develop their cooperative instincts.” Marina Raskova herself spent a morning traveling in their railcar, and when they begged her to talk of her record-setting flight on the Rodina, she said that was old news and told them instead how she had wanted to be an opera singer growing up, singing a bit of the chorus from Eugene Onegin. Voices joined in throughout the railcar, and Nina stared uncomprehendingly. She couldn’t hum a note of Tchaikovsky; spoke no language but her native Russian; had never been herded along in structured play or honed a cooperative instinct in her life.
She’d felt a similar disconnect when she first came to Irkutsk at nineteen, but then she had been so focused on learning to fly that she had adopted Komsomol meetings and the other trappings of civilized life without ever giving them the slightest thought. Now she sat surrounded by hundreds of women for whom such things weren’t trappings to be shrugged into as a grown woman, but truths they’d imbibed with their mothers’ milk. They talked of Marxist lectures and hikes with the Young Pioneers, of trying to find shoes during the famine years that didn’t fall apart after one wearing. They even talked in whispers of the black vans that might take you away if you were denounced. Yelena had a neighbor in Moscow who had been taken: “He’d been allotted a bigger room than his apartment mates, and they wanted it, so they reported him as a wrecker,” she said matter-of-factly. “When he was taken, his parents denounced him too so they wouldn’t be sent with him.” No one asked where. They knew not to ask, just as they knew about shoe shortages and lectures, Tchaikovsky and Party songs. It was more than the difference between the country girls and the city girls, Nina thought, because there were both kinds here. This was the difference between growing up civilized, and growing up wild.
“You don’t talk much, Ninochka,” Yelena said at some point, stitching away at her uniform. They’d been passing needles and thread back and forth for days, cuffing up hems as they talked. “How did you grow up, out there on Baikal?”
“Not like you,” honesty compelled Nina to say.
“How?”
“Living on the Old Man in a collection of huts too small to call a village . . .” Nina shrugged. “It’s the end of nowhere. No one sends you away to the wilds, because you already live in the wilds. No one queues for shoes; if it’s winter you go into the forest with a snare and you kill something and make shoes from the hide, and if it’s summer you make sandals out of birchbark. There’s no one to denounce your neighbors to if they have a bigger apartment. No one has an apartment. We barely have neighbors.” There was no one to hear if your father regularly informed the world that Comrade Stalin was a swindling Georgian bastard, but Nina knew better than to confess that. “Maybe once in a lifetime someone might get to a Marxist lecture,” she went on, “if they can get to the next town a hundred kilometers away, and then they talk about it until they’re a hundred. There are old women half convinced the tsar is still alive.” She looked at the curious eyes around her and flushed.
“You’re not a savage,” Yelena said, reading Nina’s mind. “Rabbits aren’t savage—” and that made them all laugh, because it had been just yesterday afternoon that they had all been waiting on a railway siding, hugging their rumbling bellies because the bread and herring were late, and Lilia Litvyak had gone sidling round the edge of the station and returned with arms full of green globes—raw cabbages from a food cache awaiting transport. Nina and the rest had fallen on those cabbages like chomping rabbits. “Whether from Moscow or Leningrad, Kiev or Baikal,” Yelena had intoned, “we are all now rabbits.”
It stuck.
At last they piled off at Engels in freezing damp. The town was blacked out, the sky spitting icy rain. Nina shouldered her pack, shambling along with the rest of the girls. Yelena scratched under her cap. “I have nits, I just know it—”
“Quit grousing, sestra,” came floating down the line. More milling in the dark as Marina Raskova went to find the officer on duty, and by the time they were herded off to bunk down, Nina had fallen asleep on her feet, swaying like a horse dozing in its stall. The gymnasium had