The Blackbird Girls: Chapters 1–10

But she knew what stood under that billowing smoke.

The enormous Communist hammer-and-sickle insignia crowned several buildings, their neon lights dark in the daytime.

But she’d get in trouble for playing truant.

She deserved the pain, for having a saucy mouth.

She focused on Valentina, who had come to a stop a few feet away and was waiting, her expression wary.

Their faces were solemn. Nothing in their expressions told Oksana who had shouted.

Sniveling excuses are unacceptable.

A pin, embossed with the face of Vladimir Lenin, the man who had helped their country become a Communist republic and was now long dead, was clipped to the front of her blouse.

Here in our great socialist nation, we are always safe. Our government protects each one of us.

When she had first come to Ukraine, she had missed Siberia so much. She had loved the way the steppe seemed to go on forever, and the forests of towering pine trees, and the realization that spring was coming because it was finally warm enough to carry metal coins in your pocket.

When the dismissal bell rang at noon, Valentina joined the throngs of children spilling into the schoolyard.

She dragged her spoon across the bottom of her bowl, creating ripples along the surface of the borscht. It was her favorite kind of soup, because it was the same deep purple as a sky long after the sun had set, before black crept in.

The man must be a Communist Party official—Valentina saw a pin, embossed with a hammer and sickle, in his lapel.

“Come,” Valentina’s mother said, and they kept hurrying through the white foam that ran in rivulets down the road.

Against the lighted windows of the hospital, the people looked like a black mass writhing up the steps.

The doctor scuttled into the hospital.

“Babies arrive on their own schedule.” Her mother heaved herself out of the chair. “Help me to the bed. Then fetch the midwife.”

She went to a nearby school, where all of her classmates were Jewish, and she rarely ventured into other parts of the city, so she didn’t know anyone who didn’t share her religion.

Most of the men were gone, conscripted into the army.

Her mother came in, her hair disheveled, her eyes still red.

“Our traditions were stamped out after the Communist revolution,” her mother said.

Her voice sounded tinny. The loudspeakers in the streets must be broadcasting her message.

“You have my sympathies, my dear child. I suppose your mother is dithering about as usual?”

She and her mother joined the orderly procession of people streaming down the stairwell.

“I have thirty thousand people to evacuate, and I don’t have time for one impertinent child’s questions.”

He frowned and made a notation on his clipboard.

Around the corner, down a deserted street where white powder dusted the pavement, perhaps the remnants of yesterday’s foam.

Radioactive fallout will easily be carried there on the wind.

The man had gray hair and wore a dark suit; the woman was in a blue dress and had pulled her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck.

Then the bus rounded a curve in the road, and everything was hidden from Valentina’s view except for the red gleam of a sky lit by fire and a seemingly endless parade of army tanks driving past her into Pripyat.