Among the Red Stars

by Gwen C. Katz

  “At least it’s a polite letter,” said Iskra as we left the post office and entered a gloomy summer drizzle. “Very personal.”

  “I’m about to get personal,” I grumbled. I pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my shirt pocket, but before I could take one, Iskra grabbed the pack and tossed it into the canal.

  “Hey!” I said, resisting the impulse to jump into the scummy water after it. “I waited in three lines for those!”

  “And that makes you a bad Soviet,” said my cousin loftily. “I won’t let you pick up that filthy habit. We need to set an example, you know. For the adults.”

  “You mean the adults who won’t let me join the VVS?” I asked. “‘Future mother.’ Ugh.”

  “Mother Russia you are not,” said Iskra. She snapped her fingers. “I know who you should write to: that airwoman from the Rodina, the one who’s always talking about getting more girls into aviation. Marina Raskova.”

  “Raskova?” I scratched my neck nervously. “She’s really important, Iskra. She has better things to do than talk to a kid from Stakhanovo.”

  “As opposed to the commander of the VVS, who has nothing better to do.”

  I had written to Raskova. Over the month since the war had broken out, I’d spent hours sitting cross-legged on the mattress that Iskra and I shared, using Notes of a Navigator as a writing surface. I wrote and rewrote, rubbing out mistakes with a dirty eraser stub until I wore holes in the paper. I just never mailed it.

  We found Pasha sitting on our building’s concrete steps, heedless of the rain. His forehead was cradled in one hand, his hair sticking up at angles where he’d raked his fingers through it. I stopped abruptly, the importance of my letter shrinking away as I realized that something was wrong, really wrong.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked softly.

  He didn’t reply.

  A slip of yellow paper was crumpled in his other hand. I reached down and unfolded his unresisting fingers, one at a time. I didn’t need to read the paper to know what it said. “Did you just find out?”

  He nodded.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Monday.”

  Three days.

  Iskra and I sat on the step on either side of him. Unsure what else to do, I took his hand in mine. It was soft and delicate. Not the hand of a coker. Not the hand of a soldier. Pasha had beautiful hands and I had never noticed them before.

  Pasha’s quiet presence had been a constant in my life since we were toddlers stacking blocks at the state-run day care. After Iskra’s arrival, he became the tagalong kid, although he was less than a year my junior. I had taken it for granted that when I made it big as a pilot, I would leave him. It had never occurred to me that he might leave me first.

  A flat-nosed towboat chugged sullenly down the canal, pushing a line of rusty rectangular barges lashed together. Pasha sat on the deck of the middle one, leaning against the side of the hopper with his arms wrapped around his knees and a battered rucksack resting beside him. The pale mountain of coke that rose above the rim of the coaming made him look very small. It was a humble way to leave for war.

  I waited at the corner where the lead barge passed close to the edge of the canal, and when it appeared, I jumped onto its low, flat deck, holding my arms out for balance. I walked along the outside edge of the tow until I reached Pasha.

  He said, “You weren’t at the dock. I thought you weren’t going to say good-bye.”

  “Not with all those people around,” I said. I couldn’t put my finger on why that made me so uncomfortable. I didn’t have anything to say to Pasha that I couldn’t say in front of everyone, did I? “I passed your sister in the hall. She was crying.”

  “She thinks I’m not coming back. It’s as good as a law of the universe for her: People who leave never come back.”

  “You’ll come back,” I said with more conviction than I felt. “You’ll go. You’ll fight. We’ll repel the invasion. And then you’ll come home.”

  “That’s what Iskra said too. But not everyone will.”

  I wanted to point out some trait of Pasha’s that would help him survive the war, but I couldn’t think of any. Instead I sat down on the edge of the deck. The barge rode so low that I could trail the tips of my toes in the murky water. There was no one else on the line of barges except the sailors in the towboat far behind. I wondered how much of our lives Pasha and I had spent sitting side by side while the world passed us by.

  Pasha told me, “You can listen to my radio while I’m gone.”

  “I don’t know how it works.”

  “My dad can show you.”

