OVER THE CHATTER OF BIRDS IN THE TREES I COULD JUST hear the drone of the German bombers that had been hammering a rail line near the front all morning. It was a mild, sunny June afternoon, so when I came off my shift guarding the aircraft, I was unsurprised to find my friends shunning the mess tables and sitting directly on the grass around a slightly squashed cardboard box, looking gleefully through the contents.
“Come join us,” said Iskra, waving me over. She sat at the edge of the group, the tiniest distance away from everyone else. Before her arrest, she would have been in the middle. Nobody else noticed these things, but I did, and I worried about what they might be a symptom of. “Zhigli’s parents sent her a massive package full of American magazines. We haven’t a clue what they say, but we’re having fun looking at the pictures.”
“I don’t want to look at magazines. We should be flying,” I grumbled. By now, the division commander’s plan was clear: If he couldn’t find an excuse to disband us, he’d simply ground us indefinitely.
“The magazines won’t change when we get into combat,” said Zhigli.
I regarded her suspiciously. Iskra rolled her eyes. “Come on, Valka. Don’t be a brat.”
I sat down on the opposite edge of the group from Zhigli, next to Galya, our squadron’s aide-de-camp. Galya would have been rather plain-looking if she weren’t constantly beaming with enthusiasm. She had accessorized her straight brown hair with a polka-dot headband with a bow on it, which made her hard to take seriously.
I peered skeptically into the box as though my grudge against Zhigli might have tainted the magazines. “Nothing interesting, looks like.”
“Maybe not to you,” Iskra retorted.
They were mostly fashion magazines, their glossy covers bearing photos of cherry-lipped women posing in square-shouldered jackets and patent leather pumps or frolicking on the beach wearing cat’s-eye sunglasses. The pilots and navigators delightedly passed them around.
Galya looked at a photo of a socialite in a long cream-colored gown and kitten heels and then, sorrowfully, down at her hand-altered cavalry pants and artificial-leather boots. She said dreamily, “Raskova says that when the war is over, we’ll wear beautiful dresses and white shoes and she’ll throw a big party for us.”
Riffling through the box, I found a red-bordered magazine depicting a large four-engine bomber in flight. “I found a news magazine.”
“Can you read English?” asked Zhigli.
“No, but there are pictures. Look at the size of that bomber, the V-24!”
Iskra looked over my shoulder and whistled. “Our Peshkas would look like tiny insects next to that.”
I licked my thumb and leafed through the magazine. There were more pictures of aircraft inside. “Look—the Americans paint pictures on the noses of their planes.”
“We would have an even harder time passing ourselves off as serious airwomen if we did that,” said Iskra.
Galya leaned over to see what we were looking at. She blushed and started giggling. “Most of them seem to be, um . . .”
“Half-naked babes,” I said. “There does seem to be a lot of that.”
“Boys will be boys,” said Zhigli.
“Hang on, here’s a dragon. Oh, wait, it’s holding a naked babe.”
“Pretty dragon, though,” said Galya.
Iskra wondered, “How can she twist like that without breaking her back?”
“American women must be flexible,” I said. “Really flexible.”
“If that’s what they’re into over there, that dashes my hopes of eloping with a handsome American pilot,” said Zhigli with a sigh.
I slapped the magazine shut and stood up. “To the airfield, Iskra! These photos have inspired me.”
“To do what?” asked Iskra.
“We shall paint a naked man on our plane.”
“Have you ever seen a naked man?”
“I . . .” I felt my face color. “There’s no correct way to answer that question, is there?”
Galya’s giggling redoubled.
“Pasha doesn’t count,” said Iskra. “Seventeen-year-olds aren’t men.”
“Iskra, please tell me the quickest way to make you stop talking.” Baseless as her teasing was, it was still embarrassing. And today it was making me angry. Pasha had dealt with bullets and shells and freezing and starvation, and it wasn’t fair to make him the butt of a joke.
I was spared further discussion when we were interrupted by our new chief of staff. Everyone set down the magazines and scrambled to attention.
“As you were,” said the chief of staff, adding, “Must you do that? I was training alongside you two weeks ago.”
“Would you like a magazine?” asked Zhigli, handing her one. The officer rolled it up and tucked it in her pocket. “Duty before pleasure, I’m afraid. You girls have another training flight.”
Groans and complaints arose from everyone except Galya.
“We’re not here to train, we’re here to fight,” I said as we reluctantly fell in. “Not that Trud Gornyaka hasn’t been relaxing . . .”
“Speak for yourself,” said Zhigli. “You’re in a house. We’re holed up in a stable. We call it the Hotel Flying Horses.”
“. . . but I want to bomb something at some point.”
“You know what I think?” said Galya. “I think the division commander doesn’t like us.”
Iskra stopped walking and looked at her. “You should have been a reconnaissance pilot with those observational skills.”
Major Bershanskaya stood on the makeshift landing strip, a section of potato field marked out with kerosene lamps, talking to Captain Ilyushina. Ilyushina had sandy hair and the resigned air of someone who was constantly stepping in to fix other people’s mistakes. She was saying, “Everything looks fine. I’ll recalibrate the altimeters tonight before takeoff.”
“Good. The meadow to the west should make a perfect auxiliary airfield. We don’t need long runways like those heavy SBs. Good morning, girls. Go get started on your preflight checks. You’re hedgehopping again. The division navigator says that your navigation skills are adequate at high elevations, but closer to the ground it’s only a matter of time before one of you ends up wrapped in high-voltage wires.”
The pilots and navigators dispersed to their U-2s. I lagged behind and asked Bershanskaya, “Ma’am, more training? I thought our first mission was tonight.”
“You’re not coming. Squadron commanders only.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too dangerous. There might be escorts,” said Ilyushina.
“Male pilots go into combat with a few weeks of training. We’ve had six months. Is it so much to ask that we actually get to fight?” I protested.
Working ourselves to the bone in training only to get stonewalled at the end seemed a worse fate than never being recruited at all. Popov said we hadn’t proved ourselves. But how could we prove ourselves if we never faced combat?
Bershanskaya told me kindly, “Koroleva, I know you want to be a daring eagle of the Red Army Air Force, but you’re still an eaglet. Give it time.”
Ilyushina told her, “It’s like you have a hundred and twelve children.”
“It’s not—” began the major, but she was cut off by an explosion followed by a scream. The three of us ducked and covered our heads before it became apparent that we weren’t under attack. The source of the noise was at the other end of the field, where a couple of dazed, dirt-speckled armorers stood around a small crater. One was holding a handkerchief to a laceration across her cheek and eyebrow.
“Well?” asked Bershanskaya.
“Only an accident, ma’am,” said the uninjured one. “That fuze went off for no reason!”
Bershanskaya raised an eyebrow.
The uninjured armorer admitted, “We did throw a rock at it.”
“We wondered if it could go off with the safety pin still in,” said the injured one, a tiny girl named Masha.
“Turns out it can.”
Bershanskaya put a hand on her forehead. Ilyushina looked from the crater to one armorer, then to the other, and shrugged. “Could have been worse. They could have tried hitting it with a hammer.”
Bershanskaya turned to me. “You girls aren’t ready.”