Night Witches

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  “Noch’ ved’m,” I whisper to myself as I crouch in the rubble of our apartment building and watch the searchlights scraping the night, looking for those tiny planes, the U-2 trainers. Tatyana and I had both learned to fly these light biplanes, their four wings made of wood and canvas. Open cockpit. No parachutes. In these fragile machines the women of the 588th Regiment harass the German Sixth Army. The engines purr so softly that the Germans call them “sewing machines.” But like small, sharp-beaked predatory birds, they will keep up the harassment until the dawn.

  The Germans set up the searchlights to defend their fuel depots, ammunition dumps, ground troops, and support vehicles—all tactical targets for our Russian army. But that won’t stop the Noch’ ved’m, the Night Witches of the 588th Regiment, who weave through the sweeping beams of light in the loom of the Stalingrad night. The young women who attack Hitler’s forces from the sky. My sister, Tatyana, is one of them. I might have been too, if I had lied about my age. But Mama wouldn’t let me lie. Although I’m only two years younger than Tatyana, my family has always treated me like I’m still a baby. They let Tatyana wear lipstick when she was twelve. But somehow, I was still “too young” at twelve. As for going downtown alone or with a friend, that wasn’t allowed until this summer, and then the Germans came and wrecked everything.

  Suddenly, there were Nazi soldiers on every street corner. They could stop you for no reason, and they loved to check young, pretty girls for weapons or cigarettes. It was not simply “frisking.” Groping would be a better word. But then the heavy tanks rolled in, and the lewd glances of the soldiers were replaced by sniper fire and heavy bombs. The shelling has been constant ever since.

  Mama is asleep now, beside me in this corner that we fashioned into a sleeping place. What was our living room is now strewn with bricks. One wall was blown out entirely two days ago. Three remaining walls still stand at right angles to one another. I stare at a calendar on one of the walls. How can a calendar be left? The bookshelves next to the calendar are in smithereens. Once, there were books all over our apartment, but now there are only fragments of pages that blow about like lost sheep scattered from their flock. For nearly two days I have tried to gather up some of these pages. It is a ridiculous task. If they aren’t torn, they are scorched. I cannot imagine what I will do with them.

  I spy another page, an illustration from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Glinda, the Good Witch of the South. She doesn’t have a broom. No U-2 aircraft either. The good witch travels in a luminous peach-colored orb of light wearing a flowing gown. Not like our Night Witches in their flight helmets and goggles, with pistols tucked into their belts. Instead of wands, they have 175 kilos of bombs tucked under each wing.

  As I bend over to retrieve the page with Glinda the Good Witch, I see my sister’s broken sports trophies nearby. I could never really equal my sister as an athlete, but my parents didn’t want me to feel bad, so they made up a certificate for me that read “Valya, you are the bright red star of our hearts.” In a funny way, that certificate made it worse. I remember Tatyana’s expression when they presented it to me at dinner that night. As Papa was making his little speech, there was a pitying smile on her face that said clear as any words that I would never be her equal, never quite catch up.

  I love my sister, don’t get me wrong. But her concern for me could be incredibly grating. Our biggest fight happened during the junior track meet when she tried to show me how she sailed over the hurdles. She had a particular way of jackknifing her knees up so she never grazed the boards. It worked for her, but not me. “It will,” she said. “When you get a little bit taller. Maybe a centimeter.”

  “That’s not the issue,” I snapped. I was tall for my age, and already nearly her height. “It won’t work. I am not a centimeter-smaller copy of you, no matter how badly everyone wants me to be.”

  In the next track meet, however, I did do well—very well. But no one paid one bit of attention to me. Why? Because in the event just before mine, the pole vault, Tatyana had broken the long-standing girls’ record for our school. Hardly anyone was there to witness my accomplishment. They were all over on the field where the pole vaulting took place. My best friend, Irina, was sitting in the bleachers practically all by herself, clapping her hands violently and whooping her lungs out.

  Tatyana had always outshone me in everything—except for flying.

  My sister and I had both learned to fly by the time we were twelve years old. Our father was head of the flight training program at Engels airbase, not far from Stalingrad. I’d flown Yak trainers, U-2s, and several others. It was not that unusual, as flying clubs had become very popular between the two wars. We were just very lucky to have a father who was not only a seasoned pilot but a major in the Russian air force renowned for his skillful instruction. Some pilots are great flyers but not especially good teachers. Our father was a great flyer and a great teacher.

  * * *

  I notice that not only is the calendar intact, but the pencil is still suspended on a string beside it. From where I am crouched, I can see that Mama made a mark on the calendar two days ago. That was the day Grandmother, my babushka, was killed. Why would Mama do that? Was the mark for my grandmother? A tombstone made with a pencil?

