by Gwen C. Katz
It would be classified as an accidental collision in the official report, but as I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of them, I was sure they were making a choice. I could see Polina, her brows lowered in intense focus. And on Galya’s young face, the hard look of a warrior. She wanted to be a real airwoman. She knew what that entailed.
As the fighter swooped in for the kill, their U-2 pulled up sharply, straight into its path. The little biplane and the sleek fighter, locked together, fell out of the sky.
We landed and stumbled numbly out of our cockpits. Our mechanic’s sturdy arm steadied me. We had made it. Why? We weren’t the best aircrew and I certainly wasn’t the best pilot, not the fastest or the boldest or the cleverest. I was the one who froze in the face of danger. Polina and Galya were the ones who saw what to do and did it without hesitation, and it had cost them their lives.
Our chief of staff held the map with the flight times noted on it, tears welling up in her eyes. She knew who each explosion represented. I foolishly wanted to ask if there had been any survivors, but I had witnessed the crashes myself. At the sight of us, a wavering smile fought through her tears. She grabbed us like she was pulling us from a shipwreck. “Valka? Iskra? You made it! You’re alive!”
I was. Useless and worthless and alive.
I couldn’t face the rest of the regiment. I feared those looks of hope when they saw that someone had returned and how they would fade into dismay when they realized it was only me. Pasha was the only person I could face. So I grabbed pen and paper and wandered aimlessly down the street and into the remains of the village until I found a quiet spot where I could sit and write to him.
It didn’t go well.
I couldn’t get my thoughts in order. My feelings came piling out one on top of another and I couldn’t make sense of the jumble. I wasn’t good at being sad. I didn’t know how. When something upset me, I channeled it into anger. Anger at the world, at the fascists, at myself.
I leaned against the charred frame of a wall from which all the plaster had flaked away and stared up at the gray predawn sky. Splinters tangled my hair. It had been a short night, but I was exhausted, not as if I needed to rest but as if the vitality had permanently drained out of me and I would never feel like myself again.
I wrote a few words and scratched them out. My bleary eyes could barely make out the sheet of paper in front of me, so I wiped them, which probably left ink marks on my face, but I didn’t care. When I picked my pen back up, I immediately smeared the ink with my wet hand. I crumpled the paper and dropped it onto the uneven floor of the burned-out house. It hadn’t said anything anyway.
Had the fascist pilot known he was killing girls? Maybe. But he hadn’t seen Sofiya playing with her kitten before takeoff. He didn’t know that Polina pasted cutouts from Zhigli’s silly magazines in her cockpit. He didn’t know that Galya had a slip of paper in her pocket granting her six months of leave, which she’d refused to take.
And there at last was the anger, bursting out in a flood. I got up and screamed and kicked the house’s blackened hearth. I pounded it with my fists. The crumbling brick ripped the skin from my knuckles. When I had worn myself out, breathing hard, my shoulders slumped, blood trickling down my hands, Iskra was there in the doorway.
She didn’t say anything, just put her arms around me and leaned her head on my chest. I clung to her solidity, digging my fingers into her so hard it must have hurt. No one would tear Iskra away from me. They had taken my other friends but they would never take her. Never. Not unless they took me too.
Iskra led me to the school and I broke down again the instant I stepped inside. Against the wall, eight camp beds, folded. I tried not to look at them. The schoolroom felt very quiet without Galya’s laughter. Everyone stuck close together as though we feared that someone else might vanish. Tanya held Vera’s hand, their fingers threaded together.
Zhigli sat curled on her bed surrounded by friends, her eyes red and puffy from crying over Polina. Her voice broke as she said, “It’s my fault. I knew as soon as I met her that she was destined to die young. It was her fate, and I was the only thing protecting her, the thread by which she was hanging on to life. So many times we had close calls and by sheer luck we pulled through unharmed, time and again. And then we parted and the thread snapped.”
