Among the Red Stars Read online

  I feel Iskra’s absence palpably, like a lost tooth. As long as the pilots and navigators were still being tested out together, I could convince myself that she would be there next time, and that she would fly with Lilya or Tanya or me. But now it’s too late. The regiments have formed and Iskra is not a part of them.

  This morning I was just about boiling over with anticipation. Is anything worse than standing at attention when you’re worried? You can’t fidget or pace, you can only stand stiffly with your eyes fixed straight ahead. Raskova informed us that she knew there would be many disappointed faces tomorrow and that, while she’s sorry that she can’t give every girl her ideal assignment, she doesn’t want anyone bursting into her office in tears demanding an explanation. She may know us too well.

  I made a decision as they began reading out the assignments for the 586th, the fighter regiment. Iskra would never see the front. She would never fight to defend the Motherland that she loved so unconditionally. But I still could. I would prove myself in combat. I would be the best damn fighter pilot the VVS had ever seen and every fascist I killed would be for Iskra.

  The pyaterka aerobatic pilots all got assigned as squadron commanders or deputies. And Lilya is going to be a fighter pilot! I was sure my name would be next.

  And then they called out the last name and mine wasn’t anywhere. They moved on to the 587th Day Bomber Regiment, Raskova’s regiment. I hardly listened. The guilty side of me says: What did I expect? How could I look forward to finding out my assignment when my cousin gets no assignment at all? How could I be willing to abandon her to get into the regiment I wanted? I wanted to fly a fighter more than I’d wanted to fly with Iskra. Now I get to do neither. Which is exactly what I deserve.

  My name wasn’t listed in the 587th. Neither were any of my friends’ names. As they finished reading out the assignments for the 587th, there was a murmur of disappointment as everyone whose name hadn’t been called—me, Zhigli, Vera, even Tanya—realized that we had all ended up in the night bombers.

  The 588th Night Bomber Regiment is my new home. Bershanskaya will be my commander. Her brow knotted pensively as her name was read out. I should care about the people who were listed, my future comrades in arms. Ilyushina will serve as the regimental engineer. Zhenechka, despite her constant claims of being bad at navigating, managed to become a deputy squadron navigator. And yet I can’t make myself feel anything for this army of not-Iskras, neither excitement nor disappointment. And that’s wrong of me, too, because they’re my friends.

  The commander of the squadron’s second flight is Tanya, and Vera is the flight navigator. I caught Tanya surreptitiously mugging at her new navigator from the other side of the parade ground. Vera diligently ignored her but grinned to herself. Zhigli is also in the flight, just my luck. And then they got to me. I’d begun to think I would get no assignment at all, which would have been a fair reward for not taking care of Iskra. But when it came, I was completely blindsided. Pilot: Valentina Sergeevna Koroleva. Navigator: None assigned.

  I stood there uncomprehending as we were dismissed. I checked the roster myself. There it was in indelible ink: my name and an empty space beside it where a navigator belonged. Now I’m back in the gymnasium, watching the other pairs of pilots and navigators find each other and trying to make sense of it all. Did Raskova make a mistake? Or was there not a single navigator in the regiment who was willing to fly with me? I can’t—

  ISKRA IS BACK! She’s here, Pasha, and she isn’t hurt or anything!

  I was just lying here writing to you and feeling sorry for myself when a voice nearby said, “I haven’t seen you mope like that since the day the Rodina disappeared.” I glanced up and found myself looking into a familiar heart-shaped face framed by blond hair just long enough to show its wave.

  Jumping to my feet, I dragged Iskra into a rib-cracking squeeze that lifted her clean off the floor. She kissed me on each cheek. Tears stinging my eyes, I attempted to talk but only managed to stammer, “You’re . . . I was so . . . I can’t . . . How?”

  Iskra said simply, “I’ve been released. I just got back. Militsa Kazarinova gave me quite a scolding for missing the regimental assignments, but she had a position for me anyway. Apparently there’s a pilot in the 588th who needs a navigator?”

  “We’re flying together!” I screamed.

  “Aren’t you disappointed that you won’t be flying a fighter?”

  I’m not anymore. Not even a little. I’m exactly where I belong.

  When I finally put my new navigator down, Iskra took my hands and turned them over. “Baby cousin,” she said softly, “look what you’ve done to your fingers.”

  The skin around my fingernails was bitten away in raw, ragged strips. I hadn’t even noticed. “I guess I was worried.”

  Iskra shook her head. “It’s good that I’m here. You need someone to look after you. I knew it back in Moscow all those months ago when I asked Raskova to make me a navigator so I could fly with you.”

  When she reclaimed the bed next to me, Iskra found the note under her pillow. She laughed when she read it. I said, “Don’t laugh at me for caring about you.”

  She replied, “I wasn’t. I was laughing because you called Engels ‘home.’”

  Iskra doesn’t want to talk about her ordeal. It isn’t that she’s afraid to or that it’s difficult for her; she just doesn’t seem to think there’s anything important to say. “They investigated me, they found I had done nothing wrong, I was released,” as if that was a perfectly self-explanatory sequence of events, and she won’t hear a word otherwise. She brushed off my attempt to intercede for her as sweet but unnecessary. When I asked if they’d hurt her, she said, “Of course not,” like I was being silly.

  I asked her if it didn’t bother her that she had spent two months in prison after being wrongly arrested. She said, “This is war and there are fifth columnists trying to undermine us. The NKVD has to follow every lead if they hope to catch them, and some of those leads will be dead ends. I can’t be angry if one of them happens to be me.”

  So I asked, “What if it was me?”

  She didn’t answer.

  And then I thought of you. Order 270 could tar you a traitor as easily as anyone else. Whenever I hear news from the front, my skin prickles with anticipation that the next words might be “The Fifth Rifle Division was encircled and destroyed.” And I realize none of us are safe.

  Yours,

  Valka

  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 Zn
amenny 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

  FIFTEEN

  6 March 1942

  Dear Valyushka,

  Thank you for the picture. I’m keeping it in the inside pocket of my coat along with your letters and Rudenko’s book. Although it’s a little awkward when the other guys show each other pictures of their girls and I only have a photo of an airplane.

  I’m never sure what to tell the other guys about you. I’m sure you’d beat me senseless if I called you my girlfriend. But I’m not sure what the truth is. The only thing I do know is how proud I am of you.