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.
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.”