“Yes, Commander.” I nod vigorously as joy swells in me. I have an urge to jump up and down like a child. The words dancing within me threaten to burble up. I’m going to fly. I’m going to fly. I dare not look at Tatyana, though I feel her stare drilling into me. Will she tear off my wings? I can’t let her spoil this moment for me.
“But—” Tatyana starts to protest.
Bershanskaya interrupts her again. “Your sister handled the plane beautifully when she had to take the controls from Mara. You realize that both ailerons were completely stripped. It’s incredible, Valya, that you landed that plane without crashing. The craft is going to be back in the air by this evening, and you will be in the cockpit.”
The commander draws her face closer. There is the smell of tobacco on her breath. “Don’t look so surprised. We need pilots like you. In another few days we will have destroyed the Blue Line. That’s been our goal. We are closer than you can imagine. We want to see the backsides of those Nazis running, stampeding, and they will be. I promise.”
I glance over at Tatyana while the commander is speaking to me. My sister’s eyes are smoldering.
“Who will be my navigator?”
“Galya.”
“Galya,” I repeat, trying to keep the dismay out of my voice. But the commander is already walking out the door of the hut. Tatyana and I are left facing each other.
“Pleased?” she asks.
“Why did you say I didn’t have the hours?”
“You don’t have the hours. The rules were there to keep unqualified people from hurting themselves. Or others.” The words like spikes of rancor make me gasp.
I glare at my sister. I am burning, burning at a low temperature. Cold fire, they call it. My chemistry teacher demonstrated the phenomenon once. It’s rather like the flame in a cigarette lighter. It’s basically noncombustible, but you can feel the heat. I feel the heat. But I won’t blow up. Instead I turn my back and spit on the ground. That gesture is worse than any words. Sharper than any slap. And as vile as any obscene gesture. But it is cold. Cold fire.
* * *
Galya’s face is unreadable as she walks out with me to the plane later that night. My heart is beating so fiercely I’m sure she’ll hear it. I can’t believe that after all these months my dream is about to be realized. I’ll be in the front seat at last. My hand will be on the control stick.
As we walk, the ghost of the rudder pedals brushes the soles of my feet, as if I’m about to initiate a turn. I love that feeling of slipping beautifully into a turn, finding that curve in the geometry of air and speed. One becomes a sculptor, carving the air like a bird, an eagle, an owl, a gull.
I climb into the cockpit, start the engine, and taxi down the runway. The land falls away so gradually it seems as if the plane is straining. Once we’re up, I breathe a bit easier. I know that the rudder for the U-2 is huge and the response is quick. I’m worried that perhaps with the weight of Galya it might not react as quickly, so I try initiating some turns by briefly touching the rudder pedals with my feet and then banking with the control stick. It seems fine. I hear a deep raucous laugh and feel a thwack on my shoulder. “You’re worried about Fatty back here!” I feel my face flush. “Not to worry. You have the right touch. You’re a good pilot.”
And Galya is a good navigator, even better than I was. She reads the wind indicators excellently and does lightning-fast calculations in her head. She is particularly skilled at calculating our burn rate for fuel. If we are low, she knows just how high to climb, as the engine burns less when the air is thinner. Less resistance.
I feel that I should be happier, more excited to be flying. But how can I be happy knowing that I sit where Mara sat just a day ago? There’s so much at stake here. We have to finish off the Blue Line, destroy it completely. This was the German gateway into Russia two years ago. The Kerch Strait separating the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea is a scant eight kilometers across. Clasping the strait are two claws like a lobster. The eastern claw is the Taman Peninsula, and that is where the Blue Line of the German army is. That line, the shark’s mouth, is spiked with antiaircraft batteries, machine guns, and searchlights—a hundred, maybe a thousand searchlights. The Blue Line runs close to sixty-five kilometers, from Novorossiysk to Temryuk.
I feel the first bite of the searchlights. Then the shark’s mouth begins to spit fire. It has become a dragon!
I hear Galya cursing through the headphones. Tracer bullets from antiaircraft guns on the ground dance around me. It is a curtain of fire. I can feel the heat. Amazingly, Galya keeps calling the bearings. “Five degrees port … Nose up … Bank.” Then the curtain parts and there is the white looming eye of a single searchlight. Galya reads my mind. She knows how I hate them.
