Her gaze remains level and the miserable little general seems to shrivel before our eyes. I suppress a smile of satisfaction.
“What a toad’s ass,” I hear Galya mutter. “Come on, let’s see if this place is as first class on the ground as it looks from the air. What I wouldn’t give for a good lice-free mattress.”
This airbase is to be the home for our regiment and the 586th, the fighter aviation regiment that flies the Yaks. The 586th had been completely female, but a new male squadron was added recently. Apparently the general who gave us such a nasty welcome is responsible for this and wanted more male fliers. His goal isn’t just to integrate the three different female regiments but to eliminate all the women fliers. But I doubt he’ll have much success with our regiment. Bershanskaya will not hear of it. And what Bershanskaya wants, she gets. The entire military has profound regard for her and her innovations, from her two-plane bombing tactic to the training procedures that enabled our regiment to become one of the top-performing units in the Soviet military. It is not easy for the generals to say no to Bershanskaya.
A few days later, we’re moved to another auxiliary airfield twenty kilometers closer to the front lines in Belorussia. The food is terrible, the beds lumpy, and it seems as if the surrounding countryside specializes in growing mud rather than grass. Taking off is a bit precarious, and we spend our first four days unloading sandbags to try to achieve a semblance of a runway. But once we are out of the mud and into the sky and the ever-lengthening nights, things begin to feel right to us.
One cannot speak of feeling happy or pleased or even satisfied. It is war, after all. I have lost my mother. I have no idea where my sister or my father are. I am increasingly haunted by the disappearance of Tatyana. After the fighting in the region quieted down, after the Germans retreated, the squadron commander sent in a search team, but no wreckage was sighted. Some witnesses claimed they saw her navigator fall from the plane. Others thought they heard an explosion and saw the plane falling down in flames.
Many times, I’ve flown over the spot where she was last spotted, but I’ve never seen a trace of her.
Could Tatyana have survived? If the Germans captured her and if the war ever ends, could she return to Russia? Unfortunately there is always risk in returning. That was why Mama never talked about Papa returning. Stalin believes that in Hitler’s camps there are no prisoners of war, only Russian traitors. Surrender, even if one is wounded, is considered a criminal act. There are all sorts of rumors about Stalin’s treatment of his own son Yakov. One story says that he was captured by the Germans, who offered to exchange Yakov for a German field marshal who’d been wounded and taken prisoner. Stalin apparently replied, “I will not trade a marshal for a lieutenant.” So it’s hard for me to imagine either Tatyana or Papa returning to Russia after the war if they have been captured. In Stalin’s mind, “true patriots” would not permit themselves to be captured, but would have fled east to the Urals.
Such questions torment me, but I can’t let them distract me. A moment’s distraction in the cockpit means death. Death not just for me but for my trusted navigator—and now friend—Galya. All one can do in a situation like this is try to push the torment into the deepest, darkest corner of one’s mind. You hope that the grief will begin to atrophy like a limb that shrivels from lack of use. You compensate somehow. You limp but you still move. And most importantly, you still fly.
Our temporary airfield is in a clearing in a forest. The gathering mists grow denser and hang from the boughs like the beards of old men. The trees stand like sentries in a ghostly silence, but sometimes, I swear I hear a murmuring.
It’s unclear if our airfield is in Belorussia or the Ukraine. Half the locals speak a dialect; the others speak something else. No one speaks Yiddish. The Nazis began killing Russian Jews three years ago in Babi Yar near Kiev. A hundred and fifty thousand massacred. There are rumors that a few months ago an even larger massacre took place in Poland. And we are a scant fifty kilometers from the Polish border. There is talk that many of the locals collaborated with the Nazis and helped round up the Jews. Starved by Stalin, their last shreds of humanity have withered with their flesh. And now with the Nazis in retreat, Ukraine’s last hope for independence is shattered. So this is truly a no-man’s-land.
The Red Army is pushing as hard as it can and we are part of that push. Our mission is to bomb any enemy supplies and clear the way for our troops. We moved in so quickly, we’re warned to take pistols with us when we go into the woods to do our business, as enemy soldiers are still lurking.
