Among the Red Stars Read online

  Then she flew. She took off smoothly, executed a tidy chandelle over the aerodrome, and made a light touchdown. It wasn’t a long flight or a flashy one, but it was carefully calculated to say that she knew what she was doing.

  The pyaterka aerobatic pilots followed her, their flights full of flashy aerobatic maneuvers. Raskova had nothing but praise for all of them. Waiting my turn and talking to the others, I discovered that I was the only pilot in Aviation Group 122 who had never flown a U-2. I found myself wondering if I would dominate as thoroughly as I’d expected.

  “Koroleva. My favorite bush pilot,” Raskova called when my turn came. When I hesitated, she said, “Go on. You can handle it, I promise. After the plane you learned on, this will be child’s play.”

  I approached the plane, trying to size it up. In the air, would it feel like our old beaten-up plane from the aeroclub? Would it respond to the controls the same way? I put a hand on its rough canvas surface. It lacked the cold bite of metal in the winter and it gave slightly under my touch. Not a wild pony, I decided, but a mule, slow and docile. I touched the propeller and spat. Then I noticed all the other pilots giving me funny looks. But Zhigli said, “Of course—for luck. I wish I’d thought of that.”

  I was relieved when I climbed in and found the same set of instruments I’m used to. I taxied slowly, sure I would bounce or make a mistake in front of everyone. So I looked away from the other pilots and pretended I was back home, flying for nobody but you.

  I’ve never flown an open-cockpit plane before. You don’t understand cold until the wind hits your bare face at 100 kilometers per hour (sky slugs are not exactly racing planes). My nose and lips went numb. If I fail at training and don’t qualify for the fighter regiment, I could end up stuck in one of these for the entire war.

  I told myself I wouldn’t spend my VVS career in a “crop duster.” I would fly brilliantly, better than Lilya, better than the aerobatic pilots, and I would end up in a sleek Yakovlev fighter.

  When I landed, Raskova was beaming. But my pride was replaced with dismay when she said, “Beautiful! I knew you’d be a natural with the U-2.” I don’t want her to think I’m best suited for a trainer!

  I couldn’t help being a little jealous of the navigators when I returned from my flight. They got to stay inside where it was warm less cold, mucking about with Vetrochets. A Vetrochet is a wedge-shaped slide rule of black-and-white Bakelite. The numbers are painted with radium so it can be used in the dark. It is a navigator’s best friend.

  Iskra refuses to let me complain. She says that I could have chosen to be a navigator.

  A forlorn thought just hit me. If I get the assignment I want, Iskra and I won’t fly together. Fighter pilots don’t have navigators. Four years of laughing at each other, arguing with each other, complaining to each other, and even occasionally encouraging each other will come to a sudden end. Who will take care of her? Who will keep her secret from getting out?

  First you and I were separated, and soon she and I will be. I thought I was taking control by coming here, but I still can’t prevent this war from separating me from all the people I care about.

  Yours,

  Valka

  21 November 1941

  Dear Valyuskha Valentina Sergeevna Koroleva,

  You worry so much about Iskra. I won’t tell you not to worry, because I know how much you care about her—and so do I. But I don’t think you need to be concerned about Lilya and Zhigli.

  Your comrades in the Red Army, not the commanders but the people you actually live and die with, are their own kind of family. I’ve heard things on the radio that could get a man summarily shot, but I’ve never repeated a word of it. I know your friends would be the same way if you would only trust them.

  Right now, half the talk on the radio is grumbling about the weather. It isn’t just you who’s noticed the cold. Pashkevich calls us wimps. Poor Rudenko is from Odessa, and he’s freezing his toes off.

  Amazingly, we’re pretty well outfitted with clothes. Now that all the mud has frozen solid, supply vehicles can come crunching down the icy roads, their chains sounding pale violet and brown. We have quilted coats and gloves and felt boots and fur-lined ushankas to keep our ears warm.

  Food is another matter. Have you noticed how much colder you feel when you’re hungry? We’ve got black bread in sufficient, if unpalatable, quantities, a little lard to spread on it, some hard sausage, and whatever we can scavenge, which is precious little at this time of year. Tea, salt, sugar, tobacco? Ha!

  Vakhromov taught me to make nettle tea. Growing up in the country during the food shortages, he learned all kinds of tricks we never learned in Stakhanovo, where coal dust chokes everything, even weeds.

  Today we took shelter from the snow in a big domed building that was a church long ago before it was turned into a community health center by the local Komsomol branch and then stripped bare by the fascists. Underneath cheap paint and the remains of ripped posters warning people to abstain from alcohol were shadowy hints of the saints who had once decorated the walls.

  As we entered the main room, Rudenko lagged behind the others and made a gesture from his forehead to his chest and then from his right shoulder to his left. A cross shape.

  I suddenly knew where I’d seen the symbols in his book before: in music history class, when we were learning about old forms of musical notation. It wasn’t a cipher. It was an Orthodox chant in Old Slavonic. And Rudenko wasn’t a fifth columnist. He was a believer.

  We put the radio in the onion-domed bell tower. The bells were missing, melted down for metals, probably. Icy light blue wind swept through the tower’s open windows and dusted the floor with snow. As we set up, stopping now and then to blow on our numb fingers, I told Rudenko what I’d figured out. He gave me a distrustful look and said, “It’s not against the law anymore.”

