Skybound

by Voinov, Aleksandr

  When we arrive at the airfield, he is greeted by his Staffelkameraden, and I join the ranks of the other mechanics. They say “welcome back,” and I am on the next shift right away because I don’t know what else to do with myself while he’s gone.

  The next morning, I see the pilots stride across the airfield to their machines. They are ready to go yet again, and I climb onto Baldur’s machine when he slides into the cockpit. I strap him in quickly, and smile briefly at him. It’s not out of the ordinary at all. I don’t look at him, just at the straps I buckle, and then I close the canopy for him. While he does a radio check, I start his engine. The others pull the chocks from the wheels, and the squadron rolls down the airfield, moving in perfect unison, the drone of the engines sounding back to us before each Rotte pair rises and lifts up into the sky.

  That day, his squadron flies four more sorties, and the rush and pressure of activity on the airfield is the only distraction I get. Every time he lands, I’m the first at his machine, but the others follow closely after, so there’s no opportunity even for a word. I may get a reputation as some kind of faithful hound to him, but he smiles at me when he climbs out, pats my shoulder before he joins his squadron mates to be debriefed.

  One evening, as I’m working by myself on a Stuka dive bomber engine in the back of the hangar, he comes closer. I recognise his shape from the corner of my eye, but I can’t stop my work with both arms up to the elbows in steel and iron and grease. I’ve made good progress on this during my free time, tinkering away to revive the plane, even if it might end up being used for spare parts.

  He pauses a few steps away, and I grimace and then grin at him. “Just a moment.” I finish oiling the engine and pull my arms, covered in soot and grease, free. I wipe at my fingers with a rag, even knowing that cleaning them is futile without a generous quantity of soap.

  Baldur offers me a cigarette and lights it when I nod. He slips it between my lips so I don’t have to touch it. I inhale deeply and push the cigarette into one corner of my mouth.

  “Why are you still working?” he asks softly.

  “Trying to get this bird back into the air as soon as possible.” I shrug over at the Stuka whose heart I’m operating on right now.

  He places a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. I want to lean into him, hug him close, but I’m too concerned about blackening him all up. That would be difficult to explain.

  “I didn’t want to do that to you, Felix.”

  I toss the oily rag on the ground. “What?”

  “I don’t want you to fear for me. I shouldn’t have revealed myself to you.”

  And carry the burden alone? Oh, this is precious. “It didn’t make any difference,” I hiss, and he’s clearly taken aback. “All you did was show me that my stupid longing had hope of fulfilment.” I’m angry and I don’t even know why. He looks stricken, so I take a step closer. “And I still do. You’ve returned so far, and if it has anything to do with me, you will keep coming back.”

  His gaze flickers to the engine. “Nothing short of witchcraft,” he mutters.

  I spit out the cigarette and grab him by the collar, his Knight’s Cross digging into my raw knuckles as I do. I want to rail at him, but somehow, we end up kissing. The despair tastes like machine oil, thick and heavy, something nobody can swallow. It’s madness, and worse madness that neither of us fights the other off. He should push me away, and I shouldn’t have kissed him in the first place.

  I catch a movement from the corner of my eye, and I see another pilot staring at us. It’s the tall pale Prussian, Wischinsky, Baldur’s squadron leader. I jerk away as if from an engine still hot from battle, wishing the ground would swallow me up. Baldur straightens and wipes his mouth, peers at his hand, no doubt to check if my dirt and oil have transferred to him. I’m mortified, speechless with the possible consequences. The last thing I wanted to do was dishonour him.

  Baldur inhales deeply, expands his chest, and faces his superior officer. I just shrink away and peer at the man whose pale face betrays nothing in the shadow cast by his cap.

  “Leutnant Vogt,” he snaps, eventually.

  Baldur straightens up further, if that were even possible.

  “You were missed,” he says, and his words might be friendly and refer to the squadron doing something together while Baldur had stolen away to see me. My heart had surely stopped and now races to make up for lost beats.