When we are not flying, we pore over maps with our navigators, trying to figure out not where we are geographically but politically. As we push west, the front becomes sketchier. It reminds me in some ways of Stalingrad, where in a six-hour time period the central railroad station was taken alternately by the Red Army and the German army fourteen times. One day we hear of the Nazis taking Korosten near Kiev, and the next day the Red Army under Nikolai Fyodorovich Vatutin has recaptured it, and then, shockingly, comes the news of his assassination by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
One day as we are studying the maps I hear talk of a sniper.
“Yuri Vaznov?” I ask excitedly.
“No!” Galya says. “Roza Shanina.” Roza Shanina has risen to sudden fame in the last few months as part of an all-female sniper platoon. She quickly racked up so many hits that she was recently awarded the Order of Glory, 3rd Class. She’s the first servicewoman on the Belorussian Front to receive that distinction, and her picture is on the front page of the Unichtozhim vraga.
“You know”—Galya turns to the other girls—“Valya spent a romantic night with Yuri Vaznov.”
“Really?” someone says as they all giggle.
Their laughter is harmless, but still I feel my face crumpling as the memory I tried to keep hidden away comes rushing back. Tears begin to spill from my eyes. I jump up and face the girls. Galya immediately senses that she has said something wrong.
“The so-called romantic night I spent with Yuri was the night my mother was murdered by a Nazi sniper. Yuri killed that sniper and sought refuge in our apartment building. I had passed out. When I awoke he was there.”
“Oh, Valya,” Galya says softly. “I’m sorry. You never told me the whole story. You just said he was handsome and very nice to you. I never knew the part about your mother.” She is clearly distraught.
“What does it matter?” I reply flatly, and stomp off into the woods to piss.
I am squatting down in a thicket of ferns when I hear the crunch of boots behind me. I quickly draw my pistol from the holster but I see it’s only Galya. She squats down beside me and starts to utter an apology when I see her face freeze. I follow her gaze. Beneath what I assumed to be a huge tangle of brambles, I detect a webbing. From it springs all matter of forest materials, and beneath that is the hulking form of a panzer. We look around, our eyes adjusting quickly to the dim green light of the deep forest. There are at least a half dozen other such tanks exquisitely camouflaged, and here we are with our pants down. We are almost nose-to-nose with these iron beasts that are hunkered down in the woods with their thick armor and bristling with guns.
Has anyone heard us? Quietly we pull up our pants and tiptoe back to the airfield. We both have the same thought. Our aircraft are all short on fuel. We have been waiting to be resupplied, but that is precisely what the tanks are waiting for. That’s when they will strike: When the supply convoy approaches with fuel and parachutes and food. We have no choice but to leave immediately.
We race to our squadron commander, and in less than five minutes we have all taken off.
It is an absurd situation, I think as we climb into a blue sky furrowed with low clouds. Our small squadron encircled by a dozen panzer tanks while those same tanks are surrounded by the ever-tightening noose of the Red Army. I am in the midst of making a fifty-degree drift correction, as the wind is increasing, when suddenly Galya’s voice rasps in my headphones. “Bear n
inety point oh one south.”
“What?” She is giving me reciprocal coordinates that would turn us back to where we came from.
“I marked it,” she says.
“You marked what?” I ask.
“Where the panzers are,” Galya says irritably.
“The panzers in the woods?”
“Yeah, you think I was just pissing out there? Come on. Let’s blow these tanks to hell.” I hear the excitement in Galya’s voice.
“But we’re short on fuel, Galya.”
“Climb higher. We’ll burn less fuel. Not only that but the clouds will be our camouflage. Better than theirs.”
“Seriously?”
“Come on, let’s do it!”
So I pull back on the stick, and our nose begins to point up like a dog sniffing for prey. But we are sniffing for cloud cover. Once we are tucked safely into a billowing bank, I breathe a sigh of relief, then say, “These birds are not supposed to fly on nonexistent instrumentation. How are you going to navigate, Galya?”
“Don’t worry,” Galya says casually, as if she were strolling through a park hoping for an ice-cream vendor. Then she gives me a steady stream of compass bearings—turn east bearing eighty-five; now angle down, five degrees west. I feel as if I have wandered into the clockworks of a human calculator. She spins off the numbers and I just fly the plane accordingly. “Crab fifteen degrees off the wind.” How she ever calculates the drift correction with these clouds covering the ground and any visible object I’ll never know. “Approaching target … duck out!”
