by Gwen C. Katz
Dear Pasha,
It’s funny how life can stand still for so long, then change so fast that your head spins. Four days ago I had no future beyond working at the coking ovens and maybe, if I was lucky, becoming a small-time flight instructor like Iosif Grigorevich. And then an unexpected telegram, a trip to Moscow, and my impossible dream came true: Iskra and I are joining the VVS! We found ourselves on a train to Engels, part of the brand-new, all-female Aviation Group 122.
We were in complete isolation from the outside world on the train, relying on an occasional newspaper bought at a station to even know whether Moscow was still standing. I scoured those papers trying to piece together where you are. I didn’t expect how uneasy that made me. Aside from my trip to Moscow to visit Iskra, you and I have never been more than a few kilometers from each other the whole time we were growing up. Now letters will have to suffice. I’ve enclosed my new address. I expect you to write promptly.
We arrived on a freezing, rainy night. The city was blacked out in case of air raids. No one was there to meet us.
Captain Kazarinova, our new chief of staff, lined us up while Major Raskova went in search of the duty officer. The captain stalked down the platform, frowning as though she expected us to look like a military parade after being stuffed in boxcars for nine days and then marched through the rain. Iskra and I held hands like lost children.
Kazarinova stopped in front of us. Her dark eyes flicked over our tangled hair and rumpled uniforms. In a moment of panic, I thought she’d found out about Iskra’s past. Maybe one of our new friends had spilled our secret, or Kazarinova had somehow looked up our family history while we were on the train, or else that piercing gaze just saw right through us and laid bare our secrets. Someone was about to get arrested.
After what seemed like eons, she shook her head and moved on. In the end, she didn’t arrest anyone.
Worse. She ordered us to cut off our hair.
It was our first sacrifice to the war effort. I know that will sound silly to you, out there dealing with real hardships, but the feeling of braids falling down to my waist has followed me around my whole life. I remember thinking, “Last chance, Valka. If you want to back out, you’d better do it now.”
Some girls cried. I held my tears, even though it was like cutting off one of my arms. I felt that weight leaving me and I knew that was it—I could never get it back, not for years and years. While she cut my hair, Iskra teased that there must be a real woman hiding inside me after all. It was her way of making me feel better.
I got my revenge by taking the scissors from her and informing her that her hair wasn’t the regulation five centimeters long, either. She actually screamed in horror. I let her go and she got another girl to cut her hair. With its natural wave it still looks pretty.
Lilya, the movie-star-glamorous girl we met on the train, flat-out refused. There was begging, pleading, and wheedling, but Captain Kazarinova had to threaten to have her arrested before she relented. I think she’s put herself on the list of troublemakers.
All three-hundred-odd of us are sleeping in what used to be a gymnasium. It has a wooden floor smooth with wax, marked up with black scuff marks and white lines setting off handball and tennis courts. There’s a trace of the gymnasium smell of leather and sweat. The windows, high on the walls, are slathered with black paint.
Iskra, our new friends Lilya and Zhigli, and I ended up in the northwest corner along with a military engineer who insists that we call her by either her last name (Ilyushina) or her rank (Captain) and a Ukrainian university student named Vera who’s training to be a navigator. The Ukrainian girls have such funny accents: they pronounce g’s like h’s. Not like in Stakhanovo, where everyone sounded the same.
We’re a proper flock of white crows. A hundred years ago, we would have had to disguise ourselves as men and run away to fight, like Nadezhda Durova, the cavalry maiden. Now we don’t have to do that sort of thing, but nearly everyone had to move heaven and earth to get here. Lilya lied about her experience. Zhigli badgered an air force colonel until she wore him down. One of the other pilots said, “My father thought flying was not an appropriate career for a woman. He wanted me to be a steelworker like the rest of the family.”
Zhigli asked, “What about you, Lilya? Did your father want to let you fly?”
The usually talkative Lilya went silent. Her mouth tightened. I came to her rescue with a story about accidentally killing the engine during my first flight.