  Baldur casts me a warning glance and follows his superior officer out of the hangar. I sit down, weak with relief and dread. I can’t even say which one is stronger. Everything depends now on what Baldur can explain. Maybe Wischinsky didn’t actually see us. The pause before he addressed Baldur was too meaningful for me to hope that is true. Maybe Baldur can talk him out of whatever disciplinary action he is contemplating. They are both heroes, after all, Experten, veterans of many years.

  I spend minutes just calming my shaking fingers and smoking in silence, but it does nothing to settle my nerves.

  I watch Wischinsky closely. When he walks to and from his plane, he’s every centimetre the decorated flying ace. Baldur once complained that Wischinsky enjoys the duel more than accomplishing an objective. He also never warns his squadron before he takes an action, often breaks out of formation to chase a British or American pilot when the opportunity arises.

  “He acts like we’re still on the offensive. The godforsaken fool will get us all killed,” Baldur snarled once when he dropped from the cockpit.

  To Baldur’s one hundred and forty kills, Wischinsky adds another sixty-four—both are legends in their own right. Yet Wischinsky is a Condor Legion veteran, and a test pilot for prototypes that never made it into production. He’s considered the wing’s best acrobat in the sky, and he invented manoeuvres before he asked to be sent back to the front, whereas Baldur has only ever been a fighter pilot, if a very good one.

  I know it’s a competition between them, a friendly rivalry, with Baldur challenging his superior and attempting to live up to the more experienced warrior who continues to put him in his place with displays of skill alone. Though Wischinsky bears the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, one of the highest possible decorations, I’ve never seen him pull rank on anybody. Maybe he really just loves flying, the chase and the kill—maybe he is a reluctant leader of men, elevated for his skills and ability far beyond his comfort. Of course, now he is also a very real danger for us, though I struggle to think of how he can punish us. We can’t be sent to the Eastern Front, for example. The Eastern Front is now just outside Berlin. At night, I can hear artillery boom and thunder, and it’s not ours.

  The fighting gets more desperate, too. Fewer machines return, and I’ve used up almost all my spare engine parts. We’re running low on everything—parts, but most of all fuel. We’re all working to exhaustion, and I almost dare hope that Wischinsky’s forgotten the disciplinary matter. What evil have we done? Nothing. We’ve barely exchanged glances ever since, Baldur too busy fighting, and the only thing that keeps me from being driven out of my mind is more work, harder work, and tinkering on the Stuka when my usual work is done, restoring the useless plane because only utter exhaustion gets me to sleep.

  One day, the squadron returns without Simon. They saw him explode in mid-air, high up, and none of them spotted the white plume of his parachute. It does not mean he’s dead, says Wolff, but they are all sombre, as if at a funeral. The absence of Simon’s riotous laughter weighs twice as heavy, and in our hearts we all know he’s dead.

  And to make matters worse, Wischinsky receives bad news just a few hours later, as he steps from his plane. He’s called to the side, where an aide hands him a letter. He opens it then and there, impatient, reads it quickly. It can only be a few lines of text.

  Then I see something I never expected to see. The tall man staggers as if struck by lightning, and covers his face. For several moments he stands there, all alone, then he lifts his hands away and folds the letter, pushes it into his unifor
m and leaves for the barracks.

  Several hours later, the news has made the rounds. Wischinsky’s wife and two small children were killed during an air raid on Berlin. I feel terrible for having been afraid of him and what he might do to us.

  If anything, people work harder and more diligently around Wischinsky now, a silent, barely visible way to express our support and condolences.

  The alarms sound again, warning us of inbound enemy aircraft. Wischinsky runs towards his plane, where we are all ready to help him get off the ground as fast as humanly possible. He doesn’t look at any of us, merely climbs into his cockpit, steers out to the airfield, and takes off to lead his squadron into battle. Simon is replaced by the sole survivor of another squadron.

  Baldur flies with them, and this time, when I strap him in, he does something he’s never done before. He presses a letter into my hand, which is wrapped around something hard and angular. I recognise it by touch the moment I see he’s missing his Knight’s Cross, and I want to rail at him, but there’s no time, and it’s not the place. Short of giving everything away, the whole messy pain of this, and baring it to the world that is now in its death throes, I can’t do a thing but my duty.

