she thought, but no one promised that. Yelena went off to Novorossiysk; Nina stayed on flying runs over the peninsula, the Crimea, the wave-shattered coast along the Sea of Azov.
“Nina Borisovna, you will assist the training squadron in your off hours,” Bershanskaia informed her, scribbling at a stack of paperwork. The Forty-Sixth trained replacements within the regiment, pilots training their navigators, navigators training their mechanics, mechanics training their armorers. Any position could be filled within the regiment; they took pride in that. “Four mechanics have just moved up.”
Nina saluted. “Get some sleep, Comrade Major.” They were all frank-spoken with each other, regardless of rank. It shocked the officers from other regiments, but the Night Witches just shrugged.
Bershanskaia smiled, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray made of a flattened shell case. “We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”
We’re dying off fairly fast now, Nina thought. That night, it was almost her.
Galina read off the headings that evening, giving the night’s target along the peninsula coast. Nina still felt strange to be the one listening to the headings rather than giving them. A night’s uneventful flying, seven runs. “Very low overcast coming in off the water,” Galina began as Nina made the wide returning turn on the last run.
“I see it.” Nina dived down, but the gray masses of cloud snowballed before her eyes as the wind picked up. She pressed the U-2 lower through the dense cloud . . . lower . . .
“Correct course sixty degrees west.” Galina sounded nervous. “We’re pushing out too far—”
“I need to get under this cloud.” The U-2 bounced like a ball in a chute. Three hundred meters, two hundred, and finally the plane bottomed out under the low hover of cloud. Fuck your mother, Nina thought in a sudden drench of panic. They were over the sea. Nina craned her head frantically but there was nothing in sight but lashing, roiling water, no land visible in this dense overhang. “Find me a heading. Find me land—”
“We came too far east, over the water instead of—”
“I don’t care where the water is, just get me off it!”
The clouds whirled, shaking the U-2, pressing them down. Under a hundred meters, fifty . . . Nina watched the altimeter, hypnotized. West, Galina was shouting through the interphones, set a heading west—but the winds blew dead east, pushing them back as they strained forward, controls fighting Nina’s grip. The U-2 sat almost motionless in the air, the forward kick of the engine canceled by the backward thrust of the wind, wobbling just to maintain altitude.
If we run out of fuel and fall into the sea, she thought in stark terror, we’ll sink and drown before we can fight out of our cockpits.
Pull yourself together, rusalka bitch, her father growled. But all Nina could think was that she had run thousands of kilometers west to get away from the lake, had run clear into the sky to get away from the lake, and she was still going to die by drowning.
The altimeter needle lay flat at the bottom of the dial. Eight meters, she thought, we are at eight meters’ height. Hovering just above the roiling dark water, roiling dark clouds pushing down from above, squeezed between a giant’s palms—
“We’re not going to drown,” Galina shouted through the interphones. She had, Nina realized distantly, been shouting it for quite some time. “We’re not going to drown.”
Yes, we are, Nina thought. The bigger waves were splashing up and wetting their wings; she could actually see it.
“We’re not going to drown.”
Yes, we are. Her stick arm was a stiff screech of pain all the way up to the shoulder. It would be easier to stop fighting the wind, give the rudder a good hard yank to one side and plant them propeller first in the water. Do it hard enough and they’d both be unconscious before they drowned. Nina stared at the sea, hypnotized.
“We’re not going to drown.” Galina repeated it, a monotonous rhythmic chant. “We’renotgoingtodrown.” She repeated it until the ferocious tearing of the wind relented just a little, repeated it as Nina still sat frozen. It was Galina who bore the U-2 around into the teeth of the breeze and clawed some wobbling height, still chanting “We’re not going to drown.” She was still repeating it when Nina came out of her terrified daze and took the stick, bringing them down on the first available spot on the abandoned coast. They both sagged in their cockpits as the engine spun down, and finally Galina shut up. Nina clawed free of her safety harness and turned to look at her navigator. The girl was ghastly pale, head thrown back and eyes closed; her cockpit was spattered with vomit. “We didn’t drown,” Nina told her weakly.
No thanks to you, rusalka, her father said. Nina knew she deserved the contempt. Shivers of terror were still coursing through her, but that terrible deep freeze that had held her motionless and staring at the water was gone. She wondered if Yelena had felt like that when she’d hallucinated the Messerschmitt.
You had a panic. Everyone has them. Nina had been the one to tell Yelena that.
“Thank you,” she told her new navigator now.
“Yelena Vassilovna said you hated flying over water,” Galina said surprisingly. “She said if we ever got in a bad way over seas, I should tell you we wouldn’t drown and be ready to jump on the stick.”
“She told you that?”
“I asked her everything that would help me fly for you. You’re my pilot,” Galina said as though it were obvious.
