‘We are not the genteel British nor the delicate French,’ said Vladimir. ‘We are Russians and we will fight with every last drop of our blood for our land!’
‘Indeed,’ said Marya, another classmate, ‘Hitler regards us Slavs as an inferior race whom he can treat as he pleases. We, who have produced some of the world’s greatest paintings, music and literature! This is the country of Tchaikovsky, Pushkin and Tolstoy, and he deems us to be sub-human!’
We all agreed heartily. We were indignant at the treachery of the Germans in attacking us and secretly ashamed of not being better prepared.
Our group of volunteers had been digging for several hours when we heard the roar of planes approaching. The call went up: ‘Germans!’ We had nowhere to hide except in the ditches we had dug and nothing to protect us but the spades, which we placed over our heads. Bullets riddled the ground around me like hailstones. My heart thumped in my chest. We heard the planes fly off into the distance but stayed in our ditches until we were sure they weren’t returning. I looked at the other students’ faces, knowing that I must have appeared as shaken as they did.
Our little group was unhurt, but an old man and a woman had been killed and several of the children were wounded. Nadezhda burst into tears.
‘Why did they attack us?’ she asked.
‘We aren’t soldiers!’ We were sombre on our way back on the trolley bus. One of the other volunteers told us that Marina Raskova, the famous pilot, was forming women’s air regiments and had advertised for volunteers.
‘I’m a pilot in an aero club but I don’t want to be in the auxiliary services,’ protested Marya. ‘I want to go to the front and fight those bastards face to face.’
‘This isn’t the auxiliary services,’ the volunteer said. ‘These are regiments for frontline duty. Raskova has been given permission by Comrade Stalin to form exclusively female units. They aren’t only calling for pilots, but also mechanics, cooks and office staff.’
I remembered the poster of Marina Raskova that Natasha had hung on the wall in her room. Had Natasha learned to fly as she’d wanted? Or had everything been barred to her? I hadn’t seen Natasha since that awful day in the Arbat after her father had been arrested and my mother had forbidden me to speak to her. My parents transferred me to another school. For nights I cried bitter tears into my pillow. People had called us ‘the twins’. Being separated from my friend and thinking of her suffering was unbearable.
‘I’m going to volunteer for that regiment,’ I announced. ‘Where do I sign up?’
Marina Raskova was interviewing volunteers at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy. Nadezhda, as the Komsomol’s representative at the institute, wrote a recommendation for me. Not long afterwards I received a telegram summoning me to an interview and advising me to pack necessities. If I was selected for one of the air regiments, I would leave for training straight away.
I told my mother that I was going to stay with Nadezhda to work on a group project. She wouldn’t have let me go otherwise. When I was younger my mother and I had been close, but she had changed. She was more concerned about her status in society than her own family now, and there was little that I confided in her any more. But she was my mother and part of me still loved her.
As I left the apartment, she was hanging blackout curtains with the maid. ‘It’s a pity that because of the Germans we have to take down our pretty curtains and hang these ugly things,’ she said.
‘Goodbye, Mama,’ I told her. ‘I’m off.’ But she didn’t hear me.
The academy had the unruly atmosphere of a girls’ school on enrolment day. There were air-force pilots in uniform, civil air fleet pilots in flying suits, and students from the Osoaviakhim aero clubs wearing their helmets. Women who had never been near an airfield, as well as hockey and gymnastics champions, factory workers and secretaries also answered the call. I recognised Raisa Belyaeva who was a famous aerobatic stunt pilot.
Some of the candidates paced the corridors with their chins up and their hands behind their backs, while others clutched their flying gloves nervously. There among them, sitting on a chair and reading a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was Natasha. She looked different from when I’d seen her last. Her face was sterner and she had a serious air. In the old days, she would have been chatting to the other girls, not isolating herself from the crowd with a book. But she still liked to stand out. She was wearing a dress suit with a pleated skirt and fitted jacket, and a polka-dot scarf tied around her neck. Her hair, blonder than I remembered, was curled under her crimson beret.
She glanced up, as if she had sensed someone was watching her, and I slipped back among the group. I was ashamed that I had not stood by her after her father’s arrest. I couldn’t bear for a reunion after all those years to be marred by a look of disdain on her prettily made-up face.
Marina Raskova and her selection committee interviewed the applicants individually. Most of the women wanted to be pilots, and fighter pilots especially, and were disappointed if they were assigned the roles of navigators. Pilots, in everyone’s eyes, were as glamorous as film stars. The women who were given preference for the pilot roles were professional airwomen. Students from aero clubs were only considered if they had been recommended as exceptional by their instructors.
I heard Natasha’s name called out and saw her rise to go into the interview room. I hoped that her dream of becoming a pilot would come true. An hour passed before she re-emerged.
‘What role were you given?’ the other girls pressed her. Natasha evaded their questioning but when they kept pestering she finally answered: ‘They selected me for pilot training, most likely in the fighter regiment.’ The girls regarded her with admiration. I was seized by an idea.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Natasha and I were placed in the same regiment? But women from universities and institutes were being trained as navigators for the bombers. The fighter pilots flew solo and did their own navigation. And the mechanics’ roles were being given to the girls from factories.
