by Gwen C. Katz
“And nobody ever owned up to it? No one ever told you, ‘I was the one who sent you that book’?”
She shook her head. “How could they? What if I were arrested again and it came out that they’d helped me when I was imprisoned before? They’d be putting themselves in danger.”
I parted my lips and said thoughtfully, “It would make sense if it was owned by . . . a navigator.”
“I’d thought of that.”
“But you lied to me. You said that no one had secured your release.”
“I don’t know that anyone did. Only that someone sent the book.”
I gave her a reproachful look. “Of course they were the same person. Why would she tell you to keep studying if she wasn’t working to get you out?”
Iskra waved me off. “I know, it looks obvious. But I had a long time to think about it. Maybe the note wasn’t even meant for me. Maybe it was written in that book years ago when it was given to its original owner. And . . .” Her shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. “All right, I’ll admit it: I wanted to be acquitted properly, because then I’d know that people could be found innocent and that would mean that if someone was found guilty, he was really guilty. Because if I allowed that what happened to me was unjust, then the whole house of cards would come falling down. But today, I saw those children and all I could think was ‘family members of a traitor to the Motherland.’ From this side, I couldn’t pretend that there was some hidden reason why this should be happening. There was no possibility of justice.”
“Your parents,” I said, fumbling for a silver lining. “They’re almost halfway done serving their sentences. When you see them again, you’ll be able to tell them that you understand. That you know they were innocent. Hearing that will mean so much to them.”
“Oh, Valka.” Iskra looked at me with sadness in her soft blue eyes. “You really don’t know what ‘without the right of correspondence’ means, do you? They’ve been dead this whole time.”
THIRTY
20 November 1942
Dear Valyushka,
Five days until the assault. I feel unprepared. Like the first day of school, or more like the dreams you have before the first day of school where you don’t have your books and you don’t know where your classes are and it turns out there was an assignment you were supposed to do over the summer.
Have I really been out here for more than a year? Can I be an experienced veteran when I’m barely nineteen and have never fired my gun in combat? It seems impossible that I’ve survived that long. But then I try to remember what normal life was like and I barely can.
When they issued us our winter uniforms, there weren’t enough to go around. I got a quilted coat and trousers and an ushanka but no warm valenki to put over my leaky high boots. The snowmelt numbs my toes. I wrap my feet in extra layers of portyanki and stuff rags and newspaper into the ends of my boots but it doesn’t help much. We’re short of ammunition, too. We’re going into this operation cold, tired, and underequipped.
I took the little cartridge-shaped capsule out of my pocket, uncorked it, and unrolled the bit of paper inside. Vakhromov said filling it out was signing your own death warrant, but as I stare Operation Mars in the face, I feel like it has already been signed and this is only a formality.
I may die, but I won’t die unknown and anonymous.
When I got to “next of kin,” I didn’t even think about it: “Junior Lieutenant Valentina Sergeevna Koroleva, 588th Night Bomber Regiment, 325th Night Bomber Division, Fourth Air Army.” Whatever happens, I want you to be the first to know. I want my family back home to find out from you, not from an impersonal telegram.
Stepanova surprised me today. I was lying by the fire, reading Rudenko’s book. I don’t mind having it out now, with this commissar. She came over to warm her hands and asked, “Do you like poetry?”
The book wasn’t poetry, but this was the first friendly gesture Stepanova had ever made to me, so I said, “Yes. I’m very fond of it.”
“Do you know Mayakovsky?”
I smiled, because every Soviet loves Mayakovsky, and I recited the first poem that came to my head, the one that goes, “Here in four years’ time from now, there’ll be a garden-town.”
Stepanova looked at me very hard and said, “Why did you choose that poem?”
Mayakovsky wrote many poems more fitting to our circumstances, poems about war, about fear and loss and meaningless suffering. But those weren’t the words I wanted to say. I wanted to speak about building and planting and hope. About a time when war won’t divide us.
