by Gwen C. Katz
Before I knew it, I heard Iskra’s voice, tinny and hollow through the speaking tube, telling me, “Target in sight.”
Looking at the ground, I could make out the vague outlines of barracks, vehicles, and small human figures running here and there. Smoke rose from somewhere. Dina and Zhenechka had left their mark. And then I was struck with the knowledge of what we were doing. Images flashed into my mind: fires and figures lying motionless.
And then the image of Olkhovskaya’s plane, spiraling to the ground.
“When you’re ready, Iskra,” I told my cousin.
“Bombs away,” said Iskra. There was a click and the U-2 leaped forward, light and agile without its burden.
We were flying low. As the bombs detonated, a cloud of warm steam enveloped us; it was glowing with the light of the explosions. I brought the plane around to return to the auxiliary airfield. Our airfield lanterns, called “flying mice,” shine in only one direction, so if you approach from any other, you can’t see anything and could easily crash. I hadn’t been afraid over the target, but now an irrational fear crept up on me, a feeling that I had done something wrong, a schoolchild’s fear. I found myself second-guessing Iskra, wondering if it was taking longer for us to return, if we had already overshot the field, how we would ever find it again if we had.
But then I saw the little pinpricks of light marking the airfield. I touched down and felt our plane’s tires sink into the soft ground. Dina and Zhenechka’s U-2 was nearby. I could hear them talking quietly.
“There wasn’t any flak,” said Zhenechka, her voice tinged with disappointment. “It was like a training run.”
“The flowers come first and the fruit comes later,” was Dina’s philosophical reply.
Our ground crew came alongside to get Number 41 armed and fueled again, and Galya brought us tin mugs of tea. There was no shelter at the auxiliary airfield, so we sat on the lower wing while we waited. The upper wing kept us a little bit drier.
Bershanskaya sat on the passenger seat of a bomb truck, her feet on the running board. She didn’t say anything to us, but she gave us a smile—not a shy, crooked half smile but a proud smile.
I was still shaken and unsettled from that first mission when they got the plane turned around, but I had no choice; we did another run of the same target. We were never fired on. We returned to Trud Gornyaka as day dawned. Our host was already out. We stripped off our soaked uniforms and climbed the wooden ladder to the sleeping platform on the oven. I should have immediately fallen asleep after that long night, but an hour later, I found myself sitting up, trembling.
“Can’t sleep?” said Iskra.
“No,” I replied.
“Me neither.” She was silent for a moment. And then, “Do you want to talk?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
Our next sortie is tonight.
Yours,
Valka
NINETEEN
22 June 1942
Dear Valyushka,
The front has moved on and left us behind. We can’t even hear the artillery anymore, but whenever there is dark red and purple thunder, I find myself ducking and trying to figure out where it’s coming from. Pashkevich swears at me, calling me a baby who’s afraid of storms. Petya isn’t afraid of thunder, Pashkevich says, and he’s ashamed to command a soldier who isn’t even as brave as a little boy.
Petya has warmed to us, but I don’t think he’ll ever be like other children. He doesn’t play or run around. Mostly he sticks close to me or Vakhromov. I wonder if it was right for us to force him into a life of military privation. And there’s that knowledge in the back of my mind, Valyushka, that absolute certainty that this reprieve is only temporary. One day I will hear those red-orange dots and dashes and we’ll be thrown back into combat. What happens to Petya then? Which is crueler, Valyushka, to abandon him or to bring him with us?
Vakhromov organized a summer school for him. I’m his music teacher. I teach him children’s rhymes and folk songs, things I sang in choir when I was a little boy. He liked “Katyusha” but was confused by the line about the gray steppe eagle. He thought Katyusha’s boyfriend was really an eagle. I laughed and told him no, it only meant that he was strong and brave, like an eagle.
“Like you?” he asked, to my bemusement.
