I LEANED MY HEAD BACK AGAINST THE LEATHER RIM of the cockpit and closed my eyes to catch a moment’s rest before takeoff. I liked this moment, when the planes were in place but their engines were still off and I could hear the familiar noises up and down the flight line.
Behind me, using her map light for illumination, Iskra flipped through the pages of her aeronavigation book. I couldn’t figure out why she was so attached to that book. It wasn’t because she needed to brush up on her navigation skills, that was for sure.
For once, I’d ended up at the front of my flight, though the other flight in our squadron was ahead of me. Two planes back, Zhenechka amused Dina, the squadron commander, by telling her a fairy tale. In the plane ahead of us, the pilot, Sofiya, played with a kitten she’d found in a pile of rubble; it had been the village’s sole remaining inhabitant. “No, you mustn’t grab that! That’s the throttle. Leave it alone. You’re doing it again! What did I just tell you?”
The middle of the flight order was the best place to be, I decided. I felt secure there, with friends in front of me and friends behind me, ready to swoop in and help me if anything should happen.
I opened my eyes at the sound of someone walking up to our plane. It was Galya, sporting a flight suit, a helmet, and a million-ruble smile. She had just returned to our regiment the day before, wincing with pain every time she took a step but undaunted in her ambitions.
“Look at you, wearing big-girl clothes!” I teased, flicking her helmet’s dangling buckle with one finger. She was my age and almost my height, but in her flight gear she still managed to look like a kid playing dress-up. It saddened me to see her moving stiffly and not bounding across the airfield with her former energy. Galya the gymnast was gone forever.
“Bershanskaya says I can navigate tonight if I can find a pilot to take me,” she said.
“Sorry, darling, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Valka is bound to get into trouble if she flies without me,” said Iskra, shooing Galya away. But her voice was kind.
A minute later a cry of excitement announced that Galya had found a pilot: Zhigli’s former pilot Polina, just behind us. She climbed into the rear cockpit while the displaced navigator stood nearby, arms akimbo, complaining, “Kicked out of my own plane. How do you like that?”
I laughed inwardly. I was barely more than a rookie myself, but already I felt a big-sister affection for the newer airwomen as I watched them reach the goals that I’d passed only a few months earlier. Galya especially. Her effervescent cheer would brighten up the airfield.
The armorers spun up our engines. The cacophony of propellers surrounded me. One by one, the planes ahead of me took off. Sofiya handed off her kitten to an armorer and roared down the runway. I sat up and took the controls. Exactly three minutes later, we followed.
It was a perfectly clear night, the indigo sky resplendent with a million stars. Clear enough to see for kilometers. Clear enough to see everything.
The searchlight beams came into view ahead of us. They looked eager. There were so many, a whole forest of them, roving back and forth and then converging on a single spot with startling speed. Transfixed in the beams was a bright speck, first white, then red. Fire. No! My heart plummeted. I pointed and shouted, “Iskra, that’s one of ours!”
My mind refused to accept what I was seeing. We had lived through countless missions and no one had been shot down. Not since that first night. They would shake off the lights. I was convinced of it, although they were already burning. Somehow they would escape, cheat death, and we would laugh on our way back from the airfield in the morning. I was sure of it, absolutely sure, even as the bright spot spiraled toward the ground and vanished, two lives with it. Gone. Just like that.
I was still reeling, unable to accept what had happened, when the second aircraft was shot down. It sparkled with flashes of red, white, and green, grotesquely reminiscent of fireworks on the anniversary of the Revolution. The signal flares were exploding. The plane came apart as it fell, all in flames, the wings, the tail, the wooden frame already stripped of its delicate canvas, and the two girls. In powerless horror, I watched my friends burning, tumbling free of the wreckage, and I tried as hard as I could not to think of the flight order, not to match names and faces to those burning figures.
Fire! My hands froze in place. Why were my friends not dodging the guns and escaping? And then a sudden realization: Where were the guns? Their concussions should have cut sharply through the silence of the night, but there was nothing.
The beam of the searchlight momentarily illuminated another shape, not the angular double cross of a biplane but a broad-winged plane with a big, tapered belly and twin engines the shape of bullets. I could plainly make out the black crosses on its wings. A night fighter. We were easy prey. We were going to burn!
And then it was Sofiya, straight ahead of me. Her U-2 seemed so close. It was like one of the demonstrations our instructors used to do with model planes, and I couldn’t shake the idea that I could have reached out and plucked the aircraft from the sky if my hands had been willing to move. The fighter dived greedily, mindless of the frantic, ineffectual burst of machine-gun fire from Sofiya’s desperate navigator. The plane barely caught fire. A hint of yellow licked it here and there; then the wings neatly divided from the fuselage and fluttered down like whirligig seeds. The broken craft plummeted out of the beams and into darkness.
We were next. We approached those stripes of light, which slowly pivoted in search of their next victim. Sweat beaded on my forehead as though I could already feel the heat of fire consuming the cockpit around me. I needed to do something. I would die if I didn’t. I would take Iskra to her death as surely as the three planes ahead of me, but my hands wouldn’t respond.
“Valka.” Iskra’s voice coming through the speaking tube was a hoarse whisper, as though she feared that the fighter pilot might overhear us. Then, louder, “Valyushka, are you all right? Focus, baby cousin. We need to complete the mission.”
I tried to think. I tried to remember what we had learned about fighters, how to outmaneuver them, but everything had been forced out of my mind except one single word: Fire!
The stick moved under my hand. Iskra had taken the controls. She cut the engine and went into a glide. “Don’t worry, baby cousin. I promised to take care of you.”
Through the fog enveloping my mind, I remembered our flight plan. We were supposed to drop our bombs on our way out. That meant circling around and passing over the target again after bombing. Two passes among the beams. Two chances for the fighter’s cannon to rip us apart.
