She chuckled. “I shock you?”
“A bit, yes.” It wasn’t as if he was unfamiliar with the idea of females who enjoyed female company. It was a little odd, however, to realize that his wife, like her razor, cut both ways.
“You’re thinking now, this means I don’t like you?” Nina grinned, tugging his head down for one of her voracious kisses. “I do.”
“I have fairly compelling evidence by now that you like me, comrade.” Ian returned the kiss, hand sliding through Nina’s damp hair, then shrugged out of his jacket, flung it over the sand, and tossed her down on it. She wasn’t wearing the willow for someone in Manchester, whether a British flyboy or a Frenchwoman who smelled of eau de violette, and that was enough to fill him with relief and hunger, setting his lips at Nina’s throat and slowly kissing his way down. Come on, comrade, he thought. There’s starlight and sand and the smell of the sea, and there’s me making love to you. Be moved by the goddamned romance of it all, would you? Be moved, Nina. Give me a chance.
“Stay with me.” He said it simply, in the moments afterward where they still lay twined up and breathing hard among the scatter of clothes, before his wife could get brisk and pull away. “I don’t want to divorce you, Nina. Stay with me.”
She stared at him, and he could feel her pulling away without moving a muscle.
“Give it a year,” he said, drawing a thumb down her sharp cheekbone. “You like this work, you like the chase, you like me. Why not stay? Try it for a year, being my wife more than just in name. It wouldn’t be like most marriages, children and Sunday lunches and peace. That would bore you, and it would bore me. We’d have this instead, the road and the hunt and a bed at the end of it. Give it a year.” Ian put everything into the words. “Give it a year, and if you want to walk away at the end, we’ll divorce. But why not try?”
Nina sat up, linking her arms around her knees, her face like a small obdurate shield. “I don’t love,” she said. “Is not what I do.”
Go soft-eyed on her and she will bolt, Ian thought. “Love isn’t the word,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s a word in the world for what you are to me, Nina. Maybe comrade says it best. Comrades who are husband and wife—why isn’t that worth keeping?”
She shook her head sharply.
“Why?” Ian sat up too, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “Tell me that. Tell me something. Don’t just glower and prickle.”
Nina glowered, prickling. He stared her down through the dark. She looked away, out at the long slow rollers of the Atlantic crashing under the night sky, and finally tugged at a strand of her damp hair. “You know why I dye it?” she said, carving the words off like ice chunks. “Yelenushka liked it—my pilot. I keep for her. Yelena Vassilovna Vetsina, senior lieutenant in the Forty-Sixth. Almost three years with her, and I love her till I die.”
Ian saw the gleam of tears in his wife’s eyes, even in the starlight. Not a hard heart, after all, he thought with a sinking feeling. A broken one. “Yelena,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “The Russian version of Helen, isn’t it? What was she like?”
“Dark. Tall. Lashes to here. And tvoyu mat, she could fly. Nothing more beautiful in the air.”
“What happened?”
Nina told him, tersely. Hard to imagine his tough, swaggering Nina as a brokenhearted girl sobbing her eyes out in a cockpit. He would have hugged her, but she would hate that. “Do you know what became of her?” Ian asked over the sound of the waves. “Your Helen of Troy.”
“Yes,” said Nina.
Ian waited. His wife stared out over the black waves. “After the war, was a little time you still get letters to the Motherland. Before everything shuts down and the West is forbidden. Is still like floating messages in bottles, trying to find people. I don’t know where to find Yelenushka, but I find my old commander.”
“Bershanska?”
“Bershanskaia. Is a relief, knowing she lived. The regiment, they got all the way to Berlin!” A flash of fierce, momentary pride sounded in Nina’s voice. “Disbanded after, of course. No one wants little princesses in the air unless it’s war and you really need them.”
“Whoever decided that,” Ian said, trying to lighten Nina’s stony face and his own leaden heart, “can fuck themselves through seven gates whistling.”
Nina smiled briefly, but it faded. “I can’t write Bershanskaia as me, as Lieutenant N. B. Markova declared dead in Poland. I write as some cousin from Kiev now living in England, someone imaginary, and I put in details so Bershanskaia knows is me. I ask news of my sestry.” A long breath. “I get one letter back.”
The slow crash of waves, one, two, three. Rustle of fragrant vegetation overhead. Mangroves, maybe, Ian thought, stomach heavy as a stone.
“Bershanskaia lists the dead, ones who died after me.” Ian didn’t think that was a slip of the tongue; in a very real sense Lieutenant N. B. Markova had died in that funeral pyre she’d made of her plane in the wet woods of Poland. “My navigator, poor Galya, she makes it to the end of the war and dies in crash outside Berlin. Others too—many bad nights, at the end.”
Ian steeled himself. “Did your Yelena . . . ?”
“No. She lived.”
That startled him. The grief in Nina’s voice, he was certain her lover must have died.
“Hero of the Soviet Union, one of ten crews marching in Moscow Victory Parade on Air Force Day, June ’45. I imagine her marching through Red Square, flowers falling on her hair.” Another long silent moment; Nina seemed to have turned to ice. “Bershanskaia tells me she lives in Moscow, instructor pilot in civil aviation. She shares an apartment with navigator she had after me, Zoya. I always wonder, does she fall in love with Zoya? That bucktoothed suka has red hair, she’s a widow, she has two babies. Always Yelena wanted babies. She falls in love with one navigator, maybe now two?” Sigh. “Or maybe she’s just sharing apartment.”
“I imagine she thinks of you,” Ian said. “I can’t imagine anyone not thinking of you.” He had not one hope in the world now that his wife would stay with him. Astounding how much that hurt.
“Bershanskaia writes once,” Nina finished. “Wishes me well, finishes Don’t write again. Too dangerous, I know that. And soon there are no more letters allowed west to east, so doesn’t matter.” Pause. “I think Yelenushka’s alive, teaching boys to fly, playing with Zoya’s babies. Happy. Maybe is true. I won’t know.”
“What would you do,” Ian made himself ask, “if you saw her coming along this beach toward you?”
“Kiss her till she can’t breathe, ask her to stay. But she wouldn’t.”
“No?”
“She loves the Motherland, just enough more than me. Is all there is to say.” Nina looked at Ian. “I love her, I lose her. I don’t love anyone else. Is better.”
For who? Ian wanted to lash back. But he stamped the anger down, and under it the pain. There was a dark-eyed Moscow rose in a training cockpit somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and against her he stood no chance.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known,” he said at last. “I’m sorry.”