by Gwen C. Katz
I felt for the revolver on my hip. I’d never fired it at anything but a paper target, and the thought that I might finally need it intimidated me. It had been a long time since I’d earned my sharpshooting badge back in Stakhanovo.
I moved as quietly as I could through the knee-high snow, grateful for my soft fur boots. I headed for the trees. I didn’t wish to stray too far from the aircraft, but Pasha must not have been close enough to see the flare or he would have come to us. Unless he was unable to. Unless . . . no. I couldn’t let my thoughts stray that direction.
I pressed through the woods, mindful of the sound of each footfall and each branch that brushed against me. There were no bodies here. The wide swath of destruction carved by Operation Mars had passed another way. I was grateful for that. I would have felt the need to stop and check every body, even those in Wehrmacht uniforms, rather than run the risk of passing him by.
Crunch. Something brittle shattered under my foot. I knelt to examine it. It was broken into a hundred fragments, but it had once been a glass tube with wires inside. A lightbulb?
While I was on my knee, something else caught my eye. A long, straight wire lay on the ground, running into a thick grove of evergreen trees. Keeping low, I crept toward the grove.
Someone had been living there. A Soviet! A rain cape was neatly laid out on the soft carpet of pine needles, along with various other bits of gear, a kit bag, a smaller canvas bag, a mess kit. The wire terminated at a pair of steel boxes connected with a cable, one sealed, the other open to reveal a mess of electronics. A bomb? I flinched away from the wire running along the ground. The whole site was a booby trap!
But the boxes had shoulder straps. Why would a bomb need those? I crept closer. The front of the open box was covered with knobs and dials. A second wire snaked up the trunk of a tree. Not a bomb—a radio! The thing I’d stepped on must have been a discarded vacuum tube.
My excitement mounted. I tried to let reason prevail. There were a lot of radio operators in the Red Army. But when I peered inside the radio case, it was as plain as if he’d signed his name on it. In the middle of the tangle of wires was a pencil stub touching a razor blade.
“Pasha,” I whispered. I had to stop myself from shouting. He was here! I was touching things he had touched a few scant hours ago.
Then where was he? Why had he left his hiding place if he knew we were coming?
I peered out through the trees. That’s when I saw him.
I spotted the soles of his boots first, black against the snow. Not gray felt valenki, but plain high boots.
Pasha had no valenki.
I dashed over, even as the knowledge sank in that there was nothing I could do. I dropped to my knees beside the feet of the snow-dusted body, pressing my face against the worn artificial leather. My shoulders shook. I was too late. He’d trusted me, he’d waited for me, and that had killed him.
I stayed like that, eyes closed, until the snow melted and soaked through my flight suit to bite my knees. My hand clutched one leg of his trousers, spotted where my tears had fallen on them. There was no warmth at all in the flesh underneath. I’d freeze too if I stayed like that, but I couldn’t make myself care.
Iskra was waiting. She’d be checking the luminous hands of her watch, her anxiety mounting. Any moment someone might stumble upon our plane. I forced myself to my feet, turning away from Pasha’s body. I couldn’t bear to see what had happened to him because of me. But I needed to look him in the face. I needed to know.
Hesitantly my eyes wandered up his body to his face. Blond hair and rugged, lined features. The muscles in my chest unclenched and warm relief flooded me. It wasn’t Pasha. There was still hope! But I immediately sobered. How could I be happy over this soldier’s body? This man surely hadn’t deserved to die any more than Pasha did.
The snow around him had been packed down by feet and raked by eager fingers. Someone had been doing a little corpse looting. More than one someone. I followed the tracks, sticking to the darkest path under the trees, my neck prickling with the mounting surety that Pasha had walked into a trap and I was following him.
Voices. Straight ahead, over the next hill. More than two, I guessed, and fewer than ten. I strained to hear what language they were speaking but couldn’t make it out. I dropped to the ground and crawled, silently sliding my sidearm out of its holster.
