by Kate Quinn
Papa—
“Where is he?” The words rasped out of Nina, cutting Bershanskaia off. “My—this enemy of the state.” Speak no names, utter only vague generalities; that was how you talked of these things. A conversation could happen, and yet at the same time not happen at all.
Bershanskaia hesitated. “There are sometimes difficulties as enemies of the state seek to evade their due arrest and retribution.”
Nina did laugh then, a one-note bark of laughter that hurt her throat. So they had not been able to scoop up her wolf of a father. He had probably melted into the taiga as soon as he saw it coming. Would they ever find him, those mass-produced men of the state with their blue caps and endless paperwork? Run, Papa. Run like the wind.
Her ears were still buzzing, but she could hear the drip of water from a leaky corner of the roof. Drip, drip. “What does this mean?” she managed to say. “For those—related?”
“You understand that in such cases warrants are frequently issued for the arrest of an enemy of the state’s family.” Bershanskaia’s gaze bored into Nina again, unblinking. “Due to concerns that anti-Soviet attitudes may have taken root in the family unit.”
“Would—would that be the case here?”
“Yes. Yes, it would.”
Drip. Drip. Drip. The leak was slowing, and Nina stood frozen. A moment ago she had been wishing her father luck—now she thought, I should have cut your throat before I left home. Her father had eluded arrest, so they’d take his family instead. For the first time in years, Nina thought of her siblings. Scattered to the four winds, probably now being rounded up and lobbed into cells. She couldn’t see a troika taking pity on the Markov brood, the feral offspring of an avowed enemy of the state. Hooligans: that was how they would all be categorized. The state was better off without hooligans.
“Children are not all like their father,” she managed to say. “A war record would speak for itself, surely.” Lieutenant N. B. Markova, Order of the Red Banner, Order of the Red Star, six hundred and fifteen successful bombing runs to her name, soon to be Hero of the Soviet Union. Surely it counted for something. “With a substantial record of service—”
But Bershanskaia was shaking her head. “The state does not take chances.”
Well, then, Nina thought.
For a moment they looked at each other, then the major sighed, folding her hands on her desk. “Even a good Soviet citizen feels fear at the prospect of an arrest,” she said, more conversational. “But a good Soviet citizen would know to bow to the will of the sentence, join in denouncing her father, and thus have a chance at saving herself.”
“For what?” Nina asked. Instead of a bullet, getting ten or twenty years in a labor camp near Norilsk or Kolyma?
Bershanskaia switched tack. “We have been lucky to have sterling records among the regiment. If any of my pilots transgressed, I would not be able to speak for them.” She didn’t flinch from Nina’s gaze. “Though it would grieve me.”
Nina jerked a nod. The regiment came first. For any officer, it had to. Bershanskaia already had to be sick with worry over the regiment’s future. Since the very beginning, the ladies of the Forty-Sixth had to justify their existence with every bombing run, had to be perfect—and now they had a rotten apple in their midst, the tainted daughter of an enemy of the state. What would it mean for the regiment? They no longer had Marina Raskova to speak for them as Comrade Stalin’s favorite aviatrix. Nina nodded again without bitterness. Bershanskaia couldn’t speak for her, not one word.
“Acquittal, of course, is entirely possible. You are not wrong that a sterling record of service will weigh in favor.”
It doesn’t matter, Nina thought. Even acquitted, she would never return to the Forty-Sixth—she’d be tainted by association with treason. She was finished here. She’d never fly again with Galya at her back; she’d never sip oily tea in the cockpit between runs; she’d never line up a target behind Yelena and the Rusalka . . .
That was when the agony hit her in the gut as though she’d been stabbed by an icicle. Yelena. What would she do when the van came for Nina? When would it come? It must be soon, if Bershanskaia had sniffed out advance notice of the arrest. It was always in the small hours of the night that enemies of the state were dealt with—the noise of the car stopping, the officious rap on a door. Yelena and the Night Witches would be halfway through a night’s bombing runs at the time Nina was taken away with a guard on each side.
Dimly, she wondered how this was happening. How a day beginning with vodka and laughter and kisses in a pink dawn had come to this evasive recitation of horror and condemnation.