There’s a sleepover feel to our gymnasium dormitory. After lights-out we stay up late talking. Everyone except Captain Ilyushina, who warned us that morning would come early and went straight to sleep. She hasn’t told us anything about herself except that she should have been sent to the front with the men and that we’re too loud, too silly, and too undisciplined, and we’ll probably all get ourselves killed.
Major Raskova has her own way of settling in. When we passed her room on our way to our gymnasium, she was upbraiding the officer on duty. He’d prepared her a nice comfortable room with a luxurious rug and a vase of fresh flowers, but she was making him take it all away. She said that if her girls didn’t have such luxuries, then she didn’t need them, either. I’ve never heard her sound so stern.
I must sleep now. Tomorrow the work begins. Write as soon as you can. I won’t be able to focus on training while I’m wondering about you.
Yours,
Valka
31 October 1941
Dear Valyushka,
I hope this letter reaches you. Our ability to send letters has been limited during rasputitsa. Horse-drawn carts are the only reliable way of moving supplies down the swampy roads. Can you believe that Pashkevich is happy about the conditions? He says that the Hitlerites have it worse than us and that any time the weather is bothering us, we should imagine a tiger tank sunk a meter into the mud.
I’m all right so far. Scared. Vakhromov tells me that’s normal. The soldiers we’re reinforcing seem tired, mostly. Like they’ve spent so long in danger that they don’t know how to be afraid anymore, even though it’s only been four months. These guys are barely older than me. It’s hard to believe.
They have a song that they sing while they work or march. A love song. A faint reminder that there’s a whole other life waiting for us back home. It goes like this:
Apple and pear trees were blooming,
Mist creeping on the river,
As Katyusha stepped out on the bank,
On the steep and lofty bank.
Stepped out, began a song,
A song for the gray steppe eagle,
A song for her loved one,
A song for him whose letters she treasured.
Oh song, maiden’s little song!
Fly toward the clear sun,
To that warrior on the distant border.
Bring Katyusha’s greetings.
May he recall a simple maiden,
May he hear her song,
May he save our Motherland
As Katyusha saves their love.
I picked up the melody’s pattern of colors and joined in. Pashkevich noticed that I could carry a tune and dubbed me Choir Boy. It is not an affectionate nickname.
After learning all the strict rules governing communications, I arrived at the front to discover that nobody actually follows them. I had scarcely staked the antennae of my radio in the fenced patch of mud we call a campsite before I was hailed over AM by a bored operator from another regiment in our division who had heard that I was the new guy. His voice was light orange. Speaking in the clear (that means unencrypted, which is never allowed), he asked me about my family and we got to chatting. He’s a Muscovite and a big football fan. He complained that he had bet twenty rubles on Moscow Dynamo and would never get it back now that the Soviet Cup has been canceled. It’s funny what people care about. We can’t wrap our minds around the war. It’s too big, too terrible. So we have to put it in terms of small things, things we can understand, like a bet on a f
ootball tournament.
It turns out that official communications constitute only a small part of radio use. The vast majority consists of chatting and griping. Griping about the war, about the food, about our commanders’ obvious lack of strategy, and of course about rasputitsa. We’ve formed a long-distance friendship. It’s fragile. One day you’ll say good morning and a different person will answer. It seems foolish to befriend people who can be torn away from you so easily, yet I can’t help caring about them.
I found out what Rudenko wears around his neck. It’s a small gold cross. He takes it out and kisses it when he hears bombs or gunshots. Sort of a good-luck charm, I guess.
And as for you, you’ve met your hero! I bet you never thought that would happen. You always adored your heroes so much. I remember when we went to the cinema to see Chapaev and you decided you wanted to be a machine gunner like Anka. For weeks you would pop up from behind cars or under tables and go, “Rat-a-tat-tat! You’re dead!”
Tell me how your training is going. It will help me get my mind off everything. Finally one of us is someplace she wants to be.