I dive out of the cloud cover. She pulls the latch of the bomb. There is the sound of a massive explosion, but the plane just jiggles slightly. We have never dropped a bomb from this high an altitude.
“Music to my ears!” Galya shouts. “The sound of panzers dying.” I pull back on the stick again and we race for the clouds. Behind us there are more explosions as the rest of the tanks erupt in flames. The panzers and especially the huge ones called Tigers carry enormous fuel loads. Soon a forest fire is raging. The flames tear at the sky behind us.
The fuel-tank needle is jittering over the E. Within seconds it is on E and the engine dies. I put the nose down and we begin a long glide into the next airfield.
“We thought they got you!” Ludmilla cries, running out to meet our plane.
“No!” Galya booms jubilantly. “We got them!”
“You got them, Galya,” I say.
“I couldn’t have done it without your flying.”
“I couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t taken that compass bearing when we were in the woods.”
“What?” Ludmilla asks. Others have now gathered around.
Galya’s broad, freckled face breaks into a toothy smile. “Moral of the story: Never take a shit in the woods without your compass. No telling what kind of turds you’ll bump into.”
We keep pushing west. Our parachutes have finally arrived, but I’m not sure what use they could be. It would be like jumping from the frying pan into the fire, for our task is to prevent enemy bombers from taking off. I delight in every successful bombing raid, and in every westward kilometer we gain. But at the same time I worry. I know the Germans keep prisoners of war near our target sites. Might I be blowing up my own sister? I can’t let myself be distracted, but the notion of rescuing Tatyana remains like a bright filament threading through my mind.
Galya and I are charged with mapping a course for the Yak regiment with the heavy firepower to follow. We drop incendiaries, which create small fires indicating the location of the enemy airfield so that Yak bombers can swoop in after us with the really big bombs and set the airfields and the planes on fire. We have to fly low, and directly above the enemy airstrip. As soon as we drop these flare bombs we become vulnerable. A terrible silence follows as their searchlights rake the sky. How long will it take the enemy ground fire to react? I’ve never had to concentrate so hard, and my whole body becomes a distillation of nerves. I feel as if Galya and I are one inseparable vascular system for pumping adrenaline.
One night we are well past the enemy airstrip, when I smell petrol in the cockpit. Our fuel line must have been hit. But how? A sudden fog envelops us. “Were we hit?” I yell through the intercom. No answer. “Galya, give me some bearings!” Nothing. “Galya, for Chrissake …” My human calculator who spews numbers at lightning speed is silent. I’m flying blind now. I touch my scarf, Mara’s scarf. We slide into a stall as we lose speed and altitude. I hear the tops of trees thrashing at the fuselage and turn around in my seat.
There is no Galya. She has vanished. There is only a big hole where her seat was. Cold terror engulfs me, and my breath locks in my throat. It’s as if God or the Devil has played a terrible trick. Has she been torn out of the plane—seat and all? Did she have time to open her chute? Did she plummet into the flames from the Yaks’ bombing of the airstrip? The plane is now shaking. I have lost all control. That is my last thought before I feel a jolt of pain and everything turns black.
* * *
The darkness that’s enveloped me begins to fray. Shapes emerge from the shadows, and I’m afraid of what I might see, or not see. My God, I think. Am I in a Russian folktale? A plump figure swathed in colorful shawls sits in a rocking chair. She is wearing a kokoshnik, or hen’s hat, that arches over her head. Two long, fat iron-gray braids fall on each side of her plump face. Her cheeks, like two rosy apples, nearly obscure her tiny mouth. Her chin is also as round as a robust little crab apple.
“So you wake up?” She has a thick Ukrainian accent. I am in a bed in a small room. My leg feels strange. I try to move it under the covers.
“Did I … ?”
She shakes her head. “No. Not broken. But I fix it in splint anyway.”
“Thank you … uh.” I put my hand to my neck. The scarf, Mara’s scarf, is still there. “How long have I been here?”
“Not long.” She shrugs. It seems a strange way to answer. I look out the small window. It’s bright sunshine, suggesting midday. But I crashed at night. “You would like some soup?”
“Oh, yes. That would be nice.” I start to move.
