Night Witches

  She looks up at me. “I do.”

  There’s a fierce light in her eyes, and I know my cause has become Galya’s completely.

  She and I begin planning immediately. Our first step is to stash a rucksack with helmet, goggles, and a flight jacket, so when we rescue Tatyana she’ll be dressed as a pilot or a navigator and not in a prison suit. We measure the cockpits. They’re each made for one person only, but we’ll squeeze her in somehow. She’s probably rail thin after all these months in a prison camp, I think grimly.

  A few hours later, Galya and I take off along with other U-2s being sent to defend the bridgeheads. We spend the majority of the next few days in the sky, chasing away the Germans trying to destroy these crucial targets. Some of the other pilots succumb to exhaustion, but thinking about Tatyana keeps me going. The sooner we dispel the Germans, the sooner I’ll be able to leave and rescue her.

  One morning, shortly after we land from a night’s work, Galya comes out of the chart room, where the navigators often gather, and calls out, “Want to do a compass check?”

  I know immediately what she means and head back toward our plane.

  She unfolds a map. Not a navigation chart, but a map showing a large complex. “This is the camp,” she says quietly. “And take a look at this.” She jabs her finger at a spot on the map. “It’s the infirmary where Tatyana is.”

  My eyes widen in disbelief as I look up at her. “How did you get this?”

  “Don’t ask. I’m putting it back as soon I can. Look at it now and remember it.”

  “Where’s your calculation board?”

  “Right here.” She reaches into the cockpit pouch behind her seat.

  I begin sketching madly. “Don’t try to copy the whole plan of the camp,” she cautions me.

  “I won’t. Just this area.”

  What Galya did was terribly dangerous. The charts are not supposed to leave the chart room. The bridgehead charts, of which there are many, are kept under lock and key until needed. I’m not sure how she managed this. But I am grateful.

  “When do you want to get her?” Galya asks. “I heard the Germans are evacuating their prison camps. She might not be there for much longer.”

  “Tonight,” I say. “After our mission. Instead of coming back to the base, we’ll head to the camp.” I pause, suddenly realizing how much I’m asking of Galya. “Or I can go by myself. It’s close enough that I can get there without a navigator.”

  “You’re not going anywhere without me,” Galya says. “I’m in. Tonight it is.”

  As Galya and I taxi down the field, I feel a mixture of excitement and dread. I’m going to find my sister, but if we’re caught, all three of us could be executed as traitors—me, Tatyana, and Galya. Talk about being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea—a favorite expression of my mother’s. But there is no sea, just sky, and it’s not blue. A fog is thickening. I just thank God that Galya is my navigator, my human calculator, which makes her almost as powerful as Superman with his X-ray vision. We, Galya and I, are the designated first-strike plane. Like the canary in the coal mine, we see how low we can dive with the first bomb load without getting knocked out by the blowback. If it works, Bershanskaya and two other pilots will swoop down.

  There’s no radio communication between our U-2s, only intercoms between pilot and navigator. Galya’s voice crackles through the earphones. “Hello, Skipper,” she says calmly. “Point five kilometers to target. Wind speed fifteen kilometers per hour. South by southeast. Holding heading two forty to maintain course. Altimeter twelve hundred meters, beginning descent now … Point two, take her down, Skipper.”

  I throttle back and begin a long, slow glide. How far will we dive? When will the canary breathe the poison? It won’t be deadly fumes, just a terrible shuddering as the air convulses around us, shattering our fragile plane, ripping our chute packs from our backs, tearing our limbs from our bodies. My hand is sweaty on the stick as I keep pushing it forward. The nose tips down farther. My eyes are on the altimeter. We are grazing the six-hundred-meter limit. “Bomb latches disengaged, Skipper.”

  “Copy, Galya.”

  “Speed, Skipper?”

  “Throttling back to cruise speed, sixty knots.”