“Let’s launch ourselves into their sights!” she yells. We swoop down. I hear the crank of the bomb-release gears. “Geronimo!” Galya roars. There’s an explosion, then an electrical crackling and sudden darkness. The sky is no longer striped with light. I carve a turn, and beneath my port wing I glimpse a huge fire surrounding the sizzling skeleton of the searchlight.
I have no idea what Geronimo means. But we’ve destroyed the biggest of the searchlights. I’m practically euphoric. I hate those searchlights almost as much as I hate the Nazis.
When we get back, our wings are blackened with smoke. We reek of smoke. Our faces are smudged with smoke and ash except where our goggles blocked it. We look at each other and laugh. We are like reverse raccoons. Instead of dark rings around our eyes we have white ones.
“Galya, what does Geronimo mean? Why did you shout that when we hit the searchlight?”
“Ha! I’m becoming a Yank. It’s what the American paratroopers say when they jump out of a plane.”
“Why would they say that?”
“Who knows? They’re Americans!”
* * *
I am so elated that for a moment I forget about my fight with Tatyana. I scan the airfield for her, desperate to tell her about my success. But then I remember, and my exhilaration turns to dust.
Tatyana and I avoid each other for several days. When we finally begin to speak, it’s just terse exchanges, always in the company of others and usually pertaining to weather, or perhaps a common mechanical issue that we all experience. Nothing personal. I remember our mother saying once that people who have nothing to say to each other talk about weather. Well, that’s us. It seems like a void in my life. We are both pilots now. We are both equal. Yet it feels as if a counterweight is missing.
Unexpectedly, Galya and I become close. Unlike Mara, Galya doesn’t sing on our return flights, but she talks. Talks quite a bit. She has had many boyfriends. She is twenty-one and claims she was, at fifteen, the oldest virgin in her school in Rostov.
“Had to get rid of it,” she says with a grin. I nod and make some sort of sound that suggests I agree with her. As if I too had to get rid of it. I can’t help but think of my “naughty angel” talk with Mara just weeks before she died.
“So anybody you had to kiss good-bye?” Galya asks.
“Not exactly,” I say. I try to imagine waking up in the arms of someone. No, not someone—Yuri Yurovich Vaznov.
“There was a boy that I met in Stalingrad just before I left.”
“Who?”
“A sniper.”
“A Stalingrad sniper?”
“Yes.”
“Not Yuri Vaznov?”
I’m grateful that Galya can’t see me blush from the rear cockpit. “Yes … him.”
“Really? He’s so famous! How did you meet him?”
I bite my lip. Meeting Yuri is so entwined with my mother’s death, I almost feel guilty admitting I was drawn to him. Not that I felt it right away, but it’s difficult for me to sort out all the feelings surrounding how we met.
“It’s hard to explain. He was hiding out in my apartment building for a couple of days.”
“So?” There’s almost a leer in her voice.
“So he seemed nice,
and yes, I sort of liked him. That’s all.” I switch the intercom off and start a banking turn back to the airfield. There are some violent updrafts coming off the mountains, and along with the wind shear, they make the plane hard to control. I have to concentrate.
As we drive the enemy west, in late spring we find ourselves in a new airfield in the Kuban region in the Northern Caucasus. Rumors abound that the Allies, the British and the Americans, are planning an invasion. So now our goal is to force the Nazis right into the deadly embrace of the Allied forces waiting to greet them in the west.
The front line is just forty-five or at most fifty kilometers away from us. The mechanics and the armorers work all night refueling our craft and attaching bombs. We are squeezing in the maximum number of missions in the smallest frame of time. With the nights growing shorter and the days longer, there’s not a second to waste. It’s bitterly cold and there are no shelters to speak of. Only dugouts and trenches. Pilots, navigators, mechanics, armorers are all squashed together. In our furry trousers we must look like a pack of forest animals in a den. There is a smallish oil drum, a burzhuika, that serves as our fireplace. Our first task in this new area is to knock out the scores of searchlights that comb the sky. Then we move again.
