“You can’t beat up everybody who comes at me,” Seb said forlornly.
“Yes, I can. Promise you’ll write?” And Seb did write. Long screeds about bird-watching and eventually a passion for Pushkin chased Ian to Spain as he tramped after the International Brigade, scolding him to be more careful when an air raid near Málaga took the hearing from Ian’s left ear for a week. Seb’s letters had followed him to Paris afterward when he was writing articles about the coming conference in Munich, and a year later there had been the fortnight they spent together after their father died in a road accident. Sixteen-year-old Seb had got drunk for the first time, and Ian had to pour him into bed … then came the day not six months later when Seb turned up on Ian’s doorstep in London, where he was writing about German U-boats sinking a British destroyer near Orkney, and said that he’d run away from school and enlisted.
“You idiot,” Ian had shouted.
“Just because you can’t fight doesn’t mean I can’t,” Seb flared. Ian’s hearing on the left side had mostly come back after Málaga, but not quite up to enlistment standards. Seb saw the look on Ian’s face and muttered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” The only quarrel that had ever erupted between them, over before it began.
“You’re still an idiot for enlisting,” Ian had retorted. “All your bird-watching left you bird-witted.”
He wondered now if his little brother had looked for birds in the sky that May morning when he was captured, a few months later. If he’d wished for wings when his battalion was forced, outgunned and ill-equipped, to surrender on the Doullens–Arras road. Realizing, as he became a prisoner, that his war was over almost before it had begun—that he would sit out the rest of the fight in a cage, like any captive bird.
But you still fought, Ian thought. Sebastian Vincent Graham had escaped his stalag, had tried to escape occupied Poland, and he’d died doing it—died at die Jägerin’s hands. And you made her pay.
Seb had been the one to give her the scar on her neck.
So Nina had said, anyway, in her almost incomprehensible combination of broken English and hand gestures. Ian wasn’t sure how she and Seb had met, how they’d stumbled across the huntress’s ocher-walled house at Lake Rusalka—Nina couldn’t explain it clearly—but there had been a struggle; there had been shots; there had been a blade. Seb had put up a heroic fight so Nina could get away.
If she told me the truth, Ian thought as he turned away from the Eichmann house.
“Let’s have that talk now, Nina,” he said aloud to the twilight.
June 1941
Irkutsk, Siberia
When war came to the Soviet Union, Nina was putting a Polikarpov U-2 through its paces, riding a cloud-scented breeze high over Irkutsk. Not that a U-2 had many paces—a dual-cockpit biplane open to the sky, crafted of linen over wood, cruising along at a pace so sedate that newer, faster planes would have stalled trying to match speed. But the old bird was maneuverable; she could turn on a razor edge without cutting herself. Nina had been happy to take her up for a solo spin to check for the mechanics if the controls needed adjustment.
It had been in a U-2 that Nina took her first flight shortly after joining the air club. That liquid excitement when the instructor allowed her to take the stick and make her first gentle, banking turn; the plane’s answering wobble as though aware of the uncertain new hands that guided it … She was four years past that first awkward turn now, an impressive number of flying hours under her belt, and she sent the U-2 looping and rolling among the clouds. The sky was Nina’s lake. She’d felt that on her first flight as she dove into the air like a green-haired rusalka diving into a lake. Diving not down but up, with a feeling of I am home. She had cried on that first flight, tears fogging her flight goggles.
It hadn’t been easy, getting in the air. “It’s going to take more than that, girl,” the air club’s director had sniffed when Nina pushed her application and birth record across his desk. “You’ll need a medical certificate, education certificate, references from the Komsomol, and only then can you even submit to the credentials committee for consideration. Do you know anyone in Irkutsk?”
“No.” Nina had no one who could pull strings for the paperwork and approvals she needed, but luckily, the head of the local Komsomol had taken a liking to her. “Here you see the epitome of proletarian spirit,” he proclaimed after one look at Nina’s hardscrabble background. “A girl who in tsarist days would have spilled the blood of her life in the field, now seeking the skies! The glorification of the state lies in the ability of its laborers to rise—” There had been a great many more slogans after that, and Nina was allowed to apply for the Komsomol with all its interviews and political literacy exams. She didn’t know much about political history, but she knew to nod fervently whenever anyone asked if she wished to exalt the Motherland by participating in the recent aviation drive to match the aeronautics of the decadent West, and alongside that, she had impeccable peasant lineage. The first time my father ever did me a favor, Nina reflected. If he’d been a prosperous kulak or highbrow intelligentsia rather than a Siberian peasant with barely a kopeck to his name, the Komsomol would have turned up their nose. But an untutored peasant with ambition was looked on with enough approval for a membership card, and with that, a good many doors opened. Komsomol girls were sought after, presumed to be aspiring Communist Party members. Nina didn’t care about policy or Party politics as long as she could get in the air.
And now here she was, dancing in the clouds.
Nina came out of her spiral, lining up the air club below. Nothing wrong with this old duck’s flight controls. She began the descent, feeling no place where the plane left off and she began; it was as though her arms had lengthened into the span of the wings and her feet had stretched down into the wheels, the sun warming her hair the way it warmed the linen over the wooden struts.
She brought the U-2 down soft as a snowflake alighting on dark water—perfect three-point touchdown, not even a bounce—smiling as she felt the tail skid brake them to a halt. Maybe that was another reason Nina liked the U-2, because it had been designed without brakes. So was I. She hoisted herself out of the cockpit, sitting on the rim atop the plane as she unbuckled her half-bald rabbit-fur cap. Nina Borisovna Markova was twenty-three now, still small, compact, and sturdy as a gymnast; she had engine grease under her nails instead of blood, and she breathed exhaust fumes instead of lake water. She might still be a little crazy, she acknowledged, because all Markovs were, but at least she’d won a place for herself in this world, on her wings and not on her back. She knew what she loved, she knew what she feared, and what she feared didn’t matter because there was no lake anywhere nearby to drown in. Nina sat atop her plane a moment longer, tilting her face up to the sun, then slid to the wing and down to the ground in one easy motion.
Looking around, she saw that something was wrong.
The runway should have bustled with students, mechanics, pilots. Even in Irkutsk, flying was such a craze that the air club was always busy. But Nina saw no one, and even the bustle of the city beyond—the noise of the streets, the sound of raised voices and feet in mass-produced boots trudging back and forth from work—seemed muted. Puzzled, she secured her plane—the process of checking her switches and mags, securing her flight controls, and taking care of the tie-downs all as automatic now as breathing—and headed for the nearest hangar.