by Kate Quinn
Jordan felt bad about that, she truly did, but she stamped the feeling down ruthlessly. She was not going to get pushed down the aisle because of guilt. “We’re the ones getting married. Don’t you want to be sure before we say I do?”
“I’m sure.”
“Really?” Jordan paused. “You’ve never told me I love you.”
He looked confused. “Yes, I have.”
“When was the last time you looked me in the eyes and said I love you when we weren’t in bed and in the middle of—”
“Lower your voice!”
“We’re partway underground, there’s no way Anna can hear us.”
“And what’s she have to say about this?” Scowling.
“Absolutely nothing.” And what a glorious feeling that was. To make her own decisions, no input from adults who were absolutely certain they knew better than she did what to do with her life. “I’m getting an allowance, the same I’d have gotten if I went to college. And I have my own savings. I’ll rent an apartment—” Jordan broke off. Too many details for Garrett, who was looking angry again.
“You know something?” He jabbed a finger at her. “You’ve never said I love you either.”
Jordan leaned against the darkroom table, tracing its edge. Her pear-shaped diamond sparkled under the harsh lighting. “Were you faithful to me, Garrett?” she asked. “When you went off to war, you gave me your high school ring and made me promise not to go out with anyone else. Did you?”
He started to say something. Jordan raised her eyebrows. He cleared his throat.
“I didn’t go on a date with anyone else,” he mumbled.
She waited.
“But some of the guys, they said those of us who had come straight out of high school deserved a good time. So we wouldn’t . . .”
Get shipped overseas and die without ever getting laid, Jordan supplied silently. “That’s about what I thought.”
“It was just the one time . . . Okay, it was twice. But I thought you’d be mad, so—”
“I’m not mad.” Jordan sighed.
He brightened. “Really?”
“Garrett,” Jordan said gently, “isn’t it a problem that I don’t mind? If I loved you madly, wouldn’t I be a tiny bit hurt, or jealous, or something?”
Silence stretched.
“You like me a lot,” Jordan went on. “I like baseball and we always had fun in the backseat of your car, and I didn’t push for a ring or tell you to stop flying. You liked that.” So many things had crystallized this week, down here in the red glare of the safelight as she worked. So many things. “I like you, Garrett. I really do. You’re kind and sweet and you make me laugh, and you never told me I had to stop taking pictures . . . or thought I was a tramp because I liked rolling around in the backseat as much as you. But—”
“What are you getting at?” Garrett said.
“We’re good together.” Jordan made herself go on before she lost her nerve. “But is it love, or is it habit?”
A long silence. Jordan looked at him, steadily. Garrett looked at his folded arms. Finally he looked up.
“I’d like my ring back.”
Well, Jordan thought, that answers that. She pried the diamond off her finger, feeling a lump in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she began, but he turned around and started for the stairs, back straight and angry.
He stopped at the door, looking down from the top of the stairs. “I’ll break it to my family if you break it to yours.”
“Tell your mother I’m sorry. She’s been wonderful to me, I—” Jordan stopped before guilty babbling set in. She looked away, down at A Pilot at Work. “Garrett . . .”
“What?” His voice was as stiff as his back.
“When you took me flying, you looked so happy.” She pointed to the photograph of him. “That’s the real Garrett Byrne. The one in the overalls, not the one standing in front of me now in a suit. You should go back to flying, not—”
“Take your advice and shove it,” Garrett said and slammed out of the darkroom.
Jordan let out a long breath, looking down at her naked ring finger. Her eyes burned, and she wondered if she was going to cry. Five years, she thought. Five years.
“Back to work, J. Bryde,” she said aloud, blotting her eyes. “This career isn’t going to start itself.”
Chapter 34
Nina
July 1944
Polish front
The Germans are falling back! Clear into Poland—” But the Fritzes fought, clawing for every step.
A frigid winter had gone by, teeth chattering behind mole-fur masks on night runs; Nina’s navigator, Galya, lost a toe to frostbite, trying to laugh it off: “How are my dancing sandals going to look?” Yelena got clipped through the calf by ground fire soon after the year turned, and Nina’s heart climbed up her throat to see her lover come limping off the field with one arm around her navigator Zoya’s neck for support. “It’s nothing,” Yelena reassured even as Nina crashed to her knees and began running her fingers over the exit wound. “Straight through the muscle and out, stop fussing!”
