Over Fields of Fire

by Anna Aleksandrovna Timofeeva-Egorova

  Mama had written me that with the help of kind-hearted people she had done up a petition to our fellow-countryman Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin52 — trying to convince him of Vasen’ka’s53 innocence. Mama had had no response and then decided to come to Moscow herself. “Katya with my grandson Egoroushka walked me to the waiting room of the President’s office and then left”, my mum wrote. “There was a long queue, a lot of people had turned up. My turn came. I thought Mikhail Ivanovich would be there himself but looking at who met me I found no goatee. I expected the assistant would walk me to our countryman but he only said: ‘The Chairman of the Supreme Soviet doesn’t receive people on such questions…”

  I continued to work at the flax factory. Twice a week I trained glider pilots, attended courses in preparation for tertiary study. One evening on my day off I popped into a café, sat at a table and ordered an ice cream.

  “Egorova!” Someone called from behind me. I turned to the voice and, seeing the aeroclub commissar, came up to his table. He introduced me to his wife and daughter and seated me next to them.

  “Why aren’t you attending the aeroclub?” The commissar asked me.

  I expressed my concerns and he told me, “You should after all, yesterday we decided to grant you the only female assignment to the Kherson aviation school.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you, ‘Kokkinaky’54! And turning to his wife he explained with a laugh, “The guys gave Anya that nickname and I’ve been calling her that!”

  “That’s fine, call me that, I even like it”, I replied frankly. “After all, the Kokkinaky brothers are famous test pilots and record-breakers!”

  “Tomorrow take the referral from the aeroclub headquarters, resign from the factory and go to Kherson as fast as possible. Consider that you’ll have to pass exams there on general secondary school subjects as well as special disciplines. The competition will be hot, get ready!”

  Indeed in Kherson there was a great flood of graduates from the country’s aeroclubs. They came from Moscow and Leningrad, Arkhangelsk and Baku, Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Minsk, Tashkent and Dushanbe. It was not a military school but OSOAVIAHIM one. Only girls were being accepted in the navigating division and mostly guys in the instructors’.

  First of all we were sent for a medical examination. Those who passed would be divided into groups for the general subject exams. The oral exam on mathematics was run by an old lecturer from a teacher’s training college. Convinced that he had poor hearing, we helped each other with prompts and most of us received ‘fives’55…

  Gradually our numbers were becoming lower and lower — but now we had passed the credentials committee. Following the advice of the Smolensk Comsomol obkom I had said nothing about my elder brother. At long last the lists of those accepted were posted up. I read: “Egorova — to the navigating division”. There was no such great boisterous joy in my heart as back in Ulyanovsk but nevertheless I ran to a post-office and sent my mum a telegram — I wanted to make her happy for a while. Yes, to make her happy by letting her know her daughter had been accepted into flying school!

  When she got my telegram from Kherson my mum replied with a letter, which I have kept.

  My dearest, greetings!

  I got your telegram. I am happy for you. But I would be happier if you were not striving for the sky. Are there really no good occupations on the ground? Your friend Nastya Rasskazova graduated from veterinary college, lives at home, treats livestock in the kolkhoz and her mum has no trouble at all. But you — all of my kids — are somehow driven, always want to achieve something and strive for something.

  There is no news from Vasen’ka. Ah, my girl, my heart’s been tormented with suffering about him. Is he still alive, my dear boy? I remember coming to Moscow to see him and he’d already become a director and some kind of Deputy. He put his leather jacket on me, linked his arm in mine and walked me to a theatre. And there were mirrors all over the place in there and I actually thought, why are there people looking like us walking past — what a surprise! If you could only put in a good word for him…

  But you do your studies, do your best. What can be done now if you have already fallen in love with your aviation and you are doing well in it. If you — my kids — are happy I am happy too. If you grieve — I — your mother — grieve too.

