Among the Red Stars Page 3

  Iskra shrugged. “Life is life, and Moscow is half a country away. Unless . . .” She tapped a finger on her pink lips. “Unless we had a faster way to travel.”

  We looked at each other, then at Iosif Grigorevich.

  “No!” he said, his face reddening. “No, no, no. Absolutely not.”

  I folded my hands in a very non-Soviet gesture and begged him. “Pleeeeeease?”

  “It’s the only way we’ll ever get there in time,” said Iskra.

  Iosif Grigorevich replied, “It would be a waste of time and fuel. Besides, don’t you read the papers? The Hitlerites are sixty kilometers from Moscow!”

  “We all have to make sacrifices for the war effort,” I said, suddenly developing a sense of patriotism.

  Iskra told Iosif Grigorevich, “You’re always saying you hate teaching girls. Now’s your chance to be rid of us.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Is that a promise?”

  “If we enlist, we’ll be gone,” I interjected.

  “Let’s make it a wager. I’ll fly you to Moscow tomorrow. If you get accepted to whatever harebrained program they’re cooking up, fine. If not, you find your own way home, and you’ll withdraw from the Stakhanovo Aeroclub. Permanently.”

  Iskra and I shared another glance. One telegram had spun dangerously out of control. Swallowing my hesitation, I stepped forward and shook Iosif Grigorevich’s hand.

  “Deal,” I said in a voice far cooler than I felt. And with that, we were on our way to meet Marina Raskova.

  FIVE

  WE MUST HAVE BEEN THE ONLY PEOPLE IN THE WORLD flying into Moscow on that dreary autumn day. Unable to get clearance to land amid the chaos at the main airport, we ended up at an aerodrome on the opposite side of the city. Iskra and I said our good-byes to Iosif Grigorevich and headed for the nearest metro station.

  When I’d last visited, the brand-new Moscow metro was a gleaming underground world straight out of science fiction. Now it was a bomb shelter crammed with hundreds of camp beds, row upon row beneath the cavernous art-deco ceilings. A Party member was handing out bottles of milk to a cluster of hungry children. The ticket booth was empty. So we walked, weaving our way past cars, wagons, pedestrians, even herds of livestock, all fighting to get out of the city.

  At first I thought it was snowing, but the flakes that fell on my hand were gray and did not melt. When I rubbed them between my thumb and forefinger, they crumbled into powder, staining my glove. Ash.

  A creeping dread began to grip me. I looked around nervously for the source, but it seemed to come from everywhere. The people of Moscow were burning everything. We passed a bonfire in the alley between the Central Telegraph Office and a looted bakery: a smoldering heap of half-burned letters, union documents, Marxist literature, and pictures of Party leaders. Iskra picked up a Party card, its red cover curled at the corners. The photo had been ripped out.

  “Cowards,” she said through her teeth. “You can see how deep their loyalty runs.”

  The streets of Moscow were a maze of tank traps and checkpoints. We picked our way around the pale, bulbous form of a grounded barrage balloon. The balloons occupied nearly every open space, giving the impression of a city full of beached whales.

  As we neared the city center, the chaos grew. A mob had formed outside a factory, demanding their wages. Workers were hitting the chained steel gates with sledgehammers and trying to scale the cinder block walls. Farther down the street, some shopkeepers threw their doors open and let people take what they wanted. They figured the fascists would have it all in a few days anyway.

  It hit me like a punch in the gut that it was all real, the bombs and the artillery and the tanks poised to crush our capital city. It struck me how different the war had been for me and for Pasha, that I’d been sheltered while he faced everything.

  Iskra stopped in front of a cordoned-off block of apartments reduced to rubble. Her eyes widened. “This was where we lived.”

  I stared at the bombed-out shell. I had always assumed that, since Iskra was from the city, she must have lived a more sophisticated life than we did out in the sticks. But the broken walls outlined a concrete cube just like the concrete cubes in Stakhanovo.

  I fumbled for something to say, but all I could come up with was, “At least it was empty. So nobody got hurt.”