I’d never seen her looking so vulnerable. I couldn’t harbor any anger toward her. At that moment it was impossible to see anyone in the regiment as a rival or an enemy, but I wasn’t ready to talk to her, either. I sat in the corner by the blackboard and focused on Pasha’s gentle presence. Pasha, who sang in the face of fear. He’d faced his own losses. He would understand. How I needed him right then. But I needed him to be really here, to hear his voice and feel his touch. I wanted to bury my face in his chest and let him put his arms around me, and then I’d be able to face what I needed to tell him.
TWENTY-FIVE
2 September 1942
Dear Pasha,
We’ve returned to something approximating life as usual, if life can ever be usual again. I don’t remember what I ended up writing to you that night, whether it was coherent or even legible through the tear stains. You’re the only person I can spill my guts to like that. We’ve seen each other at our best and worst and I don’t need to pretend to be a cool, collected military pilot around you.
Bershanskaya appointed navigators as replacement pilots and mechanics as replacement navigators. She’s the only person I haven’t seen cry. She just frowns and squints into the distance. She thinks she can’t show weakness, either for our sake or because of her superior, watching, waiting for us to crack from the strain so he can send us home. Those girls didn’t give their lives to become proof that women can’t handle combat.
But that, at least, has not happened. We took our suffering and kept fighting, and we will keep on doing it as long as any of us are left to fight.
Our regimental navigator was among the casualties. Bershanskaya appointed Zhenechka to replace her and and assigned her to train the new navigators. Zhenechka was dismayed that her promotion again came in the wake of tragedy.
Over the next few days, I kept hanging on to the stupidest threads of hope, telling myself that my own eyes were mistaken, that my friends would show up the next day, whole and well, and that entire night would turn out to have been a bad dream. But the Soviet infantry found their aircraft scattered on the steppe like broken toys. The crews were identified only by the serial numbers on the planes’ engines.
We have little time for formalities out here in the field. The major said a few words about each girl and we put them in the ground. Mourning them was no easier the second time. Soon we’ll move on and those eight graves will be left alone near an abandoned village in the war-torn steppe. Will anyone visit them? Will anyone remember that they’re here?
The next morning, I found Zhigli outside, kneeling on the wing of her U-2 with buckets of white and red paint. She had written on the fuselage “REVENGE FOR POLINA.” I felt I should say something, but I didn’t know what. Finally I simply asked her if she would write something on our plane. She nodded and wrote, in swooping white cursive, the words “TO AVENGE OUR COMRADES.”
The other airwomen and mechanics copied her. Soon half the aircraft in the regiment bore messages. Some the names of our friends. Some patriotic messages, like “FOR THE MOTHERLAND.” One mechanic painted “FOR STALIN” on a plane. When the plane’s pilot saw, her face went dark. She grabbed the brush and, in front of everyone, smeared out the message with one smooth motion, saying, “I fight for my country, but I don’t fight for Stalin! He’s a man—let him fight for himself!”
Never in my life have I heard someone say such a thing out loud. She could have been shot on the spot. But nobody stopped her, nobody reprimanded her. Iskra looked stunned, but instead of launching into a lecture about politics, she only said quietly, “That was foolish.” She’s definitely changed.
Zhigli saw the whole thing. A bit of me honestly expecte
d her to run off to the MPs and report that there was a traitor in our midst. But another part of me said that I knew Zhigli, and that nothing I’ve ever seen suggested that she would do such a thing. And she didn’t.
At the moment, I was too distressed to make anything of it. But now I see the incontrovertible proof that I am among friends. That the women around me would support each other to the death and would never, ever betray one of their own, not for all the fame and money the Soviet Union would heap on them. I found myself thinking over everything Zhigli had done and wondering if I hadn’t been, all this time, seeing something that wasn’t there.
