Among the Red Stars Page 4

  Raskova took the tape-repaired paperback, holding it carefully to keep the loose pages from falling out. She said, “This has been well loved.”

  “I’ve read it over and over. I dreamed that someday I’d have adventures like yours.”

  Raskova flipped open the book and took a fountain pen off her desk, but as she signed the title page in flowing cursive, she told me, “You won’t listen, but I’m going to tell you this anyway, because it’s important. Being lost in the taiga was not fun. It was not our plan. Everything turned out all right in the end—that time. But then, six months later, Polina was flying and there was another accident. And I lost a dear friend.” She closed the book and met my gaze as she handed it back to me. “Rise to adversity when it comes to you. Never seek it out. Don’t go to the front looking for adventure.”

  As predicted, I didn’t listen.

  SIX

  ONLY THE FAINTEST STRIPE OF BLUE GRAY ALONG THE western horizon broke up the darkness as we assembled on the platform the next morning. The train station was packed. Some people clung to evacuation orders, some to nothing but wild hope. People slept directly on the concrete, indistinguishable from the untidy bundles of luggage surrounding them. The luckiest evacuees secured seats in the few passenger cars, but most were cramming into freight trains. Fistfights broke out. When the boxcars couldn’t hold any more, desperate refugees climbed on top of them or hung on to the ladders on the sides.

  By contrast, we, the lucky three hundred and eighty newly minted members of Aviation Group 122, made our platform look almost empty. Infantrymen guarded the sides of the platform, throwing off anyone who tried to climb the black iron fence.

  We had unconsciously begun to sort ourselves. The pilots led the way, attempting to march despite their feet slipping around in oversized black boots; they were followed by the navigators, then the mechanics and armorers.

  Iskra turned on her heel one way and the other as she walked and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Iskra Ivanovna Koroleva modeling the newest fashion for autumn.”

  Her sleeves were long enough to cover her hands and her trousers bunched around her boot tops. She had the brown leather belt cinched as tight as it would go to give herself the semblance of a waist. Raskova had told the truth: we were wearing the same uniforms as the men, right down to the underwear. I laughed. “You look like a sack of potatoes. But, I mean, a fashionable sack of potatoes.”

  Iskra pouted. “You, on the other hand, have never cared how you looked, and your uniform fits. It’s a gross injustice.”

  I said, “What I want to know is how you got out of Raskova’s office so fast. You were in there for about two minutes. What did you say to her?”

  “I told her I wanted to be a navigator,” said Iskra smugly. “She practically kissed me.”

  Three girls stood by the door of one of the boxcars; they were surrounded by a tight knot of admirers.

  “We aren’t even at the base yet and we already have a popular set,” said Iskra. “Who are they?”

  I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of their faces and gasped. “You’re kidding me—it’s the pyaterka! The aerobatics team! I didn’t know they’d enlisted!” I’d seen photos of them in the paper. They were famous for their flashy flying tricks. A feeling of inadequacy washed over me. “I’m not going to be the best pilot in this aviation group by a long shot.”

  “It’ll be a good experience for you,” said Iskra.

  We teased each other until we reached the nearest boxcar. Its dim, close interior was covered with thin mattresses and filled with a low cacophony of voices. I looked around at the other girls.

  I’d made it into Aviation Group 122, but the fight wasn’t over yet. Later in our training, we’d be divided into three regiments. If I was lucky, I’d be assigned to the fighter regiment and become one of Stalin’s falcons, screaming out of the sky onto the enemy aircraft that were laying waste to our Motherland. If I wasn’t lucky, I’d be assigned to the less glamorous day bomber regiment, the workhorses of the VVS. And if I was woefully unlucky, I’d end up in the night bomber regiment. Pilots in that regiment didn’t even get proper warplanes, just trainers retrofitted to hold a few bombs. There was no glory in store for them, even if their flimsy planes didn’t all get shot down in the first week.

  Every girl who made it into the fighter regiment meant one spot less for me. But right now we all shared the same electric anticipation, and it was hard to think of them as competition.

