Dusia hemmed the too-long uniform skirt, bucktoothed Zoya transferred Nina’s insignia and polished everything diamond bright, and a lanky navigator who had once been a hairdresser in Novgorod produced combs and towels. “We’re doing something with this hair, Nina Borisovna.” Fluffing the flyaway mane that had grown out to Nina’s collar. “You aren’t representing the 588th under a mouse-brown haystack. Irusha, I know you’re stashing a bottle of peroxide, hand it over.”
“Who cares about hair as long as it’s tidy?” Nina demanded, wobbling on her new heels. But the girls had the bit between their teeth; their grief for Raskova too raw for more tears but demanding some kind of focus. “Let them fuss,” Yelena advised. “They need some way to help, even if it’s only hair.” Nina surrendered, and by the time it came to depart she stood resplendent and steady in her heels, newly blond hair pinned in a swoop, lips reddened with a navigation pencil. Her two companions also assigned to the honor guard were just as splendid; the girls in their dormitory had been hard at work too.
“You three will do us proud,” everyone said. “You’ll do her proud.” They loaded Nina and the others with dried flowers to lay with the wreaths a grateful Motherland would already be heaping up in Marina Raskova’s memory.
“Bring me something from Moscow,” Yelena said. “Anything, even a pebble. I miss it.”
“Why?” Nina thought back to her haphazard glimpse of Moscow when she first came from Irkutsk. “It’s ugly.”
“You have to see it as what it will be, not what it is. It’s a city on its way to glory. Our future home, after the war!”
Nina’s stomach flipped. She couldn’t look ahead past the next bombing run, and here Yelena was making plans for after the war. Nina tried out the words, experimentally. “After the war we’re going to live in Moscow?”
“Where would anyone live but Moscow if they had the chance?”
“Somewhere that isn’t a pit?”
Yelena swatted her. The train whistle was blowing. “You’ll see Moscow in its full glory this time, all for Raskova. Promise me you’ll love it.” Nina opened her mouth to promise, but it was time to leave. A squeeze of the hand and Yelena was gone.
Nina intended to get a look at the countryside in between here and the city, but the exhaustion caught up with her and she slept almost the entire journey. All three of them did, cheeks pressed against glass compartment windows and slatted wooden partitions. Stumbling bleary-eyed into Three Stations Square in Moscow, Nina had the sensation that time was doubling back. She was getting off the train from Siberia, not the Caucasus front . . . the 588th had not even been formed yet, only Aviation Group 122 . . . Marina Raskova was up ahead somewhere, alive and well, waiting to give Nina her chance.
But Marina Raskova was nothing but a ceremonial urn filled with ashes, sitting in state in the great domed hall of the Civil Aviation Club. And to Nina’s eyes, Moscow still looked like a gray wreck.
“The doctor gave me these.” One of her companions took out a bottle of tablets, seeing Nina yawn. “They’ll keep us alert during the vigil. Coca-Cola pills—” Rolling the American slang.
Nina swallowed two and after that the world was both sparky and hazy, the events of the funeral jumbled like confetti tossed in the air. They made their way to some office only to be greeted by a flurry of gray-faced functionaries barking orders. Nina’s arm throbbed in its sling as they were shepherded into the domed hall of the Civil Aviation Club, past the urn where Raskova’s honor guard would stand watch, breathing in the stifling smell of roses from the massive bank of funeral wreaths. No time to exchange more than a fast murmur with the other women of the honor guard, women Nina hadn’t seen since Engels. “Marina,” they whispered to each other, a greeting and a toast all together.
Nina held herself rigid through the long vigil, keeping her eyes straight ahead as most of Moscow shuffled past: women with bent shoulders, bony children, men with boots held together by twine . . . Then came another confusing shuffle of functionaries and suits, and suddenly it was the next day, the world still sparking and floating as Nina took her place in the vast stately procession into Red Square, past draped bunting and more wreaths. The only face coming distinct among the masses was Raskova’s, her dark hair and wide smile reproduced a hundred times over on photographs printed large and held aloft over the crowd, the way Nina’s father said peasants used to hold up their icons.
The Coca-Cola buzz was wearing off by the time Raskova’s ashes were laid to rest. Nina was swaying on her high heels as Lieutenant General Shcherbakov gave the funeral oration, echoing as he was broadcast across the land. Talking about the highest standards of Soviet womanhood and credit to the Motherland. Who were they even talking about? Speeches like this could be made at any funeral. Nina remembered the squadron commander who had died on the very first sortie; how the Night Witches had toasted her memory under the stars and sung soft songs that echoed across the airfield. That was how Raskova should have been remembered, not with rote rhetoric and the mournful broadcast beats of the “Internationale.” It should have been women talking about Raskova today, not these old men.
Two down, Nina found herself thinking. First the squadron commander, then Raskova. Who’s next? Which was stupid because the regiment had lost more besides those two. But the thought still echoed in Nina’s brain: Who’s next?
Yelena’s face flashed before her eyes, along with a heart-stopping kick of terror.
Marina Raskova’s ashes were formally interred in the Kremlin Wall. Banners dipped, officers held their salute, a single plane droned low and mournful over Red Square. It was done.
“RASKOVA’S EAGLETS.”
At the sound of that famous voice, heard from so many broadcasts and radio speakers, Nina thought every sestra beside her was going to faint. Women who kept calm while being peppered by antiaircraft guns were blushing and shuffling like schoolgirls, hardly able to look up at the great Comrade Stalin.
There had been endless receptions after the funeral; more suits, more droning; Nina had swallowed another trio of Coca-Cola tablets and now the world sparked bright colors again. They had all been lined up in some featureless anteroom, waiting over an hour—somewhere nearby, Nina could hear champagne corks popping. Suddenly a door opened and people flooded in, flashbulbs making everyone blink but Nina. I’m used to enemy searchlights, I won’t flinch at a camera. She looked through the flash and there was Comrade Stalin emerging from his crowd of dignitaries like a wolf from the underbrush, hard fleshed as concrete in a glittering uniform.
More rustling as an aide droned. Marina Mikhailovna Raskova’s honor guard would be honored themselves with the Order of the Red Star; applause rippled. Nina gave an inward shrug. What did a medal matter? A dozen women in the 588th flying right now had better records; she was only getting this because she’d been grounded when Raskova died. She didn’t think Comrade Stalin cared all that much about the medals he was giving out either; he stood scrawling at a notebook with a pencil stub. Making notes of the latest hundred thousand dead in Leningrad, maybe. How strange it was to lay eyes on a person who was so familiar, yet at the same time a stranger. Like peasants in the tsarist days getting a glimpse of God, only Comrade Stalin had more power than God.
Nine flashes rippled, camera clicking as each beaming woman stepped forward to be pinned with the five-pointed red-enameled star. The flash went off in Nina’s eyes as the pin pricked through her uniform. A little bit like stepping forward one by one to be shot. If Comrade Stalin had decided to do that right here in this anteroom, stick a bullet instead of a medal into each woman’s chest, no one would have stopped him.
Nina looked at the General Secretary over the shoulder of the aide pinning her. His mustache, grayer than it looked in all his portraits. Pockmarks on heavy cheeks. Teeth stained by pipe smoke. His eyes were lidded, almost sleepy as he watched them receive their medals. But you aren’t sleepy, Nina thought. Not at all. Somewhere in the next room another champagne cork popped. Would everyone get champagne, or just Party members? Party members only, Nina guessed.