Nina slowed her own steps to a swagger, staring down a mechanic smirking from the nearest aviation shed. “Get used to it.”
The first order of the day was a mass visit to the garrison barbershop. “Those braids and curls are coming off, ladies! Raskova’s orders, line up for a chair,” an officer called as the women clustered rebelliously, fingering their long plaits and muttering. No one seemed eager to step forward; Lilia was already arguing with a barber. Nina tugged the razor out of her boot and unfolded it. She looked around, challenging, and when she had enough eyes, she gathered her hair up in one hand. It was tangled and dirty after ten days without a bath, and with one sawing swipe Nina sheared it off. She dropped the fistful of hair on the barbershop floor. “Come on, rabbits.”
Yelena put her chin up, shaking her long dark braid over one shoulder, holding out a hand for Nina’s razor. Nina slapped it into her palm, even as the other girls began filing grimly toward the barbershop chairs, and that was the moment it all ceased to matter—the differences that had made Nina tongue-tied on the train. Hundreds of women from hundreds of different worlds had unloaded at Engels, country girls and city girls, those with degrees and those who knew nothing . . . And now they were simply the recruits of Aviation Group 122, identically shorn, and all their worlds combined into one.
“THIS WAR WILL be over before we’re declared ready.” Outside Engels the fight was passing them by—Nina chafed whenever she thought of the Fritzes rolling unopposed over all those carefully dug tank traps; thought of the barrage balloons hung in the air all over the Motherland and the trainloads of crying children being evacuated out of cities, half the time heading straight into the advancing German lines. Leningrad was slowly starving to death that winter, people murdering each other for ration cards and bread . . . But in Engels, the training was never-ending.
“You girls are lucky,” Marina Raskova scolded them. “There are boys being rushed out to the male regiments with only sixty-five flying hours, no better than machine-gun fodder. I didn’t bring you here to be machine-gun fodder.”
“But we’ve got better records walking through the door than those boys being rushed out through it,” Nina objected. “Why are we the ones still sitting in Engels?”
“We can’t afford to fail,” replied sober-eyed Yevdokia Bershanskaia. She was older than most of them at nearly thirty, already tipped for command. Not that she wanted to lead; she wanted to fly fighters. But everyone wants to fly fighters, Nina thought, so someone’s going to be disappointed. “We’re the only female pilots going to the front. There are plenty saying it’s foolish giving planes to little girls when there are more than enough male pilots to fly them. To keep our planes, we’ll have to be perfect.”
Perfection meant ten separate courses of study per day, plus another two hours of drilling, from classroom to airfield and back. At night they were rousted out of bed by the blare of a Klaxon to form up on the icy parade ground; Nina tried putting her coat over her nightshirt once to save time, but Raskova—always neat and bright-eyed no matter the hour—spotted the hem flapping above her boots and made her do laps about the airfield with the icy wind blowing through her bare legs. She tumbled back into bed, teeth chattering and the skin over her thighs marbled blue, and seemingly seconds later the Klaxon was sounding the dawn, calling the women of Aviation Group 122 to rise and take the old U-2s up for practice bombing runs over the treeless plain where the Engels airfield stretched flat and barren, catching every implacable puff of wind that blew off the Volga.
“Did you hear the men laughing at us this morning?” Yelena came back to the makeshift dormitory, sweat freezing to the shorn ends of her hair so it spiked in all directions. “They think we’re a joke in these uniforms, they make fun of our marching—”
“They’re just jealous because we’re getting new planes and not the old crates.” Nina sat stitching up a hole in her glove with thread borrowed from Yelena. They had cots side by side; they shared everything from socks to sewing needles. What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine, as Yelena had said the first day in Moscow, and they all lived by it—on Nina’s other side, Lilia was using Nina’s razor to slice fraying edges off her coat sleeve. “Did you hear Raskova’s trying for Pe-2s?” Nina said.
“I heard the Pe-2s are a bear to get off the ground,” Lilia volunteered.
“Better than those Su-2s they have the pilot group in now. Those are a joke.” Yelena stripped off her gloves, flexing stiff cold hands. “They smoke, they leak, they’re slower than a cow on ice—”
“They’re putting the navigators in TB-3s and R-5 trainers in the new year,” Nina said. “After we take the oath. Lilia, you put a nick in my razor, I’m kicking you all the way back to Moscow . . .”
“Try it, you little Siberian runt.”
“Runt, yourself!”
The military oath was taken in November, and Marina Raskova made one of her easy speeches in that intimate voice like she was talking to you alone in the whole crowd. “In our constitution, it is written that women have equal rights in all fields of activity. Today you took the military oath. So let’s vow once more, together, to stand to our last breath in defense of our beloved homeland.” They all cheered themselves hoarse, and Raskova pressed every hand that stretched toward hers, kissed every cold-flushed cheek within reach. As hard as they all worked, Raskova pushed harder. Nina came to make a report one afternoon in December and found her commander fast asleep across a table heaped with papers. “I’m awake,” she said, when Nina tried to tiptoe out again, though her eyes were still closed. “Make your report.”
Nina rattled it off. “Get some rest, Comrade Major,” she finished.
“We’ll rest when the war’s over.”
The year turned; flight training started for the navigators. Flying at night, getting used to the pulse of the blackness around them in the open-air cockpit, cruising under an icy sliver of moon and learning to land with no more aid than a few makeshift runway lights. Everyone knew Raskova would be sorting Aviation Group 122 into its three regiments soon: the day bombers, the night bombers, the fighters. Only the best would be in the fighters, and Nina already knew she wasn’t going to be among them.
It was a strange thing, not to be the best—she’d been the best for so long, certainly the best female in the air club, but here there were hundreds of women who had all been the best in their air clubs. Three members of an aerobatic team had enlisted; they could flip and twirl a plane like birds of prey. Lilia was impervious to air pressure; she’d push her machine to its limit without ever getting dizzy. Yelena could land featherlight on the roughest field in the region. Nina couldn’t match any of them, and she knew it. That hadn’t been a very pleasant realization at first, if she was being honest—her mouth had been sour with envy, realizing she was outclassed. But it hadn’t taken long for envy to fall away under the grinding stones of work and practicality. They were all fighting the damned Hitlerites in the end, if they ever got off this cheerless stretch of airfield by the Volga. When that happened, Nina wanted to fight wingtip to wingtip with fliers even better than she was.
“You’re a high-flying eagle,” Nina told Yelena, “and I’m a little hawk.”
Yelena slid an arm through Nina’s, giving the warm squeeze of reassurance that enchanted Nina every time. Maybe because she’d never really had a woman for a friend before. “You’re no little hawk, Ninochka.”
“I understand how the plane works—I pull the stick in a particular way, the plane moves a particular way. You understand why. Thrust, ratio, aerodynamics—you fly better for knowing all that.” They were crossing the frozen airfield toward the canteen on a freezing January morning. A group of men in mechanics’ overalls let out derisive whistles, but Nina ignored them. “For me, none of the science ever sinks in.” Nina rapped her own forehead. “Hard Siberian skull.”
One of the mechanics was shouting something at Yelena, grabbing his crotch. She still tended to blush when she heard the hoots and crude jokes, but for once she was distracted. “Don’t say you’re stupid, because you aren’t.”