At the top of the hill, I raised my head cautiously. There was a cluster of seven or eight soldiers on the other side of a small clearing. It was difficult to make out any details, but some wore squarish hats with thick ear flaps. Ushankas! They were Russians!
I nearly jumped to my feet and called out to them, but at that moment, all the soldiers tensed and raised their guns. One shouted, “Halt! Was machst du?”
I flattened my face into the powdery snow. Not Russians. Germans in Russian gear.
But they weren’t aiming at me. They were pointing their guns at one of their own. Now I saw that he wasn’t a member of the group at all. He was unarmed. His figure was slight, even bulked up with a padded winter uniform, and the dark hair that hid his face was unkempt and tangled. He had one hand inside his coat, and he now withdrew it and raised it slowly into the air. Anticipation rose within me.
He spoke. “It’s only letters and things. Personal stuff.”
I knew that voice. I thought it had grown deeper since I’d heard it last, fuller. But I knew it all the same. I’d found him—after all this time, after all the worry and the pain, I’d actually found him! But I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, couldn’t run over the hill and take him in my arms. I had to think.
One of the fascists stood away from the rest of the group, facing Pasha. He said in thickly accented Russian, “Give me the coat and I will give your letters back to you.”
The Russian winter had reduced the unstoppable Wehrmacht to highway robbers. Pasha slid the coat off his shoulders. He handed it to the German soldier, who wrapped himself in it with a grateful sigh. “Your hat and gloves also.”
Pasha protested, “You’re wearing our uniforms. You could be accidentally shot by your own men.”
“What does that matter? Without winter clothes we will freeze before we make it back to them. Give them to me.”
Pasha slipped off his gloves and gave them to the Russian speaker, who pulled them on over his red, blistered hands with palpable relief. Pasha’s hat followed. The Russian speaker said, “I must apologize for this. I wish you no harm, I promise. We are in a very bad way. We lost three men in the storm.”
“My things,” said Pasha.
I sized up the situation. The leader of the group, the one who had shouted, was a lanky sergeant who wore glasses and an ushanka torn where the star had been pulled off. Next to him stood a very young soldier, younger than Pasha, with a runny nose and round cheeks crimson from the cold, bundled in stolen Russian clothing. And then there was the Russian speaker. Everything about him was weary, from his sunken, colorless eyes to the creases lining his forehead and the sides of his mouth.
They didn’t look like the ruthless invaders I’d taught myself to imagine. After their moment of panic, their weapons once again hung slack at their sides. Were these sad creatures what we’d been fighting all this time?
Darkness was on my side. They didn’t know there was only one of me. I couldn’t hope to take them all out, but if I could take out the sergeant, Pasha might have a chance to escape while the leaderless squad was confused. Maybe. But I didn’t have a clear shot; the others were in the way. I had to be patient.
The Russian speaker reached into the coat’s inside pocket and pulled out a book with a green leather cover and a packet of letters bound together with string. His fingers fumbled in unfamiliar gloves. As he handed the things to Pasha, something slid out of his grasp, something small and folded into quarters.
He reached down and picked up the photograph. He unfolded it. His deep-set eyes flicked from the photo to Pasha. “What is this?”
Pasha replied ti
midly, “It’s a photo from my girl. She sent me a picture of her airplane instead of herself.”
“My girl.” I embraced those words. But Pasha spoke with fading hope. It was all I could do not to shout to him how I felt.
“She is a pilot? A U-2 pilot?”
Pasha nodded.
The German soldier sucked in his breath through his teeth with a hiss. “Eine Nachthexe! We know these girl pilots. The Night Witches. Every night we get no sleep because of them.”
The runny-nosed young soldier gasped and repeated “Nachthexe,” followed by a burst of angry German. He raised his rifle and pointed it at Pasha. Pasha shrank away.
I fought to keep my protective instinct in check and focused on aiming the revolver. I wrapped my left hand around my right to steady my grip. Just like at the shooting range. Don’t think about what will happen if you miss. And definitely don’t think about what will happen if you hit, don’t imagine what will happen to that face, don’t think about who he is or wonder about his life. He’s an enemy. That’s all.