  “Marked!” Galya says calmly. And I can feel the lurch as she releases the bombs. I pull back on the throttle and head straight up, accelerating to max speed. The plane shudders. There are many names for this shuddering blowback from bombing raids—some call it the devil’s throat, or the maw of the winds, but we Night Witches call it the cat’s cradle. But so far there are still wings on the plane. The propeller is still spinning, ailerons intact. Fifteen seconds later there is another shuddering explosion.

  “Geronimo!” Galya yells. Bershanskaya must have made her hit. When I look down I see a carpet of flames engulfing the landscape. “We did it! We did it! Look, there’s Bershanskaya’s plane. She made it! Made it out of the cat’s cradle.”

  Almost, I think, for just as Bershanskaya’s plane dissolves into a fog bank, I see something off to the port side.

  “Jesus Christ!” Galya swears.

  A German fighter plane has just emerged from the same fog. Probably missed Bershanskaya completely, but it had us in its sights. It’s a Focke-Wulf, flying right at us. The nose of the plane lights up as he fires. I dive and then bank into a steep slide slip. I can still hear him firing. Tracer bullets like hail ping off our fuselage as we are pummeled. I cut the speed. He overshoots us. I see the swastika smeared across the night. But then my breath locks.

  “He’s coming back!” Galya’s shouts nearly blast my ears off. I can see the Focke-Wulf coming confidently toward us. He owns the space and he knows it. My mind races desperately for a plan. Our only weapon is slowness. The tortoise must win this race. I work the rudder pedals madly to tip the craft this way and that to throw off his aim. He overshoots us again.

  I feel Galya shift behind me. She’s on her knees getting ready to fire the machine gun. With rear-mounted guns it limits our range. Can’t shoot forward, only back or sideways. We’re still a sitting duck. I push on the rudder pedal, begin to decelerate, then go for full rudder. “We’re cartwheeling!” I shout. “Fire when we come up.”

  “Ready, Skipper.” I hear the chak chak chak of the machine-gun fire. As the Focke-Wulf flashes by, I can see the pilot. He actually salutes me. But he’s in no position to fire.

  “Outta ammunition?” Galya gasps.

  No such luck; he performs a steep banking turn and comes up under us. But I quickly peel away and plunge beneath him. It’s the same maneuver I did in the Yak-7 that I flew to the temporary airbase. The German pilot fires but it’s too late. He’s far above us. We hear the bullets tattooing the nothingness of the night sky.

  “Shoot the moon! Nazi bastard!” Galya fumes.

  “How many rounds do those Folke-Wulf artillery guns carry?”

  “Not sure, Skipper. But he might be coming back.”

  Everything seems so quiet now after the explosions of the ammo depot and the strafing from the Focke-Wulf. It’s somewhat miraculous that although we were peppered with bullets, no serious damage was done.

  “He’s not going to go where we’re going.” I made the decision when I came out of the last loop. The conditions are perfect. The moon is just winking out as a cloud cover comes in. It’s my favorite type of fog—layered. One sees this kind of layering in the mountains or sometimes by the sea, a strata of clear air between layers of fog. A fog sandwich. And we are cozy as butter between two slices of bread.

  It’s time for us to find my sister.

  Galya guides us in the right direction. The layers of fog dissolve, revealing the stars. I gasp. There they are again: Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, burnishing the belt of Orion. She’s near, I think. She’s near!

  I climb up and at twelve hundred meters begin a banking turn.

  “The POW camp is up there on the left. Are you ready to go in?” Galya asks.

  My heart i
s beating so fast, I can barely speak, but manage a faint “yes.”

  * * *

  Tatyana shivered in the snow. It was just a matter of time before she would be shot. She knew it. Either the Germans would recapture her and shoot her on sight, or her own forces would capture her and execute her as a traitor. She braced for shouts, but there was just the howl of the wind. The entire world seemed to have been bleached into nothingness. She was uncertain if she was right side up or upside down in this ditch. But if she just stayed she would freeze to death. She had to move.

  She began to scrabble her way out on her hands and knees. Crawling forward, she wiped the snow from her face. Her fingers touched the pit where her right eye had been before she had crashed those long months ago. The last thing she wanted to do was to catch up with the Nazis who had imprisoned her. Was she free of them at last?

