20 November 1942
Dear Valyushka,
Five days until the assault. I feel unprepared. Like the first day of school, or more like the dreams you have before the first day of school where you don’t have your books and you don’t know where your classes are and it turns out there was an assignment you were supposed to do over the summer.
Have I really been out here for more than a year? Can I be an experienced veteran when I’m barely nineteen and have never fired my gun in combat? It seems impossible that I’ve survived that long. But then I try to remember what normal life was like and I barely can.
When they issued us our winter uniforms, there weren’t enough to go around. I got a quilted coat and trousers and an ushanka but no warm valenki to put over my leaky high boots. The snowmelt numbs my toes. I wrap my feet in extra layers of portyanki and stuff rags and newspaper into the ends of my boots but it doesn’t help much. We’re short of ammunition, too. We’re going into this operation cold, tired, and underequipped.
I took the little cartridge-shaped capsule out of my pocket, uncorked it, and unrolled the bit of paper inside. Vakhromov said filling it out was signing your own death warrant, but as I stare Operation Mars in the face, I feel like it has already been signed and this is only a formality.
I may die, but I won’t die unknown and anonymous.
When I got to “next of kin,” I didn’t even think about it: “Junior Lieutenant Valentina Sergeevna Koroleva, 588th Night Bomber Regiment, 325th Night Bomber Division, Fourth Air Army.” Whatever happens, I want you to be the first to know. I want my family back home to find out from you, not from an impersonal telegram.
Stepanova surprised me today. I was lying by the fire, reading Rudenko’s book. I don’t mind having it out now, with this commissar. She came over to warm her hands and asked, “Do you like poetry?”
The book wasn’t poetry, but this was the first friendly gesture Stepanova had ever made to me, so I said, “Yes. I’m very fond of it.”
“Do you know Mayakovsky?”
I smiled, because every Soviet loves Mayakovsky, and I recited the first poem that came to my head, the one that goes, “Here in four years’ time from now, there’ll be a garden-town.”
Stepanova looked at me very hard and said, “Why did you choose that poem?”
Mayakovsky wrote many poems more fitting to our circumstances, poems about war, about fear and loss and meaningless suffering. But those weren’t the words I wanted to say. I wanted to speak about building and planting and hope. About a time when war won’t divide us.
Stepanova said, “I was sitting by a campfire the last time I heard that poem. We were behind the lines near Moscow. Zoya was reciting it.”
Her face in the firelight did not betray how the poet’s words made her feel, whether the memory of her courageous friend saddened her or stirred a flame of pride.
This will be my last letter before the offensive, maybe my last letter ever. I don’t know if you’ll receive it or not. Your letters get delivered erratically, nothing for a month or two, then a couple of letters at once. I haven’t heard anything from you since the seventh of November. It isn’t really likely that all the pieces will fall into place and you’ll swoop in to deliver me. Chances are I’ll be cut down in the first wave of the assault.
I have so many regrets. This whole time I’ve written around my feelings for you. I’ve talked about everything else, but never what was most on my mind. I was frightened. I didn’t know how you’d react, if you’d laugh at me or brush me off or, worst of all, stop writing. But it won’t matter now.
I love you, Valyushka. I have since I was a child. You’re everything I’m not: daring when I’m afraid, bright and hopeful when I’m despondent, willing to fly across a country to pursue your dreams while I helplessly wait for the inevitable.
All these years I haven’t told you. And yet, here at the end, I want more than anything for you to know.
Yours always,
Pasha
“Is it still snowing?”
“Valka,” said Iskra. “It was snowing a week ago. It was snowing a day ago. It was snowing five minutes ago. It’s not going to stop snowing.”
I paced in the narrow dugout, my hands tucked underneath my arms in an attempt to get the blood flowing into my fingertips. I could see my breath. The dugout floor was icy at the end near the door and muddy at the end near the oil-drum stove, no middle ground. Vera and Tanya were sitting in front of the stove and passing their last cigarette back and forth, their bare feet up on the cinder blocks the stove was set on while their boots and portyanki dried.
“An offensive in the middle of a snowstorm,” said Tanya. “It’s insane. No air support, no way to sight for the artillery. Those boys are as good as dead out there.”
“Tanya, stop. Valka’s keyed up enough already,” scolded Iskra.
“They should have delayed the offensive,” said Zhigli.
“Why didn’t they?” asked Zhigli’s young navigator, cocooned in several blankets at the other end of the dugout.
“Pride,” said Zhigli. The word hung in the freezing air.
Iskra stuck out her foot in front of me. “Stop pacing. It’s annoying.”
I plopped onto Iskra’s bed. “I feel so useless.”
“Pasha will be all right.” How could Iskra sound so sure of herself?
“He doesn’t have valenki,” I whimpered. “There’s a blizzard and he doesn’t even have proper warm boots.”
“He’s from the Urals. You guys are built tough.”
I gave her a pointed look. “Iskra. You’ve met Pasha.”
Pasha’s missing boots weren’t the part of his last letter that was most on my mind. The surprise wasn’t what he said, it was that he said it. Not a revelation, but a breakthrough. But instead of speeding off through the sky to take him in my arms, I was grounded in a dugout.
All our time together flicked through my mind. I wished I could reach out and reshape those memories.
“Iskra?”
“Yeah?”
“You want to know something terrible? When we were kids, I only wanted to be friends with Pasha so I could listen to his radio. I’ve known him since he was born but I only cared about the goddamn radio.”
Iskra gave my shoulders a squeeze. “Baby cousin, this will come as a shock to you, but everyone is terrible when they’re thirteen.”
“Pasha wasn’t.”
“No. He was a sweet kid.”
Zhigli, who was lying on the next bed over, said, “You need to stop worrying, Valka. It won’t help him.”
I asked her, “You know about destiny and stuff. Pasha . . . he filled out his identity capsule. That’s bad, isn’t it?”
She drew in her breath through her teeth. “Yeah. I’ve heard that.”
“Is there a counteraction? Can you fix it if you throw the capsule away, or erase it?”
“Fate doesn’t work that way,” she replied, looking up at me with sadness in her dark blue eyes. “If something is going to happen, it will happen. You can’t trick it or find a way around it. I thought I could change Polina’s fate, thought I could hold her back from the brink. I was wrong.”
I wrapped my arms around my knees, feeling like a stalling plane, dropping from the sky.