  I’ve got eight of you — my children, and I am uneasy for all of you. All of you — my baby birds — have flown away. I’ve seen the last one — Kostya — off to the Army. I ordered him to serve faithfully and honestly but when the train had begun to disappear behind a turn I fell over onto the platform unconscious. What has happened to me — I am at a loss…

  Oh, mama, mama! How could I explain to you what flying meant to me? It was my life, my song, my love! He who has flown into the sky — found his wings — will never betray it and will be faithful to it till the end, and if it happens that he can no longer fly he’ll dream of flying even so…

  I liked the way the teachers in our school conducted the lessons. The most interesting classes were run on meteorology by an old retired sea captain who had ploughed all the seas and oceans. He was the idol of us all! The captain would enter the lecture room with his head proudly raised in a peaked service cap with a very high crown. We would all stand up to greet the captain, and looking at his meticulously ironed and made-to-measure uniform I would want so much to look like him! But the captain was not tall at all, had deep-set eyes that looked at us kindly and respectfully. The captain would begin each lecture with an ancient superstition: “If the sun sets in a cloud, navigator beware a gale…” Or he would recall another proverb related to our future occupation.

  For the first time I understood what a good teacher was: he loved his profession, was addicted to it, and would not only impart good knowledge but would also inculcate in his listeners a love of the subject. Studying was easy for me. After all I had already worked as an instructor! We studied the theory of flying and, of course, flew — on two-seat U-2, UT-1 and UT-2 trainers.

  The war against Finland sped up our graduation. They abruptly shortened, ‘rounded off’ the training program and took us through to the exams, which we also sat in a hurry. They didn’t even manage to tailor us uniforms and we graduated in the old blouses and skirts we’d worn as cadets.

  After graduation I was transferred to the Kalinin City aeroclub to work as the aeroclub navigator. But it turned out on site that there already was a navigator in the aeroclub but they were short of a pilot-instructor. I really wanted to fly and happily agreed to take up that position. After a test of my flying techniques I was permitted to train student pilots and was assigned to a group of 12 men. The guys were different in their general level of training, physical development and character. They were united by one quality — their passion for aviation. Everyone was eager to complete ground training as fast as possible and to begin to fly. And I knew exactly how they felt!

  The flight commander Senior Lieutenant Petr Chernigovets came to our classes often. He had been a fighter pilot in the Army and had been sent to the OSOAVIAHIM to “reinforce the training personnel”. Chernigovets was really a skilled flyer, knew mathematics and physics well and easily explained cumbersome aerodynamics formulas. The students liked him for his respectful attitude towards them. Petr helped me a lot too. One flying day the senior pilot-instructor Gavrilov crashed. The trainee pilot was thrown out of the plane when it hit the ground, and in the heat of the moment he got up and ran. The surgeons examined him, auscultated him and suspended him from flying. And in five days he was no more… Flights stopped. The students walked around depressed. The flight commander Cherepovets ordered the whole fight to line up to analyse the accident.

  “A plane, as you are aware”, he began, “is a plane and no matter how slow and simple it may be, you have to treat it respectfully — in other words, carefully and seriously. The experienced pilot-instructor Gavrilov had relied on his student but the latter neglected the laws of aerodynamics or knew them poorly — and here
is the result. During the last turn, as we all saw from the ground, the plane nosed up, lost speed and fell into a spin. There was not enough altitude to pull the machine out of its critical position and it hit the ground. The profession of pilot”, Chernigovets continued, “is not only romantic but dangerous as you have seen for yourselves. But there is no point being down in the dumps, let’s get down to business!”

  And he began to draw right there, on the sand, various plane positions in the air simultaneously explaining and asking one or another student. It helped the guys get over it.

  For an instructor the first independent flight of his student is an event just like his own. I remember that the student-pilot Chernov was the first one from my group to be sent by me into the air. The detachment commander had already approved it but I was uneasy and requested the squadron commander to fly with him once more. The comesk56 made a circular flight with Chernov and yelled “Why waste plane resources, let him go!”