  Like Icarus, he rises to the sky. I’m about to shed the tears that Wischinsky did not cry in public. I want to rage against fate, against the orders to keep fighting to the last man, against the madness that has darkened every mind. They say the top brass is considering suicide missions to destroy bridges and slow the Soviet advance. Maybe they already are flying such missions. What little information there is might be outdated or twisted so as not to demoralise us. Some of us run; mostly it’s the civilian staff who creep away in the dead of the night to, I guess, await the end huddled with their families. The fighter pilots rise again to fight, and will fight until destroyed, I have no doubt.

  When planes appear in the blue spring sky, I don’t have time to breathe a sigh of relief. These aren’t ours. All our pilots are gone, yet I see men scramble to the anti-aircraft guns that are now our only defence. I’m out on the airfield between the machines under maintenance, too far away from any cover. Around me, people scream and begin to run.

  The Mustangs come in low, swooping like hawks to evade the flak. I see their colours, their markings. This is the closest I’ve ever come to the enemy.

  Suddenly, there comes the throatier roar of our Messerschmitts. Did they turn around and change objectives from protecting Berlin to protecting the airfield? I don’t know, but those engines are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. Still, they are too far away.

  I can’t outrun a fighter plane. When an enemy pilot drops bombs on the spare Messerschmitts, all I feel is indignation. The bastard doesn’t know how much work he’s destroying. Then the paralysis bleeds away and I turn and run towards the barracks, though they won’t withstand the attack.

  Another Mustang swoops down, driving the fleeing personnel towards the machine gun of his squad mate. I freeze in terror, unwilling to run in either direction, while around me the Messerschmitts are burning.

  Then one plane falls out of the sky, just simply drops. I half expect to hear the terrifying siren howl of a Stuka dive bomber, yet the plane’s shape is all wrong, and I’ve never heard of a Stuka successfully attacking an airborne plane in a dive. It doesn’t matter. The enemy doesn’t see the plane coming and continues on his path.

  It’s happening so fast I barely comprehend what I see. The diving Messerschmitt lazily adjusts its course, and just as I believe he isn’t going to do it, it crashes nose-first into the rump of the attacker. The frames distort into something beyond recognition, then in two distinct explosions both become a single fireball.

  I’m knocked back as the hellish heat washes over me, ears ringing as debris rains down all around, shocked that I should escape death at such a cost.

  With an angry roar, another Messerschmitt falls like an eagle on the other Mustang. Thus engaged, the enemy pilot breaks off the attack on the airfield and gains altitude before he wheels to engage the Messerschmitt in a dogfight, the higher buzz from his engine no less angry than the darker rumble of the Messerschmitt’s. Even I can see that the enemy fighter is more manoeuvrable, and its pilot skilled and courageous, or he’d have long since turned tail and run from the vicious attack.

  I hear the Messerschmitt’s machine guns, see the enemy pilot turn to absorb the punishment, and it rather looks like two large birds of prey hissing at each other while fighting to the death. I get to my feet, feel wetness on my coveralls, and try to run while the Messerschmitt pilot fights for his life not that much higher up. I pray to every piece of the machine I’ve oiled and cleaned and refuelled and reloaded that we’ll gain one more victory—

  My knees give out. Around me is nothing but chaos and panic and smoke and fire as my vision blackens.

  Pain brings the world back into focus. Somebody gathers me up like a fallen child. I feel something sticking out of my side, which hurts worse when it’s jostled. A distorted piece of plane, not even that big. Part of a canopy frame?

  The man carrying me is Baldur. I cry out when he hurts me. I didn’t expect to see him again, but now I know that the other pilot was Wischinsky. He’s flown every plane, including some that never made it into mass production, but before he became the leader of this fighter squadron, he flew Stukas.

  “What . . .”

  “Don’t speak.” Baldur runs with me across the airfield. I only see smoke and destruction, and am not altogether sure why he’s carrying me to the end of the airfield. There’s a plane—it’s a Stuka, my Stuka, the one I’ve been working on for weeks. “Is it ready to fly? Fuelled up?”

  I nod, weakly, half indignant that he’d even ask.

