get a handful of flight hours before they were off to enlist. All the fine talk on the radio and in Comrade Stalin’s speeches about the women of the Motherland proving their worth—what did it come down to? Be a nurse, or train the men.
And then it was September; Hitler’s forces still advancing implacably east, and Nina walked the Angara River, looking over the railings across that swift blue ribbon that threaded the city. Mentally she was flying high in one of the new fighters, screaming through the clouds at a speed to make her ears bleed . . . All at once the skin between her shoulder blades twitched, and she knew she was being tracked. She stopped to fiddle with her boot, slipping her razor up into her hand, and unfolding it inside her sleeve before turning with a mild expression, ready for anything. Anything, that is, but the knife-edged smile that greeted her.
“Careless, little huntress,” her father said. “I tracked you all the way from the air club.”
THEY STOOD LEANING against the railing with their backs to the river, regarding each other. Nina left enough space between them to dodge, though his eyes didn’t have the lunatic gleam they’d had the last time he tried to kill her. Still, she kept the razor between her fingers. Her father smiled again when he saw it.
“Mine,” he said.
“Mine now. What are you doing in Irkutsk?”
He indicated a bundle at his feet. “A good hunting year. Prize pelts fetch more in the city.”
“How did you find me?”
“I can track wolverines, girl. You think I can’t track my lake witch of a daughter?”
“Sky witch now,” Nina retorted.
“I heard. They let girls fly?”
“Three girls set the long-distance record.” Nina studied her father, who seemed steady on his feet. “I thought you might be dead by now. Pickled in your own vodka.”
A shrug. “It was easier letting you fill the stewpot when you were home—girls are supposed to look after their fathers. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do it myself.”
“I’m not sorry for leaving.”
A wintry smile. “You stole every kopeck I had on your way out. Are you sorry for that?”
“No.”
“Thieving little bitch.” He said it with a kind of grim amusement, and Nina grinned. So strange to see him here; he looked as out of place as a wolf would have looked sauntering under the streetlamps.
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Nina said, surprised to find she meant it. She could easily hate the man who tried to drown her. But she rather liked the man who had taught her to hunt and told her stories, and she felt a wary respect for the man seemingly too iron-hard to die. The feelings bobbed alongside each other separate and comfortable, no need to rank one over the other. If any feeling about her father came first, it was the urge not to turn her back on him.
Her father was saying something about the war now, regretting that he was too old to join up and kill fascists. “Wonder if they die easier than tsarists,” he mused. “Did I ever tell you about that Muscovite son of a bitch whose liver I prised out with a spade?”
“Many times, Papa.”
“You always liked that story.” He looked at her from under shaggy brows. “I should have at least one child in this war killing Germans. Your brothers are all in prisons or gangs, and your sisters are all whores. Will you go?”
“They won’t put women in aviation units.”
“Do they think you’re too soft?” He barked a laugh. “I saw women in the revolution who could saw a man’s head off without batting an eye.”
“Revolutions talk big about women being the same as men,” Nina said. “Now when you ask permission to join up, they tell you to go be a nurse.”
“There’s your trouble. Asking.” Her father leaned toward her, and Nina smelled the feral reek of his breath. “There’ll be a chance, Nina Borisovna. Don’t ask, when you see it. Just fucking take it.”
“That shows a calculated antisocial disdain for the collectivist principle.” Nina quoted the kind of rubbish Tania was always parroting. “Antithetical to the principles of proletarian life.”
“Fuck proletarian life.”
Despite herself, Nina winced. “Keep saying things like that on a city street and you’ll be in trouble, you crazy bastard. You’ll end up with a bullet in your ear.”
“No, because I’m a Markov. Trouble always finds us, but we eat trouble alive.” Her father rummaged in his pack, tossing her something soft and bulky.