29 November 1941
Dear Pasha,
You win. You may call me Valyushka if you must, only please don’t use my full name again. And don’t expect any Pashenka nonsense out of me. I’m an air force cadet now, not some doe-eyed village girl.
Yesterday I went on my first night flight. I felt like a little kid being allowed to stay up late for the first time. Iosif Grigorevich didn’t trust us to fly after dark; he barely trusted us to fly during the day.
Everything changes at night. In the daylight, the snow is piled into slushy drifts stained with mud and engine oil. But under the dim blue moonlight, everything is new and mysterious and a little bit frightening. The planes are commonplace trainers during the day, but at night, they’re black silhouettes in the aerodrome lights.
When I lifted off, I was terrified. It felt like I was hanging in the middle of a void with nothing to distinguish the sky from the ground except the areodrome’s lights. Trees and buildings were just patches of missing stars. There was no horizon. How would I know if I went wrong?
Partly because of the temperamental instruments in our aeroclub’s plane, like the leaky variometer that said you were holding steady even when you were plunging into the ground, my first instinct is to double-check. But last night I couldn’t. I had to let go of sight and focus on everything else. The wind biting my face. The solid weight of the air under my wings.
And then a searchlight came on in my face.
You can’t tell when you see them at a distance, but searchlights are bright. It felt like needles stabbing my eyes. I knew I had to get out of the beam, but I couldn’t think clearly. The best I could do was fly straight and hope to get away from it, but whatever asshole was operating it kept tracking me. Eventually the operator had mercy on me and turned it off.
I came around to land, and who was standing there by the searchlight with her arms crossed but Lieutenant Bershanskaya. She was wearing her ushanka with the ear flaps down, which made her look like a spaniel, and she was giving me her most unimpressed squint.
She said, “I caught you in that beam and you just sat there. If I were a fascist with a flak gun, you’d be dead.”
All the replies I thought of would have earned me more push-ups.
I hope to hear from you soon. I’m in no danger here in a city far behind the lines, but I never forget where you are and what you’re going through. Please tell me you’re keeping safe.
Yours,
Valka
“Hey Valka, I heard you had a dazzling experience out there.” Iskra was lying on her cot with one arm behind her head and the other holding her Morse code cheat sheet.
I set down my letter. “It wasn’t fair! I wasn’t expecting it. Three other girls flew before me and she didn’t shine a searchlight on any of them.”
“Do you think the Germans will call you ahead of time and say, ‘Pardon us for the interruption, but we were hoping to shine a spotlight on you, if it isn’t too big an imposition?’” Iskra turned to Vera. “Nikolay.”
“Dash dot,” said Vera. She lay with her eyes closed, savoring a cigarette while they practiced their Morse code. With her round face, girlish rosy cheeks, and curly golden-brown hair, she reminded me of an oversized doll, which made her smoking an incongruous habit.
I said, “You wouldn’t have flown any better.”
“At least I wouldn’t have acted so surprised,” said Iskra. “Konstantin.”
“Dash dot dash.”
I insisted, “Even you would be distracted with a hundred million lux shooting directly into your eyeballs.”
“You want to talk about pain? Stick your hand on an engine block in this weather,” said Ilyushina. She held up a palm red and weeping where the skin had peeled off. We all grimaced with vicarious pain.
“The point,” I said, “is that dealing with searchlights is more difficult than it looks from the ground.”
“Sideslip. That’s all,” Iskra told me. “Yelena.”
“Dot. Now you’re making it too easy,” Vera replied.
Sitting on the end of my bed, I unwrapped my sweat-sticky portyanki and wiggled my toes. “Sideslipping is a highly technical maneuver. It isn’t easy to do blind and with a headache.”
“If you can’t fly with a headache, you’ll be useless as a fighter pilot,” said Iskra.
“Did you become a navigator so you could criticize my skills without having to fly yourself?”
Vera cracked one eye at us. “Do you two not like each other?”
I said, “What are you talking about? Of course we like each other.”
“Yeah, I looooove my little cousin,” Iskra cooed. She hopped over to my cot and squeezed me in a tight hug.
I rolled my eyes. “Little cousin? I’m eight centimeters taller than you.”
Iskra ignored me and turned back to Vera. “As for you, smart girl, question mark.”
“Dot dot dash dash dot dot.”
“Now you’re showing off,” said Iskra.
Vera flicked her cigarette butt into the ashtray at the end of her bed. “Memorization is the easy part.”
“Yesterday you told me flight calculations were the easy part,” said Lilya.
“That’s only geometry.” Vera pronounced it “he-ometry.” “Didn’t you learn that in secondary school?”
“There is no difficult part for you, is there?” Lilya exclaimed.
“Well, I’ve never actually been in an airplane. . . .”
“Do you find yourself appreciating Kazarinova now?” Iskra teased me. “If it had been her, the spotlight would have been on the flight plan.”
“No thanks!”
“What’s been up with her lately anyway?” asked Lilya. “She made me run two kilometers just because I made one extra pass over the airfield before landing.”
“Yeah, who pissed in her kasha?” I said.
Zhigli said, “Didn’t you hear? Her sister got caught in an air raid. Broke her leg. Open fracture. She won’t be fit to fly again for months, maybe never.”
I winced sympathetically. I didn’t, as a rule, harbor much sympathy for the Kazarinovas, but the major was a hopeful young pilot like me once, pursuing her dreams, only to see them shattered in one burst of heat and light.