So why do Germans call their country the Fatherland and we are the Motherland? Curious. Maybe you need a father to win a war. But you need a mother to survive one. Is that not what happened in Stalingrad? Though millions died, a city survived. The Nazis, the “superior race,” the Aryans, have finally slinked off like mongrel dogs with their tails between their legs.
The days grow hotter. The heat seems palpable, as if one could knead it like dough, pull it out, twine it into braided loaves like those for Easter. The clouds stretch out across the nearly colorless sky like cobwebs. Flying can be hard on sunny days, for the heat in this terrain roils up like waves in a tumultuous sea. However, except for noncombat missions, we still do not fly during the day. We seek the smooth velvety air of the night that we fracture with our bombs.
I can’t forget how I almost crossed my fingers when I asked which Yana had died. Is there something wrong with me? I wonder if my sister witches ever have thoughts like these. Killing from the air is easy. We see the target but not the human face behind the target. The consequences are distant. But somewhere there is undoubtedly another little four-year-old girl in Germany whose papa I have killed. Yet each night I go out with Galya. With her superb navigational skills, even in poor weather we make our hits. I know I have the most category-one target hits and am up for a medal. Not the hero medal, which is the highest, but the Order of Kutuzov, 2nd Class.
The other night we bombed a train. It must have had twenty or more cars and buckled up across the landscape like a felled behemoth. Some of the jackknifed cars scraped the night like the jagged plates on the back of a stegosaurus. It was thrilling. Am I truly becoming a witch? Have I become addicted to killing? I live now for the night.
We snatch brief periods of sleep during the seemingly endless days. I’m very suggestible, and my dreams are often prompted by scraps of conversation I hear from my fellow Night Witches. Today, the longest day of the year and the shortest night, also called the Witches’ Sabbath, there’s a lot of girlish chatter about boyfriends and “garland tossing.” Before the war, there was a tradition of casting garlands of flowers into the river at midnight, then stripping off all one’s clothes and swimming naked with one’s beau. The air swells with raucous laughter as a group of mechanics, navigators, and pilots share their stories.
“I didn’t intend to take off my clothes. I had worn my nightgown and the current really stripped it away. I couldn’t catch it. Honestly. It floated away like a white shadow on the dark river … ,” Oksana is saying.
“And then?” Ludmilla asks. She’s a terrific pilot who flies one of the Yaks that is stationed at our airfield.
Oksana blushes madly. “Well, Cyril, a boy who never had paid attention to me, suddenly breaks through the surface of the water. All chatty.”
“He caught your shadow?” Galya asks.
“Well, in a manner of speaking … yes … but he was naked too, I think.”
“You think?” Galya asks.
“It was dark. No moon.”
Oksana looks at us slyly, her mouth clamped shut. She will not say another word. But her good friend Ludmilla snorts. “It was about time, eh?”
Oksana still says nothing but smiles deliciously to herself and walks away.
About time for what? I think. I believe I’m the only virgin Night Witch. I get up and walk toward the tent. The air is crimped with heat, but it’ll be smooth by tonight and the sky will embrace me, my only lover on this the shortest night of all.
I fall asleep in the heat-clotted afternoon. A kind voice threads through my dreams. Boy, it says. Why are you crying?
I am crying because I can’t get my shadow to stick on.
I sit bolt upright on what passes for a mattress. That was not a boy speaking. It was me. But the person in the dream was not me. It was a boy huddled on the floor beneath the calendar. It was Yuri. This dream haunts me all day. What does it mean? Is it my shadow I have lost? Or is it my soul?
In July we’re transferred to a new airfield once again, back in the Kuban region. We are bombing the western part of the Blue Line on the Kerch Peninsula, which is just across the Sea of Azov from the Taman Peninsula in the Crimea. I’m thrilled when Tatyana arrives the same day we do; the terrible things I said to her have been eating at me for too long. But I barely catch more than a glimpse of her over the next few days.
