But we return. Tatyana and I and the rest of the Night Witches fly our tiny planes east in early June. And we come back as heroes.
It is a bright autumn day as we stand in a line in Red Square. I am between Tatyana and Galya. We are three among twenty-four of the 588th Night Bombers Regiment who are about to be awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal by the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. We should just call him murderer. I am trembling as Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin pins the medal on me. It is simple compared with some: A plain gold star suspended from a small swatch of red cloth.
“Ah, I can almost feel your heart beating, my dear.” His thick lips spread into an avuncular smile. His heavy black eyebrows dance up toward his hairline, and he actually gives my cheek a little pinch. “You won’t wash your face now, eh?” he jokes. But I see the flash of something unspeakably brutal in the blackness of his eyes. He moves on toward Tatyana.
“The Motherland is eternally grateful for your valor and courage.” I see her swallow and look down. She sometimes has nightmares that Stalin has discovered she was a POW.
An hour later Tatyana and I return to our little government-provided attic apartment. We now live in Moscow. We sit down and I fix us each a mug of tea. Our medals are on the table between us. “What are we supposed to do with these things?” Tatyana mutters.
“Hang them up. Display them. We are heroes of the Soviet Union.” She catches the edge in my voice.
She shakes her head. “But what about the POWs who fought as hard and are now in Stalin’s prison camps? The gulag.” We both look at each other. The words do not need to be spoken. We both know. As long as there is a gulag, we cannot display these medals. I get up and go to a drawer and fetch a napkin. We fold the medals carefully in the cloth. Tatyana takes them back to a drawer and shuts it.
“Someday, perhaps,” she whispers.
“Someday,” I repeat.
We stay up late, very late, as we cannot sleep. Sleeping has come hard for us since the war. I reach across the narrow space to Tatyana’s bed and shake her shoulder.
“You awake?”
“Of course.”
“Let’s go to the roof.”
There’s a door in the ceiling with a sliding ladder that leads onto the roof of our apartment. We often go up there at night to look at the stars and visit the constellations that we know so well from over one thousand nights of flying. We let the darkness fold around us. Like a quilt, it gathers us into the downy beauty of the night.
“Are you sure you want to go up now?” Tatyana asks. “It’s too late for stars. It’s almost dawn.”
“Yes, let’s go see the sky anyway, see the dawn.”
We start up the ladder. As Tatyana and I climb out through the trapdoor to the roof, the sky is just turning pink.
Tatyana sighs. “We never really saw the dawn when we were witches, did we?”
“Not once that I can remember.” But I do recall hating the dawn the morning that Mama was killed, wanting to curse it and wondering how the sun dared to rise. However, now, as the dawn breaks, a calmness steals over me. I take Tatyana’s hand. I no longer resent the sun, but I do feel that this dawn seems a bit forlorn. There’s an emptiness in the world, as if not enough people can marvel at the colors that bloom so quietly in the sky on this morning.
“Look!” Tatyana exclaims softly, and points toward the horizon.
“What?”
“A shadow of the moon. A daylight moon.”
The blanched sphere hovers like a ghost in the sky, with no trace of its silvery nighttime countenance.
We watch as the two orbs float just above the horizon, one a dusky shadow of its nighttime silver, the other growing bolder and brighter with each moment. Two sibling spheres rising. Tatyana and I marvel at the spectacle. I grasp her hand tighter. We have each other. We are not heroes. We are sisters. Sisters forever.
I am deeply indebted to two people—two navigators, if you will, who kept me true to course. First is Tom Ricks, Senior Advisor on National Security at The New America Foundation, and a former Washington Post Pulitzer prize-winning Pentagon correspondent. His knowledge of World War II was invaluable, and he pointed me in the direction of so many vital troves for my research. I am also endlessly appreciative of my gifted editor, Mallory Kass, who has guided my craft skillfully through so many books. I am blessed by these two friendships.
Kathryn Lasky is the author of over fifty books for children and young adults, including the Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, which has more than seven million copies in print, and was turned into a major motion picture, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. Her books have received numerous awards including a Newbery Honor, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and a Washington Post-Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, MA.
Copyright © 2017 by Kathryn Lasky
“The Forest Raised a Christmas Tree” and “Katyusha” translated from Russian by Oksana Grochowski
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First edition, April 2017
Cover art © 2017 by Ken Choi
Cover design by Maeve Norton
e-ISBN 978-0-545-68311-1
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