FOURTEEN

19 February 1942

Dear Valyushka,

I’m so glad to hear that Iskra is back! I knew she would be. I don’t think any force in the universe could keep you two apart for long. Then again, I might have said the same thing about us once, and, well, it doesn’t look like either of us will be home soon.

My friend Rudenko will never return home. All this time I was worried he’d fall victim to the purges. But my fear was misplaced. It wasn’t the purge that caught Rudenko. It was the war.

He wasn’t even fighting. He was at the back of the lines with me, carrying the battery pack, when a shell exploded in the road not ten meters from us. A fountain of dirt and snow erupted, and for a minute I was stunned by the intense whites and yellows ringing in my ears. As they died away, I heard my friend screaming. He was on the ground. Blood spilled onto the snow. A piece of shrapnel had hit him in the belly. My head still spinning, I crawled through the rubble to his side and made a futile attempt to stop the bleeding with my hands while I shouted for our medic.

The medic patched him up, but he was bleeding internally. There was an air ambulance, one of your U-2s but with pods on the wings to hold stretchers, hopping onto and off the battlefield and picking up a couple of men at a time. Its propeller made a drab orange thrum. “It’ll come get you the next time,” I told Rudenko each time it flew away, even though there were thousands wounded and only a single plane.

He grabbed my sleeve with one blood-crusted hand and said, wild-eyed, “The book. The Znamenny Chant. Take it.”

“It’s not mine to take,” I protested. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it didn’t mean to me what it meant to him, that I’d never really understand those words in dark blue and green.

“If I die, or even if I only get taken to the hospital, the commissar could go through my things and find it. You have to keep it safe for me.”

So I took the book and tucked it inside my coat with your letters. Its weight against my heart feels like a responsibility. I couldn’t help Rudenko when he was half a meter away from me; at least I can protect his book.

He was clutching his little cross so hard that it left an impression on his palm. I asked him why God had allowed him to get shot. He said he didn’t know. I told him I thought God was supposed to be all-powerful and control everything. He said that God could control everything if he wanted to and that he could make us all do the right thing all the time, but he doesn’t want to. He wants us to choose to do the right thing of our own accord, and he loves us so much that he allows each of us to make our own choices, no matter how terrible those choices are.

“Even Hitler?” I asked.

“Even Hitler.”

I said, “But you were shot because of him. He’s caused so much death and destruction and horror. We’re giving our lives to bring an end to it, but God could stop it all in an instant and he doesn’t? What good is God at all if that’s so?”

He said, “God doesn’t stop it all now. But someday he will put it all right. He will make everything new.” And then he told me what it was to be made new. How when people repair broken things, they are never the same, but how God will make the world new and wipe away all wrongs not only in the future, but in the past, too, for God is beyond time. And then none of this will have happened.

I wish I could see the world the way he did, I really do. But I can’t. I can’t make myself believe that I will be made new. If I am killed, there will no longer be a Pavel Kirillovich Danilin. That’s all.

It got dark and the plane stopped coming. The temperature had been well below zero all day, and at night, it plummeted. Rudenko couldn’t keep warm.

He was supposed to lie still but he kept getting agitated. He asked me if he would die, and I had to keep telling him no, he would be fine, because what else am I supposed to say? He kept saying that he didn’t want to die, that he hadn’t had a chance to lose his virginity or become a priest.

It was wrong of me to be frustrated with him when all he’d done was get wounded, I know, but he wouldn’t stop talking and he distracted me so that I encrypted a message wrong and didn’t notice until I was halfway through transmitting it. I had to start over. I got a grumpy reply telling me to pay attention to what I was doing. So finally I got angry and told Rudenko that I wished he would shut up.

He looked so hurt that I immediately felt terrible. I apologized and offered to sing him something. For an instant all the fear and anxiety melted from his face and he looked the way he must have looked to those who knew him in Odessa before the war, before everything. He said, “I’d like that.”

So I sang him the first chant we had learned together, the one from the church tower. He closed his eyes. I felt that I ought to sing quietly in soft sage and lavender, like a lullaby. By the time I had finished, he was gone. And then there was a flood of things I wanted to say to him. I couldn’t ask him to forgive me for snapping at him nor tell him how much it meant to me that he’d trusted me with the secret of his religion, nor even thank him for all those hours carrying the battery for me.

He was my closest friend in the whole squad and he’d died cold and scared and hurting. I don’t know where he is now or what he’s feeling, but I hope that he went to be with his God.

Yours,

Pasha

27 February 1942

Dear Pasha,

Poor Rudenko. Please don’t blame yourself. You didn’t order the offensive and you didn’t fire the shell. And because of you, your friend had someone by his side who cared about him. I guess that’s the most any of us can do.