  The order for evacuation had come shortly before the Red Army’s bombardment of the nearby ammunition depot. With the Russians coming nearer, German high command ordered that the camp near Elbing on the Vistula Lagoon be evacuated. The evacuation started ten hours before the bombardment began. The sound was deafening. Tatyana had wondered if the Night Bombers were part of this offensive. It would have been just their kind of mission. Five hundred or more of the prisoners, many Russians, Jews, and Roma people, had been staggering along rutted roads for hours. Several had died along the way. Several had been shot trying to escape. But as the Germans grew more frantic and weather worsened, Tatyana had found the perfect moment to run. And that’s just what she did. She ducked out of the line of prisoners and sprinted for her life.

  Tatyana blessed the whiteness of the snowy night, the complete silence. Still with no stars to guide her and only one eye to see them if they were there, she had to figure out which way was east, which direction would take her back to the Motherland and to her sister. She felt an unusual calmness steal over her as she gradually realized that she was in fact alone—completely alone for the first time since her capture. There was always noise in the camps: the barking of the guards, the announcements over the bullhorns, the Aufseherinnen, the matrons, stalking up and down the lineups, scowling, screaming orders, their crops raised ready to smack. They seemed to delight in smacking Tatyana near her pitted eye socket. She’d damaged her eye when she crashed, and the German doctors hadn’t tried particularly hard to save it. There was hardly a day when it had not bled.

  But now there was no blood. And there were no beatings, only this beautiful quiet world turned white with fog and silence. Perhaps this was death. It was so peaceful. Yes, I have died. All this time fearing death, but now it was here. It’s come for me, just like in the poem by Emily Dickinson that she had so loved and won an award for in translation.

  She sank to her knees, curling up to slip into the sublime slumber of that immortality. My carriage is the white night, no haste I am at leisure.

  But something began to disturb this sweet passage, like a gnat, the annoying sibilance of a mosquito on a hot summer night. She forced her single eyelid open. It can’t be … The sound was closer. It came like a soft hum now. She sat up. Her carriage had disappeared. The whiteness was gone. She looked up and saw three stars in Orion’s Belt, and just beneath the tip of his sword, she could see in a shaft of bright moonlight a small aircraft. The hum of its engine purred in the night. It could only be a U-2.

  Tatyana couldn’t believe it. She jumped up and began waving her arms. The shaft of moonlight striped the ground. She ran toward it, flailing her arms, kicking up snow like small geysers. The antic shadows of her wild frolic sprinted across the band of moonlight.

  * * *

  “Look,” Galya says over the microphone. “There’s a long line of people marching. It must be the prisoners they’re evacuating.”

  She’s right. I squint, but the people are too far away to see distinctly. It’s impossible to count the number of guards. I blink, then catch sight of something moving below, trailing behind the others by half a mile or so. My heart stops. “Galya, I knew it! I knew it. Look, there’s a person down there. It’s her. It’s Tatyana.”

  “I see a shadow, but how do you know it’s Tatyana?”

  “I just do. Trust me.”

  “But how can we land? There’s snow down there. It looks deep.”

  “It’s not so deep where she is. It must be a road. Get ready. We’ll make one pass to warn her and then we’ll land.” I glance at the fuel gauge. “Correct that. We’re landing now. Not enough fuel to make a pass. Just enough to get back to base with this tailwind.”

  I start a banking turn and head into the wind. Easing back on the throttle, I cut my speed to barely above stalling. I feel us touch down, and then we stop abruptly. The snow is deep. No matter; I’ll think about takeoff later.

  The gaunt figure begins walking toward us as I climb out of the cockpit.

  “Valya!” The sound scratches the air. But it’s not just a sound in this long night of an endless war. It is my name. My sister is calling my name.

  “Tatyana!”

  We both break into a run and fall into each other’s arms. She is shaking violently, though I’m not sure if it’s from cold or crying. I can feel her sharp bones under her ragged cloak. I tear off my flight jacket and stuff her into it. We embrace again. I can feel her tears and mine mingling as we press our faces together. But I also feel something else. There is something different about her face as it presses against mine. I draw my head back, stunned by what I see, or don’t see.