  Two spots in the back had been claimed by a couple of blond girls who were already talking and laughing as if they’d known each other for ages.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” one of the blondes, a petite girl with confident blue eyes, asked the other.

  “South, to Engels,” the other replied. “I got that from the chief of staff, along with an admonition about how to address a superior officer.”

  “It’ll be a long trip, then.”

  Iskra claimed a mattress near them. I had just done the same when the train started, with a luggage-scattering jerk.

  The first blonde, her face bright, announced, “If we’re going to spend days in a boxcar together, we’d better get acquainted. This is Zhenya Zhigulenko. As there are sure to be a hundred Zhenyas in our aviation group, I’m calling her Zhigli. She’s a navigator, but don’t hold that against her. I’m Lidiya, but everyone calls me Lilya, as in, ‘I wish I could fly as well as Lilya.’”

  I decided on the spot that, competition be damned, I liked these girls. “We’ll see about that. My name’s Valka and this is my cousin Iskra.”

  “Iskra—‘Spark.’ That’s a neat nickname. Very Soviet. How did you get it?” asked the girl called Zhigli. She was an athletic, long-legged Cossack with striking dark lashes rimming her eyes.

  “My parents wrote it on my birth certificate,” said Iskra.

  Zhigli raised one neatly shaped eyebrow. “That isn’t a real name.”

  Lilya furrowed her brow at Zhigli. “You told me that your father got his name by buying a passport off a disabled man.”

  “Well, yes, but that’s different. He was avoiding the draft during the Civil War.”

  “Resourceful yet unpatriotic,” said Iskra.

  “No,” Zhigli told her flatly. “He did what he needed to survive. Going to war to rebuff an invading fascist army is patriotic. There’s nothing patriotic about Russians killing Russians, White or Red.”

  “What, someone can’t be a threat because they were born here?” snapped Iskra. “Have you never heard of wreckers? Or fifth columnists? Our worst threats aren’t from the outside. There are . . .”

  Lilya’s sunny expression had deserted her. Tension filled the air and I eyed Iskra uneasily. My cousin, who was just getting started, didn’t notice.

  “Girls!” I exclaimed. “I’m going to be stuck in this train with you for days. I won’t listen to arguments the whole time. The next person who mentions politics is getting thrown out.”

  Lilya relaxed imperceptibly.

  Brakes screeched and the train came to a halt again. A chorus of annoyed voices arose from all over the boxcar.

  “What’s the trouble?” asked Iskra.

  “No idea,” said Lilya. “Valka, you look tall. Can you see what’s going on out there?”

  I could just hook my fingers over the bottom edge of the boxcar’s lone small window. Bracing a leg against the corner of the car, I got one forearm and then the other over the sill. The cold outside air met my face. I peered out across the maze of tracks. “We’re letting another train by.”

  “Other troops?”

  “No, evacuees.”

  “Those poor people,” said Zhigli. “They’ll never get them all out of Moscow in time.”

  “They’ll be all right,” said Iskra. “Moscow won’t fall as long as Stalin is there to keep it together. You’ll see.”

  “Yes, she’s always like this,” I informed my new friends as I released my grip and dropped lightly to the floor.


  Zhigli said, “If it’s fated to fall, it’ll fall, and no one will be able to stop it.”

  Lilya unbuttoned her comically oversized tunic and held it up. “Well, if we’re stuck on this train for days, we need to alter these uniforms. I don’t want to show up at Engels looking frumpy.”

  “I’ll help you if you’ll do mine next,” Zhigli offered.

  “Deal.” Lilya riffled through her kit bag, producing two emery boards, a wildflower identification book containing several pressed specimens (“Lilies for Lilya!” exclaimed Zhigli), and finally a sewing kit. She began snipping open the seams of her tunic with a small pair of gold sewing scissors shaped like a bird. Zhigli accepted a packet of pins.

  “Who cares how your uniform fits?” I asked. “We’re going to war, not to a beauty pageant.”

  The other three girls gaped at me as though I’d kicked a puppy. Zhigli explained with quiet gravity, “We might meet boys at Engels. Handsome boys in uniform.”