“For the regiment,” Bershanskaia was saying in guarded tones, “things must happen . . . quietly. There mustn’t be trouble.”
The words triggered Nina in pure reflex. She felt her every muscle snap taut, felt the individual hairs on her head like hot wires. Her teeth locked down a feral hiss before it could escape. She remembered Comrade Stalin’s Not one step back. The weight of her father’s razor sat just inside her sleeve—a flick of the wrist would drop it into her hand. She didn’t know what Bershanskaia saw on her face, but the major stiffened.
Nina forced the words out through the gate of her teeth. “I’m no good at quiet, Comrade Major.”
But you are good at trouble, her father whispered in poisonous amusement, evidently deciding to speak up again. You’re a Markov. Trouble always finds us, but we eat trouble alive. Nina was not going to sit meekly in lockup, grounded from flying, until her accusers arrived to take her away. The moment a thug in a blue cap came to take her by the arm, came to take her east, the razor would drop into her hand and she would paint the room red. They’d get her in the end—unlike her father she had nowhere to run—but it wasn’t going to be easy, it wasn’t going to be clean, it wasn’t going to be quiet. Bershanskaia saw that very clearly; she exhaled behind her desk.
Nina stood there shaking, fury copper-bright in her mouth. So, she thought. Haven’t changed much, have you? All the warmth and camaraderie of the Forty-Sixth, all the softening of Yelena’s love . . . it still hadn’t taken very much for Markov’s daughter to come out, the rusalka bitch born in lake water and madness. Not very much at all.
Her knees gave out and she sat down abruptly in the chair before Bershanskaia’s desk. Looking at the clock on the wall she was astounded to see it was late afternoon. Briefing would begin soon for the night’s mission.
She exhaled a shaky breath. “This has been a very informative discussion, Comrade Major. I understand you have been interviewing all your pilots, to urge constant vigilance against saboteurs and enemies of the state.”
“Of course.” Bershanskaia’s voice was cautious. “All of you.”
“My navigator is having dizzy spells,” Nina said. “Comrade Lieutenant Zelenko is unwell and would benefit from a night’s rest.” Nina raised her chin, looked Bershanskaia in the eyes. “As a former navigator, I am more than capable of flying tonight’s runs alone.”
Silence expanded around the words. Nina’s mouth dried out, and suddenly her pulse was fluttering.
“You may fly alone tonight, Comrade Lieutenant Markova. Inform your navigator to report to the infirmary.”
“Thank you, Comrade Major Bershanskaia,” Nina said through numb lips. Saluted, for the last time.
Gravely, slowly, Bershanskaia saluted her back.
And Nina took her leave.
THE WORD HAD already spread.
No one approached Nina as she left Bershanskaia’s office on feet that did not quite feel the Polish mud. Everyone watched in grave silence, eyes speaking volumes as she passed. No one reached out, no one spoke—until she came into the derelict barn that served as a barracks, and Yelena rose from Nina’s cot with swollen eyes.
“Oh, Ninochka—”
The violent pressure of those strong arms nearly broke Nina in half. She sagged in Yelena’s grip, gulping unsteadily as Yelena stroked her hair.
“The word already came
out that Galya’s grounded.” Yelena clearly knew what that meant; her voice was filled with dread. “You’re—you’re going up alone?”
Nina nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“Don’t,” Yelena whispered. “Fight the charges. It’s all a mistake. They won’t condemn a Hero of the Soviet Union! If you appeal—”
Of course Yelena with her shining belief in the system would think acquittal a simple matter of innocence. Nina just shook her head. “No.”
“Why won’t you—”
“I’m going up tonight, Yelenushka.” Her six hundred sixteenth bombing run, Nina thought. Her last.
Yelena pulled away, eyes filled with tears. “Don’t crash,” she begged. “Don’t throw your plane into those Fritz guns. Don’t make me watch flames coming up from your wreckage—”
“I’m not going to crash,” Nina said thickly.
She freed herself from Yelena’s arms. No time to waste: forcing the chaos of her thoughts aside, she rummaged under the cot for her meager stash of possessions. A pilot at war needed so little—a pistol, a sack of emergency supplies in case of crashing. An old white scarf embroidered with blue stars . . . Nina stuffed everything into a knapsack, ransacking the barracks for all the food she could find. In Bershanskaia’s office she’d been too stunned to form a plan; her thoughts stretched no further than the offer to fly alone. Get off the ground, that was all her instincts had told her—get into the sky before the shackles came.