  Uneasy silence enveloped us again, the knowledge of what lay ahead hanging over us like a storm cloud. A half-submerged tire floated by, trailing weeds and trash like an industrial-age jellyfish.

  I said, “They won’t let me enlist, but they draft you. Soviet efficiency, huh?”

  “Soviet efficiency,” Pasha echoed.

  “I saw a story in the paper this morning. Two girls wanted to fight so badly that they stole a fighter and flew it to the front. Didn’t end well, but I’m a little jealous anyway. Maybe we could just take the old plane and fly away.”

  “Where to?”

  I shrugged. “Who cares?”

  Ahead, the canal curved away around a ridge and out of sight. I nodded in the direction of the bend. “This is where I get off.”

  Pasha looked up at me out of the corner of his eye. “Do you have to?”

  There was no Iskra around to tease me, none of the aeroclub guys who accused me of joining to meet boys. So I turned toward him. His face was suddenly close to mine. I reached out to touch his cheek, then hesitated. It was long enough that we both blushed and dropped our gaze. I gave him an awkward hug.

  “Valka?”

  “Yeah?”

  Pasha fumbled with his hands. “Is it okay if I write to you?”

  Of course I said yes.

  FOUR

  4 September 1941

  Dear Valyushka,

  I guess basic training is a luxury from an earlier time, because I only spent a couple of days doing drills with a wooden dummy rifle before I was dispatched to the outskirts of Moscow to dig ditches.

  You’ll be glad to hear that we have yet to see so much as an unfriendly plane in the sky. Those spiky steel tank traps feel almost lonely standing there in the road. They remind me of giant spiders waiting for a fly.

  My NCO—the noncommissioned officer I report to—is a sergeant named Pashkevich. I’m afraid of him. He has a sharp vermilion voice speckled with a brown Belorussian accent and he always sounds like he’s yelling even when he isn’t. He usually is. Yelling at me for being too small and skinny, or too slow and lazy, or for not knowing how to do things that I was never taught.

  Pashkevich is very zealous about the war effort. Partly it’s patriotism but mostly he really, really wants to kill some Fritzes. He wishes he’d stayed through the invasion of Belorussia so he could have become a partisan, sabotaging the Germans from behind their own lines instead of supervising a bunch of teenagers with shovels. I’m not sure if he’s as tough as he talks or if it’s all bravado, but it sure makes me feel spineless.

  After that reception, I wasn’t keen to meet the rest of my squad. They all seem to know what they’re doing, and I was sure they were judging me. But while we dug, the big, burly soldier next to me said, “You get used to Pashkevich.”

  I asked why he was so angry.

  The big soldier said, “He fled ahead of the invasion. He saw Minsk burn. Can you blame him?”

  He assured me that the rest of the squad were draftees like me, confused and frightened. We all want to help the Motherland, but we’re afraid we’ll throw our lives away without accomplishing anything.

  The big soldier took me under his wing. His name is Vakhromov and he has a wife and son and another child on the way. He wonders what his baby will be like and when he’ll get to see him (or her) and whether he (or she) will think he’s a
bad father for not being around. That’s something a kid like me can be grateful for. No one depends on me. I told him about my sister and my parents and about you and Iskra, since it doesn’t feel right to talk about my family without mentioning the two of you.

  When I’m not digging ditches I’m training to become a radio operator. It’s the first time I’ve used a real radio, the kind with vacuum tubes. Do you remember the colors, Valka? The ones that match up with different sounds? When I tune my radio, it chirps and squeals pink and yellow like a robot from a science fiction movie. It has two settings: AM and CW. AM, which sounds just like my radio at home, lets us use it as a telephone. CW is continuous wave, which only transmits long and short beeps. It’s for sending and receiving encrypted messages by Morse code. I can’t tell you how the encryption works, but it’s interesting, like a crossword puzzle.

  The radio hooks up to a battery pack with a thick black cord. It has a pair of long coils of antenna that I can string out wherever we make camp and a shorter stand-up antenna for sending and receiving messages on the march. The battery pack is so heavy that Pashkevich assigned another soldier, Rudenko, to carry it. “He’s almost as useless as you,” said Pashkevich. “Keep an eye on him; everyone knows the Ukrainians welcomed the fascists with open arms.”

