The Huntress

“What about the Huntress? She vanished at the war’s end. She was not worth pursuing - a woman with the blood of only a dozen or so on her hands, when there were the murderers of millions to be found. There were many like her - small fish, not worth catching.” 

This extract from Ian’s April 1946 article describes the relatively small-scale nature of the Huntress’s murders when compared to the large death toll of armed conflict and the concentration camps. His assertion that this murderer of 12 is a “small fish, not worth catching” is ironic and in stark contrast to his own opinion, given that he has written an article about her and endowed her with the mythic name of the Huntress. This also reflects how many in the United States were prepared to forget Nazi atrocities as the emergent Soviet threat loomed.

“It was the expression on the Austrian woman’s face. Jordan had sat across from that face all evening, and she’d seen nothing but pleasant interest and calm dignity, but in the photograph a different woman emerged. She wore a smile, but not a pleasant one. The eyes were narrowed, and her hands around the dish towel suddenly clenched in some reflexive death grip.” 

Jordan’s suspicion of Anneliese, who is to become her stepmother, originates in the photograph she takes of her. While in person, Anneliese embodies grace and delicacy, the photograph reveals a different, more malicious side to her. It is not only the “reflexive death grip” that is disturbing, but the duality of Anneliese’s presence. Jordan is unsure of which side to trust. 

“What is the opposite of a lake? What is the opposite of drowning? What lies all the way west?” 

Nina’s questions after she survives her father’s attempt to drown her in Lake Baikal, inform her destiny. She finds the opposite of lakes and drowning in flying planes in the sky and moves west, first as she crosses the border into Poland and later when she goes to America. This near-drowning is thus the most formative experience of Nina’s life in that it compels her to become a pilot and to abandon the Soviet Union.

“An Iron Cross, black swastika gleaming. It lay among the bridal roses and loops of pale blue ribbon like a drop of poison. Something old, something new, Jordan thought, waves of bewildered horror crawling down her spine, something Nazi, something blue.” 

When Jordan discovers the Nazi Iron Cross couched in her new stepmother’s bridal bouquet, she receives the greatest evidence yet that her stepmother is not as nice as she seems. The juxtaposition of the pretty, harmless bridal flowers and ribbons with the Iron Cross, hard and heavy with Nazi symbolism, illustrates the two sides of Anneliese’s personality. She seems soft, feminine, and benign, but has associations that are the opposite. Jordan’s modification of the common bridal rhyme, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” replaces “borrowed” with “Nazi”, as she fears that her father has married a dangerous woman.

“‘Never mind, cricket. You don’t have to remember if you don’t want to.’ ‘That’s what she said,’ Ruth mumbled into Jordan’s middle.” 

When Jordan takes her new step-sister, Ruth, out for an ice cream, Ruth mentions how her mother used to play the violin. When Jordan contradicts her and says that she has never seen Anneliese pick up a violin, Ruth gets upset and drops her ice cream. A guilty Jordan tells Ruth that she can choose to suppress her memories if she wants to. Ruth ominously reports that Anneliese told her the same thing. The theme of optionally forgetting to deal with war trauma recurs throughout the narrative. In this instance, Ruth’s willingness to forget delays the emergence of the truth about Anneliese. 

“We listen to lies day in and day out, not just from war criminals. Refugees and good guys lie too. About whether they’re Jewish or gentile, about their war record or their imprisonment record, about their health, about their age and how they got their papers. Good reasons or bad, everybody lies.” 

Tony argues that the postwar climate of secrecy surrounding the horror of the Nazi crimes has created an environment where no one involved in the war tells the truth. The lies, which emerge from the mouths of “refugees and good guys” as well as criminals, are a defense mechanism against the potential dangers that could follow Ian and Tony’s knowledge of the truth about their situation. 

“Something in Nina’s chest expanded. Sestra, she thought, giving the plain word the twist that had made it something unique when she heard it in Yelena’s voice. Nina had not felt this burgeoning warmth since the day she walked singing with Vladimir and the other pilots to enlist - the warm feeling of belonging. Only these women would not leave her behind.”

For the first time in her life, Nina experiences the feeling of belonging. She feels that she can trust the women in her aviation regiment on an unprecedented level. Starry-eyed and hopeful, especially when she meets Yelena, Nina cannot imagine a day when the regiment will have no choice but to leave her behind. Quinn here sets the stage for the gravity of Nina’s loss when it comes. 

“She didn’t have the Leica to record it this time, but she heard the click very clearly in her mind as she snapped an image of her stepmother’s expression. Not a mother’s concern as she looked at her crying child, but eyes full of hard, cool consideration. Like a fisherman deciding whether an inferior catch should be tossed back in the lake.” 