I said, “I don’t think so. I think he’s more like this.” And I showed him the picture of your airplane. I told him how you and Iskra dart into enemy territory and strike them from the sky when they least expect it. He liked that.
Teaching him gets my mind off how sick and miserable I am. We sit on the grass by the reservoir, draw notes in the dirt, and sing. Sometimes I accompany him on the harmonica. There’s a book of music in my pocket, but I never use it. If I showed it to Petya, he might talk, and if the commissar found out, he might take it from me, and Rudenko gave it to me to protect.
The reservoir is beautiful in the summer. Sometimes it’s as still as a mirror and sometimes the wind breaks it up into ripples that make the sun sparkle off it. And when it rains, it makes a periwinkle pattering sound and you can’t tell where the sky ends and the water begins. But Petya discovered that it has a secret. I was cleaning my gun by the bank when he ran over and said, “Danilin, come look.” He calls us by our last names like a soldier.
I stood on the ruins of the church on the steep part of the bank and looked where he pointed. It was a calm day. The water was like green glass. Far out in the middle of it, beneath the water, there was a town. Dozens of houses, some destroyed, some intact. The roofs were thick with fuzzy green algae that waved gently with the current. Eerie dark windows and doorways. People lived there once until someone decided that we needed the water and electricity more than they needed their homes.
I imagined the water rising to fill the reservoir, overflowing the riverbanks, running down the streets, welling up around the foundations of the buildings, pouring in under the doors and through the windows. I wonder if the people who lived there watched as their former lives disappeared in the flood. How helpless they must have felt, the way I felt last summer, listening to the news.
“Did many people drown?” asked Petya.
“No. They evacuated the town first,” I said, hoping that they had.
Petya pointed. “What about him?”
A body floated facedown near the bank on the far side of the reservoir, tangled in the reeds. It wore a waterlogged uniform. Wehrmacht gray? Russian khaki? I couldn’t tell. A fat crow perched on its back, pecking at the exposed flesh of its neck. I pulled Petya close to me and told him we would practice inside today.
I wondered how long that body had been there, polluting the water. Had it been trapped in the ice upstream and floated down when the Volga melted? No. It wore a light summer uniform, not a heavy coat. All might be calm here at the reservoir, but to the east, at the town of Rzhev, men were still fighting and dying over a tiny strip of land.
I didn’t want to know what else the river had sent us, but it had to be done. I smoked a quick cigarette to psych myself up and went walking upstream along the reservoir’s twisty bank.
And there they were, piled up in a serpentine inlet where the current had washed them. Dozens of them tangled together, their bellies bloated, their vulnerable faces pecked away. The sight made my skin crawl. But we stopped drinking from the reservoir and now we’re beginning to feel better.
Sometimes the whole world feels like a death trap.
Be safe, Valyushka. When you wrote your letter, you had flown two runs. You will have flown more by the time this reaches you. I’m keenly aware that any one could be your last. I know, you’ll say it’s silly of me to worry about you when I am in constant danger myself. Maybe it’s just easier for me to dwell on what’s happening to someone else.
I’ll recite a chant from my liturgical music book for you. I don’t suppose there is any truth to all that, but what harm can it do?
Yours,
Pasha
3 July
1942
Dear Pasha,
Only a few weeks and I feel like a seasoned veteran. There have been mistakes here and there, but we’re learning. Not fast enough to please the division commander, though. To him, a dozen successful sorties can be outweighed by a single out-of-place jot in a logbook, at least if the offending jot was penned by a woman. Iskra says we can’t expect someone his age who served under the Tsar to know any better. But he has not, so far, found cause to disband us.
There are two other night-bomber regiments in our division. The 459th flies the last of the big, broad-winged Tupolev SBs. The SB might look familiar to you: it is a descendant of the Rodina. They think of themselves as the real airmen who go on important bombing runs while we in the “broads’ regiment” play with our toy planes.