Stepanova said, “I was sitting by a campfire the last time I heard that poem. We were behind the lines near Moscow. Zoya was reciting it.”
Her face in the firelight did not betray how the poet’s words made her feel, whether the memory of her courageous friend saddened her or stirred a flame of pride.
This will be my last letter before the offensive, maybe my last letter ever. I don’t know if you’ll receive it or not. Your letters get delivered erratically, nothing for a month or two, then a couple of letters at once. I haven’t heard anything from you since the seventh of November. It isn’t really likely that all the pieces will fall into place and you’ll swoop in to deliver me. Chances are I’ll be cut down in the first wave of the assault.
I have so many regrets. This whole time I’ve written around my feelings for you. I’ve talked about everything else, but never what was most on my mind. I was frightened. I didn’t know how you’d react, if you’d laugh at me or brush me off or, worst of all, stop writing. But it won’t matter now.
I love you, Valyushka. I have since I was a child. You’re everything I’m not: daring when I’m afraid, bright and hopeful when I’m despondent, willing to fly across a country to pursue your dreams while I helplessly wait for the inevitable.
All these years I haven’t told you. And yet, here at the end, I want more than anything for you to know.
Yours always,
Pasha
“Is it still snowing?”
“Valka,” said Iskra. “It was snowing a week ago. It was snowing a day ago. It was snowing five minutes ago. It’s not going to stop snowing.”
I paced in the narrow dugout, my hands tucked underneath my arms in an attempt to get the blood flowing into my fingertips. I could see my breath. The dugout floor was icy at the end near the door and muddy at the end near the oil-drum stove, no middle ground. Vera and Tanya were sitting in front of the stove and passing their last cigarette back and forth, their bare feet up on the cinder blocks the stove was set on while their boots and portyanki dried.
“An offensive in the middle of a snowstorm,” said Tanya. “It’s insane. No air support, no way to sight for the artillery. Those boys are as good as dead out there.”
“Tanya, stop. Valka’s keyed up enough already,” scolded Iskra.
“They should have delayed the offensive,” said Zhigli.
“Why didn’t they?” asked Zhigli’s young navigator, cocooned in several blankets at the other end of the dugout.
“Pride,” said Zhigli. The word hung in the freezing air.
Iskra stuck out her foot in front of me. “Stop pacing. It’s annoying.”
I plopped onto Iskra’s bed. “I feel so useless.”
“Pasha will be all right.” How could Iskra sound so sure of herself?
“He doesn’t have valenki,” I whimpered. “There’s a blizzard and he doesn’t even have proper warm boots.”
“He’s from the Urals. You guys are built tough.”
I gave her a pointed look. “Iskra. You’ve met Pasha.”
Pasha’s missing boots weren’t the part of his last letter that was most on my mind. The surprise wasn’t what he said, it was that he said it. Not a revelation, but a breakthrough. But instead of speeding off through the sky to take him in my arms, I was grounded in a dugout.
All our time together flicked through my mind. I wished I could reach out and reshape those memories.
/> “Iskra?”
“Yeah?”
“You want to know something terrible? When we were kids, I only wanted to be friends with Pasha so I could listen to his radio. I’ve known him since he was born but I only cared about the goddamn radio.”
Iskra gave my shoulders a squeeze. “Baby cousin, this will come as a shock to you, but everyone is terrible when they’re thirteen.”
“Pasha wasn’t.”
“No. He was a sweet kid.”
Zhigli, who was lying on the next bed over, said, “You need to stop worrying, Valka. It won’t help him.”
I asked her, “You know about destiny and stuff. Pasha . . . he filled out his identity capsule. That’s bad, isn’t it?”
She drew in her breath through her teeth. “Yeah. I’ve heard that.”
“Is there a counteraction? Can you fix it if you throw the capsule away, or erase it?”