  “Zhigli. All. Women’s. Aviation. Group.”

  “It isn’t an all women’s city. There will be boys somewhere.”

  “The odds have to be better than in Stakhanovo,” said Iskra. “Of course, given that boxcars don’t have showers, we won’t be presentable when we get there, no matter how well tailored our uniforms are.”

  “Disgusting. We’ll never survive,” mumbled Zhigli around a mouthful of pins.

  Lilya patted her hair. “I’ll need to touch up my roots soon, too. I wonder where to get peroxide on an air force base.”

  “From the hospital, if you can live with the knowledge that you stole it from wounded soldiers,” said Iskra.

  “All’s fair in hair and war,” said Zhigli.

  “If you wanted to meet boys,” I insisted, “you should have become nurses. As airwomen, we might never even see them.”

  “Nonsense.” Zhigli took the pins out of her mouth and gestured evocatively with them. “Perhaps I’m forced to make an emergency landing at another airfield. All the male pilots rush up to my plane. I gracefully alight from the cockpit. I take off my flight helmet and shake out my long golden hair.” She fluttered her black lashes and tossed her braid over her shoulder. “Then and there, every one of them falls in love with me.”

  “I take it back,” I said. “You shouldn’t be a nurse. You should be a writer.”

  The train still hadn’t moved. Lilya complained, “The war will be over by the time we get to Engels.”

  I looked over at Iskra, who shifted uncomfortably. I squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t worry. No one will be measuring the train to make sure it’s a hundred kilometers from Moscow.”

  Only when I heard Zhigli quietly draw in her breath did I realize what I’d said. Around Stakhanovo I didn’t need to be careful about mentioning Iskra’s secret because everyone already knew. I looked helplessly at my cousin, feeling the blood drain from my face. “Oh my god, I didn’t mean to . . .”

  Iskra threw up her hands, more in resignation than in anger. “Thus ends the world’s shortest military career. It would have happened sooner or later.”

  Zhigli scooted to the far end of her mattress as though treason were contagious. She said to me, “You’re . . .”

  “No,” said Iskra. “Not her.”

  Zhigli’s uneasy gaze slid from me to my cousin.

  Lilya said quietly, “Someone was taken from you.”

  “My parents,” said Iskra in her matter-of-fact way.

  “What happened?” asked Lilya. Not “What did they do?” but “What happened?”—as if it were an accident or a natural disaster.

  Iskra shrugged. “They were wreckers. They got caught.”

  I explained, “You remember the 1937 census? They were part of it.”

  In 1937, Iskra’s letters from Moscow burst with enthusiasm about our young nation’s first-ever census. Her father was compiling maps for the census bureau, and her mother had been dispatched to the Ukraine as head statistician for an entire oblast. “It’s a major responsibility,” one letter crowed. “Life is better under Communism, and my family will help prove it!”

  Then the results came in. According to the census, the USSR wasn’t prosperous and growing. It was struggling to even keep the population level, and the Ukraine had it worst of all. The official response was that the data had been doctored to make the whole Soviet project appear a failure, but I remembered when Stakhanovo had been overrun with peasants fleeing their barren farms to escape starvation. Recalling their colorless faces, I couldn’t believe that the country was thriving, as Stalin claimed.

  Someone had to take the blame. The arrests began with the chief of the census bureau and worked their way down. The NKVD—the secret police—came for Iskra’s mother a few months later, and because of her, they also came for Iskra’s father, even though he had only drawn maps.

  Zhigli’s look softened into what might have been sympathy. “Wrong place, wrong time. That’s rough.”

  “How long did they get?” asked Lilya.

  “Ten years without right of correspondence.” Iskra said it with the casual indifference of someone talking about missing a boat or failing an unimportant exam.

  Lilya’s eyes widened. She put her hand lightly on top of Iskra’s. “I am so, so sorry.”

  Not being able to write to one’s parents was harsh, but that seemed like an overreaction. Iskra apparently agreed. She drew back her hand. “Stop looking at me like I’m a lost baby animal. They were arrested, they got a fair trial, and they were punished. Justice was served.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To redeem your family name?”