Spring fog becomes a menace. Often we can’t make it back to base and have to land in a field that we hope is not in enemy territory. We have been lucky so far. On those nights we sleep in the cockpits. I tease Galya that her snores are louder than our sewing machine of an engine. On one particular night as we sleep I hear a gentle tapping on our fuselage. I jerk awake. An elfin face with dark eyes peers into mine.
“Madame, would you like some tea?”
I inhale sharply as a younger face slides across my mind’s eye. A face from what now seems a century ago. Yuri! It’s as if my dear sniper friend has suddenly become an old man. But it’s not him, of course. This man does not carry a rifle. He’s holding a flask.
“May I?” he asks as he sets the flask on the lower wing. He then unhitches two metal cups from his belt, sets them on the wing, and begins pouring.
“Sugar?”
“Yes,” Galya, who is awake now, answers for both of us. He pours about a teaspoon from a small paper cone.
“Now, I can bring you some hard-cooked eggs from my house if you like? Or perhaps you can come in?”
“We have to leave as soon as the fog clears,” Galya says.
“I thought so,” he replies. “The others always say that.”
“Others?” we both blurt out with sudden alarm.
“Oh, don’t worry. I don’t serve tea to Nazi scum. They’ve never seen me. But several from the other women’s regiments, the 586th, 125th, and now you, the first of the 588th—but I understand they call you the Forty-Sixth, the Taman Guards. The ones the Nazis call the Night Witches, but I … I call you Night Angels.”
“Really?” I say.
“Yes, my son, who was at Azov, wrote about your food and medicine drops. The least I can do is bring you a cup of tea and a hard-cooked egg.” He looks about. “Hup! The fog is lifting. Let me run off for your eggs. Be back in a tick.”
I watch him totter off into the swirling scarves of mist. If he had not had that clearly Asiatic face and been dressed in farmer’s overalls, I would have sworn he was a butler who had wandered in from one of the English movies Mama and Tatyana and I sometimes saw at the Illuzion Theater in Stalingrad.
By the time we have our eggs peeled, the fog has cleared off completely. I immediately start up the engine, and we taxi down what had once been a sugar-beet field. But is it worth replanting a field in the midst of war? The seeds of war seem to be the only crop that is growing. The kessel is working. Stalingrad has not succumbed to the Nazi Sixth Army. But outside the kessel, particularly in the Northern Caucasus, there are eruptions.
June is a very tough period. Searchlights comb every one of our targets. We stick to what we call our two-plane strategy, slightly different from the three-plane strategy that was used over Stalingrad. Cooperating over a target, one of us flies decoy; the other slides in at a very low altitude and speed, then blasts the hell out of the target. Most of our targets are depots—fuel ones are especially tricky, for when they explode, it is like instant inferno in the sky. Deadly walls of fire and then thick smoke. There are moments when it is impossible to tell the sky from the ground. And always there are the searchlight beams. I have become an expert at weaving through the blades of light like a shuttle through the warp of a loom. And we have been hitting them. Galya and I keep count. Within one week we score thirty searchlights. The sky feels safer than I have ever known it since flying as a navigator with Mara or as a pilot with Galya.
However, a few nights after we land in that beet field where we are served tea and eggs so courteously by the farmer, the weather begins to deteriorate again. Visibility is down to a few hundred meters. The fog in the Caucasus can be lethal. It reminds me of the pneumonia I once had when I was a small child. It is as if the lungs of the night are filling up. Galya is an expert navigator, but beyond our compass, our altimeter, and our wind-speed indicator, everything has to be eyesight. There’s no sophisticated instrumentation on U-2s. We fly as low as we can for some sort of visual reference.
I am getting more tense by the second, and I sense Galya’s growing anxiety. Her lightning-quick calculations are useless in these conditions. We’ll have to find someplace to land until the fog clears. I discern a clear patch on the ground that indicates a field, but just as we enter our glide path for a landing, the fog simply evaporates. There’s a lurid flash of yellow, like a livid sun in the night. I gasp as I catch sight of the black iron crosses outlined in yellow on the wings. It’s a German interceptor plane, a Stuka. We can clearly see the pilot in his cockpit. His shoulders are hunched. He slides his head around in a smooth, almost reptilian movement, then grins.
“Pull up!” Galya yells.