We were almost there. Somewhere in the darkness the fighter waited for us. Iskra veered a little way off course and circled around, approaching the target from the far side. We were still gliding. She put us into a gentle dive, eight hundred meters, five hundred, three hundred. It was risky. At that altitude, we could easily be caught in the blast when our bombs landed.
And suddenly, through the fog in my mind, I saw what Iskra was doing. When the searchlight operators looked for us, they would look too high.
The pair of chalk marks on the wing lined up with the target. A jolt. The bombs dropped. Iskra barely had time to reengage the engine before a hot shock wave hit us. It tossed us through the air. The plane’s controls jerked wildly. For a moment I thought that fire had caught us after all, that we had evaded the fighter only to be destroyed by our own bombs. But we were undamaged. As Iskra brought us level, there were the searchlight beams—crossing above us! I could hear the drone of the fighter, searching for us where he had found the others. But we were already away. Safe.
Galya and Polina. They were behind us. Polina must have seen what Iskra had done. I found myself pleading aloud as though they could hear, my throat dry and hoarse. “Please don’t drop your bombs yet. Do what we did.” But then came the explosion as their bombs fell and my instrument panel was illuminated with yellow light. I glanced back. There was their plane, transfixed by the searchlights, its crew blinded and disoriented. And half the squadron was still behind them.
It would be classified as an accidental collision in the official report, but as I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of them, I was sure they were making a choice. I could see Polina, her brows lowered in intense focus. And on Galya’s young face, the hard look of a warrior. She wanted to be a real airwoman. She knew what that entailed.
As the fighter swooped in for the kill, their U-2 pulled up sharply, straight into its path. The little biplane and the sleek fighter, locked together, fell out of the sky.
We landed and stumbled numbly out of our cockpits. Our mechanic’s sturdy arm steadied me. We had made it. Why? We weren’t the best aircrew and I certainly wasn’t the best pilot, not the fastest or the boldest or the cleverest. I was the one who froze in the face of danger. Polina and Galya were the ones who saw what to do and did it without hesitation, and it had cost them their lives.
Our chief of staff held the map with the flight times noted on it, tears welling up in her eyes. She knew who each explosion represented. I foolishly wanted to ask if there had been any survivors, but I had witnessed the crashes myself. At the sight of us, a wavering smile fought through her tears. She grabbed us like she was pulling us from a shipwreck. “Valka? Iskra? You made it! You’re alive!”
I was. Useless and worthless and alive.
I couldn’t face the rest of the regiment. I feared those looks of hope when they saw that someone had returned and how they would fade into dismay when they realized it was only me. Pasha was the only person I could face. So I grabbed pen and paper and wandered aimlessly down the street and into the remains of the village until I found a quiet spot where I could sit and write to him.
It didn’t go well.
I couldn’t get my thoughts in order. My feelings came piling out one on top of another and I couldn’t make sense of the jumble. I wasn’t good at being sad. I didn’t know how. When something upset me, I channeled it into anger. Anger at the world, at the fascists, at myself.
I leaned against the charred frame of a wall from which all the plaster had flaked away and stared up at the gray predawn sky. Splinters tangled my hair. It had been a short night, but I was exhausted, not as if I needed to rest but as if the vitality had permanently drained out of me and I would never feel like myself again.
I wrote a few words and scratched them out. My bleary eyes could barely make out the sheet of paper in front of me, so I wiped them, which probably left ink marks on my face, but I didn’t care. When I picked my pen back up, I immediately smeared the ink with my wet hand. I crumpled the paper and dropped it onto the uneven floor of the burned-out house. It hadn’t said anything anyway.
Had the fascist pilot known he was killing girls? Maybe. But he hadn’t seen Sofiya playing with her kitten before takeoff. He didn’t know that Polina pasted cutouts from Zhigli’s silly magazines in her cockpit. He didn’t know that Galya had a slip of paper in her pocket granting her six months of leave, which she’d refused to take.
And there at last was the anger, bursting out in a flood. I got up and screamed and kicked the house’s blackened hearth. I pounded it with my fists. The crumbling brick ripped the skin from my knuckles. When I had worn myself out, breathing hard, my shoulders slumped, blood trickling down my hands, Iskra was there in the doorway.
She didn’t say anything, just put her arms around me and leaned her head on my chest. I clung to her solidity, digging my fingers into her so hard it must have hurt. No one would tear Iskra away from me. They had taken my other friends but they would never take her. Never. Not unless they took me too.
Iskra led me to the school and I broke down again the instant I stepped inside. Against the wall, eight camp beds, folded. I tried not to look at them. The schoolroom felt very quiet without Galya’s laughter. Everyone stuck close together as though we feared that someone else might vanish. Tanya held Vera’s hand, their fingers threaded together.
Zhigli sat curled on her bed surrounded by friends, her eyes red and puffy from crying over Polina. Her voice broke as she said, “It’s my fault. I knew as soon as I met her that she was destined to die young. It was her fate, and I was the only thing protecting her, the thread by which she was hanging on to life. So many times we had close calls and by sheer luck we pulled through unharmed, time and again. And then we parted and the thread snapped.”
I’d never seen her looking so vulnerable. I couldn’t harbor any anger toward her. At that moment it was impossible to see anyone in the regiment as a rival or an enemy, but I wasn’t ready to talk to her, either. I sat in the corner by the blackboard and focused on Pasha’s gentle presence. Pasha, who sang in the face of fear. He’d faced his own losses. He would understand. How I needed him right then. But I needed him to be really here, to hear his voice and feel his touch. I wanted to bury my face in his chest and let him put his arms around me, and then I’d be able to face what I needed to tell him.