  “No. I’m fighting to defend the Motherland, same as you.”

  “Same as me.” Lilya sounded distant. “I suppose so.”

  Zhigli said, “We shouldn’t be talking to you. You understand that, don’t you? I know it sounds mean, but we could all get in trouble. She shouldn’t even be with you.” She nodded at me. “Her aunt and uncle are already a black mark on her record. Associating with you will only make it worse.”

  Anger rose in my chest and I leaped to my cousin’s defense. “So, what, are you going to turn her in for a pat on the head? Because you’re perfect and the rest of us are smudging your record?”

  “I didn’t say that! I just—”

  “Before we all overreact, did anyone else hear?” asked Lilya.

  I looked over my shoulder. The rest of the girls seemed happily absorbed in their own conversations. “I don’t think so.”

  Lilya nodded, unquestioningly allying herself with us. “Let’s keep it that way. Zhigli, can we trust you?”

  Zhigli thought for a moment too long before replying. “Lilya. Valka. You’re pilots. I could be your navigator. And Iskra. You could be my flight navigator or I could be yours. When we’re on a mission and our lives depend on each other, we won’t have the luxury of caring about whose relatives were arrested, or who knows whose secrets. Yes, you can trust me.”

  Although her speech sounded sincere, or maybe because it did, I wasn’t entirely convinced. But Lilya said, “Good,” and then the two of them went back to work altering Lilya’s uniform.

  As Zhigli held up a piece of Lilya’s tunic, an envelope fell out of the front pocket. “What have we here?”

  “It’s none of your business,” said Lilya, making a grab for it.

  Zhigli snatched it away. “Is it a picture of your boyfriend? Your childhood sweetheart, left behind tearfully waving a handkerchief as his ladylove departed for the front?” That got all our attention. Iskra and I joined in, passing the envelope from hand to hand.

  “Give that to me!” yelped Lilya. “I can take all of you!”

  But she couldn’t. There was a brief scuffle during which I received an unaimed but possibly deserved kick to the face, and then we overpowered the smaller girl while Zhigli took the photo out of the envelope. She unfolded it with great ceremony, announcing, “Ladies and . . . ladies, I am pleased to announce that Lilya’s secret boyfriend is . . .
Marina Raskova. I was not expecting that.”

  I released my glowering captive and looked over Zhigli’s shoulder. Sure enough, it was the same photo as in my newly signed book.

  “Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak, I hereby find you guilty of the extremely sentimental possession of your idol’s photograph,” Iskra announced, to the amusement of all the onlookers.

  Lilya raised herself onto her elbows and retorted, “Well, I find you—”

  Just then the inside of our car brightened as the rusty door slid open. “What are you girls up to?”

  The four of us looked up and found ourselves looking at Raskova herself.

  We froze for an instant and then dissolved into giggles. I collapsed onto the floor, snickering helplessly.

  Zhigli recovered first and, pointing at Lilya, managed to choke out, “She keeps a picture of you in her pocket!” Remembering that she was in the military, she tardily added, “Ma’am.”

  “She does?” Raskova took the proffered photograph. I thought she blushed a little. “That’s . . . actually very flattering.”

  She returned the photo to Lilya, turned to me, and asked, “Koroleva, you look like you’ve been in battle already. What happened?”

  I gingerly touched the beginnings of a beautiful black eye. Lilya hastened to explain, “It was an accident.”

  “Yes, your boot accidentally met my face.”

  “I see,” said Raskova mildly. “Seeing as it will be another six months before you girls are cleared for combat, let’s keep boots away from faces for the remainder of the journey, shall we? Less horseplay and more rest. You’ll need it; this is the last downtime you’ll have for a long while. Now, if everyone can hear me all right, we’ll go over some military regulations on our way to Engels.”

  Eyeing us, Lilya muttered, “You’re all on my list.”

  Iskra, Zhigli, and I exchanged looks, biting our lips and trying not to laugh. And just like that, we were once again four new friends on a train.

  SEVEN

  26 October 1941