  I took the signal flags with emotion as the instructor Miroevskiy had done long ago. Everyone was watching the trainee pilot as he sat in the cockpit, focused and serious, and waited for permission to take off. I raised the white flag and then swiftly stretched my arm out showing the direction along the airstrip with the flag.

  The plane headed for take off and it seemed to me I had forgotten something, hadn’t said something! I wanted to shout out some loud directions after him! Keeping my eye on the plane I walked to the finish point to meet my pupil at the landing T…

  A student called Zhoukov was the second to fly and he made it superbly too. But a student called Sedov gave me a lot of trouble. While everything had been coming easily to Chernov, Sedov had learned to fly slowly, if surely. I understood that later, when all twelve students were already flying independently, and I began to summarise the hours they had spent with me in the air. It turned out Sedov had flown with me less than the rest. “How did that happen?” I thought about it and understood: I had held up Chernov as an example all the time but had made Sedov do more ground training. As a result more fuel and plane and engine resources had been spent on Chernov. But both of then flew at the same level by the end of the program, and Sedov even did it a little bit more elegantly and confidently.

  One day the State Commission came upon us unawares but by now I was confident — my guys flew well. Only one student got a ‘four’ for aerobatics, the rest got excellent marks.

  There was a festival at our aerodrome on Aviation Day. We, the pilot instructors, had been preparing for it ahead of time. We had been flying in formation, practising individual flying, flying in pairs and sixes. We’d been flying gliders too. Parachutists had been preparing their own program but it was we, the flyers, who would have to drop them. And early in the morning the aerodrome was ready to receive guests. The space for spectators was marked off a thick rope. We checked our planes time and again, specified the program — and the festival began!

  At last the announcer called out my flight. I carried out an aerobatics set over the aerodrome, landed and hadn’t managed to taxi in when I was told: “Your mum is here”. It appeared that having found out from a provincial newspaper that there would be a festival here she came to Kalinin and headed to the aerodrome straight from the train station. Of course, mum had brought with her a basket of gifts. She sat down on the grass behind the barrier and began to watch what was happening in the air, and she was sitting quietly until my surname was announced. Then she got anxious and when I began to do aerobatics, mum rushed to the centre of the airfield shouting “My girl, you’ll fall down!” holding her festive lace apron as if she was setting it under me so in case I fell I would fall on it! Orderlies walked mum to headquarters. It was clarified who she was worried about — and then the head of the aeroclub offered her “a ride in an aeroplane”. But mum refused categorically…

  After our students graduated we, the instructors, were awarded a river boat tour from Kalinin to Moscow to visit an agricultural exhibition. And soon we steamed down the Volga feasting our eyes upon the marvels on her banks. Then we sailed through the channel57: seeing the shipping locks for the first time, I was amazed and delighted. Then there was Moscow. We visited the exhibition, I also saw my family on the Arbat58. Now Katya worked as a knitter at a stockinet factory, Yurka was studying at school. We talked a lot. My brother took an opportunity to send a letter in which he wrote that they had sailed down the Yenisei river for a while on a barge with criminals. The ‘mobsters’ scoffed at the ‘politicals’ and took away their clothes and food, but the guards either noticed nothing, or didn’t want to notice. In Igarka they were put ashore and marched into the tundra. Many of them caught cold and died. Less than half survived…

  The second stage of the Moscow Metro was already in operation and I felt a longing to see my station, ‘Dynamo’. Its columns were tiled with semi-precious onyx. There was a bench between the columns and behind it in a niche — a bas-relief of an athlete. It was beautiful!

  In the Metrostroy I found out that nearly all my mates from the Metrostroy aeroclub had graduated from the flying schools and were now serving in the Air Force. Victor Koutov was a fighter pilot in an aviation regiment on the Western border. He’d been writing me letters in verse, asking a reply to each of them but as always I had had no time. After graduation from the school Victor had visited me in Kherson hoping to take me away with him but I didn’t even want to listen to him.

  “Once I graduate I’ll come to you myself”, I responded back then.

  “You won’t! I know you pretty well. You’ll have to be dragged to the altar.”