I didn’t much enjoy being able to see my target.
An argument had broken out between the Russian speaker and the young soldier. The latter was still waving his gun. It was obvious what he wanted. The Night Witches had made him afraid—I had made him afraid—and since he couldn’t hurt us, he would retaliate against Pasha instead. The former shook his head and began to lead Pasha away from the others. They were closer now. But the Russian speaker was between Pasha and me. Amid the harsh sounds of his unintelligible language, I heard “nach Vyazma.”
I clenched my free hand. I’d begun to think he wasn’t as bad as the others. But if he wanted to take Pasha to Vyazma, he was only saying that they should kill Pasha slowly, rather than quickly.
The sergeant had had enough. He told the two soldiers to be silent and drew his own sidearm. He was going to settle the argument by shooting Pasha himself!
There were still people blocking my view of the sergeant. But I had a clear shot at the Russian speaker. With him out of the way, Pasha could run to me. I aimed and pulled the revolver’s trigger. It was heavy, as though it was reluctant to be fired, but I squeezed it hard and the gun recoiled into the pad of my thumb with a report that echoed through the open space, multiplying into many gunshots. The Russian speaker crumpled onto the snow-covered ground.
It was so easy.
The German sergeant yelled, “In Deckung!” His men dropped onto the earth, looking around frantically for the source of the shot. I fired at them a few more times and shouted, “Pashenka! Over here!”
He turned. His face was chapped by the cold and covered with untidy stubble, but there was a look of dawning recognition. His lips formed the words “Cinnabar red.”
I stood up and screamed, “Run!”
Struggling through the snowdrifts, Pasha scrambled up the hill toward me. I was struck by the impression that he was hopelessly far away, that no matter how far he ran he would never be any closer and would never reach me. But he stretched out his arm, and I mine, and then my hand clasped his, bare and cold. We were running hand in hand.
I heard the Germans behind me getting to their feet. They’d figured out that I was only a single person. The sergeant shouted to his men. The sounds of pursuit followed us.
I half led, half dragged Pasha into the trees, through the grove where he had hidden his radio. As we passed it, he grabbed the small canvas bag and slung it onto his shoulder.
Number 18 crouched on the snow ahead, its white body striped by the shadows of the trees. Iskra had heard us coming. She was already firing up the engine. Just a few more steps . . .
Gunshots cracked from behind us. Pasha’s body jerked as a spray of dark blood burst from his shoulder. He tried to take another step, but his legs buckled. He fell in the powdery snow. The bag slithered down his wounded arm. I tried to pull him to his feet, but the strength had gone out of him. No! Not now, not when we were so close.
I went down on one knee in front of him. I lifted his uninjured arm over my shoulder and placed my other shoulder against his chest and lifted him, one hand grasping his forearm and the other, the bag slung over it, around the backs of his knees. I carried him the rest of the way to the airplane, keeping my steps steady because I knew how much pain every jostle must cause him, and mindless of the gunshots that continued to ring out.
A burst of machine-gun fire issued from Iskra’s cockpit, so close that it made my ears ring. I set Pasha down on the wing of the plane, allowing him to slump for a moment against the frost-encrusted fuselage, and then reached down and pulled him into the cockpit. He flinched as I strapped the harness over him. I shouted, “Iskra, get us out of here!”
Wind bit my face as the plane began to move, its propeller beating out its familiar rhythmic tick. My arms crisscrossed Pasha’s chest as though I was worried he might slip out of my grasp. We lifted off into blackness.
THIRTY-FIVE
PASHA LAY HEAVY IN MY LAP. HE STANK OF SWEAT AND urine and salty blood, but at that moment he seemed the most precious thing in existence. I could hardly make myself believe that it was really him. I put my arms around him and whispered with my lips against his cheek, “You’re safe now, Pashenka.”