  “Yeah,” she said vaguely. “It isn’t as if I could return here anyway.” She looked around. “I shouldn’t even be here now.”

  Iskra was supposed to stay a hundred kilometers from Moscow. That was the rule. Iskra had been a model Soviet all her life, but she was still treated like a criminal because her parents had been arrested on a trumped-up charge of trying to undermine the Soviet Union in order to make Communism look like a failed experiment. Wrecking, it was called. I remembered that Uncle Vanya kept a pencil tucked behind his ear and Aunt Anya always did three things at once, like telling me where to look for my lost mittens and helping Iskra with her math homework while preheating her Primus stove in the collective kitchen. Neither seemed like a wrecker.

  I told Iskra, “There’s a war on. No one is looking for you.” I hoped it was true.

  Zhukovsky Air Force Academy was camouflaged. Crude black-and-white paint coated the arches and pillars and ornate scrollwork of the old palace that now served the people, disguising it as a cluster of smaller buildings. We stepped into a spacious hallway barely warmer than outside. Since the Germans had seized all the mines to the west, Moscow had almost no coal. The factories still chugged out smoke, but there was nothing to spare for civilians, and electricity was being rationed.

  Inside, it was packed, but the atmosphere was completely different. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of girls and women, all bubbling over with excitement. I didn’t know there were this many female pilots in all of Russia. One name was on everyone’s lips. Would she really be here? Would we really meet her? And then there she was at the end of the hall. Not a picture, but the real thing!

  I’d always taken for granted that being a soldier, and being a pilot for that matter, meant looking and acting like a boy. Sure, there was Iskra, who fussed about color coordination and curled the ends of her already-wavy hair; for all I knew, she joined the aeroclub to meet boys. But Marina Raskova wasn’t like a man at all. I’d never realized how young she was. Not even thirty, and she already had a list of accomplishments that ordinary people only dreamed about. Her uniform had a knee-length skirt and she had her long hair in two braids pulled into a knot at the back of her neck, just like she always did in photos. She looked warm and friendly, not soldierly. She glanced around at the hopeful girls and occasionally paused to greet someone, saying, “So you made it after all!”

  Another female officer about the same age was walking with her. I couldn’t resist leaning forward to catch their conversation as they passed me. The other officer asked, “How many were you expecting?”

  “Based on the letters? Around a thousand, I suppose. How many are there?”

  “More,” said the other officer drily.

  “And I’ll have to disappoint so many of them. I should have asked for more regiments!”

  “Do you want to split the interviews?”

  “Nonsense. These are my girls and I need to get to know them. I won’t have an aviation group full of people I’ve never met.”

  By the time she reached her office door, the noise level had become a dull roar. She turned to face us and held up her hand until we quieted down.

  She asked us, “What are all of you here for?”

  “We want to fight!” we shouted.

  “But don’t you know that the fascists will be shooting at you?”

  Suddenly emboldened, I called out, “Not if I shoot them first!”

  She said, “If you go to war, you’ll face all kinds of hardships, and many of you will not return. But for those of you who insist on staying, I am going to interview each and every one of you personally.”

  For every girl who came out of that office walking on air, th
ree or four trudged out downcast. I wondered what would happen to those girls. Some were from the Ukraine or Belorussia and had no homes to return to. And then there were the ones from Moscow. One glance outside convinced me that they had it the worst of all.

  Iskra, cheerful and relaxed, amused herself by watching the other hopefuls.

  I tried to pretend I wasn’t nervous, even though my palms were sweating. “What if we don’t get picked? We could be stuck in the city when it falls.”

  “When it falls? Aren’t you a ray of sunshine!”

  Another worry struck me. “What if they pick you and not me?” Iosif Grigorevich always said I should fly more like Iskra, who did everything with textbook precision. “Or . . . what if they pick me and not you?” That would be a rare chance to lord it over her; but faced with the possibility of flying without my cousin, I found the idea unthinkable, even for gloating purposes.