The fighting is intense from the very start. On these short nights we begin flying in three-minute intervals in order to disrupt enemy land troops. We have to vary our bombing patterns to keep the Germans from becoming too familiar with them.
The next week, Tatyana and I are both transferred to another airfield at Kursk. As we approach the airfield, we notice that there are a number of Yaks. The Yak-1 is a high-performance craft, heavily armed yet maneuverable and quite fast. It’s capable of inflicting serious damage on Messerschmitts. We have barely landed, when crews run out to refuel us and an officer from the Yak regiment, Captain Iraida Ivanaov Ol’kova, comes out to brief us.
“Forty-three German aircraft are flying toward the rail junction that we’re guarding. You need to take off right now and support the Yaks that are defending the junction.”
We know this is hugely important. Soviet troops and ammunition have been drawn to that region in preparation for a battle that is becoming known as the Kursk Bulge. This could literally be the turn of the war. And when that turn comes, when the Nazis run west and cross into Poland, we’ll be on their tails.
As we draw near, we see the Yaks attacking what seems to be a vast herd of panzer units. I come to think of this battle as a layer cake. The ground layer is composed of the panzer divisions; above them are the Yaks of the 586th; above them are the enemy aircraft; and then above them, the frosting on the cake, is us, the Night Witches, in the slipstream of the enemy, creeping up to distract or fly decoy. In just over a week the German assault is destroyed. Their dream of recovering the eastern front is wrecked. It is the largest tank battle in military history, with six thousand tanks, two million troops, and four thousand aircraft. Galya and I in our little U-2 are one of those four thousand.
Little do we suspect that barely two weeks later, our regiment will suffer its most devastating loss. Yes, the Germans are theoretically on the run, but a few stayed behind. We want them all gone, and so we intensify our air attacks as the length of the nights increases. Galya and I are soon leading the regiment in completed missions.
But as I trim off a light wind shear one night, something goes terribly wrong. There is no antiaircraft fire from the ground. Everything seems relatively silent, but then ahead of us a plane suddenly explodes.
“Jesus Christ!” Galya roars as a Russian night fighter peels away. Seconds later another craft explodes. The sky is no longer safe at all. I cut my engine to evade the enemy and plunge into a steep dive over our target. We’re under six hundred meters, the lowest altitude from which it’s safe to drop a bomb without serious blowback. But we do it. The shock waves buffet us, damaging our port aileron, which makes banking very difficult.
How we ever get back to the field I’ll never know. As we land, I hear shouts and whoops and cries over the whir of the engine. But they’re not cries of joy.
We’re greeted by a grotesque scene on the runway. Dozens of people run toward us, their faces distorted with soundless screams and a wild hysterical light in their eyes.
They drag Galya and me from our cockpits. The news is almost incomprehensible. Fragments of sound, inarticulate words whip through the air. Alina … burning … Vavara … navigator … plummeting … Stukas … a dozen … no, two dozen … I smell the smoke now. A dark cloud rolls in from the west. I open my mouth to scream as their words swell with meaning. I twist my head around, frantically looking for Tatyana’s plane.
The story of the attack comes out in chunks. It was massive, and within ten minutes, we lost eight members of our regiment. Four pilots and their navigators. It stands as the most horrific loss of any of the three women’s regiments so
far.
“Tatyana’s gone?” My mouth moves around the words, but it is as if they are coming from another person.
Elena looks at me steadily. “Her plane was shot at. But Ludmilla says she saw her still flying.”
“Flying where?”
“West, I think. But her rudder was hanging by threads and she was spilling fuel.”
I feel Galya’s hand grab my arm as I sway. All I can think of is that moment I spat on the ground as I walked away from her. I break loose from Galya’s grasp and run toward the command hut. Bursting into Bershanskaya’s office, I shout, “I have to go after her!” She’s on a field radio with headphones and waves at me to sit down. She repeats some coordinates into the microphone before saying, “Yes, yes. Understood.” She turns a switch and peels off the headphones.
