by Gwen C. Katz
Next thing I knew he was wiping tea off the table.
Our competition with our big brothers is not a competition any longer. Now we outstrip our objectives every night and they find many different ways to say “What?” “How?” “That’s not possible!” We run out of bombs and our armorers have to beg, borrow, or trick their way into getting more.
In a few months we’ve cracked a problem that no one at the VVS had been able to solve. Bershanskaya told Ilyushina to write up a report for the division engineer so the other regiments could adopt our procedure. But instead of accolades, Ilyushina acquired a reprimand for violating the Technical Maintenance Manual and Bershanskaya got a strongly worded letter from Popov warning her that if she didn’t follow regulations, our flying days would be over regardless of how much the marshal liked us.
“Predictable,” said Ilyushina.
Bershanskaya asked her, “How often do you actually see the division engineer?”
“Not since we first arrived,” replied the captain. “He’s too busy keeping those obsolete Tupolev SBs in the air.”
“So he has no way of knowing if we’re following the manual or not.”
“I . . . suppose not,” said Ilyushina, who had figured out where the conversation was going and didn’t look completely on board. “But if Popov catches on, it’s all over.”
Bershanskaya thought it over. She said, “I’d rather spend a few weeks as an excellent regiment than the whole war as a mediocre one.”
And so she made a pragmatic decision: Ignore the reprimand and keep doing it our way.
Yours,
Valka
P.S. Have your orders come through yet? Tell me the instant they do. Maybe they’ll bring you closer to my edge of the map.
14 August 1942
Dear Valyushka,
Yes, our new orders came through. I felt nauseous as I decoded them. Rzhev. Even the name is the color of blood. My friends on the radio call it the “meat grinder.”
The first thing we saw when we arrived at the salient was a battery of armored trucks carrying big racks of parallel rails for launching rockets. When Pashkevich saw them, his face split into a feral grin and he yelled, “All right! Those will send the Fritzes running scared!” And to me, “You’ve finally met the Katyushas.”
That night, the Katyushas fired.
Why did the army give such a pretty name to such a horrible machine? When those rockets lit up in a salvo, they made a sound so unearthly that its color was not a real color: blindingly bright, yet black, pure jet black. As they screamed overhead, Pashkevich sat on the roof over the dugout door and laughed. “Eat rockets!” he shouted at the Germans.
I retreated to the far end of our dugout and huddled there, trembling, my eyes squeezed shut and my arms covering my head. You’d be ashamed of me.
Another voice joined the cacophany. Petya was screaming. A piercing, prolonged scream, breaking only for an occasional gasp of air. Vakhromov sat on the bed next to me, cradling the boy in his arms and speaking soothingly. Deep creases lined his forehead. The war is wearing him down.
Pashkevich reentered the dugout and caught me cowering. He backhanded me and shouted not to be such a coward. I’m nearly as frightened of him as I am of the Hitlerites, even though they’re the ones who will kill me. Then he turned to Vakhromov and ordered, “Shut that kid up!”
“I’m trying, but he’s frightened,” said Vakhromov.
Pashkevich drew his sidearm. He said through clenched teeth, “Shut him up or I will.”
Vakhromov drew the boy closer to him, his eyes darting back to the officer with the gun. “Petya? Petenka, listen to me. You have to quiet down now. I know you’re scared, but . . .”
Petya kept screaming. I took his hand. He dug his nails into my palm. I searched for words, anything that could reassure him, but couldn’t find any.
But I did have a song.
I opened my mouth, but choked on the sound. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Apple and pear trees were blooming.” At first my voice was barely audible, but as I continued that familiar song, it grew stronger. Soft gold tones began to paint over the piercing black.
Petya cracked one eye open a sliver. His screaming diminished to whimpering. Another volley of rockets howled outside. Their noise sliced through the music, so sharp it felt like physical pain. I faltered. Then a new color entered the song, sky blue, timid and quiet.
Petya was singing. I found my voice again and sang with new strength. We finished the last verse together.
