“I was forced to destroy my cello in Leningrad.”
Madame Nadia wrinkled her nose in contempt. “Whatever for?”
“I needed the firewood.”
Madame Nadia sighed. “Very well. Then we will have to find you an instrument. You are our new lead cello.”
CHAPTER 38
THE CHOIRBOY
Bobby hadn’t believed anything could be bigger than Alaska, but Siberia was just that. They flew over vast stretches of taiga wilderness. Up ahead, the Russian girl pilots were leading his formation of P-39 fighters as they escorted General Marshall’s C-47 Skytrain. They’d stopped briefly to refuel at no fewer than seventeen different airfields, mostly for the P-39s.
The C-47 would have needed to refuel only once before reaching Chelyabinsk, as a B-17 bomber would have. But General Marshall wanted to land at as many fields as possible to gain a complete picture of the proposed route. Most of the airfields were tiny and remote, little more than gravel runways ground into the permafrost. But, as Bobby observed, all were adequate way stations for a potential B-17 bombing run.
At one such airfield, Seymchan, the American pilots had spent their first night. Their barracks were a log cabin with a sod roof. It was cold enough in June; Bobby couldn’t imagine what it must be like in the middle of winter. It took him ages to fall asleep, and it felt like only moments later when Jack woke him.
“I need your help,” he said.
“Help doing what?”
“Help with Bel.”
“Why? What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing’s wrong, everything’s right. That’s the problem.” He looked around, making sure no one else was waking up. “Lenka knows this hot spring. She’s willing to show us, but only if you come along.”
“Why me?”
“Why do you think? Lenka’s sweet on you.”
Bobby groaned. “All right, but you owe me.”
It was an hour hike through the darkness. Pine and fir trees climbed all around them, the bushy needles of their branches blocking the sky.
Bobby heard a strange sound as they hiked—a sort of grunt or a growl. “What’s that?” he asked.
“Bear,” Bel responded with a smile. “How you say… white, big?” she gestured with her arms to indicate a bear’s enormous size.
“A polar bear?” Bobby blurted in alarm. “What if it attacks?”
Bel shrugged. “Then it eat. Us.”
Lenka leaned close, draping her arm around Bobby’s shoulder so she could whisper in his ear. “Do not worry, she tease,” Lenka reassured him. “Most likely just wild pig.”
The forest parted to reveal a wide circle of barren ground. Bobby gasped at the horizon. Bright-green streaks rose like reverse lightning into the sky: the aurora borealis. It was so bright, it illuminated everything, including the girls’ glowing faces.
Lenka led them across the icy dirt interspersed with granite boulders. In the center of the clearing was a small, perfectly circular pond. Thanks to the light of the aurora borealis, Bobby could see steam rising off the pond’s surface.
“Turn around,” Lenka told the boys.
“How come?” Bobby asked.
“Just do it!” whispered Jack, turning around. Bobby frowned and followed suit.
“No look!” Lenka called out.
Then came a long pause, broken by one splash and then another.
“OK, you can look now!”
Bobby discovered both girls up to their necks in the warm water. Though the black, murky depths obscured their bodies, Bobby knew they were both naked because their clothes were draped neatly over nearby boulders.
“Now your turn,” teased Lenka.
“What? You want us to strip right here?”
Lenka shrugged, revealing her bare shoulders as they briefly rose above the surface of the black water. “You must not walk back cold in wet clothes.”
“Aren’t you gonna turn around?” Bobby asked incredulously.
“No,” Lenka stated. Bel giggled beside her.
Bobby looked around. The clearing was at least fifty yards in circumference. There was not a single bush or tree to hide behind.
“What’re you waiting for?” Jack urged, practically tearing off his shirt and trousers.
Bobby sighed and followed suit, disrobing and jumping into the water as quickly as possible so the girls wouldn’t see his naked body too long. His clothes lay in a tangled pile on the cold ground. The warm water of the hot spring immediately relaxed him. It smelled bad, like rotten eggs, but he couldn’t deny it felt wonderful.
The foursome began to chat, with Jack telling the story of how he’d learned to fly. That prompted the girl pilots to tell their own stories.
Bel had grown up worshipping Maria Raskova, a sort of Russian equivalent, Bobby decided, of Amelia Earhart. Bel always dreamed of flying, and when she was twelve, she jumped off her apartment balcony with homemade wings. The experiment ended with her breaking both her legs. But it didn’t end her desire to fly. When she turned eighteen, she applied to the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy, where her hero, Marina Raskova, was now working as an instructor. When Germany invaded, all the student pilots were conscripted into the military.
Lenka admitted that her reasons for becoming a pilot were much more practical than Bel’s. She, too, learned to fly at the Zhukovsky Academy, but Lenka had never heard of Marina Raskova. Lenka’s mother believed that pilots would make good husbands, since their jobs were both respected and in demand. She’d sent Lenka to the academy not to succeed, but to fail, trusting that her daughter would hitch a man before flunking out.
“But she not flunk,” Bel declared, proud of her friend. “Lenka was best in class.”
Lenka blushed.
“Your mother must be proud,” Bobby observed.
“She still want I marry rich pilot,” Lenka replied with another shrug of her cute bare shoulders.
“But if you’re a pilot now,” Bobby reasoned, “you can be rich yourself. You don’t need a husband.”
“Nobody rich in Soviet Union,” Lenka informed him. She leaned forward so that the steam parted around her smiling face. “So maybe I marry rich American pilot instead.”
Bobby suddenly realized how hot it was getting. “Hey, I’m starting to sweat. What do you say we head back?”
Lenka smiled, as if proud of herself for making Bobby uncomfortable. “OK, you first.”
Bobby knew there was no arguing. He just had to swallow his embarrassment, get out of the water, and get dressed as quickly as possible. “You coming?” he asked Jack.
Jack looked over at Bel, who shook her head with a grin. “No, I’m just fine. Why don’t you two go ahead?”
Bobby pulled on his clothes in seconds, and turned around to let Lenka dress in private. As they walked away, Bobby glanced over his shoulder and noticed that Jack and Bel were no longer across from each other. Jack had slid up beside her.
Obviously, something happened that night between them. For the rest of the trip, on through Yakutsk and Kirensk and Krasnoyarsk, Bobby caught Jack and Bel kissing. And for every time he caught them, he was sure there were at least a dozen more times that he didn’t. Bobby was glad for his friend. But he also had to admit he was a little jealous, because it reminded him of all those good times in New York with Karen. He could only hope he was getting closer to bringing them back.
CHAPTER 39
THE CELLIST AND THE ORGAN-GRINDER
Karen had never been on a train that was so luxurious. It was more like a rolling resort hotel than a means of transportation. After all she’d been through, she tried not to smile the whole time.