When Colonel Popov ordered us to assemble, I didn’t have the strength to muster my usual indignation. Mostly I felt resignation when he told us, “Well, girls, I’ll finally be rid of you.” So I almost didn’t register what he told us next. We’re not being disbanded, as I expected—we’re being transferred. You’ve heard that the fascists have stormed the Caucasus, heading for the oil fields, and that the Red Army is throwing everything it’s got in their way to stop them. Apparently that includes us. We’ve graduated from a valueless regiment suitable only for the most routine, unimportant missions to an actual strategic resource. Figures that it happens when we’re too broken up to care. Join the VVS, see the world, so the posters say. But it troubles me to be moving even farther away from you.
Please write. There’s been no word since you arrived at Rzhev. I keep thinking of reasons why. Excuses, really. You ran out of paper. The mail isn’t getting through. If this letter makes it, or even if it doesn’t, know that this Katyusha remembers you, like the song says.
Yours,
Valka
8 September 1942
Dear Pasha,
I’m writing to you from our new base in the Caucasus, despite the fact that you still haven’t written back and I am getting cross about it.
I’ve missed mountains. The Caucasus Mountains are a jagged pale blue range with deep valleys and streams cutting through it. On clear, moonlit nights, the view from the air is breathtaking: the stark mountains jutting up from below, the deep blue sky speckled with stars, and the dark expanse of the Black Sea.
While we were packing up to rebase, I found Galya’s headband. The silly polka-dotted one with the bow. It was hanging on the clothesline, and I guess we missed it when we packed up our friends’ things to send home to their families. That had been hard. Blinking back the moisture that had gotten into my eyes, I tucked the headband into my kit bag. I couldn’t let go of this unexpected reminder. Galya wouldn’t make it to the Caucasus, but this would. Zhigli would call it an omen.
Our new division commander is a harried colonel who always looks like he was just unexpectedly awakened. He warned us that the Transcaucasian Front wasn’t playtime. They were fighting a war here and he didn’t have time to babysit us or coddle us with safe missions. He didn’t know what we’d been doing in the steppe, but here, we would fly real, dangerous combat missions from our first night onward, and he hoped we were prepared.
A few months ago, I would have taken that as a challenge. Now it feels like an insult. As if he knows what we’ve been through.
Our base is a sleepy resort town on the Black Sea. The sea is a nice change from up north, where we were sometimes reduced to washing in puddles. The Red Army didn’t give much thought to hygiene when it sent women to the front. Bershanskaya does her best to keep us supplied with cotton wool, but like all other supplies, it’s not always easy to get.
We’re staying in a sanitarium, sleeping in real beds with pillows and sheets. Such luxury! Ilyushina says it’ll turn us soft, but I don’t see her volunteering to sleep under the wing of a plane. Zhenechka is sitting under the window, writing a fairy tale that begins “Once upon a time beside the blue sea there lived a female night bomber regiment.” How she plans to end it I can’t imagine. Our time at the front has been nothing like a fairy tale.
Our airfield is on a cliff above the village. Our planes look proud and formidable lined up in their green and tan and black camouflage. But the weather is treacherous. Gales blow in off the sea. The wind howls and our planes rock as each gust threatens to rip them off their anchors. The ground crews have to run up to the cliff and hang on to the wings of the aircraft to keep them from being tossed through the air like dry leaves.
The worst are the impenetrable fogs that roll in from the sea and engulf us. Sometimes a night begins clear, but fog swallows up our airfield while we’re away, and everyone has to find somewhere else to land. We sleep huddled under our planes’ wings and fly home in the morning, wet and shivering. Major Bershanskaya is always out on the airfield those days, counting each plane as it returns and resembling a mother duck making sure all her ducklings have safely crossed a road. At breakfast, we lay out places for the girls who aren’t there. It’s our way of assuring that they will come back.
The fascists have fortified the Taman Peninsula with everything they’ve got. Around the fascist-held territory is one solid wall of flak after another. They’re firing a new kind of multicolored tracer, red, white, and green. Each shell breaks up into dozens of smaller shells, like a flower blooming. It’s dazzling and beautiful and very, very dangerous.
