“As far west as I can without falling off that edge of the world. You help me get to England, I look around and think not bad. It’s ugly, there’s rationing, but the ice in winter doesn’t eat you alive.”
“How does a Soviet girl end up in Poland in the first place?”
“Assigned to the front. Surprised? Soviets, they use women in their wars, not just for factory jobs or behind desks.”
Ian knew something about that. One of his fellow war correspondents, a motherly-looking American woman with nerves of gunmetal, had written a pointed article for her paper about how Soviet women were employed as tank drivers and machine gunners, whereas the great and enlightened United States of America just told their women to plant Victory gardens, and be thrifty with their bacon grease. Ian looked at his wife from the Siberian wastes and wasn’t terribly surprised to discover she had been assigned to the front. No wonder we won the war.
“So,” he said at last, “you defected.”
“Not so official as that, luchik.” She grinned. “You think I go to an embassy, ask for asylum? I see chance in chaos, I take it.”
“Not very patriotic,” he couldn’t help observing. “Walking away from your countrymen in the middle of a war.”
Her smile disappeared. “My countrymen, they want to stand me against a wall and shoot me.”
“Why?”
“Is Stalin’s world, Stalin’s rule. Who needs a why?”
“I do.”
“Not your business.”
“Yes, it is.” He linked his hands behind his head, not backing down from their stare. “You’re my wife. I gave you my name, you got your citizenship through me. You and your past and anything else I helped you bring to my country are very much my business.”
Her lips remained sealed.
“Did my brother know?” Ian asked, changing tack. “When he promised he’d get you safe to England if you both lived, did he know you were a Soviet?”
“Yes.” No hesitation there.
“Why would he make such a promise? Was it an affair? Love in a time of war?” Ian held his breath, waiting. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard of desperate women escaping war zones by finding a dead soldier’s belongings and making up a tragic wartime romance when his grieving family came around. Only Ian knew that for his little brother, that was unlikely. He waited for Nina to step into the lie . . . hoping, he realized, that she wouldn’t. So far she’d only misdirected him. Now, he realized just how badly he wanted his wife not to be a liar.
“Lovers, Seb and me?” Nina laughed outright, shaking her head. “No. He liked the boys.”
Ian let out his breath. “Yes, he did.” Seb had told him that the night their father died, so drunk he could hardly stand. It hadn’t shocked Ian particularly. You didn’t spend years in an English public school without knowing exactly what two males could do together if they had the inclination. You don’t look surprised, Seb had slurred, not only drunk but in tears by then.
I’m not, Ian had answered. Chagrined, maybe—he knew full well how this would complicate and endanger his little brother’s life—but not surprised. I’ve never seen you even look at a girl, Seb.
I don’t know anything about girls. A hazy wave indicating the all-male household where they’d grown up, the all-boys’ schools. Maybe I’ll grow out of it?
Maybe you will. If you don’t, well, you’ll have to keep your head down and be careful, but it’s more common than you think.
It is?
Ian had poured them both another measure of whiskey and delivered a blunt, mildly drunken lecture on all the various combinations of the sexes he had seen tearing at belt buckles in Spanish hospital supply closets or going at it under Hyde Park bushes during blackouts—any prudishness Ian had carried out of school had died as soon as he went to war. Seb had passed out from whiskey and relief not five minutes later.
I was the first one he told, Ian thought now, painfully. And Nina, if she spoke truly, was the last. “He really told you?”
Nod.
“Tell me how you two met, what happened.” Ian’s voice sounded rough to his own ears; he cleared his throat. “I didn’t get much detail when we spoke of it five years ago. Difficult to get a lot of nuance from a conversation that’s half pantomime.”
“I’m in Poland, getting clear of Soviet lines.” No hint how or why she’d done that, and from her barbed smile, Ian thought it