“It had better be warmer than it is in Moscow.” Yelena’s dark lashes glittered with ice; her eyes were watering and the tears had frosted to her eyelashes. “How can it be this cold in October?”
“This isn’t cold,” Nina lied, trying not to shiver. No Siberian was ever going to admit to a Muscovite that she was cold.
“Liar.” Yelena’s eyes laughed. “Your lips are blue.”
“Well, it’s still nothing compared to winter on the Old Man. The cold there comes rolling out over the lake and there’s nothing to stop her, the icy bitch.” Yelena wrinkled her nose. “What?”
“You’ll think I’m a terrible prude.”
“What?”
“I can’t hear anyone swear.” Yelena blushed. “My father wouldn’t let anyone curse—he’d flick you on the nose hard enough to make your eyes water. Not just the one who said it, but any of us in earshot. So whenever I hear a bad word, I cringe and wait to get hit on the nose.”
Nina laughed, as they pushed their way along to the next railcar. “Fuck your mother, Yelena Vassilovna!” Just to see that nose wrinkle again.
“Laugh away.” Yelena sighed. “I’m a little Moscow goody, and I know it.”
Nina grabbed the handle beside the railcar’s open door, swinging herself up. “Little Moscow goodies don’t have as many flying hours as you. Here, jump up!”
Yelena took Nina’s outstretched hand. A freight car, not a passenger car, and so cold inside their breath came in white clouds. Nina tugged her sealskin hat farther over her ears as more girls piled in. “I won’t swear,” she heard herself saying to Yelena, “if you don’t like it.” It had never occurred to her to care what her fellow pilots thought of her, because she’d always flown alone. But she’d be navigator to one of these girls in the pilot class, responsible for keeping her safe and on course. They had to trust her; she had to trust them. Trust may have been simple for Yelena with her warm, easy ways, but for Nina it felt like flexing a muscle she had never used.
“Swear all you want, Ninochka!” Yelena laughed. “I have to toughen up. If I’m going to kill fascists, I can’t wrinkle my nose at bad words.”
Nina grinned, feeling that muscle flex a little easier. “So say, it’s fucking cold in here.”
“It’s—” Yelena screwed up her face.
“Say it, say it!” Little Lilia Litvyak laughed from Nina’s other side, overhearing.
“It really is exceptionally cold in here,” Yelena said primly, red as a beet, and they nearly fell over laughing as the railcar shuddered into motion. Then the news passed back like a ripple over a field of grain: “Engels, we’re going to Engels—”
“—the training airdrome on the Volga—”
“—Engels!”
NINE DAYS TO ENGELS. Nine slow, cold days: braced and swaying with the movement of the cars, gnawing on rations of bread and herring and swallowing bitter sugarless tea, standing on railway sidings stamping their feet to keep warm as the track was cleared for more urgent supply trains to push through. Talking, always talking, and it was Nina’s turn to be astonished. They know so much more than me. A tall brunette from Leningrad had work calluses from digging tank traps and hauling sandbags, but she had a university degree and spoke four languages. A pink-cheeked girl two years younger than Nina studied children’s education—“Very important to give children a system of structured play that will develop their cooperative instincts.” Marina Raskova herself spent a morning traveling in their railcar, and when they begged her to talk of her record-setting flight on the Rodina, she said that was old news and told them instead how she had wanted to be an opera singer growing up, singing a bit of the chorus from Eugene Onegin. Voices joined in throughout the railcar, and Nina stared uncomprehendingly. She couldn’t hum a note of Tchaikovsky; spoke no language but her native Russian; had never been herded along in structured play or honed a cooperative instinct in her life.
She’d felt a similar disconnect when she first came to Irkutsk at nineteen, but then she had been so focused on learning to fly that she had adopted Komsomol meetings and the other trappings of civilized life without ever giving them the slightest thought. Now she sat surrounded by hundreds of women for whom such things weren’t trappings to be shrugged into as a grown woman, but truths they’d imbibed with their mothers’ milk. They talked of Marxist lectures and hikes with the Young Pioneers, of trying to find shoes during the famine years that didn’t fall apart after one wearing. They even talked in whispers of the black vans that might take you away if you were denounced. Yelena had a neighbor in Moscow who had been taken: “He’d been allotted a bigger room than his apartment mates, and they wanted it, so they reported him as a wrecker,” she said matter-of-factly. “When he was taken, his parents denounced him too so they wouldn’t be sent with him.” No one asked where. They knew not to ask, just as they knew about shoe shortages and lectures, Tchaikovsky and Party songs. It was more than the difference between the country girls and the city girls, Nina thought, because there were both kinds here. This was the difference between growing up civilized, and growing up wild.
“You don’t talk much, Ninochka,” Yelena said at some point, stitching away at her uniform. They’d been passing needles and thread back and forth for days, cuffing up hems as they talked. “How did you grow up, out there on Baikal?”
“Not like you,” honesty compelled Nina to say.
“How?”
“Living on the Old Man in a collection of huts too small to call a village . . .” Nina shrugged. “It’s the end of nowhere. No one sends you away to the wilds, because you already live in the wilds. No one queues for shoes; if it’s winter you go into the forest with a snare and you kill something and make shoes from the hide, and if it’s summer you make sandals out of birchbark. There’s no one to denounce your neighbors to if they have a bigger apartment. No one has an apartment. We barely have neighbors.” There was no one to hear if your father regularly informed the world that Comrade Stalin was a swindling Georgian bastard, but Nina knew better than to confess that. “Maybe once in a lifetime someone might get to a Marxist lecture,” she went on, “if they can get to the next town a hundred kilometers away, and then they talk about it until they’re a hundred. There are old women half convinced the tsar is still alive.” She looked at the curious eyes around her and flushed.
“You’re not a savage,” Yelena said, reading Nina’s mind. “Rabbits aren’t savage—” and that made them all laugh, because it had been just yesterday afternoon that they had all been waiting on a railway siding, hugging their rumbling bellies because the bread and herring were late, and Lilia Litvyak had gone sidling round the edge of the station and returned with arms full of green globes—raw cabbages from a food cache awaiting transport. Nina and the rest had fallen on those cabbages like chomping rabbits. “Whether from Moscow or Leningrad, Kiev or Baikal,” Yelena had intoned, “we are all now rabbits.”
It stuck.
At last they piled off at Engels in freezing damp. The town was blacked out, the sky spitting icy rain. Nina shouldered her pack, shambling along with the rest of the girls. Yelena scratched under her cap. “I have nits, I just know it—”
“Quit grousing, sestra,” came floating down the line. More milling in the dark as Marina Raskova went to find the officer on duty, and by the time they were herded off to bunk down, Nina had fallen asleep on her feet, swaying like a horse dozing in its stall. The gymnasium had been made over into a dormitory, rows of cots laid out hospital ward fashion. Nina flopped onto the nearest one without even pulling off her boots. “What’sat yelling?”
“Raskova,” someone said, laughing. “The commander tried to give her a room of her own with a double bed, and she’s shouting she’s going to bunk down in shared quarters just like us.”
“I would die for Raskova.” Nina yawned, eyelids sinking. “I would cut off my leg for her. Carve out a kidney.”
“All of us would, malyshka . . .” Nina’s last sensation that night was someone pulling off her boots.
A cold gray morning dawned, and the women of Aviation Group 122 were up with the pale sun, tumbling out of bed, pulling bedclothes tight. “When do we get our hands on the new fighters?” Men stared when the women trooped across the base in their uniforms. Nina returned the stares every bit as rudely, but the more well-bred girls hurried along with blushes rising in their cheeks. “I’m not used to being gawked at,” Yelena whispered. “Not like this.”