  They say the same thing about the Belorussians, but I didn’t say so.

  Rudenko is a nervous guy who winces at every loud noise, not my first choice to be tethered to by a radio cord. Pashkevich says the Katyushas made him funny in the head.

  “Who’s Katyusha?” I asked.

  Pashkevich laughed an unkind laugh and said that I would meet the Katyushas soon enough.

  Rudenko doesn’t talk much. In the evening, he wanders off by himself and reads. He has an old book that he hides whenever he sees our commissar.

  There’s a poster on our barracks of a soldier holding up a sheepskin, inside of which is a wolf with a swastika on it. The caption says: THE ENEMY IS CRAFTY—BE ON THE LOOKOUT! I’ve never met a fifth columnist, those sneaky Russian traitors they say are hiding in our midst, but if movies are anything to go by, they act like Rudenko.

  Then again, maybe he just wants to be left alone.

  Give my love to everyone at home. And write soon. I miss you.

  Yours,

  Pasha

  17 September 1941

  Dear Pasha,

  I’ve never written a letter to a boy before, much less a soldier, and I’m not entirely sure what such a letter should contain. Feelings, I suppose. No doubt that’s what Iskra hopes; she’s sitting across the table pretending to read a book, but I know she’s actually peeking at what I’m writing. I’m trying to think of what people write to each other about in war movies, because this feels like a movie—you the brave soldier and me the damsel waiting helplessly back at home. It’s a shame neither of us fits the roles we’ve been forced to step into.

  How could I forget the colors after all the rainy days we spent amusing ourselves with that game? I’d make a noise and you’d tell me its color. It made me feel close to you, as though I were getting a glimpse into your own secret world. Will you remind me what color my voice is?

  So you are a radio operator now. All that tinkering has paid off. I will always remember the day I climbed the fire escape to throw that scrap-wire antenna over the roof. I was sure it wouldn’t work. But there you were on the floor of your apartment, holding a paper cup wound with wire to your ear, and you said, “I can hear it!” And I took the homemade speaker and, sure enough, there were voices, fuzzy and indistinct like listening to the sea in a shell. It was magical. I felt as if that radio program had been recorded especially for the two of us.

  Not much has been going on here, and it makes me miss you even more. Now I realize how often I’d say “Pasha, let’s kick a football” or “Pasha, come wait for ration coupons with me.” And all those flights together. It isn’t as much fun flying without a passenger. Isn’t that vain of me?

  Since every combat-fit male pilot has been drafted, it’s up to those of us left behind—the female pilots—to train the rookies. Meanwhile, I’ll stay behind and watch as, one by one, everyone goes off to fight except for me. It’s not fair.

  I know I shouldn’t be jealous of you, that you’d do anything to be here with me. But I feel so helpless stuck here half a country away from everything. I just wish I could do something.

  Yours,

  Valka

  P.S. Don’t call me Valyushka. You know I hate pet names.

  1 October 1941

  Dear Valyushka,

  We were mobilized today. How the fascists keep advancing closer to Moscow in the muddy rasputitsa season is beyond me. The rain has turned the dirt roads into impassable quagmires.

  My transceiver has a steel case with straps and it’s heavy even without the battery pack. I have so much to keep track of: the radio, a canvas bag of spare parts, a logbook, a code book, and all my regular gear. And, most important, your letter. It makes me feel I have a place in the universe. I’m not just a nameless soldier among thousands of other nameless soldiers, I’m someone with an identity. Someone you can write to.

  When I was packing up my things, I found an odd little object that I’d been issued without explanation. It’s a smooth, hollow ebony cylinder the size of a rifle cartridge, stopped with a bit of cork.

  “That’s an identity capsule,” Vakhromov explained. “You fill out the paper inside so they can identify your body.”