Now that she’s back, I never want to let Iskra out of my sight. She’ll be heading to the toilet and I’ll find myself yelling, “Hey, Iskra, where do you think you’re going?” and she’ll laugh and say, “We’re cousins, not Siamese twins!”

The other navigators were nearly as delighted to see Iskra as I was. Now they’re laughing and catching her up on gossip. Iskra’s arms overflow with a week’s worth of Pravdas that Vera used to make a second copy of all her notes.

I tried to warn her about Zhigli. Of course she didn’t listen. She grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me dead in the eye and said, “Valka. It’s over. I was never charged. I have nothing to fear from here on out—I never did. I intend to put this whole thing behind me as though it never happened. Can you? Or will you drag it out because you have a grudge?”

Well, I’m not like her. Everything doesn’t just roll off my back. And no matter how long we spend in the same regiment, I will never forgive Zhigli.

Major Raskova took me aside and told me that Iskra had been through a difficult time and that I shouldn’t expect her to immediately be her old self. She asked me, since I knew Iskra better than anyone, to keep an eye on her and to report on how she was managing in a month or so.

She added, “See? When you are patient, things have a way of working themselves out.”

Iskra is different. She slept through reveille twice and was duly punished by Captain Kazarinova. She’s nervous in crowds. She has trouble following conversations, especially when several people talk at once, and struggles to make up all the material she missed. Vera works with her evening after evening and never loses patience when she can’t figure out a calculation that she did with ease in November.

But, day by day, her normal self returns. There’s no outward sign of her ordeal, nothing except what she carries inside, which she refuses to share. I have to put her strange behavior from my mind as we focus on transitioning from being Koroleva and Koroleva, cousins, to Koroleva, pilot, and Koroleva, navigator.

No one but Iskra could ever have been my navigator. Your navigator is more than the girl who reads the map. She is your friend, your sister, your comrade in arms, the person who shares your triumphs and failures. No matter how many people you fly with, no one can ever replace your navigator.

We don’t get to slack off now that we have our assignments. We deploy in two months and that’s all the time each of the regiments has to learn their new aircraft. And I do mean new aircraft. The fighters have Yak-1s, delivered straight from the factory along with many bitter remarks about the shortage of aircraft and the foolishness of wasting the best new machines on a bunch of girls. The Yak-1s look gorgeous lined up on their skis, those red stars standing out on their snow-white wings. The girls of the 586th are taking full advantage of their new planes’ capabilities, doing mock dogfights and aerobatics overhead while we in the night bombers try to sleep. How jealous they make us!

Meanwhile, we get . . . a different model of U-2, one with bomb racks and a peashooter machine gun. The planes arrived on flatbed trucks with their wings detached. Ilyushina supervised our mechanics on their first bit of real work, reassembling the aircraft. So far the wings have stayed on. I’ve enclosed a photo of our plane: Number 41. She’s no fighter, but I like her. I think she’s the scrappy type that doesn’t know she’s small.

Major Kazarinova works the fighter pilots like a slave driver. There is no such thing as acceptable performance for her, only “not good enough” and “not nearly good enough.” She was serious about not fraternizing with her subordinates. Lilya says they still don’t know anything about her outside of her military service. Then again, if I were thirty-seven and single for glaringly obvious reasons, I probably wouldn’t talk about my personal life, either.

Ilyushina says Kazarinova is doing us a favor because we’ll be deployed soon enough and we’ll need to have our act together then. A few more months and I’ll be a daring hawk of the VVS, delivering deadly strikes against our enemies. My heart races thinking about it. But another bit of me remembers the horrors you’ve described and wonders if my experience won’t be so heroic after all.

Raskova somehow finds time to train the fighter and dive-bomber regiments during the day and still be on the flight line with us every night. I have no idea when she sleeps. On top of all that, she’s still learning herself. She knows everything there is to know about navigation, but she can barely fly. She’s determined to get her skills up to par by the time her regiment is deployed.

She got a visit a few days ago from Valentina Grizodubova, her old commander from the Rodina. Grizodubova curtly brushed off the admirers who gathered around her and settled down with Raskova in the officers’ mess to catch up.

Grizodubova, who now commands an all-male bomber regiment, scoffed at Raskova for wasting her time with girls and told her that she ought to come fly with them. But Raskova smiled and said that her girls were doing quite well, actually, and that she had no intention of quitting after all the work she had put into us.

Grizodubova said, “With your connections, you could have any position in the VVS that you wanted.”

Raskova replied, “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

Yours,

Valka