Spring melted into summer, less flying, more sleep, but they all seemed to have lost their ability to sleep longer than a few hours at a stretch. “I get such headaches,” Zoya cried, and Nina tried not to feel the prick of jealousy when Yelena hugged her tight and crooned reassurance. You were close to your navigator when you were a pilot; it was inevitable. You loved her. Don’t love her more than me, Yelenushka. Red-haired Zoya, whose husband had died fighting in Stalingrad, who had two children in Moscow living with her mother—children whose pictures Yelena exclaimed over wistfully . . .
She doesn’t love anyone more than you, Nina told herself. They still crept off to lie together under the Rusalka’s wing, kissing and talking nonsense. Nothing had changed.
Only because you don’t bring up anything that might upset the balance.
They were flying over Poland by summer: a land of smoke and ruin and mud. A land that had been raped, Nina thought. The summer rains had churned the ground into a deep, malevolent glue that sucked on U-2 wheels and bogged fuel trucks. In their crude dugouts, the walls streamed water and the mud came up to the shin. “But look at this—” Yelena held out a fragile red flower. “Corn poppies. I found some blooming in the field behind the airdrome.”
Touched almost to tears, Nina stared at the poppy already wilting on the stem. I’m so tired.
Does anyone care, rusalka? Nina’s father sneered. So she kissed Yelena, threaded the poppy through her overall front, swallowed another Coca-Cola tablet, and kept going.
“IT SHOULD BE a crystal glass, not a soup can—”
“We don’t have a crystal glass. We’re lucky Bershanskaia let us have the vodka!”
The Night Witches laughed, oil smeared and radiant, exhaustion evaporated. The word had come down as they trooped into the canteen at dawn: Nina Markova and four other pilots were to be made Heroes of the Soviet Union.
It wouldn’t be official until the ceremony, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t make the traditional toast. Yelena and four others had been the first to get their HSUs a few months back; now they jostled to the front and stripped off their stars. Yelena dropped hers with a clink into the small empty soup can in Nina’s hands, and Nina’s four fellow pilots held out soup cans to receive borrowed stars too. The entire regiment filed past grinning, everyone bearing a tin cup with the daily two hundred grams of vodka allotted to pilots. Normally they let the alcohol go to the men, Bershanskaia’s orders, but today the Night Witches poured all their vodka into the cans of the incipient Heroes, until the gold stars were covered to the rim.
“Drink, drink!” The cry went up, and Nina downed the canful of vodka in one gulp, Yelena’s gold star clicking against her teeth. She surfaced dizzily, and Yelena and the other Heroes lifted cans of their own, crying “Welcome, sestra!” and bolting down the rest of the regiment’s vodka. The others didn’t grudge it, they all crowded around cheering—Nina f
elt herself kissed so many times her cheeks glowed. She was dizzy with vodka and love. It’s just a medal, she thought as she tried to press the star back into Yelena’s hand, but Yelena pinned it crookedly to the breast of her flight overalls, laughing. Wear it for the day, get used to the weight! Yelena looked so beautiful with her cheeks flushed like corn poppies—“You’re beautiful too,” Yelena whispered back. Nina realized she must have said it aloud . . .
When the alarm blared, she looked up almost sleepily, too warm and content to be startled. But the canteen doors flung wide and there were three panting ground crew shouting. “Fighters coming over the field, the U-2s haven’t been camouflaged yet, get them up—” and pilots and navigators alike jostled out of the canteen, sprinting into the pink-streaked dawn. Nina dropped the soup can and ran blindly after her pilot’s flying dark hair. Yelena was already in the cockpit and the Rusalka’s engine roaring when Nina toppled herself nearly headfirst into the rear. Someone shouted, and the first spider shape of a Messerschmitt appeared. A U-2 to their left took off east over the nearest line of trees, another lifted to the north and dived up for cloud cover, and then there were U-2s rising into the sky in every direction. No orderly conveyor belt; everyone simply flinging the planes into the air and escaping every which way. The Rusalka rose like a bird, straight into the rising sun.
