The Huntress

A British war correspondent, Ian Graham spent his life going from war to war in search of the most exciting stories from the front. However, by the time the reader meets him in 1950, he has stopped writing and instead tracks Nazi war criminals. This is a time when the West considers that “the Nazis are beaten and done” (22). Ian however, cannot rest until he catches and brings to justice the Nazi Huntress who killed his brother, Sebastian.

Tall, nearing 40, and with “dark hair […] salted with gray” (20), Ian leads an ascetic life of tracking comparatively minor Nazi criminals and violin-playing. That changes when Nina, his mysterious wife of convenience, reappears on the scene (20). Nina guides him to take risks. She helps him remember that he too is a restless hunter, forever seeking new battles rather than settling into a vision of domesticity.

Still, behind Ian’s restlessness lies a deep loyalty and sense of duty to the people he loves and cares about. His relentless quest for the Huntress is an attempt to bring justice for Sebastian’s murder, he gives Ruth secret violin lessons, and he vows to do everything in his power to make Nina stay with him. 

“Tiny blue-eyed” Nina Markova grows up the daughter of a dysfunctional alcoholic who tells her that her mother was “a rusalka […] a lake witch who comes to shore trailing her long green hair, luring men to their deaths” (34-35). Indeed, Nina becomes this macabre watery figure for the Huntress, who has nightmares for years about how Nina emerged from the lake. It is Nina’s ability to pass as the rusalka at Selkie Lake that causes the Huntress to finally stop her flight and wish for death.

The irony of Nina’s role as a rusalka, is that she seeks the opposite of water—air—when she takes to the skies as a pilot. The air represents ambition to Nina, who must elevate herself to the level of Moscow-educated women like Marina Raskova and Yelena Vetsina. However, Nina names the plane she uses to fight the Nazis, Rusalka and retains the razor she brought with her from Siberia close to hand. She makes use of the fighting instinct she needed to survive the father who tried to drown her in a lake. She also inherited her father’s disregard for Stalin and the egalitarian myths of the Soviet Union, a trait which causes a rift between her and Yelena. While Yelena is a loyal Soviet citizen who dreams of children and domesticity after the war is over, Nina wants “to fly missions, hunt Germans” (299).

This aspiration makes her a good match for Ian, a fellow hunter. Yet she is so heartbroken after Yelena’s rejection that she vows she will never love again, a decision she only begins to reconsider in the Epilogue. Although Nina has a warm, corporeal presence with her heavy boots, peroxide-blonde hair, frequent swearing, and love of sex and hamburgers, she also possesses the little silent feet and otherworldly serenity of the Huntress. 

A budding photographer, Jordan McBride is tall and tomboyish with dark blond hair that she wears in a “careless ponytail” (8). While her father would prefer that she work in his antiques shop and marry Garrett Byrne, Jordan dreams of being like her photographer heroines Margaret Bourke-White and Gerda Taro. Jordan was initially drawn to photography after enduring a period during her childhood when people lied to her about her mother’s terminal illness. She could pick up a camera and find that “there weren’t gaps in photographs; there wasn’t any need to fill them up with stories. If she had a camera, she didn’t need to tell stories; she could tell the truth” (13). However, when the woman who presents herself as Anneliese Weber enters Jordan’s life, Jordan encounters two conflicting images: one of Anneliese’s real-life gentility and the other of her cruel expression under the lens. After Jordan’s photographic discoveries cause a scene at the Thanksgiving dinner, Jordan opts for an interpretation of the photographic evidence that will keep the peace.

Over time, Jordan’s love for Ruth and even Anneliese overrides her initial suspicions. Jordan relates to Anneliese as a fellow woman who wants to “stretch her wings” (357) beyond the confining roles of postwar womanhood (357). Meanwhile, Jordan finds an intellectual and sexual match in Tony, delighting in “a man who was not official, not in the slightest” (378). Although her fondness for Anneliese remains profound, Jordan instinctively begins to mistrust her, following her stepmother’s erratic behavior. While Jordan quietly resumes her detective-work on Anneliese, she has to make fast and ruthless decisions about severing her loyalty when she learns the truth about her. In a final blow to their relationship, Jordan becomes a huntress herself as she pursues Anneliese with her camera at Selkie Lake and publishes the photos in the series “Portraits in Evil.” Thus, although Jordan missed out on capturing the conflict of the photographer heroines, by joining Ian’s postwar hunt for remaining Nazis, she still manages to fulfill her dream of becoming a photographer of action. 