  She was killed by a roof timber that crashed when the Nazis dropped the bomb that took down the wall. Her head was smashed in on one side. And yet her face was remarkably unscathed. There was, however, a startled look in her eyes, as if she were asking “How could you do this to me?” Her limbs were all askew, like a marionette that had come loose from its strings. Her legs were broken in several places, and one leg from her knee down was bent back at a crazy angle. Somehow in the rubble, Mama found a lace-trimmed handkerchief and placed it over my grandmother’s eyes, as if she didn’t want Babushka to see the devastation of what had been her home for nearly thirty years. Then Mama bent over her with deep concentration and began to gently move her legs and arms, tending to this broken marionette. I made myself watch, pressing my hands against my mouth so I would not cry out loud. But Mama did not shed a tear. She just murmured softly to Babushka, as she had whispered to me when I had been a child with a high fever. “It’s all right, Mama, Lena is here. You’ll be right as rain tomorrow. Lena is here. Right as rain but the sun will shine.”

  Shortly after that the Germans seized our city. Like an invading herd of rabid beasts, the Nazi bombers turned the sky dark. First the Stukas—dive bombers—then the tanks. It was hard to believe even a mouse could have survived the bombardment, let alone human beings. The sound was so deafening for so long that Mama and I couldn’t hear each other for several hours.

  The sky is still brown from the dust and ashes of the bombing. Air-raid warning sirens rake our days and nights, along with the ceaseless bark of an urgent voice from our local Komsomol: “Air raid! Air raid!” But even the shelters h
ave been bombed and our neighborhood cratered out so that the exposed cellars offer no protection at all.

  A Komsomol unit comes routinely through our street to collect the bodies. They took Babushka away within hours. But they missed the horse in the pile of rubble with its legs sticking up in the air. Across the street from us, the entire block has been wiped out except for two buildings that lean shoulder to shoulder like two old cripples trying to prop each other up.

  A few blocks down the street, a main sewer line has been bombed. Now the stench from a vast pool of sewage engulfs the neighborhood. It’s hard for me to believe that just one month ago, the scent of cinnamon swirled through our apartment as Babushka’s summer pudding cake baked in the oven.

  Across the street from our apartment building, a wrecked panzer tank is serving as a refuge for two families. I witnessed a fight earlier when relatives from one of their families arrived wanting to move in, but they were turned away.

  A maple tree on the corner had just started to turn golden when, a few days ago, an explosion from a phosphorus bomb snagged it. The tree burst into flame—a pre-autumnal flare, precisely the color it would have been in another two weeks. Now it is a blackened corpse. It was the only tree on our block. Four months ago, I helped Mama plant pansies around its base. Mama believed that from every window in our apartment we should be able to see something lovely. But now the tree is gone. The object of our pride replaced by a new “pride”—the very unlovely Pak 38 antitank gun that our Red Army captured.

  I turn the calendar back three pages to June 22. That was the day the unthinkable occurred. The Nazis invaded Russia. Operation Barbarossa, they called it. The largest invasion force ever assembled in Europe burst like a tidal wave across the Soviet border. The nonaggression pact Stalin had signed with Hitler was made obsolete within the space of one morning. Over seven hundred Russian aircraft were instantaneously destroyed while still on the ground. Then came the official announcement over loudspeakers blasting throughout the city from Commander Molotov, commissar of foreign affairs: “Men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union.” His voice seemed to tremble. “At four a.m. and without declaration of war and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked out country.” We all froze. I can remember exactly where everyone was. Mama, Babushka, Tatyana, and I were all in the kitchen. Babushka was sitting reading a newspaper at the table with her magnifying glass. She recoiled suddenly, as though articles reporting Hitler’s gains in Slovakia and Bulgaria had leapt into life in front of her very eyes. She looked toward the door as if expecting a jackbooted Nazi to burst in. Mama was standing up turning the tuning pegs of her violin. The D string was off. Tatyana was about to bite into a vatrushka bun. It was the season for those delicious cherry-filled pastries.

  I was reading Huckleberry Finn for the third or fourth time. How I longed for his river! Our river, the Volga, was a wall the Nazis were pressing us up against. But that big, broad Mississippi was pure freedom. Huck says “in two seconds away we went a-sliding down the river, and it did seem so good to be free again and all by ourselves on the big river, and nobody to bother us.”

  How I wanted to slide away!

  Molotov’s voice continued, gaining strength as he spoke. “The government calls upon you, men and women citizens of the Soviet Union, to rally even more closely around the glorious Bolshevik Party, around the Soviet government and our great leader, Comrade Stalin. Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours.”

  I remember looking at Tatyana, then shifting my eyes to Mama. A secret signal seemed to crackle between them, as it always did right before Papa left for an undisclosed location—an airbase, undoubtedly, since he was a major. None of them ever included me in those looks. I’m not sure if it was to protect me or because they assumed I was too young to understand.

  Tatyana put down the bun, wiped her mouth, and reached for her pocketbook hanging on a peg. I got up to follow. Mama reached out and grabbed me.

  “No, not you!” she cried.

  I watched Tatyana head out. “Where is she going? The Komsomol?” I asked, referring to the student branch of the Communist Party.

  Mama’s face went pale. “Where is she going?” I repeated.

  “To the People’s Volunteers.”

  “The P-V?” I repeated, feeling a rush of excitement. “Then I’m going too. I’m also part of this war. I can fly. I don’t have to sit on the ground doing nothing.”

