and found Tony saying something to Ruth; Ruth listening as she unwrapped a piece of gum; Jordan snapping a picture of the field . . . and Ian lazily fanning himself with his battered panama.
“This is our year,” the vendor who sold Nina her peanuts predicted. “We go all the way this year, I can feel it. This is our team.”
“Yes,” Nina agreed, smiling at the two blond heads below, the black head, and the dark with its salting of gray. Maybe they weren’t Night Witches, they weren’t a regiment, but—“Is our team.”
She tore into the peanuts, wandering back down. Men on the field were running around again, people were on their feet shouting, who knew why. “Hit him with the bat!” Nina shouted, just to join in. Slid into her seat beside Ian, who had dropped his hat and pulled a paperback out from Nina’s bag: The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer. “You stole my book again, Vanya,” Nina complained.
“Sophia Stanton-Lacy is being vexed by the spiteful Miss Wraxton, but I am confident she will prevail.” Ian removed a bookmark. “And since when am I Vanya? We’ve moved on from little ray of sunshine?”
“Ian—in Russian, would be Ivan. Proper nickname for Ivan is Vanya.”
“Nicknames are to shorten. You don’t shorten a three-letter name to a four-letter name to a five-letter name.”
“You do in Russian,” she said serenely.
He raised an eyebrow, studying her. “What are you thinking, comrade?”
“I think maybe we put off divorce for a year.” She’d been turning those words over for a while, not sure about them. She followed them up with a glare. “Only a year. Then maybe . . .”
“Then maybe,” he agreed, nonchalant. Englishmen, they couldn’t do nonchalant. Or maybe just her Englishman. He was fighting the grin that tugged at his lips, the grin she’d liked from the start even when she couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. It wasn’t much like the grin that had scrunched Yelena’s nose so sweetly, but there must have been something about it that was the same, because it had a similar effect on Nina’s stomach.
“A year,” he said again, as if he liked the sound of it. Nina liked it too. Not too confining, a year. It didn’t make her want to bristle and retreat. It wouldn’t stop her looking at a waning quarter moon and wanting Yelena back, missing her more than life—Nina didn’t think that would ever leave her. But she could bear it.
Nina took Ian’s panama and clapped it over her own head, tilting her face up to the sun, warmed through. “Tvoyu mat,” she said, blinking at the blue sky above. “Good flying weather.”
NAZI MURDERESS SENTENCED
BY IAN GRAHAM
OCTOBER 9, 1959
THE TRIAL OF Nazi war criminal Lorelei Vogt has played to its last act, as the woman known as die Jägerin stood yesterday in an Austrian courtroom to receive her sentence. Although she was first arrested in 1950, her trial would not commence until 1953 and proceeded to drag out for a further six years. Crowds gathered outside the courthouse to see the arrival of the defendant, made notorious by the award-winning photographic essay “Portraits in Evil” (J. Bryde) run in the October issue of LIFE magazine in 1956. Lorelei Vogt showed no emotion as her sentence was read: life imprisonment. So the wheel of justice turns.
Those hoping to read answers in her face were surely disappointed. The face of evil remains unknowable, and the questions remain: Who is she? What is she? How could she? Her victims are memorialized at the Rodomovsky Documentation Center in Boston, Massachusetts (director Anton Rodomovsky, human rights attorney), where the words over the center’s doors read “The Living Forget. The Dead Remember.”
The dead lie beyond any struggle, so we living must struggle for them. We must remember, because there are other wheels that turn besides the wheel of justice. Time is a wheel, vast and indifferent, and when time rolls on and men forget, we face the risk of circling back. We slouch yawning to a new horizon and find ourselves gazing at old hatreds seeded and watered by forgetfulness and flowering into new wars. New massacres. New monsters like die Jägerin.
Let this wheel stop.
Let us not forget this time.
Let us remember.
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KATE QUINN is a New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction. A lifelong history buff, she