  I told him that I’d learned a bit about stolp notation in my music theory class and asked if I could see his book.

  He hesitated.

  I said, “We’re at the top of a tower and it’s freezing. No one will climb all the way up here to find out what we’re doing.”

  He slipped the book out of his kit bag. We brushed the snow out of the tower’s most sheltered corner and sat down side by side to look at the symbols.

  I said, “I can work out a bit of the melody, but I can’t read the words.”

  A trace of a smile played on Rudenko’s face. “I understand the words, but I can’t read the music! My grandmother knew Church Slavonic, but only men sang the Znamenny Chant, and there was no one to teach me, since the seminaries closed. I prayed that when they reopened the churches, they’d reopen the seminaries, too. I wanted to become a priest.”

  “What does it say?” I asked, touching the page lightly, as though I might damage it.

  “It’s open to the Christmas section. Have you ever celebrated Christmas?”

  I shook my head.

  “You should. You ought to see a church the way it’s meant to be, when the nave is bright with candles and incense is burning and the bells are ringing. You don’t know how wonderful it will be to hear that music again!”

  I warned him that I wouldn’t sound brilliant. “I only studied it for a few days. They told us it was obsolete.”

  Rudenko sighed. “Close enough. You Soviets have done a good job stamping out that sort of thing.”

  I didn’t like the way he said “you Soviets,” as though it was my fault.

  He read the words and I hummed the music and we figured out the tune together. The music is strange. Folk music, the kind we sang in choir, is humble and warm and familiar, like a hug and kiss from a friend. This . . . I don’t know how to describe it. Not cold exactly, but distant. Powerful. Something to be respected and maybe frightened of.

  Rudenko says the word I’m looking for is “reverent.” Do you know that word, Valka? It’s a church word. The book is full of new words, strings of melodic syllables that feel unfamiliar on my tongue. “Octoecho
s.” “Irmologion.” “Triodion.” They are sea blue and deep verdant and they sound like water running over rocks. This music has no place in our new world, but it’s sad to lose something old and beautiful, even if I don’t understand it.

  Yours,

  Pavel Kirillovich Danilin

  “Octoechos, irmologion, triodion,” I murmured to myself, as though by repeating the words I could make myself feel what Pasha felt. But to me they were only words. His world of colors was a locked garden to which I didn’t have the key.

  I was leaning against the wall of the mailroom. The mail had just come through and half the girls were there, reading their letters. Major Raskova had one from her daughter. She mentions her in Notes of a Navigator, but I could never quite accept her existence because the idea of Marina Mikhailovna Raskova changing diapers, or whatever else you do with babies, was so unfathomable.

  My friends were clustered around Zhigli and giggling. Iskra waved me over. “Come here, Valka. Zhigli’s got a bunch of photos from when she was a kid and they’re adorable.”

  I took a peek. There was one of her riding a black cavalry horse, and one of her as a little girl in a traditional Cossack dress with her hair done up with flowers and ribbons, and finally her, beaming, beside a glider.

  “I had to go to glider school at night because I was attending university and taking music classes in the daytime,” Zhigli explained. “But I did it—here I am!”

  “You don’t mind that you didn’t end up a pilot?” asked Lilya.

  Zhigli raised her chin. “Why would I mind? Navigators are an elite group. We’ve been to university, we’re intelligent, we’re well-read, and we have good manners.” She leaned heavily on the last phrase and eyed me and the other pilots.

  It had been a month and my initial fears about her were fading. If someone was going to rat out Iskra, there had been plenty of opportunities. Maybe Zhigli really was just another girl trying to follow her dreams and protect the Motherland. It was hard to consider someone a threat when I’d seen pictures of her playing dress-up.

  Our giggles died down as I noticed a girl standing apart from the rest of us and crying silently. It was Zhenya Rudneva, who everyone affectionately called Zhenechka, a cute blue-eyed girl in an impeccably neat uniform. She shared a name and position with Zhigli, but otherwise they were as different as two people could be.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked softly, looking down at the letter in her trembling hand. The news I most feared to receive filled my mind.

  “I-it’s from my astronomy professor,” she choked. “The observatory in Leningrad has been bombed. I was studying there.” Fresh tears trickled down her cheeks. “What happened to the sixty-five-centimeter refractor? The new solar telescope? The library with all those beautiful old books and manuscripts?”

  I looked away awkwardly, unable to think of anything to say that didn’t sound empty and forced. I had sought out the war, but the people of Leningrad had been thrust into it against their will. It tore me up, thinking about how many civilians died every day we spent in training. Hundreds? Thousands? We girls were in a bubble, shielded from the real war raging outside. The one Pasha was living in.

  I clutched my own letter and the knowledge that, as of two weeks ago, Pasha was safe. It was horribly selfish of me, but my concern for him made the rest of the war feel like an afterthought. It ate at me more and more every day that passed without a letter, and when one did show up, I walked on air for the rest of the day.

  Raskova came over to Zhenechka and put her hands on her shoulders. She had the words of comfort I couldn’t find. “You must be brave. There will be many more losses before this war is over.”

  “I’ll try,” said Zhenechka, wiping her cheeks with the heel of her hand. She smiled through her tears. “And I’ll dedicate my first bomb to avenging the observatory!”

  NINE

  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.