One side of Pashkevich’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing, holstered his pistol, and left the dugout. Petya looked up at me, showing his big front teeth biting his lip in a hesitant semblance of a smile. Vakhromov said, “That was brave.”
He’s wrong. Even while I sang, my heart was pounding and my cheeks were wet with tears. The truth is, I’m anything but brave.
I’m scared, Valyushka, so scared, and it feels all the worse because you are always so bold. Please don’t hate me. Please don’t think I’m a coward. I don’t want to be even though I probably am. I shouldn’t be writing this to you but I have to talk to someone and I wouldn’t dare say so to Pashkevich or Vakhromov or even my radio friends. Maybe I won’t send this letter. Maybe I won’t get a chance.
Yours,
Pasha
TWENTY-THREE
IT WAS MIDMORNING, OR THE BEGINNING OF THE NIGHT for the 588th. I was snapping open and closed one of the hair slides that had proliferated everywhere as the other girls grew out their hair and trying, not very successfully, to fall asleep. My nerves were still shot from the night before. It had been a creepy night. An eclipse had turned the moon a sullen red. Zhenechka said it was beautiful. Zhigli said it was bad luck. I only knew that I hated flying beneath it.
And then there were the dark blue pills. The regimental doctor gave them to us pilots to keep us alert. They keep us alert, all right, and narrow our irises down to nothing so that our eyes look dark and strange. I had taken one before my last flight of the night and now the thin stripe of light that fell through the crack in the shutters seemed unbearably bright.
It was not a good night to be struck with insomnia. The words of Pasha’s last letter ran circles inside my brain. His hopelessness was beginning to scare me. But anything I might say to console him would feel empty or, worse, falsely cheerful, because he really was staring a horror in the face, and my words couldn’t shield him from it.
I sighed and propped myself up on my elbows.
We were based in a schoolhouse, the only intact building in a bombed-out town long since evacuated. The other girls’ sides gently rose and fell under their blankets. Vera was sitting at the teacher’s desk, rolling cigarettes out of coarse military-issue tobacco. I raised myself onto my elbows and said quietly, “You might as well get some sleep if you can. She’ll be fine. That mission will be easy compared to those daylight bombing runs you love so much.”
Vera asked, “If it was Iskra, would you be sleeping?”
“Of course not.”
Tanya entered the classroom, pulling off her leather flight helmet and unbuckling the belt around her baggy flight suit. She was a willowy young woman with heavy-lidded eyes and a long face usually decked out, as then, with a big, sloppy smile. Vera looked up and relief flashed across her face.
“Did you stay up all this time waiting for me? You’re not my babysitter!” Tanya laughed.
“I’m not? Then why do I spend all my time keeping you out of trouble?” Vera got up, pulled her pilot close, and kissed her.
They stayed like that for a long moment, eyes closed, arms resting lightly around each other’s waists, before Tanya pulled away. “Not in front of everyone, Verok. You’re embarrassing me.”
“They’re all asleep.”
“Not Valka. I can see you watching us, you voyeur!”
“Am not. I just can’t sleep,” I mumbled, covering my eyes with the crook of my arm. Seeing them filled me with a forlorn feeling.
How nice it must be to serve alongside the person you loved. To see them and know that they were safe and well every day, not just through an occasional letter. To draw strength from them.
Vera asked her pilot, “How was the morning bus to headquarters? Did Number 9 get shot full of holes?”
“You’ll be happy to know that I brought our baby home completely unscathed.”
“Good.” They sat down on Tanya’s bed, which creaked under their weight. Vera’s voice turned serious. “Tatiana, I want you to stop flying these solo missions.”
Tanya laughed. “I was ferrying a political officer. It was the safest thing I’ve ever done.”
“I understand that. But anything can happen. And if it does . . . I want us to be together.”
“Verok. Don’t talk about that. It’s bad luck.” A pause. “But I’ll stop.”
“Tanya. Vera. Go to sleep!” hissed Iskra.