Nina felt herself smiling. “What are you afraid of, Galya?” Calling her navigator by nickname for the first time.
A long pause. “The black vans.”
Nina nodded. Normally one didn’t speak of such things, but here on the barren edge of the sea there was no poisonous listening ear to hear and report. “They came for my uncle seven years ago,” Galya went on. “His factory foreman denounced him as an agitator. He went to the Lubyanka and never came out. My aunt had to denounce him too or be taken herself. That’s what I fear, the van stopping at my door.”
“I can’t protect you from that,” Nina said. The van could come for anyone, for the smallest of reasons or no reason at all. “The van can’t come for
you in the air, Galya, so what do you fear up here?”
“Those new German shells, the ones with red and green and white tracers. When they split into dozens of little projectiles in the dark, I think of flowers . . .” Galya shuddered.
“Well, if we see flowers and you freeze, I’ll get you out of it,” Nina promised. “We stall out over water again, you’ll get me out of it. In the meantime, you can fly home.”
Galina brightened. They wobbled home, and it wasn’t till they returned that they learned another U-2 had gone down in the sea, in the same low-rolling overhang of cloud.
Sixteen women died in all, over that summer and fall. Nina hoped all this territory was worth it, this unseen ground they were clawing back from the Germans. She couldn’t even see the gains they were dying for, just that it was soaked in blood.
“Who are these new girls?” Yelena asked in bewilderment when she came back from Novorossiysk in October, looking around the barracks. “They’re so young!”
“New arrivals.” Girl volunteers to the front, every one of them round-eyed at the sight of the gaunt female pilots in their bulky overalls, more and more of which were pinned with Orders of the Red Banner and Orders of the Red Star. Nina and Yelena both had one of each now, and there were whispers that the first set of HSUs were going to be passed down—the gold stars of Hero of the Soviet Union, highest decoration in the Motherland.
“My pilot sleeps with a razor under her pillow and she knows Comrade Stalin,” Nina overheard Galina bragging to one of the new recruits, who looked both terrified and impressed, and Nina would have laughed herself sick if she hadn’t been already sick with worry over Yelena.
“You look terrible,” she said frankly.
“That’s a nice thing to tell a girl.” Yelena made a face, teasing. She was skin and bone, her complexion ashy. The autumn dawn was icy, but cold was their friend; no one now lingered on the airfield when the night’s flying was done. Everyone had retreated to the dugout, warming hands at the oil-drum fire, and Nina and Yelena drifted back out to the Rusalka, lying entwined under the wing. Always the Rusalka, never Nina’s new nameless U-2. She was a nice plane, tough and reliable, but she wasn’t their plane.
“Was it bad, flying over Novorossiysk?” Nina persisted, turning over so they lay nose to nose. Because Yelena’s hands had a fine tremor they hadn’t had two months ago.
“Not so bad. I heard things got rough here—”
“Nothing difficult,” Nina said.
They smiled at each other. Both lying, Nina knew. What else do we lie to each other about? she thought, but pushed that away.
“The war will be done soon.” Yelena sounded more certain than she had in the summertime. “And then we’ll have it.”
“What?”
“Us together in Moscow. I picture it whenever I need something to keep me on course. Don’t you?” She nudged Nina. “Imagine us, sleeping at night again rather than during the day, chasing babies around the floor after breakfast . . .”
“Do I have to tell you how babies happen, Miss Moscow Goody? Because if you think anything we do is going to help on that front—” Tickling Yelena between the breasts.
Yelena laughed, swatting her hand away. “There’ll be so many orphans after the war who need mothers. Don’t you want children?” she asked as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
No, Nina thought. “I never thought about it,” she hedged.
“I know what you’re thinking—”
I doubt it.
“—you’re thinking we won’t be able to hide things out in real life. Hide this.” A little swirling gesture encompassing the two of them, their private world under the Rusalka’s wing. “But we can, believe me. It’s not like when men go together, people being suspicious. There will be so many widows living together after the war, pooling supplies and pensions—as long as we’re raising children for the Motherland and we each have a story about a fiancé who died in the war, no one will look at us twice for sharing an apartment. We could be civil pilots, or teach aviation.”
Her voice was eager, her cheeks pink. She’d been thinking about this a long time, Nina realized with a sinking stomach.
“It won’t be like how we grew up, Ninochka—shortages, queuing for fuel, never being able to get shoes. The world’s going to be different after the war, Moscow’s going to be different—”
Worse, Nina thought. After years of starvation and war, it’s going to be worse.
“—and we’re not just air club fliers anymore. We’re decorated officers of Marina Raskova’s eaglets. You’ve met Comrade Stalin.” That damned awe in Yelena’s voice again. “We’ll have no shortage of recommendations when we apply to join the Party, you’ll see. Then we can pull strings for an apartment we don’t have to share with three other families, get plush jobs at the Zhukovsky Academy or anywhere we like.”