And there’s the 650th, which flies the Polikarpov R-5, another two-seater biplane slightly bigger and much uglier than the U-2. The men of the 650th have taken a liking to us. They call us their “little sisters.” There’s a friendly rivalry between our regiments. Their commander calls Major Bershanskaya in the middle of the night to tease her and compare how our regiments are doing. They’re ahead by a solid margin. Their commander says not to worry; there’s never been a women’s regiment before, and all things considered we’re doing well. Bershanskaya is not mollified.
Flying over occupied territory is difficult. Not because of the danger, but because of the destruction. When it’s cloudy, it isn’t so bad. Everything is indistinct, just specks of light. But then there are clear nights when the moon comes out and we can see everything: the fields churned up by tank treads and pockmarked with shell craters, thick plumes of smoke rising from burning farms and houses, cities reduced to nothing but a few isolated walls, black and gray and bathed with silver moonlight.
After one of those nights, I found Zhenechka crying on Dina’s sturdy shoulder. She used to live here. I slid next to her and said, “We’ll drive them off. We’ll win it all back.”
She said, “But it won’t ever be like it was before.”
And that made me feel out of touch and ashamed for being from a town that war has never touched, for knowing that I’ll never see the remains of a place I loved as a burned-out ruin, not unless the entire country falls.
The first time we were fired on, I wasn’t afraid, only confused. When the shells pass by you, they make a hissing sound and you see the trails of smoke from the tracers, and then boom, boom, earsplitting concussions as they explode. You can taste and smell the smoke and it chokes you. They can rip our fragile planes to pieces, but our stubborn mules keep flying with holes torn in the wings and shreds of canvas flapping in the wind. We haven’t lost anyone since that first night.
Still, it’s terrifying. I put fear from my mind while we’re flying, but as soon as my feet touch ground, my hands start shaking and my legs melt. Bershanskaya says it’s normal. It would be bad, I think, if I wasn’t afraid. We’re not immortal. We’re so vulnerable up there in our fragile little planes. Especially since, after the first few nights, we stopped wearing parachutes. Foolish, I know. But without their weight, we can carry more bombs.
Worse than the guns are the searchlights. Nothing makes me feel more helpless. Sometimes four or five blind me from all directions and I can’t tell up from down. Iskra is my salvation at those times. In combat she hasn’t lost her presence of mind for even an instant. Once I felt the control stick squirm under my hands as she took over, and I only then realized that I had frozen up in a panic. I don’t know what I’d do without her.
The rattling engines of our sewing machines were giving us away. The fascists heard us coming. I came up with the solution less by conscious choice than by instinct. I was approaching the target, getting tenser every second as I waited for the flak to begin, and the engine noise felt so painfully loud that I thought, “I wish I could shut it off!”
I thought of our old plane with the faulty engine and of all the times at our aeroclub when I’d killed the engine and had to land the plane like a glider. So I disengaged the engine and glided over the target while idling, making no sound except the whistle of the wind through the control wires. I could hear the soldiers below speaking their ugly language. It nearly worked brilliantly. They didn’t know we were there until we dropped our bombs. Then the searchlights swung around, looking for our silent plane. A clever pilot would have started up the engine and darted away before the searchlights had a chance to catch us. Unfortunately the pilot was me, so instead I attempted to hit the throttle and wondered why nothing was happening before I remembered that the engine was off. I managed to get it reengaged right as the searchlights settled on me, and we escaped with a lacerated horizontal stabilizer.
I expected a reprimand when we reported at the end of the night. I’d disobeyed the flight plan and gotten shot up. But Bershanskaya said, “That’s brilliant! Try it again tonight. If it works, I’ll have everyone do it.”
And that’s how my momentary instinct became our regiment’s official procedure.
Tanya perfected the technique. She and Vera have quickly proven themselves the best airwomen we have. Tanya puts her U-2 through aerobatic maneuvers that make me forget that she’s flying the exact same plane as me. They get sent on all the most important runs, taking out bridges and crossings and running the occasional perilous daylight mission.