We can’t land, for if we did, we would become the perfect target. We are truly between a rock and a hard place, and utterly defenseless except for our slow speed.
But damn if we don’t see him a minute later, banking a turn to come back for us. The swastika on the tail is like a brand defiling the sky. There is a burst of machine-gun fire. I hear it ping off the surface of the fuselage. Then there is the staccato of our own rear-facing machine gun. Suddenly the Stuka is gone.
There is a new quiet in the night.
“Is he gone, Galya?” I dare not turn around to see.
“I think so.”
I begin a banking turn. We’re going back to base. I don’t think we were badly hit even with those pings off the fuselage. The ailerons are intact, that’s for sure. I can see the ghostly shapes of four planes on the ground. Their props are revved and ready to go as soon as we land.
We glide in. Ironically, it is a rougher landing than the one I made when Mara was shot. As we roll to a stop, I hear Galya exhale mightily. I turn around. Her chin is bloody.
“You were hit!”
“No! You were hit,” she replies.
We will laugh about this later. We have both bitten our lips bloody.
Last night I dreamed of Yuri. I dreamed of the touch of his hand on my face when he held it, dabbing the blood with his kerchief as I sat in the rubble in Stalingrad, watching the steamer sink just meters from the jetty. I try to remember what his fingertips felt like on my skin. Hadn’t his hand cupped gently around my jawline? Didn’t one finger brush my ear? Was it his trigger finger? The trigger finger of a sniper.
Yuri Vaznov’s fame is spreading. He’s becoming a legend, a hero. However, except for that time I told Galya a bit about him, I don’t say that I know him. I need to keep those brief moments of my time with him to myself, as if they might become diluted if I share them with too many people.
I even treasure those moments of my anger when Yuri held me back from going to the jetty. I remember his words: Your face is a bloody mess, and in this weather that blood will freeze. That was almost si
x months ago—in the dead of winter. Now it’s June, almost midsummer. We are, for the moment, farther north in the Caucasus and at a new airbase, so the nights are very short. Less time to bomb, more time to sleep and to dream. But dreaming is frustrating. It seems unfair that I can recall Yuri’s words precisely, but not his touch.
Had I tipped my face up as if to be kissed? I have been kissed twice—no, actually, three times if you count the time with Alex. But Alex is my third cousin, so I am not sure if that counts. The others sort of counted. But they didn’t stir me as the faint recollection of Yuri does. How can I be stirred by something I can hardly remember? I might be ahead on missions flown—indeed, I’m in the top ten in our regiment for summer night flights—but I’m behind on kisses, and the rest. Most of the women in the 588th have done way more than just kiss. Yana, who is not married, has a four-year-old daughter in Leningrad. And I know Tatyana has done more than kiss. She would often sneak out to be with Nikolai, her boyfriend, all through high school.
I have not seen Tatyana in nearly two months, not since we were both based on the peninsula. Each time there’s been a transfer we have been sent to different airfields. I do hear through the grapevine that she is doing well and scored a really big hit recently near Krasnodar, where she wiped out a large supply convoy. Despite the tension between us, I can’t help feeling proud.
The nights are growing shorter and shorter and the fighting becomes fierce. We lose several planes. When we return to base we learn that Yana has died. “Which Yana?” I ask, for there are two: Yana Zavragin and Yana Dezshnyov. Waiting for the response, I actually have to fight not to cross my fingers behind my back. What has happened to me that I’m almost praying for one Yana’s death over another?
“Yana Dezshnyov,” Larissa, a navigator, replies. So there is one more motherless four-year-old girl in Mother Russia. What will happen to her now? I ponder this name—the Motherland, or Rodina-mat’ as it is more often called these days, and I imagine that it’s supposed to reflect the spirit of collectivity in our post-czar world. But my own mother told me that the expression Mother Russia goes back to the time when the Mongols sacked the city of Kiev. I picture a big grandma in a babushka scarf spreading her skirts and gathering up hundreds of babies. We are all tiny babies, even if the men are old with bald pates and bushy beards or the women are bent with age and clutching their canes. Age does not matter. It is vulnerability that is the common denominator, and Mother Russia is there to protect us, nourish us, and defeat the Fatherland.