  “You do that then!” I burst out angrily. Victor left, and I was very melancholy. I would walk to school in tears… maybe I had a premonition that I’d seen him for the last time in my life…

  We spent five days in Moscow and when we got back home we set about work so intensely that there not even weekends any more. Through the whole pre-war winter we trained pilots drafted via a special call-up of pre-conscription-aged youth. They were fully exempted from work and studying in any institutions. The aeroclub paid them an allowance. By the spring we had trained all of them and all of them were recommended for accelerated transfer to flying schools. In fact back then we had guys from two call-ups — exempted from work and not exempted from work. The students who studied without exemption from work started flying in the summer — after the graduation of the guys from the special call-up. Day after day we helped them find their wings and not all of them had started to fly independently when the war broke out.

  10. This is war, girls!

  Flying had dragged on till evening and a June night comes late. I was already tired but couldn’t go home: I still had to do debriefing with the trainee pilots, and write up paperwork. As soon as I had sat at the desk my friend Mashen’ka59 Smirnova stuck her head in the door, “Don’t sit up late, Anyuta60, we’re going to the forest in the morning. We’ll have you up with the sun!” she said and flitted away.

  “Of course”, I recalled, “It’s Saturday today!” So many weeks in a row we’d worked with no days off — we could afford one. The girls’ idea was a good one — off to the forest. The weather was as if ‘on demand’. And the area around Tver’61 is crawling with inviting places. And there’s no need to walk far — get on a tram and it’ll take you right to the pine-forest, the one beyond the ‘Proletarka’ Textile Factory.

  When the first tram left we left with it. The instructors were glad — after all this time we’d got together. The car was filled with laughter, jokes and songs… The conductor was outraged, “You’re playing up like schoolkids — there’s no keeping you in check!”

  There were five of us girls there: two aircraft mechanics, two Marias (Nikonova and Piskounova), two volunteer pilot instructors (Tamara Konstantinova and Masha Smirnova) and the two of us, pilot instructors via the Kherson aviation school: Katya Piskounova and I. Later, during the war, at night the latter would drop ammunition and provisions from her defenceless Po-2 down to the m
arines of a landing party at Eltigen.62

  …But for now we were walking, feasting our eyes on marvellous spaces… The fading lilies of the valley showed through the grass in places — like a gift of nature… We came out on the Volga river, chose a comfortable spot on her high right bank and sat down, admiring the passing steamships. But usually music was heard from them and it was uncommonly quiet. And suddenly we heard the distinct voice of a radio announcer echoing in the forest: “We are at war…”

  All nature’s colours faded then and there. Our cheerful mood had vanished somewhere. In a moment we became older than our years. All of us standing in that Sunday morning forest were certain: the country was rising to a mortal battle. And each of us who had mastered a military profession decided for herself not to stay out of it. Someone said briefly: “Time to go home”, but in less than an hour we all encountered each other at the city military commissariat. Our little ruse against each other hadn’t worked but our visit to the commissar’s office turned out to be futile.

  “Do your job, girls”, the military commissar responded to our request to send us to the front. “You’ll have enough work in the rear now.”

  I had enough patience to stay at the aeroclub’s peaceful aerodrome only for a month and a half. The alarming reports of the first days of war were stirring us up and at the same time we were informed that it had been ordered to evacuate the aeroclub into the deep rear. The day came when I walked to a train heading off to Moscow. Mousya Nikonova, my plane’s technician, saw me off. Her husband, a tankman, had been badly wounded and was dying in one of the city hospitals. Mousya didn’t cry but her beautiful face with brown almond-shaped eyes had become thin and dull. Another tanker who’d lost his arm lay in an adjacent ward. He was the husband of Tatyana Nikoulina, with whom we’d studied in the Metrostroy aeroclub. She’d come to him from Moscow, leaving her small daughter in the care of neighbours, and sat in the ward next to her maimed husband day and night, comforting and tending him as best she could. The war was already making itself felt — very brutally, sometimes irremediably…