Now what?
Despite herself, she envisioned aiming for a battery of antiaircraft guns, the white flare of the searchlight filling her world like a sun as she dived into it for once rather than away. The image crooned. Better to go, in fire and glory, to sleep.
I’m so tired.
But Nina pushed that vision away. She looked at Yelena, standing in her flying overalls trying not to weep, and opened her mouth. But she thought who might be listening and put a finger to her lips in warning. Shouldering her knapsack, Nina grabbed Yelena’s arm and marched her wordlessly out, across the trampled field to the middle of the runway. The dying afternoon sun beat down, insects droned, and there was no one within fifty meters to hear anything they had to say to each other.
“I’m not going to crash my plane.” Nina swung around at last, facing Yelena. “I’m going to run. I’m flying west.”
The uncurling quiver of fierce affirmation inside her stomach was all she needed. West, not east. The dream of the girl growing up by the Old Man.
She looked at Yelena’s wide eyes and cupped that much-loved face between her hands. “Come with me,” Nina heard herself saying, heart beating in her throat. This was not planned either, but among the torrent of emotions running riot through her chest—shock at her own coming arrest, rage at her father, stark liquid grief for the loss of her regiment—something lighter joined the maelstrom: a feather touch of hope.
“Come with me,” she repeated, and suddenly the words were spilling eager and blunt. No speaking in vague generalities now—here under the open sky, Nina was done with Party euphemisms. “Wait until the last instant, then run for the navigator’s cockpit. They won’t be able to stop us. They’ll report us both dead before the time my arrest warrant arrives, and we’ll be free as birds with no disgrace attached to the regiment. How far west can we get, the two of us and a U-2 full of fuel?”
“Into Poland?” Yelena gestured at the ugly trampled ground around them, the smoke-smudged western horizon. “It’s crawling with Germans—”
“Where else can I go? Anywhere behind our own lines, I’ll be found. It’s west for me, or it’s propeller first into the nearest battery of guns.”
Yelena winced, turning away from Nina’s hands. “You don’t have to go. You’ll be acquitted—”
“No,” Nina cut her off. “I flee now or I die later—a few days, a few weeks, even a few years, but I’ll die. I can make my way through Poland, maybe even farther. To a new world.” She had no idea what she was going to do, dropped into war-racked Poland, but she knew she and Yelena could survive together. “Come with me,” she repeated, grasping Yelena’s hands in both her own. “The West, Yelenushka. Where black vans don’t come in the dead of night because your neighbor wants your apartment—”
“Don’t say that!” Yelena cried in reflexive fear of eavesdroppers, but Nina threw her head back in defiance.
“Why not? They’ve already denounced me. They can’t do it twice.” The satisfaction of that was fierce. Take me away from my regiment, my plane, my friends? Nina thought to the vast barren country that had sired her. I’ll turn my back on you without a second glance, you frozen heartless bitch. And I’ll take your finest Hero with me. She and Yelena would be so much better, if only they could escape the Motherland and wait out the war. No arguments about Party politics or Comrade Stalin, nothing to divide them. She’ll see what this place is, if she sees it from the outside. I’ll give her everything else she wants—an apartment by a river and babies playing on the floor. Nina was ready to tear those things bare-handed out of the unknown capitalist world if she had to, tear them out and lay them at Yelena’s feet if only she’d come west tonight.
But her heart seized, because Yelena’s head was shaking back and forth.
“My mother is in Moscow,” she said. “My aunts and uncles are in Ukraine. I can’t leave them—they’ll all be denounced and arrested in turn, if there’s even a whisper I deserted.”
“Bershanskaia will report us shot down, heroes who died fighting—”
“So I let them think I’m dead? Let them grieve? I’m the only child my mother has left.”
I don’t care about your family, Nina thought. I only care about you. But she didn’t say it.
“It’s not just my family,” Yelena went on. “I can’t leave the regiment.”
“I’m leaving the regiment!” Nina lashed back. “Do you think that’s easy?”