  He manoeuvres me into the gunner seat, and I think I must have screamed. I feel blood run down inside my coveralls, but he helps me get my legs into the cockpit regardless of my protests. I’m hurt, and he wants to fly? It’s not something I can understand. He straps me in, takes my hands, and presses them against the wound.

  “Hold this. Don’t you dare bleed out on me.”

  I want to tell him that it doesn’t hurt that much. And that I’m not afraid. I’ve only ever really been afraid of the fear, but right now, I fear nothing. I wish the pain would stop, but that’s it. After the raid I’m not the sanest I’ve been. I don’t think he’ll hold it against me.

  I feel the engine start, and then we’re rolling, speeding up, while smoke billows all around us. Baldur is starting blind, rolling over debris—maybe bodies, from the feel of it—but still, the dive bomber hurtles down the airfield. With a little jerk, we are skybound. I see the base rush past and become small, then we climb.

  I clutch the piece of metal in my side and push as far as I can away from the cockpit wall, but every jostle, every turn hurts, and I’m not sure I can control the bleeding. There’s really nothing I can use to staunch it.

  I drift in and out of what passes for consciousness. In those minutes or hours, I don’t care if I’m dying. I merely endure the discomfort and watch the landscape below us rush past. Judging by the shadows and the golden afternoon light, we’re flying west. I turn my eyes towards the sky and feel a placid joy. I’m flying towards the sun, carried by an eagle’s wings.

  I hear Baldur speak, but it’s all muffled. He slows, waggles his wings. He’s surrendering. Then two large shadows circle us. They look like enemies—plump, cigar-shaped Thunderbolts, the most graceless fighter planes in existence—yet nobody is shooting or doing any kind of acrobatics. We’re being escorted.

  I wake next when the plane sets down on another airfield. It’s evening now, the light is all red, the shadows long. I glance outside and see Baldur standing on a different airfield, hands raised over his head. I remember his story about his Katschmarek who came down behind enemy lines and was beaten to death by the Iwans. These soldiers don’t look like Slavs. One of them is black. I’ve never seen a black-skinned man this close. He looks nothing like those in the caricat
ures or the captured French African troops they paraded around in the newsreels. They must be Americans.

  After a soldier has taken Baldur’s pistol and dagger away, a different soldier gestures towards me. Baldur turns and looks at me, and I nod. I see him smile, harried and exhausted, and then they lead him away.

  I don’t know who our captors think I am, but only one of them keeps an eye on Baldur when he comes to visit me. The guard seems to be a friendly fellow and smiles at me when I turn my head towards him.

  Baldur sits at my bedside, holds my hand, and even smiles. To our captors, I’m the man he’s taken to safety behind enemy lines. Maybe they think we’re just comrades. They can’t think we’re brothers; they’ve seen my Soldbuch, which lists my name and rank and unit and pay. No doubt they’ve processed Baldur as a prisoner of war, too.

  “How are you feeling?” he asks eventually.

  I nod and squeeze his hand lightly. So many things I want to say, how the luxury of lying flat on my back is spoiled by the odd urge that I should be working. Or that I can see that his eyes are haunted, and I wonder whether he is thinking of Wischinsky or Simon, or even his friend who died in Russia. Most of all, though, I’m grateful that he’s returned, unlike the others.

  “Much better.” Which is the honest truth.

  “While you were being lazy, Germany capitulated.” He leans in closer. “It was either the Americans or getting you into Berlin, towards the Soviets.”

  “I’m not complaining.” I’m not convinced the Russians would have operated on me and looked after me while I got well enough to be awake. Considering the chaos and disarray on our own side, I’m not convinced our side would have looked after me.

  Baldur reaches out to touch my shoulder. “There was no other way.”

  Maybe he has to repeat this to soothe his ruffled honour; he’s not used to giving up, and he wouldn’t have, if not for me. I do mean that much to him. I can’t say I’m glad I was wounded, or that I welcome the current circumstances. The fact that he’s sitting here is a miracle, that he’s in one piece even more so. And how ironic that of the two of us, it would be me who was wounded in action—that danger would come for me, even though he kept racing into the heart of it. But then, poor Wischinsky’s wife died before he did. Right from the outset, there’s been no protection for civilians; we just didn’t expect the war to devour our own country.