“Do we have the night’s coordinates?” Nina nearly asked, sheer rote habit, and blinked. Something wasn’t right here. She fumbled with the interphones.
“Whazzat?” Yelena sounded curiously fuzzy. The Messerschmitt passed over the airdrome; the strafing roar of its fire followed, and Yelena was yanking the Rusalka upward as fast as she could. “What?”
“Oh.” Nina figured it out. “I’m in the wrong plane.” Galya had headed for their U-2, but Nina had tracked blindly after Yelena and the Rusalka. It struck her as funny, and she giggled.
“Nina?”
Nina’s ears buzzed. Was the plane weaving? “Fuck your mother,” she called out. “I’m drunk.” She’d always been able to hold her vodka like a Siberian, like a Markov, but she hadn’t swallowed a drop in months. The whole world was slipping and sliding. “Are you drunk?”
“No,” Yelena called back.
The Rusalka was definitely weaving. The airdrome had fallen away rapidly below, they were rising into tatters of pink cloud. Disappear in the sky and they’d be safe from any more Messers; they had the fuel to wait it out in the air, not like the time they were chased down. Safe, Nina thought as the airfield disappeared. “What heading are we on?”
Pause. “I don’t know.”
“The compass—”
“The compass is all blurry.” Another pause. “I’m drunk,” Yelena said, and suddenly they were both howling with laughter in their cockpits. A canful of vodka on an empty stomach after a long night’s flying and no sleep . . . We’re drunk as polecats, Nina thought, and that was even funnier. Flying with Yelena instead of Galya; flying in the day instead of the night; everything was upside-down. Then Nina realized they actually were upside-down; Yelena was looping over a tail of cloud. “Got it!” she whooped.
They were up above the cloud floor now, flying along in the rosy morning. Nina squinted over the side of her cockpit, wondering how long it would be before the Messers abandoned the attack. “’Nother U-2 below.”
Yelena waggled their wingtips, and the plane below waved back. Nina took the stick—why not, they had to burn some time before risking descent—and they played with the other U-2 for a while, chasing back and forth. The other plane always stayed below, rippling along the cloud floor . . . “Oh,” Nina realized. “S’not another plane. It’s our shadow.”
They went off into gales of laughter again, and Nina fought her way out of the safety harness and half stood up, leaning into the rigid airstream. “Don’t you climb on the wing again,” Yelena shouted, but Nina stood up just enough to tug Yelena’s hair back and kiss her dizzily, warmly, besottedly in the morning wind. “Let’s land,” she shouted back. “Because we’re so drunk we’ll end up over Berlin.”
Yelena brought them down with a lurch, jouncing along the muddy runway to a halt. “Was that a landing?” Nina wondered, climbing out. “Or did a German shoot us down?”
“Shut up.” Yelena giggled, sliding from her cockpit, and would have slid straight to the ground in a puddle if Nina hadn’t caught her around the waist.
“Get up, rabbit!” Nina dragged Yelena down the runway as the ground crew hauled camouflage toward the Rusalka. “We can’t go back to the canteen like this, I can’t look Bershanskaia in the eye!” They managed to sign off what was necessary, then slunk off giggling behind the temporary airdrome.
“Poppies!” Yelena breathed. The field behind the airdrome was a weed patch, but red blooms had threaded themselves through. She bent over a patch of red flowers and staggered, toppling headfirst among the poppies and taking Nina with her. They couldn’t think of a reason to get up so they just lay there in a patch of rye, twined up and kissing, Nina on her back staring up at the sky. Everything she had seen of Poland had been made hideous by mud and smoke and ruins, but here in this tiny frame of vision staring straight upward, it was beautiful. A pure blue sky, framed on either side by fronds of rye and waving poppies, Yelena’s head resting heavy on her breast.
“We should get back,” Yelena whispered eventually.
“Don’t want to.” Nina twined her fingers through Yelena’s hair.
“We have to, rabbit.”