He didn’t respond. His body sagged in its harness. Something warm seeped through my flight suit where his shoulder pressed against me.
“Pashenka?” I said. Still no response. I told Iskra, “He’s out cold.”
“Hang in there. We’re forty-five minutes out.”
I yelled, “We don’t have forty-five minutes. He’s bleeding! We’ve got to make an emergency landing!”
“We’re over fascist territory. Landing now would not do Pasha any favors.”
“If we don’t get help, I might lose him!” I had Pasha in my arms after everything we’d been through, only to find him slipping away from me. I couldn’t let that happen, not when we were finally together. Not when I could tell him how I felt.
“What do you want me to do?”
The answer hit me. “The partisans! Viktor Malakhov, remember? His camp isn’t far from here.”
Iskra’s voice was hesitant. “Valka . . . we bombed them. If they have a sense of self-preservation, they’ll shoot us out of the sky. And they’re Trotskyists!”
“Iskra! This is not the time for politics!”
Iskra sighed. “All right.”
I squeezed a hand that was losing its color and whispered, “Hold on, Pashenka.”
Our little plane circled a patch of forest like every other patch of forest. There were no signal fires, only a bit of warm light spilling in long rectangles out of the windows below to highlight rubble, tree trunks, a few patches of open space. I heard a dull pop and hiss as Iskra fired a red flare. I braced myself for the gunfire that would come if Iskra was right. For a long moment, there was only darkness. Then a bright spot of green burst above us and drifted downward.
Iskra came around for the landing. People ran out into the clearing, pointing and shouting. A single shot cracked, making me wince and lower my head, before a figure in the center of the crowd held up his hand and said in a clear, commanding voice, “Hold your fire!”
Iskra clumsily touched down, letting Number 18 bounce across the rutted, crater-filled ground, the plane threatening to nose over at every moment. Pasha’s body jostled against me. Iskra steered the U-2 into a snowdrift to bring it to a halt.
Partisans ran up beside us, men and women and teenagers armed with drum-fed submachine guns or black-gripped automatic pistols. The man who had ordered them not to fire carried a snub-nosed PPSh-41 replica with its maker’s initials engraved on the stock in intricate letters. Malakhov. He shouldered his way past the others and asked, “What’s the trouble?”
I unbuckled my harness. “This man is wounded. He needs immediate attention.”
They would refuse me. I was sure of it. The partisans had every right to shoot all three of us on the spot. But Malakhov nodded over his shoulder and a couple of you
nger partisans, a man and a woman, scrambled up onto the plane’s lower wing and helped me lift Pasha out. They carried him to one of the houses, with Iskra in tow.
When I climbed out of my cockpit, I found Malakhov blocking my path. After fighting my way through so many obstacles, my first instinct was to shove him out of the way. I controlled myself. I needed him to save Pasha.
His eyes moved over my plane’s worn canvas surface, settling on the tail number. “Number eighteen. Is this your aircraft?”
I nodded, wondering if my guilt was visible on my face. Did a killer look different from an innocent person? Had the war changed me that obviously?
“Brave of you to come back here.” His voice was quiet, controlled. “Did you think we wouldn’t recognize your plane? It was a memorable night. And you were flying very low.”
“We needed help,” I managed to say.
“From the Trotskyist traitors you tried to wipe out a week ago? We lost a dozen men in that raid. Soldiers who were fighting to defend you. One aircrew would be fair compensation, don’t you think?”
He was right. Being shot would be a fitting fate for someone who had killed her own people despite the twisting pain in her chest telling her that it was wrong, despite Iskra begging her not to. But I had to live for Pasha’s sake. I said, “Pasha is innocent. He had nothing to do with the air raid. Don’t hurt him to punish us.”
“You think I don’t consider one life acceptable collateral damage?” To my surprise, he smiled. Crinkles formed around his eyes. “You’re right. I don’t. I know who my real enemies are. We’re all fighting the same people, defending the same Motherland. Remember that.”