“I am so sorry for your loss, comrade.”
The words hit me squarely in the chest and I nearly stagger back. “I want to go.”
“Go? Go where? We aren’t sure if there is anyone to even rescue,” she replies, her voice softer than usual.
“I don’t care. If there’s a chance she’s out there, I’m going to find her.” I rap the desk with my fist.
She reaches across the desk and grasps my hand. “Comrade Baskova, if there is a rescue mission, it will be launched from a field northwest of here, one that has Yaks. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing you can do.”
“I need to try. She’s my sister.”
The commander sighs. “Comrade Baskova, don’t be childish. You are not going. That’s final.”
It’s as if my entire world is sliding off its axis. The counterweight is gone, and I am slipping into a void of desolation. It occurs to me that I have always needed Tatyana to define me. I am amorphous without her, a lump of clay seeking a shape. The tears that I’ve been storing since I spat and turned my back on her come now. I stagger back to the shed where we sleep and throw myself on the bunk. A hot blade of morning sunlight strikes across my face. Even with my eyes closed the bright light pries at my eyelids. I press my forearm against my eyes to escape into some sort of darkness. My grief is bottomless, and I’m grieving for two of us, for I am lost as well. The person who infused me with purpose and meaning is gone. Without Tatyana I am nothing.
I fall into a strangely dreamless sleep that lasts through the remaining day and into the next night. I fight waking up. My sister’s voice threads through the dregs of my sleep. We call it Witch’s Delight when the moon is gone. More protection. More bombs. More kills. When I open my eyes and look out the small window I see it is in fact a moonless night. There’s only starlight. I hear the revving of engines. I reach for my helmet and goggles, put on my boots, and zip my flight jacket.
There is no time to grieve. Just time to kill.
* * *
I spend the next few weeks in a sort of daze. All I can focus on is killing as many Germans as possible. The only moment when the pain disappears is when I see my bomb hit a target. In my heart of hearts I simply cannot believe that Tatyana is dead.
I shut my eyes. I try to picture Tatyana’s face. The curls of her unruly mop of red hair dance around her heart-shaped face like small flames. Her chin comes to a delicate point. But I have trouble picturing her eyes. Were they green or gray-green, or sometimes almost blue? It depended on the light. At twilight they were gray. In the morning on a sunny day, possibly green, and on a cloudy day, they were softly blue. The harder I try to recall her eyes, the more difficult it is to remember her face.
To even begin to think about her being lost, wounded, or captured could crack my concentration while flying. There’s simply no room in the air or on the ground for such thoughts.
A few weeks later I am standing on a field in the Ukraine. Since Kursk we had advanced steadily on the Nazis’ tail. First the city of Kharkov fell in late August. Then Smolensk. Now we are at a temporary airfield. A crisp fall breeze stirs the few unscorched wheat fields. I stand in a line stretching west to east. At the head of the line is our commander, Yevdokiya Bershanskaya. She is one of those women with a beautifully high, clear brow that seems to endow her entire being with a sense of elegant composure. But her eyes are alert. Not simply alert but keenly observant.
I am perhaps six people down from Bershanskaya. Galya is on my left, Ludmilla on my right as a plump man makes his way down the line with his aide-de-camp. Before I know it he is in front of me. His large face reminds me of a mushroom. And it seems that he has a tiny baby mushroom growing on the left side of his nose. I find this little bubble of flesh distracting. I should be used to this, as I’ve seen Nikita Khrushchev’s picture in the newspaper numerous times. He is quite short. I’m at least ten centimeters taller. Khrushchev is commissar of the Communist party in the Ukraine. He serves as a link between Stalin and his generals on the western front, which is why he’s here today. On the recommendation of General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, our regiment is to receive its new and official designation. Because of our heroic actions in the Taman Peninsula, we will be known as the Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Regiment. We are now officially heroes of the Soviet Union.