She was gabbling now, all hope. Such good, normal, usual things to want. Probably most of the women in the regiment cherished similar dreams for after this war was done.
“It’s not too much to want, Ninochka. You, me, a home, a baby or two, a job flying civil routes instead of bombing runs.” Yelena leaned forward, brushed her lips over Nina’s. “All we have to do is survive the war, and we can have it.”
“Maybe it isn’t too much to want,” Nina said. “But what if I want something else?”
“What?” Yelena smoothed her cheek. “Do you not want to live in Moscow? We don’t have to, I know you don’t like it—”
I don’t like Moscow, or Irkutsk, or the Old Man, Nina thought. I’ve come thousands of kilometers across Russia, and I haven’t seen any part of it I liked except the skies. She was happy flying over it, because then she didn’t have to look at it: a land of implacable crowds and draped bunting, bread queues and the eternal droning of loudspeakers, ruled over by a wolf.
When the war is over, what do you want? Yelena was still waiting for her answer. Such a simple question, surely the simplest question of all for soldiers at war. Everyone dreamed of what came after the bloodshed was done. Everyone, apparently, but Nina, who could honestly say she’d never given it a single thought. Who had never thought at all beyond the present, beyond a night spent flying and a morning spent kissing Yelena. Who would take this strange, perilous, nighttime life in the regiment over any other in the world, even with all its griefs and its terrors.
What do I want, Yelenushka? Nina thought, looking at her lover’s eager smile. I want to fly missions, hunt Germans, and love you. And the only thing on both your list and mine is you.
Chapter 31
Jordan
June 1950
Boston
You have no desire at all to marry Garrett Byrne. Anneliese’s wry comment still reverberated even as Jordan tried to busy herself behind the shop counter.
Of course I want to marry Garrett, she told herself. I’ve got a half-carat’s worth of sparkle on my left hand proving how much I want to marry him.
Ruth’s voice drifted up from the nearest display case. “May I hold the violin?”
“It’s not a toy, cricket,” Jordan said absently. “It’s a late-nineteenth-century copy of a Mayr.”
“But it’s small,” Ruth begged. “It’s my size.”
“That’s a half-size violin, Mr. Kolb says.”
“Very pleased to meet you at last, Mrs. McBride.” Tony Rodomovsky’s voice issued from the front of the shop, where he stood with Anneliese in her black suit. “My condolences for your recent loss . . .”
Anneliese murmured some reply as Jordan bent back over her own work: trimming down one of the prints of her dad she’d made late last night. It was a good portrait, very good—she could judge her own work well enough to know that.
You could do something with that shot, the thought whispered. Something professional.
Like what? she answered herself. You aren’t a professional. She was a girl with a nice job behind this counter, and an entertaining hobby in the basement. In sprin
g she was going to be a wife with a nice husband going off to work every morning, and an entertaining hobby kept in the spare room.
“I’ve prepared the weekly report if you would like to see it, Mrs. McBride.” Tony came back to the register behind Anneliese in her full black skirts, black jacket, and little black hat with the spotted net chicly angled over her eyes. “Just a moment.”
“What do you think?” Jordan asked her stepmother as Tony vanished into the back room, remembering Anneliese had dropped by to give the new clerk a final look.
“He seems quite charming. If you’re satisfied with his references, I see no reason not to keep him on; you’re a good judge of character.” Anneliese gave Ruth a quick hug and looked at the shop clock. “I’m meeting with your father’s lawyer about the will; can you keep Ruth until closing? Oh, my—” Seeing the photograph of Dan McBride.
“Isn’t it him to the life?”
Anneliese nodded, tears in her eyes. Jordan gave her black-gloved hand a squeeze across the counter. Tony came back with the report, and Anneliese took it distractedly. “We’re glad you’ve joined us, Mr. Rodomovsky—” and she was gone in a waft of lilac scent.
“Phew,” Tony said. “I was shaking.”
“You were not. You think there isn’t a lady on earth you can’t charm, Mr. Rodomovsky.”
“Tony,” he said, as he usually did. “Every time you say Mr. Rodomovsky, I look around for my father and start counting up my most recent sins.”
He was leaning on the counter giving Jordan the same smile he gave all the ladies who set foot in this shop—though it came, she had noticed, with variations. The boyish grin went to ladies over sixty, who pinched his cheek (then bought something). The roguish grin went to ladies over forty, who lidded their eyes speculatively (then bought something). The full grin included both the crinkled eyes and creases in the cheeks, and it went to ladies over twenty who blushed (then bought something). Even Anneliese had gotten the modified grin with the sympathetic edge, given her widow’s weeds, and had responded to it. Tony Rodomovsky probably flirts with a hat rack if there isn’t anything else around, Jordan thought with considerable amusement. She was glad Anneliese had approved him, because he was certainly good for business.