“Fate doesn’t work that way,” she replied, looking up at me with sadness in her dark blue eyes. “If something is going to happen, it will happen. You can’t trick it or find a way around it. I thought I could change Polina’s fate, thought I could hold her back from the brink. I was wrong.”
I wrapped my arms around my knees, feeling like a stalling plane, dropping from the sky.
THIRTY-ONE
27 November 1942—never mailed
Dear Valyushka,
I am alone.
It’s been a long time since I was well and truly alone. One doesn’t have much privacy in the army or sharing a one-room apartment with three other people. But now, if I were under orders to get up and go find someone, anyone alive, I couldn’t do it.
Vakhromov is a little ways from my grove. He lies on his back, his body bent unnaturally over the radio battery. He stares sightlessly into the sky, his lips ash gray, frost forming on his eyelashes, a fresh layer of snow gradually softening the shape of his body. That’s what courage looks like.
As for me, I can’t so much as bring myself to dash across that open space. I haven’t even checked whether Vakhromov is dead. Oh, god, my friend could have been lying there unconscious for a night and a day, slowly freezing to death.
I close my eyes and focus on the colors. White. White. For a moment the rustle of the branches above me creates a streak of muted green. Then it fades. I couldn’t break that oppressive blankness, not even if I spoke, for my speaking voice has no color, not even white. My voice is like me: nothing and no one, a thing that can be added or subtracted without changing the result.
Only my singing voice has color. But I can’t find it in myself to sing.
I want to talk to you so badly it hurts. I spent the last few days before the assault knotted up with anxiety about my foolish, heartfelt words to you, in addition to my anxiety about the mission. Did that letter reach you? How did you respond—did you cry or laugh at my earnestness? What would you say to me if you were here now? I’ll never know. I’ll never see you again.
And so I decided to write to you. I’ll never have a chance to deliver this letter, not even a romantic silver-screen moment where it is found on my body and given to you so that you can tearfully read it after my death, not that I can imagine you sorrowfully dabbing your eyes with a handkerchief under any circumstances. But it makes me feel like I’m not so completely and utterly alone.
I’m having trouble putting my thoughts in order, but what does it matter? No one will ever read this letter anyway. I don’t need to worry about wasting paper or about whether my words make sense to anyone but me. So I’ll simply begin where my mind takes me, to the start of the offensive, the crossing of the Volga.
I was carrying my rifle. I was running in the snow. It was white and thick as a blanket and its sound would have been green if it hadn’t been buried beneath all the other sounds. The heavy radio was strapped to my chest like a suicide bomb. Its steel case was cold. So was my helmet where it pressed against my forehead. I wished I could wear my ushanka instead. Snow leaked into my high boots and melted, soaking my portyanki with icy water. My feet prickled with pain every time they touched the ground.
I hadn’t fired. There were only three bullets in my magazine and there was nothing to fire at anyway. I was crossing a frozen river, slick and featureless. Five meters ahead everything disappeared into a white void. The world was a blank canvas painted with sounds: bright orange gunshots, yellow-green hissing bullets, rumbling burgundy artillery.
And the Katyushas. When they fired, the whole canvas was splashed with their unearthly color. Their voices got brighter and sharper and more terrifying as we closed in on the enemy lines. They made my feet root themselves to the ground. I forced myself to pick up my lead-heavy legs and keep moving.
Vakhromov was to my left, clutching Petya’s hand. The boy’s short legs couldn’t keep up. Vakhromov knelt and let him climb onto his back on top of his kit bag. He got up and kept running, carrying the battery and his rifle and the piggyback child all at once.
On my other side, our medic and the NCOs. Pashkevich charged ahead with a wide, crazy smile. This was the most fun he’d had since the war started. Stepanova’s mouth was set in a thin line. She held her submachine gun, but she didn’t fire, even though only she had enough ammunition. She was saving it.
More streaks of light green. I wanted to curl up on the ground and make myself as small as I could. But there was our commissar, sidearm drawn, faintly visible through the whirling snow. The pistol wasn’t for the fascists. It was for anyone who turned back.