‘Svetlana Petrovna Novikova.’
I entered the interview room. Although there were three other women in there, it was Marina Raskova who caught my attention. She was even more beautiful than she appeared in photographs in the newspaper, with her clear bright eyes and her dark hair neatly parted in the centre and pulled back in a bun.
‘Before we begin,’ she said, a pained expression on her face, ‘you must understand we are not selecting women for summer camp. We are choosing women to fight for our country. Women who may be maimed or killed.’
Marina was softly spoken but exuded confidence. No wonder she was admired. I sensed that she also cared for our welfare.
‘I understand,’ I told her.
‘Good! Because your qualifications are excellent and you are the first candidate we have interviewed who hasn’t commenced by insisting that she be a fighter pilot.’
The woman next to Marina, the battalion commissar, said, ‘We need navigators for the bombing regiments.’
I had to think quickly if I wanted to be placed in the same regiment as Natasha. ‘But you see, I hoped to be a mechanic,’ I said.
The commissar’s chin rose. Marina Raskova regarded me curiously.
‘I’m scared of flying,’ I told them.
Marina bit her lip as if she were trying not to laugh.
‘You do realise that you have applied to an air regiment?’ the commissar asked. ‘When the regiment moves airfields, the mechanics and armourers are flown by transport planes.’
‘I will be fine when moving airfields,’ I said. ‘But every day, several times a day in a plane … I’d get airsick.’
The women exchanged glances. I could tell that they were impressed by my qualifications and didn’t want to lose me.
‘Does this have anything to do with Natalya Azarova?’ Marina asked me.
The mention of Natasha caught me by surprise.
‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘You see, Natalya spent half h
er interview time praising you and your ability to fix things. We need navigators but good mechanics are also worth their weight in gold, especially in the fighter regiments where the turnaround time is vital.’
So Natasha had seen me after all.
That evening, after we had been assigned rooms for the night, I found Natasha writing a letter to her mother. She lifted her eyes and, far from giving me the look of disdain I had been expecting, she stood up and threw her arms around me.
‘I’m so happy to see you again,’ she said. ‘I heard that they selected you to be a mechanic!’ So Natasha wanted to be with me as much as I wanted to be with her.
We reconciled after all those years with no recriminations. Just as I had never forgotten her, she had never stopped thinking of me. There was much to catch up on and we wanted to talk more, but the political officer ordered lights out and told me to go to my own room.
The following day, we were issued with our uniforms. The military pilots, like Marina Raskova and her chiefs of staff, already had smart uniforms, but as the decision to create women’s air regiments had been made at the last minute, no special provisions had been made for us. We were taken to a room and issued uniforms that had been made for men. Peals of laughter filled the air as we donned trousers that hitched up higher than our breasts and jackets with sleeves that dangled past our knees. We were even given men’s underwear! One girl modelled a pair of long johns with a fly opening while the rest of us rolled around the floor laughing. The worst thing, however, was the boots. They were gigantic. We stuffed newspaper into the toes but still we could only shuffle instead of walk.
‘How are we ever going to march?’ Natasha whispered to me.
That night we sat in our rooms with scissors, needles and pins, doing our best to make our uniforms fit. Many of the girls tried to adjust the pants by shortening the legs, but ended up with the crotches of their trousers down near their knees. Natasha, who was good at sewing, showed the other girls how to cut and resew the trousers so they fitted, but there was only so much we could do before lights out.
The next evening, those of us who had been selected marched to the station to catch a train to our airfield in the east. The platform was crowded with people evacuating Moscow as the Germans came nearer. They must have despaired at the sight of us. We shuffled along with our greatcoats trailing behind us, like unwieldy gowns. We lacked military discipline and chatted like schoolgirls departing for a picnic.
The trip to Engels took nine days. We sat in the icy rail cars according to our place in the regiment: pilots, navigators, mechanics and auxiliary staff. The train had to wait several times in the sidings to allow the passage of soldier transports heading west. Whenever we were allowed to stretch our legs, Natasha and I would find each other. Sometimes we read War and Peace together and sometimes we huddled up against each other in the weak autumn sunshine. Natasha wrote letters to her mother but also, I noticed, to a man named Roman whom she said was fighting at the front. I wondered if he was her fiancé but was reluctant to ask. Was that the change I had noticed in Natasha? Had she known physical love? It was only when we were stuck at one station for hours that I had a chance to ask her about Alexander. Tears came to her eyes when she told me that he had been killed in a shaft fire.
‘I wish I’d been there for you!’ I said.
Natasha grasped my hands in hers. ‘We will always be there for each other from now on. Always!’
We arrived at Engels at night. Everything was dark in the town because of the blackout. Even the Volga River was invisible. The cold air bit at our faces, reminding us that winter was on its way. The burly garrison commander at the airbase, Colonel Bagaev, showed us to our dormitory. ‘Sleep well,’ Marina instructed us, ‘for tomorrow you begin a new life, which will be very demanding. You must study hard and persevere because your examination will not be in a great hall but on the field of battle.’