They dropped off into silence, but sleep still eluded me. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands hard enough to make myself see spots, even though I knew from experience that nothing would make the effects wear off faster. I grew acutely aware of every bruise and ache I’d acquired being jounced around in my plane’s hard seat.
A curling paper border of capital and lowercase letters ran along the top of a green chalkboard so worn its plywood backing showed through. The wooden desks and chairs, marred with ink spills and carved initials, were stacked against the back wall to make room for our cots. It was strange to remember that I’d been a student scarcely more than a year ago. I’d struggled with algebra and complained when my parents made me miss a flight because I hadn’t finished my math homework.
The memories were like watching a film about someone else’s life. I’d never be that schoolgirl again. When Raskova said she’d make us into soldiers, I hadn’t realized I’d be giving up my old self. The one who could sit beside Pasha in the cockpit of our little plane as easy as anything. We could never have a moment like that again, not now that planes had become killing machines.
We might save our Motherland and our homes, but we could never really return.
TWENTY-FOUR
I LEANED MY HEAD BACK AGAINST THE LEATHER RIM of the cockpit and closed my eyes to catch a moment’s rest before takeoff. I liked this moment, when the planes were in place but their engines were still off and I could hear the familiar noises up and down the flight line.
Behind me, using her map light for illumination, Iskra flipped through the pages of her aeronavigation book. I couldn’t figure out why she was so attached to that book. It wasn’t because she needed to brush up on her navigation skills, that was for sure.
For once, I’d ended up at the front of my flight, though the other flight in our squadron was ahead of me. Two planes back, Zhenechka amused Dina, the squadron commander, by telling her a fairy tale. In the plane ahead of us, the pilot, Sofiya, played with a kitten she’d found in a pile of rubble; it had been the village’s sole remaining inhabitant. “No, you mustn’t grab that! That’s the throttle. Leave it alone. You’re doing it again! What did I just tell you?”
The middle of the flight order was the best place to be, I decided. I felt secure there, with friends in front of me and friends behind me, ready to swoop in and help me if anything should happen.
I opened my eyes at the sound of someone walking up to our plane. It was Galya, sporting a flight suit, a helmet, and a million-ruble smile. She had just returned to our regiment the day before, wincing with pain every time she took a step but undaunted in her ambitions.
“Look at you, wearing big-girl clothes!” I teased, flicking her helmet’s dangling buckle with one finger. She was my age and almost my height, but in her flight gear she still managed to look like a kid playing dress-up. It saddened me to see her moving stiffly and not bounding across the airfield with her former energy. Galya the gymnast was gone forever.
“Bershanskaya says I can navigate tonight if I can find a pilot to take me,” she said.
“Sorry, darling, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Valka is bound to get into trouble if she flies without me,” said Iskra, shooing Galya away. But her voice was kind.
A minute later a cry of excitement announced that Galya had found a pilot: Zhigli’s former pilot Polina, just behind us. She climbed into the rear cockpit while the displaced navigator stood nearby, arms akimbo, complaining, “Kicked out of my own plane. How do you like that?”
I laughed inwardly. I was barely more than a rookie myself, but already I felt a big-sister affection for the newer airwomen as I watched them reach the goals that I’d passed only a few months earlier. Galya especially. Her effervescent cheer would brighten up the airfield.
The armorers spun up our engines. The cacophony of propellers surrounded me. One by one, the planes ahead of me took off. Sofiya handed off her kitten to an armorer and roared down the runway. I sat up and took the controls. Exactly three minutes later, we followed.
It was a perfectly clear night, the indigo sky resplendent with a million stars. Clear enough to see for kilometers. Clear enough to see everything.
The searchlight beams came into view ahead of us. They looked eager. There were so many, a whole forest of them, roving back and forth and then converging on a single spot with startling speed. Transfixed in the beams was a bright speck, first white, then red. Fire. No! My heart plummeted. I pointed and shouted, “Iskra, that’s one of ours!”
My mind refused to accept what I was seeing. We had lived through countless missions and no one had been shot down. Not since that first night. They would shake off the lights. I was convinced of it, although they were already burning. Somehow they would escape, cheat death, and we would laugh on our way back from the airfield in the morning. I was sure of it, absolutely sure, even as the bright spot spiraled toward the ground and vanished, two lives with it. Gone. Just like that.
