Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(45)

On the other side of me Irina asked in a bored voice, ‘What did the f*cking Rabbit say about me?’

‘She told me not to talk to you.’

They had a brief argument in Russian (I think), spitting and hissing like a pair of cats.

‘Fucking Poles,’ Irina said to me in French.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did you say? What did she say?’

‘Fucking Russians,’ Ró?a half-translated. (Ró?a taught me to swear like a sailor in about half a dozen European languages. The Polish students from Lublin spoke everything. It made me feel so stupid sometimes, this uneducated American who could only speak English and barely scrape by in French.)

‘Go ahead and talk to her,’ Ró?a sneered permission. ‘Witch. That’s what the Germans call those Soviet girl pilots – Nacht Hexen. Night witches. Go ahead and listen to her propaganda.’

I couldn’t imagine what kind of propaganda I was going to get from a girl who’d been in prison so long it had turned her hair white. In all the time I knew Irina, I never heard her say the words ‘communist’ or ‘party’ without turning away from me and spitting. But most of the Russian women at Ravensbrück were Red Army soldiers. Irina was a little different.

Her lanky height and hollowed face and white crew cut gave her the look of a grim, battle-worn king – Macbeth, maybe – someone competent and ruthless and experienced.

‘I’m not a Night Witch,’ Irina murmured low in my ear. ‘I never flew those tired old sewing machines except when I was training students. I am in Soviet Air Force 296 Regiment, based at Stalingrad. Men and a few women, flying Yaks, chasing together.’

‘Chasing together?’ I pictured a school dance, everyone running around after other people’s partners. ‘Chasing what?’

‘Chasing the Fascists.’ She always said ‘the Fascists’ when she was talking about the Germans. ‘Chasing Fascist aircraft.’

The French word doesn’t mean chasing – it means hunting. Irina was a hunter pilot. In English we say fighter, not hunter.

She was a combat pilot.

I was so thrilled it took my breath away. It was like meeting Amelia Earhart. Irina was a woman, and a fighter pilot.

‘What’s your score?’ I asked breathlessly.

She hesitated, trying to think of the right word. ‘Eleven?’

‘Eleven?’

That couldn’t be right. Shooting down five enemy aircraft makes you an official Ace. She’d said eleven – a double Ace.

She held her hands up so they were silhouetted black against the bright moonlit sky – ten fingers. Then one more, shaken for emphasis. ‘Eleven kills. Decorated Hero of the Soviet Union. Have you many kills?’ she added casually, as if we were comparing notes. She called them kills – a hunter bringing down prey.

‘No, I’m a transport pilot.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘I was –’ I didn’t know the French for intercepted. ‘I was caught – caught in the air by Luftwaffe jets. Jets? Fast planes. I had no guns.’

‘When my guns were empty, I made a taran. Straight into a Fascist bomber, a fast dive from above. They did not know what hit them. Lost my –’ She didn’t know the French for propeller – she sketched a tight, fast spinning circle in the air above our faces. ‘Forced to land in Poland, and Fascist soldiers picked me up with a face full of glass and half my ribs broken.’

‘You made a taran!’

She must have thought I didn’t know what she meant. She smacked the palm of one hand with the fist of the other. ‘In the air. Like this –’

Ró?a’s high voice pitched in suddenly at my other ear in fluent French. ‘Taran is a Polish word.’

‘I know! My friend Felicyta told me about it! Aerial ramming!’ And in an agony of excitement I punched a fist at the sky.

Taran. It is the same word in Polish and Russian. There is a technique to it, which Irina showed me – her hands became planes, wings spread and rigid, above our faces in the sky.

Irina had the most beautiful hands!





Triolet for Irina


(by Rose Justice)

Rigidly spread, like taut wings, fly



her open hands. Above her head

mute ruthless fingers slice the sky

rigidly spread like taut wings, fly

while forty thousand women lie

in frozen cinders, blind with dread,

rigidly spread. Like taut wings fly

her open hands above her head.





(I am amazed I remembered the rhyme scheme for a triolet. Mr Wagner would be proud of me.)

These are your weapons, Irina’s hands told me – pointing with the left, demonstrating with the right. Propeller, fuselage, wing. Go for the enemy wing or rudder, clip it with your own wing or prop.

All around us people were weeping in fear, face down in the dirt, while Irina’s hands flew over our heads. She showed me how she rammed her last kill. Then I showed her how I tipped my V-1 flying bomb.

When the air raid began, anyone who was Camp Police like Karolina had been hustled off to the perimeter ditches to haul sandbags and drag the anti-aircraft guns into position; but Ró?a and Lisette were both watching, and helping along the conversation which was now going on in four languages. I made my hands chase each other in slow motion. My left hand crept up on the right, passed it, slowed down again as the right caught up, four times. Finally thumb to thumb, wing tip to wing tip, a sliver of space between them, until the slight triumphant moment when the wings caress –