Tony Rodomovsky is Ian’s work partner. He has the “olive-skinned, dark-eyed intensity of a European, and the untidy swagger of a Yank” (20). Raised in Queens, New York, Tony is a polyglot with a mixture of Polish, Hungarian, German, French, Czech, Romanian, Russian, and Jewish blood. Tony’s weapon for catching the Huntress is one he shares with her: his maverick power to disguise himself and to speak many languages. Charming and good-humored, Tony can pass for several nationalities and can even earn the trust of former Nazi housewives, including the Huntress’s mother. He is the merry, talkative counterpart to Ian’s quiet sternness. Tony’s persuasive powers are such that despite knowing nothing about antiques, he manages to get even the most stubborn customers to purchase goods from McBride’s Antiques.

Although he is a great listener and interpreter of human behavior, Tony risks losing an independent sense of purpose under the guise of the charming interpreter. He describes his experience of being an interpreter during the war as a disappointing one; it was as though “you’re not really there, in a way. You’re like a set of interphones; you make it possible for the two people on either side to hear each other” (375). Frustrated with being a mere communication channel, Tony wants to create a repository that houses the stories of those who fought in the war. This goal allows Tony to reach for a more authentic and stable lifestyle, in which he can put his name on a documentation center, rather than exert himself anonymously as an interpreter.  

Yelena Vetsina is Nina’s lover during the war. Born in the Ukraine but raised in Moscow since the age of 12, Yelena dreams of returning to Moscow when the war is over. Contrary to the uneducated and instinctive Nina, Yelena is a “pedigreed candidate” (119) with an impressive technique in the air. She is tall, slim, “porcelain skinned and smiling” with “ink-dark hair in a plait past her waist” (119). Unlike Nina, Yelena joins the regiment with little sexual experience. Despite the attention she receives from male pilots, Yelena prefers women, especially Nina. While she enjoys the camaraderie with Nina and the other pilots, Yelena is visibly shaken by her bombing experiences and the stimulants she takes to stay alert, which cause her to suffer tremors and weight loss.

While Nina could spend her life in action, Yelena envisions a domestic future with a Moscow apartment and adopted orphans. She achieves this vision with Zoya, a tamer girl from the regiment, rather than Nina. While her love for Nina is strong, it cannot compete with her love for the Motherland and the Communist ideology of her youth. She tells Nina that to break her promise to her homeland for love would be to fulfill the misogynist stereotype of the over-emotional “little princess” who has “no place at the front” (340). Nina considers that Yelena’s ability to abandon the relationship makes her the rusalka, who seduces her lover to the point where she feels like “dying” (341) when she breaks her heart.

Ruth is a young girl who is instructed to pose as the Huntress’s daughter. The Huntress killed her mother for a passport and abducted Ruth to aid her passage to America. She has “blond pigtails and a blue coat and a grave expression” (10). Ruth’s trauma at what she has witnessed emerges in her reserve and her fear of strangers. Although she likes Jordan and Daniel and cannot wait for them to become a family, she is only able to be “cautiously thrilled” (67) on the day of the wedding, as she lacks the typical healthy spontaneity one associates with a child (67). While on the surface, the Huntress appears to be firm but fair with Ruth, correcting her manners and reminding her to speak English, the German nickname she gives her, Maüschen—meaning little mouse—is sinister, as a little mouse is the most vulnerable type of prey.

Four years after her entry into the McBride family, a bolder Ruth responds to violin music and would obviously like lessons herself, perhaps as an unconscious means of connecting with the memory of her real mother. The Huntress seeks to control her by denying the request. When Jordan and Ian find a means of procuring violin lessons for Ruth, she learns to trust them above the Huntress. 

Garrett Byrne, the “nice young man” (12) from a good Boston family, is Jordan’s boyfriend and later fiancé. He is cast in the novel as the expressway to the typical postwar life of domesticity that Jordan does not want. He looks “about as all-American cute as a Coca-Cola ad” with “his dimples, his broad shoulders, and his Red Sox cap tipped down over short brown hair” (41). Like Jordan, Garrett feels the parental pressure to lead a sensible life. He becomes engaged to Jordan at the appropriate time, without being in love with her, and gives up his dream of being a pilot to work at his father’s business. Quinn shows how Garrett is as ill at ease as Jordan in his confining gendered postwar role when he elects to go back to being a pilot. Along with Jordan and Tony, clean-cut Garrett sets a new life-model for postwar youth, one that is more defined by personal interests than familial duty.