“Kettles? Kolb didn’t have kettles.”
“Never mind.”
Nina’s hamburger arrived. Ian watched her tear into it. The door of Kolb’s building stayed closed. It was always even odds what a guilty man did after being accused: about half bolted in the first hour, and half decided to stay put and pretend they had nothing to hide. He would have bet Kolb for a bolter . . .
Ian sighed. It was going to be a long night, he could tell. One of the sleepless ones, where the parachute drifted at his shoulder.
“Is lake I dream about,” Nina said.
Ian blinked. “What?”
“Lake. Drowning in it. Sometimes is my father holding me under, sometimes is die Jägerin. Always lake.” She shrugged. “Your lake—what is it?”
“There’s no lake. Like there’s no kettle. Your English is very peculiar, comrade.”
Nina took another huge bite of hamburger. “Is parachute?” she asked thickly.
His blood went ice-cold.
“Antochka says you mutter in your sleep. Something about parachute.”
“It’s nothing.” That came out sharper than Ian intended.
“Is something,” she replied. “Or else why is it your lake?”
He said nothing. Nina said nothing either, just looked at him.
“His name was Donald Luncey,” Ian said, wondering why he was telling her. He hadn’t told anyone. “GI from San Francisco, eighteen years old. He called me Gramps. I probably looked ancient to him. He looked about twelve to me.”
“Sounds like my navigator after I was promoted to pilot.” Nina smiled. “Little Galya looked like she should have been on Young Pioneer hikes, not flying runs over the Black Sea.”
“What happened to her?” Ian asked.
Nina’s smile vanished. “Dead.”
“Donald Luncey too. March ’45, American troops parachuting out into Germany. I begged permission to hitch a ride on the jump.”
“Why?”
“It’s what you do, if you want to be any good as a war correspondent.” Ian tried to explain. “At the front, no one likes journalists. The brass worry you’ll see something you shouldn’t, make them look like idiots. The poor bastards in the ranks think you’re a ghoul, sticking your notepad in their faces looking for a story as they’re trying to stay alive. The only way they don’t hate you is if you’re in the thick of it too. Bunk with them, drink with them, jump out of planes with them, run into fire with them—you share the danger, they’ll share their stories. It’s the only way to do the job right.”
Ian had chatted up Private Luncey when they lined up to jump. One of those narrow beaky faces, ears that stuck out like jug handles, a big smile. “We jumped,” Ian went on. “The rest came down safely and went on to their mission, but Donald Luncey and I splatted off course. Hooked our rigs up in some German wood.”
Another woman would have taken his hand. Ian’s wife just looked at him steadily.
He’d snagged badly about twelve meters off the ground in the branches of a massive oak, hanging breathless and tangled under his lines. He’d had a knife, but the overhead angle was so awkward the blade slipped, spinning to the ground below before he could cut a single line. His straps were too badly knotted to slip out of without cutting. But he was lucky compared to Private Luncey, who had hit every branch on the way down through the tree that eventually snagged him up short. A shattered rib had pierced his lung, or at least Ian guessed that was what had happened. It killed him slowly over the course of seven hours, shredding his lung as he hung there screaming. Ian remembered every moment of those hours: first telling him to be still, not exacerbate the injury; then trying and failing to pendulum-swing close enough to help; finally just hanging there listening as the boy’s voice ran out, from screams to the occasional monotone mutter of Gramps . . .
“By the time he died I was hallucinating,” Ian managed to say. “Dehydration and shock—it turned Donald Luncey into my brother—into Seb. I knew it wasn’t him, I knew Seb was sitting in a stalag in Poland, but it was still him, down to the last freckle. My little brother was hanging dead in the tree next to me.” Hanging there for most of a day as Ian, mouth leather dry, shivering in the cold sweat of horror, stared at his corpse. Ian had tried to focus on the ground below instead, and that twelve meters under his swaying boots seemed to double, an impossibly long fall into darkness.
“Ah,” Nina said. “Is why you have your thing, the thing about heights.”
“Foolish, really. I didn’t even fall. I was found soon after; they rigged me down safe. Quite lucky.” Lucky, but maybe not entirely sane, Ian sometimes thought. It was five years after the war was done, yet still he had the dream and in the dream it was always Seb, right from the beginning. Donald Luncey wasn’t even there; start to finish it was his brother he couldn’t save.
“Don’t brood, luchik.” Nina upended ketchup over her hamburger like she was drowning it in blood. “Brooding is no good.”
“You never brood, do you?” For all that she moved in such a cloud of anarchy, Nina was very even-keeled—rather remarkable, Ian thought, considering what she’d lived through. He wondered if flying in combat had drilled that into her, or if it had already been there—in her, and in her fellow Night Witches. “Most assume women have no place at the front lines, but after hearing about your friends in the regiment—”
“Women are good in combat,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “We don’t compete like the men do. Is all mission, no proving who is better with stupid stunts.”
“You told me you once climbed out on a plane wing at eight hundred meters, you little Cossack. If you want to talk about stunts.”
“Was necessary!” She smiled, but there was a shadow behind it. “My pilot yelled at me for that.”
“Good for her.” Ian studied Nina’s lively face, suddenly gone still. “I can see how much you miss them. Your friends.”
“Sestry,” she said softly.
He could guess the word meant sisters. “Were they all like you?” She shrugged, and he imagined hundreds of Ninas, handed planes and set loose on the Führer’s eastern front. Bloody hell. No wonder Hitler lost the war.
“No one ever did what we did before.” Nina picked up her hamburger, dripping ketchup. “We pay for it, what we do. Dreams, twitches, headaches . . .”
“I know what you mean.” Ian tapped his left ear. “It’s never been quite right after that bombing run in Spain nearly did it for me.”
“My ears too, not so good as they were. U-2 cockpit is noisy. And those years being awake all night every night—I still never sleep all night through.”
“Don’t be ashamed of it. You were a soldier.” Not like me with my pointless nightmares, Ian thought, wry.
She seemed to catch his unspoken thought. “You went to war too, luchik. You go to war, you have a lake or a parachute after. Everyone does.”
“Soldiers do. They’ve earned it. I wasn’t a soldier. Nightmares are for those who fight, not those who scribble. Maybe I was at the front, but I could leave any time I wanted. They couldn’t.”