As Jordan witnesses Anneliese’s expression as she goes to attend to a traumatized Ruth, she is struck by the difference between the maternal concern she would expect and the calculating expression that Anneliese assumes. The simile likening Anneliese to a fisherman deciding the fate of an inferior catch indicates the rational deliberation that takes place in her mind and gives an impression of her hunter-like ruthlessness. By this point in the narrative, Jordan no longer requires a camera to sense the sinister core underneath Anneliese’s pleasant countenance.  

“Inside the dark hallway Nina was only a shadow - all Ian could see was the gleam of her teeth as she padded noiselessly down Frau Vogt’s hall carpet and disappeared round a corner. Her smile seemed to hang disembodied in the air like that of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat.” 

Ian observes Nina’s otherworldly appearance as she breaks into Frau Vogt’s house. She is agile enough to become as insubstantial as a “shadow”, while the gleaming teeth of her smile, procured by her disregard for Ian’s protocol, make her like Lewis Carroll’s elusive Cheshire Cat. The ethereal metaphors make her seem like a force of nature that Ian cannot control. 

“Hundreds of women from hundreds of different worlds had unloaded at Engels, country girls and city girls, those with degrees and those who knew nothing […] And now they were simply the recruits of Aviation Group 122, identically shorn, and all their worlds combined into one.” 

After their hair is shorn army-short, the women in Nina’s aviation group appear identical despite their differences. Nina is happy because she feels that she can trade her individual past of Siberian wasteland and lack of education for a collective present and future where she belongs to the Aviation Group. This sense of belonging, however, will be short-lived.

“Nina had no idea why a propeller worked or what the flying wires did, but as soon as the wheels lifted from the ground, her whole body disappeared into the plane. Her arms became wings, her torso filled the cockpit, her feet disappeared into the wheels. The sensation only strengthened in night flying; her eyes disappeared altogether and she could no longer see that she hadn’t become part of the plane.”

This passage describes Nina’s symbiosis with the plane. She feels not so much that her body is helping her to control the plane, but that it has become part of the plane. Thus, her wish to fly is becomes fulfilled in the most complete manner. Moreover, this stands in contrast to Yelena’s more technical approach toward aviation.

“You might know more Latin than your wife here, but don’t think that makes you better than she is. You’ve got a savage in there too, you just pretend he’s never coming off the leash.”

Tony confronts Ian about his unwillingness to take the investigation to Boston and his alleged pretense that he would not like to violently harm the Huntress. Tony claims that Ian is hiding his truly violent, vengeful nature behind a facade of English reserve. His stiff upper lip will crack at a later stage in the novel, when he defends Nina against violent, anti-communist thugs. 

“Thinking about after the wedding was almost impossible, like the crest of a hill she couldn’t see beyond […] exactly how life alongside Garrett was going to continue after the honeymoon was still in many ways a question mark.” 

Jordan’s reluctance to marry Garrett Byrne and to settle down as a housewife so young is shown in her inability to imagine her life after the wedding. Arguably, Jordan’s imaginative failure also functions as a premonition that the wedding will not take place. This attitude reflects the book’s larger theme of rejecting postwar gender norms and the nuclear family.

“Maybe he saw that the last of Marina Raskova’s eaglets didn’t believe the horse-shit stories he wove for girls like Yelena, the stories about how the Motherland was on its way to a glorious future. Did he see that? Nina always wondered. He must have seen enough to remember her name. Maybe he jotted it as an afterthought into his notebook beside the running wolves. Because the investigation came within a year.” 

Nina, who had to eventually flee her regiment to escape arrest on suspicion of being an Enemy of the State, continues to wonder whether something in her visit to receive a medal from Stalin aroused his suspicion. The fact that he could have jotted her name in his notebook full of doodles as an “afterthought” indicates how casually and on what little evidence Stalin could send a mandate for a person’s arrest. The fact that Nina and her family are victims of Stalin’s totalitarian regime makes it sting even more when Nina is accused of being a Soviet sympathizer later in the book.

“She cried into that small shoulder as the sky darkened from twilight to night, a half-moon beginning to rise, and there was one final stab of resentment. That Anneliese, whom she had met at seventeen, knew her so well, and not her father, who had known her her whole life.”

This passage reveals how insidiously Anneliese makes herself indispensable to a Jordan who is tired of pretending to be a good girl and hungry to follow her dreams. Whereas Jordan’s deceased father was a confining force, Anneliese plays the role of liberator. In truth, however, Anneliese merely wants Jordan out of the way.

“During the war, I have my bad nights, I dream the lake, but it never makes me want borscht and babies. My war finishes, you get me to England, I end up at the airfield in Manchester. Loops on old biplanes, no target, going crazy. Until I get the message about die Jägerin. Is good then; because I have target again.” 