They disentangled and made their way back to the airdrome. The vodka had, for the most part, worn off. “I could sleep for a week,” Nina said with a yawn, but before they could turn for the barracks, Nina heard herself being hailed. “Comrade Lieutenant Markova!”
She turned, saw the approaching figure of the regiment’s deputy commander, saluted with a smile. The other woman did not smile back. She was grave at the best of times—Nina wouldn’t have wanted to carry the burden of being deputy commander and chief of the commanding staff—but now she had a face like winter. Nina felt the last of her vodka euphoria drain away as cold tendrils of dread crawled along her veins.
“You’re to see Comrade Major Bershanskaia at once.”
“What’s wrong?” Nina took a step forward. She couldn’t think of anything that would cause such an expression but death: a U-2 crashed or missing. “Has someone not returned? Did Galya—”
“Report to Comrade Major Bershanskaia,” the order was repeated. Nina was suddenly aware of eyes on her all over the airdrome. Heart suddenly pounding, Nina tugged her hand free of Yelena’s puzzled arm and turned toward Bershanskaia’s temporary office. Where she stood at attention in her flight overalls pinned with a borrowed gold star, crushed poppy petals still tangled in her hair, and learned that her world was at an end.
AT FIRST SHE DIDN’T KNOW what was happening. She stood baffled as Bershanskaia gazed down at her desk and talked in circles.
“I’m sure you understand that in times of war there is increased vigilance, Nina Borisovna. Enemies of the state uncovered every day.”
Nina nodded, since a response seemed to be required.
“Enemies of the Motherland are found even in the most remote regions. Distance is no protection. We must all continually manifest the greatest vigilance”—she was clearly quoting someone, Nina didn’t know who—“in relation to the enemies and spies that secretly penetrate into our ranks.”
Pause. Nina nodded again, confusion mounting.
“Very recently there was a denunciation as far east as Baikal. A man denounced as an enemy of the state.” Still, Bershanskaia would not meet Nina’s gaze. “A tiny village not far from Listvyanka.”
Alarms began blaring through Nina’s skull. “Oh?”
“Perhaps you knew him.” Bershanskaia lifted her head at last; her eyes bored into Nina. “I feel certain you do. Isn’t everyone family in such small places?”
She emphasized family with nothing but a flare of her eyes. Nina stood gripping her
sealskin cap as implications crashed like exploding shells. “Not everyone is related out by the Old Man,” she managed to say. “It’s a huge lake, after all. Many villages. Did the man have a wife, children?”
“Grown children, I’m told.” Again that emphasis with the eyes. Children. “Though any children would be wise to distance themselves from a father accused of speaking anti-Communist rhetoric, and making inflammatory statements about Comrade Stalin.”
Your father has been denounced. The words hung there, silent and hideous. Papa, Nina thought. So often he spoke up in her head, snarling and spitting. Now he was silent. What did you say? Did the wrong someone finally overhear one of your rants? Nina supposed, remotely, that he was lucky it had taken this long for his mouth to bring him down.
“A warrant has been issued for the man’s arrest.” Bershanskaia cleared her throat. “Enemies of the state must be punished with utmost severity.”
“Is it—is it known who denounced the man?”
“No.”
Was it my fault? Nina had met Comrade Stalin’s eyes at Marina Raskova’s funeral, had thought of cutting his throat, and he had paused. Not long—but he had paused. Had he noted her name in passing beside the running wolves sketched in his notebook? Or simply remembered that name when he saw it raised beside an award for a gold star? Was all of this happening simply because the General Secretary disliked the way the smallest of Raskova’s eaglets had met his eyes? He’d ordered men killed for less . . .
Nina swept the thought away. What does it matter how it had happened? It happened. Whether from the Boss’s intervention or a simple report from a neighbor, her father had been denounced. Nina’s ears buzzed with the sound of that word, as though she’d been deafened by tracer fire. Bershanskaia’s voice faded in and out.
“. . . the innocent, of course, have nothing to fear at the hands of . . .”
Nina almost laughed. Innocence did not mean safety; everyone knew that. Her father was doomed; Bershanskaia knew it. And Nina’s father wasn’t innocent. Any of his ranting monologues over the years were bad enough to earn a bullet.