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.
Not anymore. As Nina and the others joined the line outside the recruitment office, which already stretched down the street, she could feel that sense of distance draining away. The four of them talked eagerly about the new planes coming, the fighters that would put Hitler’s Messerschmitts and Fokkers into the ground, and Nina belonged. She couldn’t stop smiling.
But when the four of them emerged from their turn in the office, her smile was gone. Vladimir put a hand on her arm. “You can still do your part—”
“Not as a pilot!” The officer who had taken their applications had been brusque: no women to be taken in aviation units. “I have more flight hours than any of them!” Nina had protested, waving at Vladimir and the others.
“Your enthusiasm to serve the state will not go unassuaged. We have need of nurses, communications operators, antiaircraft gunners—”
“Why can’t I be a pilot?” Fumbling for arguments, Nina fell back on Stalin. No one argued with the Boss. “Comrade Stalin himself has commended the drive of women pilots. I have been a flight instructor for—”
“Then do your job, girl,” the officer said sternly. “There will be plenty of training work for you.” And he moved to the next in line.
Vladimir tried now to sneak an arm around Nina’s waist. “Don’t be sour, dousha. Come celebrate with us!” Nina just glowered, slipping back to her shared room where she had taped a single three-year-old newspaper clipping to the mirror: Marina Raskova, Polina Osipenko, and Valentina Grizodubova standing in front of their twin-engine Tupolev ANT-37, grinning like fiends because they had just set the distance record. Nearly six thousand five hundred kilometers in twenty-six hours and twenty-nine minutes. Nina’s heroines, everyone’s heroines—even Comrade Stalin’s, because he’d bestowed the Hero of the Soviet Union award on them all and said “today these women have avenged the heavy centuries of the oppression of women.”
I’m not avenging the heavy centuries of anything by being a damn nurse, Nina thought. But none of the other girls who flew at the air club were taken as pilots either, even as the men were snapped up down to the last spotty boy.
“What did you expect, Ninochka?” Vladimir shrugged. “Only one in four flying at the club is a girl anyway.”
“But I’m better than any of the men they took,” Nina said bluntly. “I’m better than you.”
She said it as a simple statement of fact, not an insult, but he looked offended. “Keep talking like that, dousha, and I won’t offer to marry you before I go.”
Nina blinked. “Since when do you want to marry me?”
“Every man wants a woman to wave good-bye when he goes to war. We could go down to the office, it would be easy.” He flung a careless arm around her waist. “Don’t you love me?”
“You’re a great lay, Vlodya, and you’re a good pilot but you’re not better than me,” Nina said. “I’d only fall in love with someone who can fly better than me.”
“Bitch,” he said, and stamped off to spend his last few nights in some other bed than Nina’s.
All through the summer, the ranks at the air club thinned. The days marched toward fall and newspapers reported Hitler’s barbaric swastika-clad army murdering babies and torturing Soviet women on the western front. Even as far east as Irkutsk the tide of patriotism swelled, war news traded with relish if it was a Soviet victory or fury if it was a treacherous German advance, and Nina’s frustration ate her alive. There wasn’t an aviation unit that would have her; there wasn’t a commanding officer who would give her a plane; there wasn’t a use for what Nina did best—she spent her days training seventeen-year-old boys who barely listened long enough to