The fascists aren’t aiming at me, I told myself. If I can’t see them, they can’t see me, either. But not every bullet misses, even if fired at random. There was a brief, choking cry, and the commissar collapsed. Our medic tried to stop, but Stepanova shouted, “Keep moving!”
Then she staggered as though she had run into a wall. Pain cracked her emotionless facade, but she didn’t fall. She regained her footing and kept running.
I nearly fell into a hole in the ice where a bomb or shell had broken through and exposed dark water, gaping in the snow like an open wound. Vakhromov and I stayed close to each other. Petya’s eyes squeezed shut against the storm, or maybe out of pure terror. The boy buried his face in the shoulder of Vakhromov’s quilted coat and grabbed his own wrist around the soldier’s neck so he wouldn’t fall.
Tears froze to my cheeks. Ice clumped on my eyelashes, forcing me to wipe my eyes on my sleeve so they didn’t freeze shut. A fresh gust of wind engulfed us, kicking up the snow on the ground. I lowered my head against it and whispered in a fear-cracked voice, “May he save our Motherland as Katyusha saves their love. . . .”
Six of us made it across the front lines to collapse breathlessly against the wall of a gutted house. Stepanova was holding her side.
“Let me look at that,” said our medic.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” said Stepanova through clenched teeth, waving him away.
He offered her morphine.
She said, “No. I need my head about me.”
But she should have accepted his help, because as the day wore on, her gait grew unsteady and her face flushed and feverish.
The blizzard had died down, but snow still swirled around us, giving the battlefield an unearthly feel. Shapes approached us like dark paper cutouts before resolving into solid objects. Craters. Tank stoppers. Twisted human figures, some in gray Wehrmacht uniforms, more in padded Russian coats.
Stepanova led the way through the macabre scene. The battle raged on every side, heard but not seen. Gunshots echoed deceptively. Once we walked blindly into the middle of a firefight. We hit the ground and scrambled for the Russian side. A bullet ricocheted off Pashkevich’s helmet.
“Help or get lost,” said an officer.
On the map, the salient looks small. From the inside, it’s an endless wasteland. We picked our way laboriously through, clambering over a tangled pile of tanks, belly-crawling across a stretch of open ground. Darkness fell before we reached our destination. As Vakhromov
and I hunted for a spot free of corpses where we could make camp, I felt I was on some sort of gruesome picnic.
The next morning, we reached a patch of forest. I found it difficult to believe that a forest had survived and that every tree was not smashed to splinters. Vakhromov handed his canteen to Petya, then took a drink from it himself. Stepanova took out her map and compass.
“Can we cut through the forest?” asked Vakhromov. “It would be safer.”
The starshina frowned at the map. “We got turned around back there. If we’re where I think we are . . .”
“Women have no sense of direction,” said Pashkevich. “Give me that.”
Stepanova bristled and held the map away. She said, “The town we’re assigned to burn down should be on the other side of the trees.”
“What are you talking about?” Pashkevich demanded.
“Ma’am, we’re not burning anything. We’re here for the photos,” I said.
“But . . .” Stepanova furrowed her feverish brow. “We just left Moscow.”
I shook my head. “We aren’t near Moscow. We’re near Rzhev.”
“Rzhev. Of course. I misspoke.”
The medic ventured, “Ma’am, are you feeling all right?”
Stepanova curtly told us to keep moving.
We smelled the stable before we saw it. The artillery had opened it like a greedy child ripping open a present. The fire had burned itself out, for the most part, except for a few wan flames flickering among the butchered horses. One man was alive. We found him cowering in the corner, his face slashed by shrapnel. Pashkevich finished him off with his bayonet. Stepanova rounded on the sergeant and demanded, “What did you do that for? We might have needed him!”
“A dead fascist is a safe fascist,” grunted Pashkevich.