  I pried out the cork with the tip of my combat knife and extracted a rolled-up slip of paper. Name, rank, service number, address, next of kin . . . I took out my pen, but Vakhromov pulled it out of my grasp and shook his head. “You don’t want to do that. It’s like signing your own death warrant.”

  Rudenko nodded grimly. “Remember Vasilyev? He stepped on a mine not ten minutes after he filled his out.”

  I nervously looked around for unexploded ordnance, then tucked the capsule into my pocket. I can’t say I feel safer for having followed their advice.

  Vakhromov got a letter in the same batch as yours. He has a new baby girl. As we marched, he kept asking us questions about her as though we would somehow know the answers. What color do we think her eyes will be? Do we think she’s fussy or calm? Do we think her brother likes her? I told him we’d do our best to end the war so he could find out for himself.

  When we stopped for lunch, Rudenko was again off on his own with his book. It’s a pretty book, with a green tooled-leather cover decorated with gold leaf, only a little of which has rubbed off. I sneaked a glance inside and saw a page full of curious black hooked symbols. I thought I recognized them, but couldn’t recall what they meant or where I’d seen them before.

  Each symbol was preceded by a small letter in red ink with a syllable of two or three letters printed underneath. The letters were old-fashioned Russian peppered with hard signs, but they spelled gibberish. A cipher?

  He wears a black cord around his neck that he keeps tucked under his tunic. A picture of his girl, maybe? I suppose even fifth columnists have loved ones.

  Yours,

  Pasha

  P.S. Your voice is cinnabar red.

  “Cinnabar red,” I mused as we crossed the bridge. “What color is cinnabar anyway?”

  “Red,” said Iskra. We were headed to the airfield to teach the rookies.

  I rolled my eyes. “No, I mean, what does it mean that my voice is cinnabar red? Is that a good thing?”

  Iskra gave me an indulgent look. “Baby cousin, if Pasha said it about you, it’s a good thing. He’s been sweet on you for ages, despite your mannish jaw and sartorial ineptitude.”

  I felt a blush rise on my cheeks. It was usually easy to ignore Iskra’s teasing, but I found it harder to brush off comments about Pasha. Truth be told, I was a little terrified—on the barge, something had stirred inside me that now refused to be still. Tucking my hands into the pockets of my overalls and shifting from foot to foot, I said, “I’m a serious pilo
t. I’ll become famous and fly all over the world. I’ll be too busy for boys.”

  My troubled thoughts about Pasha were swept aside when we reached the airfield and found Iosif Grigorevich, our flight instructor, holding a telegram. His face wore its customary scowl. He cleared his throat and said, “An old war buddy in Moscow sent me a telegram that I really shouldn’t let you girls see.”

  “From Moscow?” I said. It had to be something exciting. I grabbed for the telegram, but he snatched it away and held it out of my reach before finally relenting with a chuckle. Iskra and I read the brief typewritten lines together.

  KOMSOMOL CENTRAL OFFICE SEEKS FEMALE PILOTS NAVIGATORS AIRCRAFT MECHANICS TO SERVE IN ALL FEMALE FIGHTER AND BOMBER REGIMENTS. QUALIFIED PARTIES REPORT TO MAJ M M RASKOVA AT ZHUKOVSKY AIR FORCE ACADEMY MOSCOW OCT 13.

  I stared. My eyes were glued to one phrase of the uneven dark printing. “Maj M M Raskova. Major Marina Mikhailovna Raskova? The Marina Raskova?”

  “There aren’t two of her,” said Iosif Grigorevich in a tone that implied he’d have been happy if there hadn’t even been one of them. “I’m a fool to let you see that telegram. But clearly I’m an even bigger fool, because I’ve already forwarded your documents to the Komsomol Central Committee.”

  Marina Raskova! Fighter regiment! I could barely get my mind around it. My stomach did a confused flip-flop of combined excitement and just plain shock.

  “Hang on,” said Iskra, taking the telegram. “October thirteenth. That’s Monday. We could take the barge to Magnitogorsk tomorrow, but the train to Moscow doesn’t leave until Tuesday—if it’s running at all.”

  I stung with indignation. “No! Something important finally happens and we’re going to miss it?”