  “No, you’re not.” Mama’s fingers dug into my shoulder. “You’re too young. You don’t have the training yet.”

  “I scored higher than Tatyana on the Grade Three navigation test at Engels, and I was a year younger when I took it!”

  “I don’t care how high you scored. The only place you’re going is to the gastronom with me.”

  “The grocery store?” I stared at her. “Mama, please. I can help. I’m a great pilot, you know I am. Papa said so. His commanding officer, General Akiva, said so.”

  “Let your sister fly. We have to eat.”

  The anger that had been bubbling up in my chest turned to ash. They didn’t trust me. Didn’t believe in me. The Germans might’ve turned our world upside down, but some things would never change.

  We weren’t the only ones who’d decided to go to the store. The streets were chaos, and when we got to the grocery store, the line was blocks long. By the time we got home, Tatyana had returned and left again. Babushka was still at the table, tears running down her face. She turned to us. “She’s already left for training. She took her warmest jacket and I gave her my fur wrap,” she said dully.

  “Your fur wrap?” Mama repeated. “The one you wear to the opera?”

  “Yes. I doubt I’ll have use for it for quite a while. I told her to cut it up and line her boots. Winter will be here soon enough.”

  I looked down at the table. The half-eaten bun was still there, surrounded by crumbs. How could this all have happened so fast? In less time than it had taken me to eat my breakfast, my sister had gone off to war. Soon she’d be in the air, leaving me on the ground, as useless as a scattering of crumbs.

  Since that day, I have yearned for so much. I yearn for Babushka and the scent of summer pudding. I yearn for pansies. I yearn for Irina, my best friend. But I think she’s dead. She lived in the apartment building on Gorky Street that was destroyed. I’m not sure if I want to know if she’s alive, because if she’s dead, I can’t keep imagining our future. Irina and I had plans. Not big or important plans. Just small, silly plans. We were going to go to the store near the park where she heard they sold nail polish. We’d talked about going with Irina’s aunt, who worked at the state theater, to go see rehearsals. Irina hoped to be an actress. She always thought that perhaps a director would discover her, just like Lana Turner was discovered eating ice cream at something called a “soda fountain” when she was just sixteen years old. Not that we get to see many Hollywood movies. The Communist Party censors what is shown. We’d also been excited to go skating this winter. Irina and I both had new ice skates that we were eager to show off. There is a part of the Volga that freezes solid in January. Tea vendors and bakers sell food along the banks. Before last spring, we always had to go with our older sisters. Now we are finally allowed to skate on our own, and guess what happens? Our city is invaded by Nazis.

  But of all the things I want to do, I yearn to fly the most. My father didn’t just teach me how to read the instruments, he taught me how to fly beautifully, with skill and precision. How to initiate not just a turn but a lovely, efficient turn that carves the sky like a bird’s wings. How to “crab” for a crosswind landing. How to catch an updraft from a warming earth.

  To fly is to slip the cords of earth and join the sky. When you fly in an open cockpit like that of the U-2, you are wrapped in the wind. If you love a sunset, you become part of that sunset. You do not simply see the colors but feel them, as you feel the hush of the dawn steal into your soul when you fly east in the earliest h
ours of morning.

  Mama stirs. “Do you think Tatyana is out there in all that?” she asks, and strokes my arm. The Nazis have surrounded three sides of our city with searchlights and flak guns. These are precisely the targets that my sister and her fellow pilots in their tiny planes want to bomb. Mama is looking out at the threads of red light from the antiaircraft emplacements that fracture the night and the screams of artillery shells as they seek their targets. Each evening the belly of the sky is ripped wide open and the glistening entrails of the night spill out in a slime of fire.

  “Is she out there? Do you think so, Valya?” Mama asks again. She has her arm around my shoulder. I feel her fingers dig in, as if she is trying to hang on to me, the bright red star of her heart. But the other red star, the true red star, is out there in her tiny plane defending our city. I look up at the plumes of smoke rising from the bombed buildings.

  “Maybe,” I answer. “But dawn is coming. So not for long.”

  “You really wanted to go, didn’t you?” she whispers hoarsely.

  “It’s all right, Mama.” It’s not all right, of course. But I can’t tell Mama this now. She has lost so much: her own mother; my father, who is missing in action, maybe a prisoner of the Germans. Tatyana up there every night with a very good chance of dying. War is a time of giving up dreams, but it doesn’t seem fair to me because my dream is to fight. To fly. Flying is the one thing I do as well as Tatyana. In school, she took firsts in math, firsts in literature and chemistry. But I passed every flight test with top marks. I was a so-so math student, but when I took the flight-training navigational tests I didn’t make one mathematical error. When I was flying, everything came together for me.

  I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if we had gotten out of the city, across the river. But now there is no place else to go. We are pressed between the west bank of the river and the Nazis. It is said that they send one thousand planes a day to bomb us. It’s enough to break not just a city but the entire sky.

  “I know you could have flown as well as any of them,” Mama says. “But, darling girl, it also takes maturity to fly in combat. That’s why it is different for Tatyana. She is older. At her age she is more prepared to deal with the pressures of air combat.”