Yours,
Pasha
9 November 1941
Dear Pasha,
Thank you for writing. Except for the part where you called me Valyushka again. I’m a VVS officer cadet now and I simply don’t feel I’m being taken seriously when you’re calling me by the name my parents used while they were toilet training me. If you call me that one more time, I’ll be forced to stop replying. Do you know how sad that would make me?
Engels is an industrial city in the barren steppe, like a larger copy of Stakhanovo. A long rail bridge connects it to the much prettier city of Saratov across the Volga River. The skyline is a succession of smokestacks, large and small. When the wind is right, oily brown smoke engulfs our aerodrome and reminds me of home. A corner of the city is fenced off to form our base. The brick buildings are slathered with fresh coats of off-white paint, but you can figure out that they used to be cafés or barbershops or, in our case, gymnasiums. Our wrought iron bedsteads make the place look like a girls’ orphanage.
The morning after we arrived, when the reveille music came on over those tinny speakers, I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but Iskra pounced on me and announced, “Good morning, Valka! You’re in the VVS!”
By the time I’d thrown my legs over the side of my cot and rubbed my bleary eyes, Ilyushina was already showered and dressed and looking unimpressed with the rest of us. Vera was sitting on the edge of her bed puzzling over the rectangular pieces of cloth that we’d been issued instead of socks, as though they were a difficult math problem. Ilyushina shook her head and repeated the military saying “You don’t know how hard life is until you tie your portyanki.” I sat next to her and wrapped my own portyanki (I did learn a thing or two from Iosif Grigorevich) so that she could see how it was done. She gave me a serious sort of smile.
Some of the girls showed up late to breakfast because they’d heard that we were sharing the cafeteria with the male pilots and they wanted to powder their noses. Surprisingly, it was Lilya who couldn’t stop rolling her eyes at this behavior. Zhigli says that someone as naturally pretty as Lilya can’t understand the plight of the homely girl.
We are cramming three years of training into six months at the cost of our health and sanity. Ten classes a day plus two hours of drill. If our drill sergeant expected us to faint on our first march, he forgot that we’re the sort of girls who do parachute jumps for fun.
Raskova is preparing us for conditions at the front by sounding the air raid siren in the middle of the night and making us form up outside. One time Zhigli thought she was being clever by throwing on her greatcoat over her nightgown, but that became its own punishment when she had to march around outside with the icy rain lashing her bare legs.
We’re doing well for a pack of squirrely kids who didn’t know which foot to put forward first. I’ve already been punished once for losing track of my own footing during a march. It was all your fault. You see, one of the other girls was leading us in a marching song, and I recognized it from your letter. I was so caught up thinking about it that I completely forgot that I was supposed to be marching.
Captain Kazarinova made me do push-ups and kept adding more because my form wasn’t good enough. When she finally let me up, she informed me, “I’m not just tormenting you. We don’t have the luxury of going easy on you kids. We’re at war now. You need to be soldiers now.”
We got our first test today. Still sleepy from the midnight wake-up call, we formed up to be inspected by a VVS marshal. He’s the commander of the whole front. As he was walking down the line, he stopped in front of one of the mechanics and pulled off her beret. Her glossy black hair came tumbling out. There was a faint but audible hiss across the parade ground as everyone simultaneously sucked in their breath. And Kazarinova . . . You’ve heard of looks that kill? But the marshal turned to the rest of us and said, “See, this is how a young lady ought to look. The rest of you look like boys!”
I am apparently indistinguishable from a boy, as I discovered when I sat among the men at the mess hall. They were discussing the new girls, particularly certain parts of them, in highly descriptive terms. Lilya was the favorite. One of them turned and asked me which of the girls from Aviation Group 122 I preferred. I asked whether I could pick myself. Breakfast was awkward after that.