“No, no, I didn’t—I meant—” Yelena’s face contorted, tears shining in her dark lashes. “Ninochka, I can’t leave them for you. I can’t betray them. They need me.”
“I need you.” Nina wanted to shout, but it came out a whisper. Her hands were so cold, gripping Yelena’s in the sunshine. “They’ll fly on without you. None of us are irreplaceable. Slot another sestra into the cockpit and keep flying, that’s the regiment’s way. But you’re irreplaceable to me.”
Yelena tore her hands away. “You’re asking too much,” she cried. “Leave my family, my regiment, my oath, my country—”
“Your country is throwing me away,” Nina yelled back. “Six hundred and fifteen successful bombing runs, and they’re going to put a bullet in my head or work me to death in a gulag, all because my father is a drunk with a foul mouth. I don’t have a family or a regiment or an oath, thanks to this country. You are all I have left.”
Yelena was still shaking her head, but in blind stubbornness. “They won’t shoot you. It’s all a mistake.”
“Wake up! This place is rotten—”
“How can you think that? You fought for the Motherland for more than two years—”
“Because it’s all someone like me is good for.” Nina realized she was shouting, but she couldn’t stop. “I’m good in the air, I’m good on the hunt, and I’m good at surviving, so I gave it all to this regiment because of the women in it. I’d cut my heart out for any of them, but all I can do for them now is leave and let them tell the world I’m dead. I don’t care about the Motherland, Yelena. She’s a frozen mass of dirt, she was here long before I got here, and she’ll be here long after I’m gone. She got two years of my service, but she’s not getting my death. The Motherland and Comrade Stalin and all the rest can fuck themselves through seven gates whistling.”
Her Moscow rose couldn’t help recoiling. Nina seized Yelena’s face between her hands, yanked her to eye level, and kissed her savagely.
“Come with me,” she said again, against Yelena’s trembling mouth. “Come with me and leave it all behind, or you will di
e here.”
She put her whole heart into those words, everything she had, everything she was. She could feel her pulse thrumming like the Rusalka’s gallant little engine just starting to spool up for the fight. Yelena was going to burst into tears, she’d cry her heart out in Nina’s arms, and after that it would be all right. There was time. They could go.
But though Yelena’s long dark lashes were wet, not a tear fell. “Maybe it is all rotten,” she said, so softly she was all but inaudible. “But if the good ones leave, who’s here to make it better after the war?”
In Nina’s chest, the engine died.
Yelena leaned down, touching her forehead to Nina’s. “I know why you have to leave, Ninochka. It’s leave or nothing. But I can’t give up my homeland and my oath for love.” She managed a small smile under swimming eyes. “That’s the kind of thing that makes men say little princesses have no place at the front.”
Silence stretched out between them, as vast and frozen as the Old Man. Nina’s lips parted, but she had no more words. Not Don’t leave me. Not Go to hell. Not I love you. Nothing. She took a stumbling step backward, tripping over a clod of earth.
Yelena steadied her with an outstretched arm, tried to pull her close. “Ninochka—”
Nina wrenched away. One more kiss, and the huge sob building in her chest would tear loose. One more kiss, and she’d be the one crying her heart out in Yelena’s arms and vowing to stay, vowing to denounce her father, vowing to take ten years or twenty in a gulag if her pilot would only wait for her. One more kiss and she would be utterly undone. In the old stories a rusalka could bring a mortal to their knees, perishing in ecstasy after a single kiss that seared like ice.
Maybe Yelena had been the rusalka all along. Not small, shaken Nina Markova who felt like she was dying.
“Nina,” Yelena said again, softly. Nina didn’t look back. She stumbled to the edge of the airfield, tear-blind, lips sealed on her own pleas, standing there with her head bowed. She saw the gold star still pinned crookedly to her own breast—Yelena’s HSU—and tore it off blindly, hurling it to the mud. The alarm went up to signal the briefing; pilots would be spilling out of canteen and barracks to hear the night’s mission. Nina stayed rooted to the spot, eyes squeezed shut. She heard Yelena move past her, light footsteps in thick boots, and thought desperately, Don’t touch me. I will shatter if you touch me.
