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. The sun stood directly overhead—high noon on a perfect June Sunday.
She found a silent crowd inside. Pilots, students, fellow instructors, all crowded together with faces lifted toward the loudspeaker high on the wall. Flying goggles and oilcans dangled from hands, and no one so much as cleared their throat. Everyone listened to the flat drone of the words coming from the radio.
“—to the effect that the German government had decided to launch war against the U.S.S.R.—”
Nina sucked in her breath. Coming to the fringe of the crowd, she saw the coal-black hair of Vladimir Ilyich and pushed up beside him—he was the best pilot in the air club besides Nina; they slept together sometimes. “Was there an attack?” she breathed.
“Fucking Fritzes bombed Kiev, Sebastopol, Kaunas—”
Someone shushed him. Nina pointed at the loudspeaker, the flat cadences of whoever was speaking. Vladimir mouthed back Comrade Molotov.
The public address continued. “—now that the attack on the Soviet Union has already been committed, the Soviet government has ordered our troops to repulse the predatory assault and to drive German troops from the territory of our country . . .”
So much for the Soviet-German pact, Nina thought. In truth she wasn’t surprised. War had been hovering in the air for months like the smell of dynamite. Now, war was here. Everyone knew Hitler and his fascists were crazy, but crazy enough to take on Comrade Stalin?
“—government of the Soviet Union expresses its unshakable confidence that our valiant army and navy and brave falcons of the Soviet Air Force will acquit themselves with honor—”
The Soviet Air Force. Nina did a rapid calculation. She had more flying hours than almost any pilot at the club; she’d scraped through two years of advanced training at the nearest pilot school and had been sent back as an aviation instructor. Already there were rumors of new fighter planes coming off the lines; to get in the cockpit of one of those . . .
“—This is not the first time that our people have had to deal with an attack of an arrogant foe. At the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia—” Hoots and cheers momentarily drowned out Comrade Molotov. Nina tried to imagine Hitler’s swastika being unfurled over the Old Man on the far edge of the world and shook her head in amused contempt. This land was too much for outsiders; Napoleon could tell you that. Too cold, too vast, and too unforgiving for anyone not seasoned to it from birth. A little fascist with a scrubbing-brush mustache thought he’d march on Moscow? He’d have better luck emptying Baikal with a pail.
Comrade Molotov evidently agreed with her, blaring on through the loudspeaker. “It will be the same with Hitler, who in his arrogance has proclaimed a new crusade against our country. The Red Army and our whole people will again wage victorious war for the Motherland—” Cheers rose again, until Nina could barely hear his final “The enemy shall be defeated. Victory will be ours.”
The crowd erupted, some racing across the airfield to take the news to others, some flinging arms around each other. Maybe in the streets there were tears and dread, Nina thought, but this was the air club—if war was here, they’d all be in the air, and there was nowhere any of them would rather be. Vladimir Ilyich turned with a fierce smile, and Nina kissed him so hard their teeth clashed. “I’m going to enlist tomorrow,” he said when they came up for air.
“So am I.” Her blood was running hot as gasoline; she couldn’t close her eyes even after she and Vladimir went back to his room and spent the night drinking vodka and rolling around his old sheets. She lay there with Vladimir’s arm across her middle, staring through the dark, hearing a couple arguing on the other side of the wall, imagining a chain of ice floes drifting across the surface of the Old Man, one after the other leading over the blue horizon. The train from her village to Irkutsk had been the step from shore to the first floe as she thought I can fly. Now here was a step to the second floe, as she thought I can fight Germans.
“War isn’t a game,” Nina’s roommate, Tania, said when Nina came home in the morning long enough to change her shirt. They’d been assigned to each other as roommates, sharing an eleven-square-meter room in a communal apartment with eight other apartment-mates. Nina thought it was a hole, but Tania said they’d been lucky to get it. “You shouldn’t be smiling and humming like you’re going to a dance.”
Nina shrugged. Tania was an aspiring Party member, a staunch believer in order and virtue and the state; the only thing she and Nina had in common was a room. “Wars are terrible, but they need people like me.”
“‘People like you.’” Tania picked up her pocketbook, ready for her shift as a blast-furnace operator. “You’re an individualist.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You don’t volunteer for outside work.” Tania was forever volunteering—collecting state procurement quotas from the collective farms, carrying out exercises to improve labor discipline in factories. “You don’t participate in Komsomol meetings—I see you sitting there doing your navigation figuring! You don’t make an effort to participate in proletarian life—”
“It’s not worth the effort.”
“See? The state has no use for individualism. Try to enlist, and they won’t take you,” Tania said with a certain satisfaction.
“Yes, they will.” Nina grinned in that way she knew unsettled her roommate. “They need people who are a little bit crazy. Because crazy people do well in wars.” Her father had said that, whenever he whispered tales of the tsarists he’d killed in the revolution. It was the first time she’d thought of her father in a while—she hadn’t seen him since she left home. She’d wondered often if leaving him meant killing him, if he’d pickle to death in rotgut vodka without someone to bring home game for the stewpot. That had given Nina a twinge of guilt, but she wasn’t going home, not ever, not for a father who tried to drown her. Yet she still wondered from time to time how he was, if he was alive. I hope you are, she thought, because if the Hitlerites get past me in my plane—if they get all the way to the Old Man—then you’re just the old man to bring them to a halt. She could see her father slipping through the trees with his rifle, his knives, his sharp-toothed grin that was just like Nina’s, cutting German throats in utter silence.
“Not just an individualist but a slut,” Tania muttered, stamping out. “I know you were out with Vladimir Ilyich again last night—”
“Do you want to join us next time?” Nina called after her as the door slammed. She was out that door herself a few minutes later, meeting Vladimir and two of their fellow air club pilots. They sang as they trooped down the street, bellowing an old worker’s march that Nina had never learned as a child. There was so much she had never learned, growing up in near-total isolation out by the lake. It was the kind of thing that still put a distance between her and most of the people she knew. It was better at the air club than among the Komsomol girls like Tania; at least at the club there was the unifying passion for flight. Even so, people like Vladimir and his friends had grown up knowing what a city looked like; they knew Party history and could recite Comrade Stalin’s most famous speeches because they’d studied all the right state-mandated subjects. Growing up a peasant was a bonus, but growing up a complete savage, Nina thought not for the first time, had its disadvantages.