Nina explains that no matter how many dangerous and traumatic experiences she had during wartime, she does not want to give it up for peace and domesticity. She always needs action and a target to hunt, whether the Germans or the Huntress. Nina is not nearly as afraid of another “lake” or experience of near-death by water as she is of familial living. 

“One more kiss, and she’d be the one crying her heart out in Yelena’s arms and vowing to stay, vowing to denounce her father, vowing to take ten years or twenty in a gulag if her pilot would only wait for her. One more kiss and she would be utterly undone. In the old stories a rusalka could bring a mortal to their knees, perishing in ecstasy after a single kiss that seared like ice. Maybe Yelena had been the rusalka all along. Not small, shaken Nina Markova who felt like she was dying.” 

This quote shows how fearsome Nina, who is the rusalka-like sum of the Huntress’s nightmares, feels defeated by the rusalka-like phenomenon of a love who lets her down and abandons her to her own fate. She feels that Yelena’s power is such that if their lips make contact one more time, Nina will work against her own interest and give herself up to the Soviet authorities, no matter the cost. This is yet another example of how the symbol of the rusalka is fluid and flexible for the author’s purposes.

“Other children born when Ruth was will grow up to start more wars; that’s the way of the human race, but Ruth won’t be one of them. She’ll bring music into the world instead. She’s at least one thing that’s right, going forward. Building a generation is like building a wall - one good well-made brick at a time, one good well-made child at a time […] Enough good children, you have a generation that won’t start a world-enveloping war.” 

Ian’s theorizes that raising Ruth to love music is a contribution to creating a generation that will not be so eager to go to war. While he is a hunter himself, he sees that peace is the best way forward. In his mind, children like Ruth are the only way to break the cycle of war and violence.

“Anneliese smiled, an arm still about Jordan’s shoulders, and Jordan’s heart cracked because that smile was so warm and soothing that she still had the urge to trust it. Like Taro, who sat shoving an adoring black nose under Anneliese’s free hand, Jordan felt the same instinctive surge of comfort as her stepmother’s soft murderous fingers stroked her hair.” 

This passage shows how Jordan’s turn against Anneliese goes against her instinct which, like her dog Taro’s, has been trained to trust her stepmother and feel soothed by her presence. The detail of Jordan and Taro’s psychosomatic ease around Anneliese shows how difficult it is for Jordan to come to terms with the truth, despite her knowledge. This is a testament to Anneliese’s immense skill as a liar and manipulator.

“Let go. Let the rusalka have you. She’s the first night witch, the one who comes from the lake with ice-cold arms and a kiss that kills. No, Nina thought, I am the rusalka. Born from a lake to find home in the sky, come back to the lake.” 

During her encounter with the Huntress on the night she fails to save Sebastian, Nina contemplates letting herself become the Huntress’s prey and drown in the lake. However, she determines that she will be the rusalka who haunts the Huntress, rather than her victim. This passage highlights the similarities between Nina and the Huntress and how Nina can use her own instincts for killing and survival to her advantage. 

“‘I know just how to throw her off guard,’ Jordan murmured back, feeling the Leica about her neck on its strap. She’s snatched it on pure instinct when they left the house - perhaps the same instinct that made Ian stretch for his typewriter, Nina for a plane, Tony for his own nimble tongue. When preparing to level with an enemy, you readied your best weapon.” 

Jordan’s reference to each member of the team using their best weapon in the case for justice against the Huntress—in each case, a non-violent weapon—shows their commitment to hunting hunters in non-violent ways. It also allows Jordan to align her passion for photography with her knowledge of the Huntress’s camera-shyness to best effect. That shyness is a result of the Huntress’s psychological and practical need to hide her true identity.

“Ian vivisected the woman born as Lorelei Vogt, reborn in murder as Anneliese Weber, rechristened in deception as Anna McBride, and identified by nature - primitive, primal nature red in tooth and claw - as a huntress.” 

In his article, Ian reveals the Huntress’s many names and guises, in addition to her consistent “nature” as someone who kills for sport and to protect herself. Far from letting her escape as a small-scale Nazi criminal, Ian’s idea is to make the Huntress world-famous so that her example can stand as a warning. He refuses to let the world forget Nazi war criminals, no matter the relative magnitude of their crimes.

“It wouldn’t stop her looking at a waning quarter moon and wanting Yelena back, missing her more than life - Nina didn’t think that would ever leave her. But she could bear it.” 

At the end of the novel, Nina agrees to remain Ian’s wife and realizes that she loves him. Yet it still does not prevent her from missing Yelena and pining for the future they could have had together. However, Nina learns that she can carry her sorrow and live her new life all at the same time.