I was still reeling, unable to accept what had happened, when the second aircraft was shot down. It sparkled with flashes of red, white, and green, grotesquely reminiscent of fireworks on the anniversary of the Revolution. The signal flares were exploding. The plane came apart as it fell, all in flames, the wings, the tail, the wooden frame already stripped of its delicate canvas, and the two girls. In powerless horror, I watched my friends burning, tumbling free of the wreckage, and I tried as hard as I could not to think of the flight order, not to match names and faces to those burning figures.
Fire! My hands froze in place. Why were my friends not dodging the guns and escaping? And then a sudden realization: Where were the guns? Their concussions should have cut sharply through the silence of the night, but there was nothing.
The beam of the searchlight momentarily illuminated another shape, not the angular double cross of a biplane but a broad-winged plane with a big, tapered belly and twin engines the shape of bullets. I could plainly make out the black crosses on its wings. A night fighter. We were easy prey. We were going to burn!
And then it was Sofiya, straight ahead of me. Her U-2 seemed so close. It was like one of the demonstrations our instructors used to do with model planes, and I couldn’t shake the idea that I could have reached out and plucked the aircraft from the sky if my hands had been willing to move. The fighter dived greedily, mindless of the frantic, ineffectual burst of machine-gun fire from Sofiya’s desperate navigator. The plane barely caught fire. A hint of yellow licked it here and there; then the wings neatly divided from the fuselage and fluttered down like whirligig seeds. The broken craft plummeted out of the beams and into darkness.
We were next. We approached those stripes of light, which slowly pivoted in search of their next victim. Sweat beaded on my forehead as though I could already feel the heat of fire consuming the cockpit around me. I needed to do something. I would die if I didn’t. I would take Iskra to her death as surely as the three planes ahead of me, but my hands wouldn’t respond.
“Valka.” Iskra’s voice coming through the speaking tube was a hoarse whisper, as though she feared th
at the fighter pilot might overhear us. Then, louder, “Valyushka, are you all right? Focus, baby cousin. We need to complete the mission.”
I tried to think. I tried to remember what we had learned about fighters, how to outmaneuver them, but everything had been forced out of my mind except one single word: Fire!
The stick moved under my hand. Iskra had taken the controls. She cut the engine and went into a glide. “Don’t worry, baby cousin. I promised to take care of you.”
Through the fog enveloping my mind, I remembered our flight plan. We were supposed to drop our bombs on our way out. That meant circling around and passing over the target again after bombing. Two passes among the beams. Two chances for the fighter’s cannon to rip us apart.
We were almost there. Somewhere in the darkness the fighter waited for us. Iskra veered a little way off course and circled around, approaching the target from the far side. We were still gliding. She put us into a gentle dive, eight hundred meters, five hundred, three hundred. It was risky. At that altitude, we could easily be caught in the blast when our bombs landed.
And suddenly, through the fog in my mind, I saw what Iskra was doing. When the searchlight operators looked for us, they would look too high.
The pair of chalk marks on the wing lined up with the target. A jolt. The bombs dropped. Iskra barely had time to reengage the engine before a hot shock wave hit us. It tossed us through the air. The plane’s controls jerked wildly. For a moment I thought that fire had caught us after all, that we had evaded the fighter only to be destroyed by our own bombs. But we were undamaged. As Iskra brought us level, there were the searchlight beams—crossing above us! I could hear the drone of the fighter, searching for us where he had found the others. But we were already away. Safe.
Galya and Polina. They were behind us. Polina must have seen what Iskra had done. I found myself pleading aloud as though they could hear, my throat dry and hoarse. “Please don’t drop your bombs yet. Do what we did.” But then came the explosion as their bombs fell and my instrument panel was illuminated with yellow light. I glanced back. There was their plane, transfixed by the searchlights, its crew blinded and disoriented. And half the squadron was still behind them.