We were exhausted and got ready for bed as soon as Marina left us. Uniforms were discarded and out came nightgowns and bed socks. Some of the women brushed each other’s hair and helped braid it. One girl took out a doll from her knapsack and sat it on the end of her bed, while another spread out a tapestry to work on until lights out. Natasha pinned her hair into curls and massaged cream over her face and hands. I suddenly understood the magnitude of what we had signed up to do. We were just girls, most of us weren’t even twenty yet. For many of us this was the first time we had been away from our families — and we were going to take on the mighty German Luftwaffe.
We were in the military now, but when the order came the next day to cut our hair to five centimetres all over, we were horrified.
‘You can go to the barber or do it yourself,’ Colonel Bagaev told us. ‘But I want to see you on parade this afternoon with your hair short and your boots polished.’
Natasha had shoulder-length hair but the rest of us still had our maiden’s braids, which we pinned up on top of our heads. ‘Why can’t we leave it in braids?’ asked one girl, who had beautiful hair the colour of honey. But we soon learned that an order in the air force was an order and we had to obey. Some of the girls kept their braids to send to their mothers.
Natasha cut my hair. She snipped it short at the nape of my neck and left longer strands around my ears and crown. ‘Pin those parts back,’ she said, wetting my hair and slicking the longer strands down. ‘Comb them forward when you are off duty so you don’t look entirely like a boy.’ Although I wasn’t happy about having my hair so short, she had managed to make me look fetching!
Natasha took obvious pride in her movie-star waves. When it was my turn to cut her hair, she held the mirror in her hand and gave me instructions on every strand I touched. Instead of five centimetres all over, she made it ten and then put her hair in rollers. ‘When it’s curled, it will be five centimetres all over,’ she said.
The other girls, who had already shorn their hair, looked at her enviously. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ asked one of them.
I had no idea how long curled hair took to set. I only hoped Natasha didn’t intend to go out on parade with her hair in rollers. She didn’t. But she did wear her lipstick and perfume. Marina noticed but didn’t say anything. Perhaps she realised that Natasha, like herself, was a person who paid attention to detail.
The training at Engels was a three-year course condensed into six months. The pilots spent fourteen hours a day in combat training as well as studying theory. The mechanics worked equally hard. We learned to repair, maintain and refuel planes in freezing winter conditions, which the windswept plain of the airfield readily provided. Some of the parts were in narrow cavities, so we had to remove our padded jackets to reach them and work in our field shirts or overalls. Our arms turned numb and we would slap them to get the circulation going again. Sometimes the bolts were frozen and scorched our fingers. To prepare us for battle conditions, Marina would sound the alarm in the middle of the night and we would have to leap out of bed and assemble outside. The first time it happened, Natasha didn’t have time to take the rollers out of her hair. Marina made her march around the airfield in the biting wind. The punishment didn’t stop Natasha curling her hair; she learned to use pins to style it instead of rollers, which she could hide flat underneath her cap if called out in a hurry.
Most of the male instructors were good to us, but one of the flight instructors, Lieutenant Gashimov, was antagonistic to our pilots. He did not believe that women should be trained to fight on the frontline. When he learned that Marina had used her influence with the Kremlin to secure Yak-1s for the fighter regiment and the latest Pe-2 bombers, he was livid. ‘There are experienced male pilots waiting for planes and we are giving new ones to a bunch of women who will turn back at the first sight of a German!’
When student pilots complained to Marina about Lieutenant Gashimov undermining them, she told them, ‘When I was at the military academy some of the men used to speak over the top of me or refuse to address me according to my superior rank. I
learned that trust in myself rather than complaining conveyed an inner power that was disconcerting to those men. The bombers I have secured for the regiment require three people to operate them — the pilot, the navigator and a gunner. We will also require more mechanics. There isn’t time to train more women for these roles so you are going to have to get used to giving men orders and, if they don’t like it, too bad.’
The Yak-1 was a single-seat monoplane and, compared to the biplanes that the women had trained on, very fast. Marina supervised the candidates she was considering for the fighter pilot roles, including Natasha. No one was allowed to do more than take off and land for the first session. Only after they had mastered that were they allowed to circle the airfield. When Lieutenant Gashimov saw that the pilots weren’t daunted by the Yak’s speed, he became even more hostile towards them. He’d swear at the pilots, although Marina had forbidden the men at the airfield to use foul language in front of us, and did his best to reduce them to tears. He even went so far as to call Natasha a ‘painted-up tart’. Instead of being upset, Natasha, in her blithe way, showed she was amused by his insult, which infuriated him further.
When the women began combat training on the Yak, Lieutenant Gashimov went hard at them from the first day, giving them no chance to practise their manoeuvres. He stayed in close on their tail and didn’t budge until they were forced to make the sign of the cut throat and land. He did everything he could to demoralise them.
Sapphire Skies Page 16