But you haven’t been eagerly anticipating this letter to hear me talk about hair, so I’ll tell you more about training. We’re back in ground school as if we were all fourteen again. It turns out that dogfighting involves math. I would be dominating if we were actually flying, but instead I’m getting schooled by Vera, who has never flown in her life but is studying physics. We have no textbooks and hardly any paper, so I hope you’ll forgive me for taking notes in between the lines of your letters.
I am only just wrapping my head around Iskra’s choice to become a navigator. In an odd way, it makes sense. We joined the aeroclub on the same day, but while I was a small-town kid who wanted to get away, she was a new arrival from Moscow who had just lost her parents and everything she believed in. I found freedom in the sky. She found order. And so she spends her time surrounded by rulers and compasses.
Lieutenant Bershanskaya, the woman we met at the academy, is studying dogfighting with us, but her hopes of becoming a fighter pilot are melting away. I overheard her talking to Raskova.
“No!” she was saying. “I couldn’t command a flight of three planes, much less an entire regiment.”
“You’ve captained an aircraft,” said Raskova.
“An airliner. Crewed by civilians.”
Raskova waved off her objections. “You’ll pick up military regulations quick enough. I’d rather have a capable commander than an experienced one. Don’t forget that this is my first command too.”
“People listen to you. They don’t listen to me.”
“They will.”
“You are not listening to me. Right now. I’m telling you that if you put me in command of the 588th, it will be a disaster. Your girls could die because of my lack of experience. Do you think that’s acceptable?”
“I think you might wait until you actually fail before declaring yourself a failure” was Raskova’s mild reply. “I’ll give you my commissar. You’ll do fine.”
“I won’t do it.”
Raskova told her, “Lieutenant, you’ll follow orders like everyone else.”
You’d like Major Raskova. Do you know that she studied to be an opera singer when she was a girl? First a musician, then a chemist, then a navigator, thus becoming the ultimate retort for anyone whose mother has ever said, “You’ll never amount to anything if you don’t settle down and pick a career!”
And then there’s Captain Kazarinova. She constantly punishes people for minor infractions, most involving boots. It’s hard to do anything in boots five sizes too big. Sometimes when we’re marching, someone will accidentally step right out o
f them. Raskova burst out laughing the first time that happened. Kazarinova did not. And if the mechanics have the temerity to slip out of their boots when they’re climbing on a wing or squeezing into a tight space, they have to hope she doesn’t spot them.
Ilyushina, who still hasn’t told us her first name, says Kazarinova has spent her whole career among male airmen and is only strict because she expects us to be as good as them. I think she needs to get laid. Her sister, the major, didn’t come to Engels with us, which I’m grateful for. I hear she’s even tougher.
For Iskra, attracting the wrong attention could mean far worse than a five-kilometer run—and, thanks to my slip-up, two people already know. Lilya’s all right. It’s Zhigli I’m worried about. And believe me, I do worry. She’s been nothing but friendly, but I’m still not sure about her. If it came came down to it, she’d put herself first.
Yours,
Valka
EIGHT
14 November 1941
Dear Pasha,
We received our winter uniforms yesterday just in time for it to dump half a meter of unseasonable snow. I hope they’ve got you properly supplied. I hate to think of you poor boys freezing out there.
When the weather cleared up, we pilots headed out to the airfield all roly-poly in our winter gear. After an invigorating couple of hours shoveling the runway, we finally got to fly some airplanes. Major Raskova watched from the ground, taking notes on our performance.
We’re training on Polikarpov U-2s, but no one calls them that. They’re always “crop dusters,” “sky slugs,” or “sewing machines.” I wondered about the latter until I heard the ticking sound of the dinky five-cylinder engine. They’re puny taildragger biplanes made of canvas stretched over a wooden frame, with two cockpits and two sets of controls so that a student can sit in front and an instructor in the back.
I couldn’t help laughing as Lilya climbed into the cockpit, lost inside her oversized fur flight suit. This was the pilot who would have us saying “I wish I could fly as well as Lilya”?