Their closest call came when we were bombing an ammunition dump. We saw their plane caught in the intersection of two beams. Tanya was flying straight, not even attempting to maneuver. Their rudder had been torn off in the barrage. I remember thinking that the 588th could afford to lose me, but that Tanya and Vera had to make it back at all costs. So instead of dropping our bombs on the ammunition dump, I veered off, and Iskra dropped them over the searchlight battery. Brilliant flashes and showers of sparks, then darkness, wonderful darkness. Vera and Tanya slipped away and limped back to the airfield using only their ailerons. Vera said it was the longest three minutes of her life.
Can I blame the fascists for shooting at us? We’re trying to harm them. I’ve killed people; I know I have. Some as evil as Hitler. Others, maybe, as innocent as you. It bothers me less than it should. The details are hidden from me. I don’t know how many casualties I’ve caused, whether they died quickly or whether their deaths were long and lingering. Without knowing, without having to see my handiwork up close, it’s easy to put it from my mind, easy to laugh and sing with my friends as we head back to the village at the end of a good night. I haven’t told the others how effortless I’ve found it to become a killer. I’m afraid of what it says about me.
We’ve each been flying two or three runs a night. There’s a chance to rest in between while the ground crew gets the plane turned around. Bershanskaya caught Vera and Ilyushina playing chess on the wing between missions and scolded them. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“We’re waiting for the armorers, ma’am,” said Ilyushina.
Bershanskaya walked off with her brow furrowed, muttering, “There has to be a faster way to do this.”
I think she’s too hard on the ground crews. The click-snaps (that’s what we call the armorers, after the sound of them loading ammo belts into the machine guns) have to wrangle 100-kilo bombs with only a flashlight for illumination, or sometimes nothing but the moon. They work bare-handed so that they can feel what they’re doing. In the day, while the aircrews sleep, the mechanics and armorers are still up, cleaning the guns, patching the canvas, and getting the planes ready to fly again the next night.
We’re packing up now to leave Trud Gornyaka, retreating along with the front. Temporary fences are being dismantled, trucks loaded, good-byes said. Soon we’ll be sleeping in dugouts. “Like real airmen,” say our big brothers in the 650th.
Despite all the noise and bother and our churning up their potato field beyond recognition, the villagers are sad to see us go. It pains me to think that tomorrow this place might be overrun by the fascists, to imagine that cozy little house where we
slept on the brick oven burned to an empty husk or, worse, serving as a headquarters for those jackbooted thugs. Anna Aleksandrovna says she’ll be fine. She’s lived through two wars and a famine already, she says. This won’t be the end of her.
How are you getting along, Pasha? I’m glad that you’re out of danger for the moment, but I know how quickly that can change. Sometimes when Iskra and I are working out our flight plan on a map, I let my eyes stray off the edge and think about which way your reservoir is and how far. Too far. Impossibly far.
Yours,
Valka
TWENTY
WITH REDDISH-BROWN CLOUDS HIDING THE SETTING sun, I had to do the preflight check by the stark light of the “flying mice.” Number 41 rested lightly on the crushed, rutted grass between the other two planes in my flight, wingtips rocking now and again when a gust caught them. Today I saw the three planes not as mules but as a line of cavalry horses lined up for the charge, stamping and pawing the ground in their impatience as we and the other aircrews circled around them.
The crew of armorers were struggling with a bomb. There was something odd about its shape and the style of its fins.
“What are you hanging on my plane?” I demanded.
“It’s a German bomb,” said Masha the armorer. “We captured a fascist munitions dump.”
“Well, don’t give it to me! I’ll take real Soviet bombs, thanks. Put it on Tanya’s plane.”
“Belay that order!” said Tanya, appearing from behind her plane, which was Number 9. “I’m the flight commander and I shall take the Russian bombs.”
Masha made a face. “You’re both out of luck. These are all we have, unless you want concrete practice bombs.”