“Do not try to walk yet. That leg is very bruised and with the splint.”
She gets up from the chair. I watch her as she walks out of the room. Her gait is peculiar. I try to decide if one would describe it as a waddle or a toddle. Silly question. I wonder if she lives alone, and if she does, how she moved me from the plane to here.
And my plane? Not a silly question. Is it in smithereens? Did it burn? The frightening moments replay in my head: The smell of fuel filling the cockpit. The stall. The fog. The sound of the treetops scraping the fuselage. And then my mind explodes with the worst image of all. The nothingness when I turned to look for Galya and saw only the hole in the cockpit where she had sat in the navigator’s seat. By the time the woman returns with the soup I am leaking tears. She sets down the tray and puts her arm around my shoulders. “Here, here,” she says. I am making odd sounds. Funny little hiccups and gurgles. Sounds that I don’t even recognize as coming from me. “Is … is … or did you …” I am not sure how to say this. The words fly away like a flock of startled birds. Finally I gasp, “Did you find my navigator?”
“Navigator?” She puts her hand to her ear. “Say again, I am a tad deaf.” I soon learn it’s more than a tad. I constantly have to repeat words or questions.
“My … my friend … Galya.” I cannot bring myself to say the word body. Galya cannot be a body. There have been too many bodies.
She opens her dark eyes wide. “No, no. Just you. I find you.”
“And you brought me here … here into your house.”
“Eh?” She cups her ear again.
“You brought me here to your house.”
“Yes.”
“But how? Did you drag me all by yourself?” A shadow seems to cross her face. She nods decisively. “You live here alone?” Again she nods. The little crab-apple chin bobs up and down. “But how did you d
o it all by yourself?”
“I put you on the sledge and my donkey drags you.”
“Oh … oh, yes. I see. But you are sure there was no other person.”
“Not your friend. No one,” she says firmly.
“And the plane?”
“It’s in worse shape than you are. Don’t worry about the plane. Now, eat your soup. Be a good girl. Eat.”
As I eat, I look around the bedroom. There are yellowed curtains with a crocheted fringe, and a bad painting of a sunflower. The quilt on my bed is a traditional block design with a different flower in each block. There is a small icon of, I believe, the archangel Mikhail, for he is lifting a sword. Mikhail is the patron saint of war and of the police.
* * *
I follow her advice and rest for a few days. The old lady’s name is Rufina. She shares her food with me, and teaches me how to make khrustiki, or “ears,” the Ukrainian pastry that’s so light and crunchy. She never tells me much about her family. There are some pictures around, but I don’t want to ask. Undoubtedly she, like me, has lost loved ones in this war. Perhaps because I am not flying half a dozen raids a day, perhaps because for the first time I have time on my hands, I think more and more about Tatyana. I survived the crash, so perhaps Tatyana did as well. Maybe she too is being cared for in a cozy farmhouse eating dumplings and khrustyki. Maybe … maybe … she is not broken into pieces, her limbs twisted and charred.
As my leg heals and I’m able to get around better, I start taking short walks. But Rufina is adamant that I not “overdo it.” I keep mostly to the barnyard. I enjoy picking up the eggs from the henhouse. There’s one hen who is quite a character. She’s taken a fancy to me. If I sit down on the board that serves as the makeshift bench, she will hop up onto my lap. This gives Rufina a good laugh.
“I am jealous,” she says to me each time the hen settles on my lap. “Why you and not me? I’ve been so good to that hen. Could have put her in a stew months ago.”
The word months triggers something in my mind. How long have I been here? We seem so far from the front. On that last bombing raid we were about fifty kilometers west of Belarus in Minsk. But I have no idea where I crashed. I am hesitant to ask if Rufina has heard any news about the war. I tried once and it was as if her face turned to stone. I can’t say I blame her. The little house seems idyllic, nestled among rolling green hills. She receives food from the collective farm, the artel, near her, but she is permitted to keep a few chickens for herself as long as she gives half of the eggs to the collective. She also has a small vegetable garden, two-thirds of which she must also give to the artel. I have seen no trace of the donkey that dragged the sledge with me unconscious up to her house, but I assume that it was on loan to her for the day from the artel. When I get stronger and can walk farther, I plan to set out to see my plane, or what’s left of it.
Night Witches Page 11