  Iskra shrugged as if that was a trivial concern and directed her attention to a beret-wearing officer who was leaning against the wall with her hands in her pockets, avoiding eye contact with everyone. “Who’s that over there?”

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t look like she wants to chat.”

  Iskra, undeterred, made a beeline for her. The woman, who looked to be in her late twenties, had straight hair cut just above her shoulders and light green eyes that squinted even though there wasn’t a glare. Her expression seemed stern and distant, but as soon as Iskra said hello, it melted into friendliness. She introduced herself with a modest, almost embarrassed smile as Yevdokiya Bershanskaya.

  “Hang on—I’ve heard of you,” I said. “What did it say? ‘A woman can’t be an airline pilot unless she’s someone like Yevdokiya Bershanskaya—’”

  “Oh, dear. I didn’t keep you from getting a job, did I?” asked Bershanskaya.

  “Not one I wanted very badly,” I assured her.

  “Valka,” said Iskra, “has her heart set on being a fighter pilot.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Bershanskaya warned me. “Every girl here wants to be a fighter pilot. I’m hoping to become one myself, but Raskova called me here to talk about command.” She held out her arms helplessly. “Do I look like a commander?”

  Just then two middle-aged officers with punctilious military bearing came striding down the hall. The crowd instinctively parted to let them through. Both women wore men’s uniforms with cavalry pants, but otherwise they looked entirely different. One had large eyes, dark curls cut short, and a cigarette dangling from her hand. Her collar tabs marked her as a captain. The other, a major with a severe face and close-cropped hair, wore a gold-bordered medal with a portrait of Lenin in platinum.

  The major was asking, “No attack regiment, then?”

  “Fighters, day bombers, night bombers,” replied the captain.

  “I could handle the fighters.”

  “You’ll get them. You’re the only woman here with command experience. Even Raskova can’t handle her own regiment, even though she thinks she can.”

  I bristled at that comment.

  “You said she already had a position for you?”

  “Chief of staff,” the captain said grimly.

  The major looked at her with pity. “You poor thing. You’re in charge of . . .” She looked around.

  “All this,” the captain finished, gesturing broadly with her cigarette.

  The major curled her lip at the crowd of girls. “Look at all of them. When we were their age, we fought to enlist. Every step of the way, we had to prove ourselves better than the men. And now they get an invitation!”

  I was about ready to march over and set them straight about the work it took for me to get here, never mind the fact that they were high-ranking officers, but Iskra’s hand on my elbow gently held me back.

  “Most of them aren’t even pilots,” said the captain. “Students, workers, farm girls . . . It’ll be a job making them into soldiers.”

  “How will you manage?”

  “Discipline, discipline, discipline. I’ll get them whipped into combat-ready shape, so long as I can keep Raskova from coddling them.”

  “You’d better. Don’t send them into combat one second before they’re ready, no matter what the major says. If they can’t measure up to the male pilots, the difference will be blamed on their gender. Our gender. I won’t jeopardize twelve years of work because some teenagers get themselves killed.”

  They stopped in front of Bershanskaya, their faces stony. The captain said, “Lieutenant. I hear you’ve been sworn in.”

  “That’s right, yesterday morning,” said Bershanskaya.

  “That makes you an officer,” the captain replied. “An officer would know not to wear her cover indoors.”

  Bershanskaya abashedly took off her beret.

  The major said coldly, “You may be an officer on paper, Bershanskaya, but until you can act like one, you’re still a civilian pilot, as far as I’m concerned. You’re not ready to fly for the VVS, let alone command.”

  They swept on.

  “Who are they?” I whispered.

  Berskanshaya lowered her voice. “Those are the Kazarinova sisters. The major is Tamara and the captain is her younger sister, Militsa. They’ve both been in the VVS for dog’s years. A bit of free advice: Watch your step when those two are around.”

  “You ought to get along with them, Valka; they’re almost as masculine as you,” teased Iskra.

  “Girls. I’m not kidding,” said Bershanskaya, her friendly look vanishing.

  Before I could respond, a voice barked, “Koroleva, Valentina Sergeevna!”