It’s taking a toll, not so much physically as emotionally. It’s hard to go to sleep in the morning knowing that you’ll have to face it again the next night.
When we showed up at Engels in high spirits, keen to defend the Motherland, we had no idea what we were getting into. Sometimes I wonder how many of us still would have volunteered if we had known.
War is not natural for women—that’s what the other girls say. We are made to create and nurture life, and to destroy it goes against our fundamental nature. They’re right that war is unnatural, but I think of you singing or quietly reading and it seems to me that nobody could be less suited for combat than you. I don’t mean that as an insult. No one should find war easy. When I’m on a mission, I feel that hardness slipping over me and I realize I’m getting accustomed to this. That I’m good at this. And I don’t want to be.
Do you remember how I begged you to play Nadezhda Durova with me? I would hide my hair under a hat and be Nadya the cavalry maiden, and you, of course, had to play everyone else. You didn’t like playing the French dragoons that I drove off with my broomstick lance. But you liked being the wounded officer who I put on the back of my horse (my father’s bicycle) so that it could carry you to safety. And you liked the end of the game, when you got to play the tsar and I confessed to being a woman and then you pinned my mother’s brooch on me and pretended it was the Cross of St. George.
War was heroic back then. Banners and pageantry. Or do we only think that because we’re far away from it, because we can’t hear the cannons or smell the smoke and the blood? Is it possible that Nadezhda Durova felt as useless and miserable as I do?
Damn, will people in the future think of us the way we think of her? Will there be films and plays about the heroic 588th Night Bomber Regiment? I hope someone survives the war to set the record straight.
Stay safe.
Yours,
Valka
14 September 1942
Dear Valyushka,
I’m still here. Despite everything, I’m still here. That’s good; I didn’t want that other letter to be the last one I ever sent you. Truthfully, after I sent it, I hoped it would get lost. I didn’t want you to know those things about me.
I’m sorry about your friends. I know what it’s like to lose a friend, that space inside you that can never be filled by anyone else. Those unique things about friends, the way they walked or the colors of their voices, things you might have hardly noticed when they were there, but you miss keenly once they’re gone. Rudenko was like that. Vakhromov does the work he used to do without complaint, and when he and I are carrying the radio equipment and Petya is walking between us we form a sort of family, but our squad will always feel incomplete.
Why does the army encourage us to form bonds like
that? Why do they want us to be close when they know what will happen to us?
Petya is still with us. Bringing a child here is insanity. Pashkevich said as much, but Vakhromov and I couldn’t think of parting with the boy who to me is a little brother and to Vakhromov another son. It’s selfish of us. If we really cared about his welfare, we would send him away. But if we even mention the idea, he throws a fit and says he won’t go.
Most children don’t like bedtime, but Petya is particularly intractable. Last night he, Vakhromov, our commissar, and I were sitting around the fire. I was playing “Katyusha” by the flickery red light. My harmonica’s colors are sliding from bright to dull as the stressed metal loses its pitch. Vakhromov told Petya that it was bedtime, but the boy ignored him. He repeated himself increasingly firmly, but Petya kept refusing and finally burst into tears.
“That boy needs a spanking,” said Pashkevich, who was cleaning his gun nearby.
I offered to sing Petya something, but he wasn’t interested. I asked if he was afraid of his dreams. He nodded.
I asked, “What do you see?”
Petya’s voice was very quiet. “Houses burning. Guns shooting. The soldier girl.”
“What soldier girl?”
“The one they killed.”
Our commissar looked up sharply. “Killed? By the Hitlerites?”
Petya nodded again.
He came around to Petya’s side of the fire and went down on one knee so that he could look him in the face. “Tell me what happened.”
In bits and pieces, Petya’s story came out.
He remembered the night only in fragments. A noise awakening him. Fire everywhere. Fascists running and yelling, then emerging from behind a stable with a captive.