  “I lost it in the crash,” Tatyana says, trembling. “But it could have been worse.”

  “Worse? You mean you could have died.”

  “Yes, that.” She smiles crookedly.

  “Quick, let’s get you into the plane,” Galya says. “Then we’ll have to clear something for a runway. This snow is deep.”

  We help Tatyana into the rear cockpit, giving her our chocolate bars to eat while Galya and I go to clear the snow. We have to clear off two hundred meters of it in order to be able to take off.

  I look at Galya and mutter, “It’s a lot of snow. How are we going to do this?” But Galya is not looking at me, but the plane. She has what I call “that look.” She is calculating.

  “Your sister probably doesn’t weigh more than, what? Thirty-five kilos?”

  “You’re thinking about fuel, right?”

  “Not just fuel. Look at our bomb racks.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re not just bomb racks.”

  “Huh? What are they if they aren’t just bomb racks?”

  “You think we can just scuff this snow away and clear two hundred meters for takeoff with our hands and feet? We can use the racks as snowplows. Or scrapers.” My eyes widen. I look at the frame of the bomb racks. They are perfect for scraping off snow.

  Galya runs for the toolbox and together we start dismantling the racks.

  Once we start pushing the snow aside, we realize that the footsteps of the retreating prisoners have packed down most of it, so our work is a little easier. Tatyana tries to help but we won’t let her. It takes us close to an hour to clear the new snow. By the time we climb back in the plane, Tatyana is curled up sleeping in the rear cockpit. I stare at her face. The scar boils up diagonally across the left side of her face. She opens her right eye and looks at me.

  “Shrapnel,” she says quietly. “Do I scare you?”

  “Never!” I lean over my seat and kiss her forehead. Galya and Tatyana are squashed in the rear cockpit. The weight seems fine as we taxi, and a minute later we are lifting off into a clear starry night. The fuel gauge is hovering barely above empty. I think our approach glide is done on fumes.

  But we make it.

  Commander Yevdokiya Bershanskaya sways slightly as she stands by her desk, staring at us in disbelief. Tatyana is propped up between Galya and me. If she weighs thirty kilos, I would be surprised.

  “What is this?” she whispers.

  “Tatyana Petrovna Baskova, reporti
ng for duty.” Tatyana makes a sound halfway between a gasp and a chuckle.

  Bershanskaya comes out from behind her desk and folds Tatyana into her arms, then leads her to a chair.

  “Sit down, the three of you.” I can almost see the gears of her brain working behind the intense green eyes. “This is going to be our story. We found you not today but months ago, staggering east, toward the Urals, as all good Russian soldiers are supposed to do in order to evade capture by the Nazis. You had been hiding out all the time, surviving in the woods, stealing from farms, whatever. We need not get too detailed. Serafima Krutosky and her navigator, Elena Pashuka, picked you up.”

  “But they’re dead,” I say.

  “That’s the point,” Bershanskaya says evenly. “I’ll alter the records.”

  “But … but … ,” Tatyana begins to stammer. “But what about the others?”

  “The other Night Bombers?” Tatyana nods. “Is that what you want to know? Will they rat you out? Never! They are steadfast. You see, one of the things that bind us is this dirty little secret—the NKVD and SMERSH. But now we have a sweet little secret to protect. And that is you.”

  * * *

  The sweet secret is kept. A week later Tatyana climbs back in a U-2 and takes her first flight. A few months after that, she is leading a squadron. We’re flying raids in east Prussia, supporting the allied American and British forces who had started the bombing of Berlin in February. On April 30, Hitler commits suicide in a bunker fifty-five feet beneath the chancellery in Berlin.

  The war ends officially on May 8, 1945. We are at an American airbase when it happens. But for many Russians, the war does not really end. Or rather a new one begins. The Yalta Conference in February had a provision requiring that all prisoners of war and displaced persons be returned to their home countries, whether they wanted to go or not. For many Soviets it meant imprisonment or death.