Daughters of the Night Sky(23)
The letters from the army recruiters finally came in October, and we had to get ourselves to Moscow for interviews to be considered for placement in one of the three airborne female regiments. While they were taking any man or boy able to stand, we had to prove our worth for a few hundred coveted spots. I couldn’t think about the odds as the train lurched on, creaking ever forward on the rusty tracks. I couldn’t even think about the fact that I was finally returning to Moscow. It had given Mama a smile to think I would be returning home, even if it meant war—or rejection. I wasn’t sure which fate she dreaded more for me.
I had thought I might enjoy the three months with my mother between graduation and my deployment, but her eyes looked haunted every time she saw me. And though he was still in training, my worry for Vanya overshadowed everything. I wanted to go to the front and do my part to end the war.
“You’re so much like your father,” she would say, her dusty blond curls shaking as she chopped the potatoes for the evening soup. “Bound by duty and honor. You will do your country proud, Katinka.”
Behind her pride, there was unvoiced fear: Don’t let your fate be the same as his.
She sent me off to the train station with a hug as warm as she’d ever given me. She’d had so little warmth to spare since Papa died, and I thought I had done well enough with the love she’d had to give. As I took my place on the train and felt the engine groan to life, propelling us to Moscow, I felt an emptiness settle into me. What would it have been like to spend my youth with a mother who sang and smiled? What if I had known the strength of my father’s embrace, and not just from faded memories? The images of a childhood—brighter, purer—stole the oxygen from my lungs. One question loomed larger over all the others: Would I be on this train, prepared to fly, to fight, to be a warrior, if a stray bullet hadn’t claimed my father’s life decades too soon?
By the second day on the rattling train, I had become acutely aware that the answer didn’t matter. My course was set, and I knew it was the one I needed to take.
When we arrived in Moscow, the interviewers organized us into groups, then had us wait in hard seats until they called us one by one to answer their volley of questions. They didn’t bother holding the interviews in heated buildings, but rather drafty tents that gave us little protection against the October chill. It was no accident. If any woman complained about the cold in a tent midday in the autumn, there was no way the army would accept her for flying missions in an exposed aircraft midwinter. I gave wordless praise for the woolen uniform and thick socks, and waited my turn while Taisiya buried herself in the newspaper. She left her manuals and texts in her valise so the others didn’t think she needed to cram for her interview. I leafed through one of my advanced flight-training manuals but found the words just swirled on the page.
A guard escorted me to the interviewing area. I avoided eye contact with any of the other recruits who had finished their questioning as they exited to the mess hall or the barracks. I didn’t want to read too much into their expressions. Was the major cruel, or was the pilot merely unused to his brusque military manner? I had no way of knowing, and it didn’t matter. When the alternative was spending my waking hours in a factory building tanks, or worse, cooped up in Miass knitting socks for the men at the front, to fail this interview would be a disaster.
A young lieutenant, only a few years older than I, took notes as Sofia Orlova herself presided over the interview. The young man had hair somewhere between brown and blond, watery blue eyes, and the weakest chin I had ever seen. He breathed with an irritating wheeze. The perfect sort of man to keep holed up in an office. Major Orlova looked mildly annoyed at his presence but ignored him with her quiet civility as he scratched out my responses to her questions on his notepad.
“Name?”
“Age?”
“Place of birth?”
The litany of questions progressed through all manner of expected topics relating to health, mental stability, and fortitude, but it wasn’t until they turned to technical experience with aircraft that I felt the muscles in my shoulders loosen, though I hadn’t realized how tense they had become. There was nothing in his dossier that would stump me. If she did not select me, it would not be for my deficiency, but for an overabundance of qualified pilots. That risk seemed remote.
Major Orlova shifted her gaze and attention from the papers before her to my face. She was scrutinizing not only my words, but also everything about my reaction to her final question.
“What calls you to serve Mother Russia as an aviator, Comrade Soloneva?”
The new surname still startled me, but I kept my expression impassive. I sat straighter in my chair and looked into her assessing eyes. “Major, because I was given a gift. I am an excellent navigator, and it is only thanks to the education I have received through the generosity of Mother Russia that I have been able to develop my skills. How could I, in good conscience, not use that gift to come to her aid in her hour of need?”
“Well said, Comrade Soloneva.”
I saluted the major and in the coming days, as I waited for her answer, was left with little occupation other than vision and medical screenings. Those of us who completed our interviews early had a few days of relative freedom while Major Orlova personally saw to the rest of the candidates. She insisted on selecting us herself. There were more than two hundred of us, after all, and choosing the best of us was not the task of a single morning. They did their best to keep tabs on our comings and goings, but I had to escape to Moscow on my own, if only for a few hours, to explore the city of my birth and early childhood.