“Moi pozdravleniia, comrade.” Commissar Khrushchev pronounces his congratulations as he appends the medal to my left lapel. It’s a round disk suspended from a red-and-blue ribbon. In the center of the disk is a hammer and sickle. The commissar’s expression is somber, but it cracks suddenly with a smile, revealing teeth that are yellow and chunky. There’s a gap between the two front ones that makes him appear almost feral. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev implemented the Great Purge of 1934 that led to the Moscow trials that sent hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to the gulag. “He’s nothing but a criminal!” my father would say every time he saw his picture in the paper, though my mother was quick to hush him.
But the people of the Ukraine have long memories. They hold grudges. As soon as the Germans invaded in 1941, they formed the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion, an auxiliary police force that had more than five hundred Ukrainian volunteers. They helped the Nazis annihilate countless villages in the Ukraine and Belarus and were enthusiastic participants in the massacre of Jews in Babi Yar. Now they are on the run, and in his opening remarks, Khrushchev touts how the Red Army will ferret out every single one of these collaborators. Of course he himself was responsible for creating these collaborators when he joined Stalin in implementing the purges.
So now I am shaking hands, and a plump hand it is, with a criminal who has just pinned a medal on me.
Following the ceremony, Commander Bershanskaya explains to us the task at hand. We are to penetrate farther into the Ukraine as the Nazis flee to the west. I’m not sure what kind of a welcome we’ll get. I mean, even here at the award ceremony, there are several Ukrainian functionaries. Do I imagine that there’s a flash of deep hatred every time they look at Comrade Khrushchev?
I squash the flicker of excitement that’s sparked when I learn we’re heading west—toward Tatyana’s last known location. Over the past few weeks, I’ve forced myself to accept the worst. I will not even allow myself to indulge in any hope that she might have survived a crash. For hope is a terrible distraction.
“Bozhe moi!” Galya exclaims as we fly over the new airbase. “They call this temporary! Oh my God.”
The base is certainly impressive. It was originally built by the Nazis, and they actually have real landing lights on the airstrip, which is paved! How often have Galya and I done our approach with no lights at all, or with just the tiny glow of a ground person’s cigarette.
“Can you remember how to do it with lights and strip marks?” Galya chuckles.
“I’ll try.”
As our wheels touch the ground I notice a short man strutting out onto the field. There’s something about his walk that fills me with apprehension. He radiates a certain irascibility and arrogance. Bad combination. I see from the flat hat and the encrustations of gold braid that he is a general.
Galya and I climb down from the plane.
&
nbsp; “Girlies!” he thunders. “They send me girlies.” So much for our medals declaring us heroes of the Soviet Union. “They keep sending me girlies.” I look around. There are a lot of Soviet fighter planes here. A sprinkling of Yaks.
“We are the Forty-Sixth Taman Guard Night Bombers,” I say, lifting my chin. If I’d had a bomb I would have dropped it on him. How dare he speak to us this way! But before I have time to say anything impertinent, I spot Yevdokiya Bershanskaya, marching out onto the field. She comes up to the general and touches his elbow lightly. No salute. Nothing. It’s a joke among us that Commander Bershanskaya knows nothing of basic military protocol and discipline.
“Quite enough of this,” she says calmly.
“Of what? What do you mean—women?” The little general almost spits the words.
Bershanskaya’s green eyes burn. “Get used to us. We are women and we are proud of that. Indeed, that is the motto of our regiment. We’ve flown over eighteen thousand missions. We have dropped a total of twenty-five thousand tons of bombs on invading German armies. Do I need to go on? Let’s make a deal. You shut up about my ‘girlies’ and I’ll shut up about your boyos, one of whom just flew his Su-6 smack into a mountainside the clearest day we’ve had this autumn.”
He sneers. “What are you accusing me of?”
“I’m accusing you of having an astonishing lack of vision. The Motherland knows how to use her women to the best advantage. It is only the Fatherland that squanders its female talent.”
Night Witches Page 10