  As I entered Marina Raskova’s office, I was so nervous that I almost couldn’t tell I was nervous; I just felt dazed. Marina Raskova gave me an easy, unaffected smile.

  “Well”—her soft gray eyes flicked down to the file in front of her—“Valentina Sergeevna, you look like you’re on needles, but I promise there’s no need to be nervous.”

  “It’s just I can’t believe I’m meeting you for real,” I said haltingly. “The Rodina changed my life. I can’t begin to explain how much it meant to me. Also, we didn’t count on there being so many people here. . . . We sort of don’t have a ride home.”

  “I’ll do my best to see that you don’t need one,” Raskova promised. “What can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to be a fighter pilot, but that was before I saw how much competition there was. Now I have no idea if I’ve got what it takes.”

  Raskova told me, “This isn’t a contest—it’s a chance to serve the Motherland. And what you need is five hundred hours of flight experience.”

  “Five hundred hours.” I whistled. “The boys in my aeroclub are getting drafted with sixty or seventy.”

  “And you think that’s unfair?”

  “Well, it is!”

  To my surprise, Raskova said, “You’re right, it is. But it’s the last unfairness. From here on, you’ll be treated exactly like the male regiments. You’ll wear the same uniforms, fly the same aircraft, and go on the same missions. But first you need five hundred hours in a powered aircraft.” She added, “If you don’t have enough hours, we’re training many pilots as navigators.”

  “Please don’t make me a navigator,” I begged.

  She said gently, “I’m trying my very best to meet everyone’s wishes, but everyone wants to be a pilot. We have a greater need for navigators. It might be more interesting than you think.”

  “I’m the world’s worst navigator.”

  “Well, how many hours do you have?”

  “Six hundred and eighty. All but fifty solo.” I paused a moment before asking, “But, um, what do you mean by ‘powered’?”

  That was the first and last time I saw Raskova caught off guard. “An aircraft with an engine . . . ?”

  “The plane physically had an engine in it. It just wasn’t always running.”

  She furrowed her brow. “What sort of plane was this?”

  “No idea,” I admitted. “I mean, it
’s a closed-cockpit four-seater monoplane with a nine-cylinder radial engine, and it has a steel body but a wooden wing, but we don’t have a clue what model it is or anything.”

  And then I was foolishly spilling the whole story of the Stakhanovo aeroclub. How a peasant in our oblast found it, with its paint peeling off, in a shed full of rusty parts. How we bought it for our aeroclub. How we fixed the broken variometer with a piece of tape. How the engine was temperamental and we couldn’t find replacement parts. How we figured out that it only stalled when you went into a shallow dive at exactly the right angle. How I became an expert at deadstick landings.

  Raskova was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You put in almost seven hundred hours in a plane without a fully operational engine.”

  “Yes.”

  “Or instruments.”

  “Yes.”

  “That you found in a shed.”

  “I didn’t find it. But yes.”

  Raskova covered her mouth with one hand and I realized with dismay that my future commanding officer was trying valiantly not to laugh at me. “You and your aeroclub sound equal parts resourceful and reckless.”

  “I’m completely flubbing this, aren’t I?” I sighed in resignation. I would return home in shame. The wager hardly mattered; I’d never be able to face Iosif Grigorevich after this.

  So I was completely blindsided when Marina Raskova said, “On the contrary! All day I’ve interviewed girls who can fly perfectly under perfect conditions, but if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that conditions at the front will never be perfect. I need airwomen who can handle themselves when everything starts going sideways. I have just the assignment for you. Congratulations, Officer Cadet Koroleva, you’re going to be a pilot.”

  I stifled an involuntary squeal by biting my fingertips and managed to squeak out a thank-you. In the flood of elation, I failed to note that she hadn’t specified that I would be a fighter pilot.

  Bouncing in my seat, I felt a weight in one of my coat’s big front pockets. I pulled out the battered, black-covered book with the image of the Rodina printed on it and asked timidly, “Will you sign your book for me? Please?”