Daughters of the Night Sky(40)
There was precious little for me to do on the flight except check the compass from time to time to ensure we were on course, but with twenty-four other planes flying in formation, the task was next to unnecessary.
I wondered if Vanya’s letters would find me at the front as regularly as they had found me in Engels. He said all the right things in them—that he was well, as safe as he could hope to be, and that he had confidence in the skills of his regiment—but there was a melancholy he could not, for all his talent with words, erase from the text.
I struggled to keep my mind on the flight and felt a gnawing guilt in the pit of my stomach that Taisiya was left with all the work while I was free to daydream. My reverie came to an abrupt halt when the planes around us began scattering out of formation. Sofia and Oksana had broken away and begun evasive maneuvers. A fighter plane followed them into the dive, and several others emerged from the fluffy summer clouds.
The breath caught in my throat. We were thrown into battle fifteen minutes before reaching base. Unarmed.
“Dive!” I screamed to Taisiya over the tinny interphone. If we managed to take the dive steep, slow, and low, they would stall out long before we lost control of our craft. She had already begun her descent before I shouted the command, and flew to Sofia’s flank, taking her place back in formation.
Instead of using our training, trying to shake the nimble fighters with our evasive maneuvers, most of the pilots panicked. I couldn’t decipher what was going on with the enemy aircraft. They were in perfect attack formation, but I didn’t hear the telltale rattling of the guns. If they meant to take us down, they were missing their opportunity. They flew off into the distance, leaving us for some other, more important target. At least Taisiya hadn’t overreacted, and I was heartened by it.
The landing strip came into view, and we circled, desperately waiting for our turn to land. There were officers and pilots looking at us from the ground, but there wasn’t the bustle of activity we expected with enemy aircraft so close. How could they not have seen the flock of fighters that had just encircled us?
By the time we landed, several of our regiment had rushed over to tell the commanding officer of the nearby threat. As Taisiya and I joined the throng, we overheard General Chernov, an imposing man with a red face and deep lines of experience, expel a formidable guffaw.
“You dolts. That was your escort. Can’t you tell the difference between a swastika and a star?”
“Two more weeks of training. It’s insulting,” Taisiya growled as she tossed her duffel on the lumpy mattress in her corner of the tiny bedroom.
We had been expecting a rudimentary version of the barracks and mess hall that we’d known in Engels and Moscow but were instead quartered in the village in the homes of the residents—whether they wished for it or not. Taisiya and I were the “guests” of the Utkin family and would be staying in the back bedroom, just large enough for two mattresses to lie side by side, with a couple of meters of room at the feet for us to stow our belongings, which were mercifully scant. I had little more than two books, one spare uniform, and Papa’s violin.
“If the training can teach us something that will save our lives,” I countered, “I’ll gladly wait another two weeks for combat. I’m in no rush to be a martyr.” I spoke like a peacemaker, but in truth I was just as irked at General Chernov’s edict as she and the rest of the regiment were.
Taisiya was having none of it. “If a new regiment of male pilots had been joining them, the general would never have allowed such antics. His pilots swarm around like unsupervised schoolboys, yet we’re being humiliated for it.”
“I can’t argue with that.” I sighed, stretching out on the mattress, hoping the lumps would conform to my back over time. They seemed stubborn in their lumpiness, though. The room was drafty, and the entire house was even shoddier than our little cabin in Miass. It would be fine in the summer, but it was a miracle the family hadn’t frozen to death winters ago. But if the front hadn’t moved by winter, we would have problems far worse than drafty bedrooms to contend with.
“In the general’s defense,” I said, “he seemed more disappointed in our aircraft than the women crewing them.”
“Well, it’s certainly not our choice to be going up against proper fighters in dinky trainers.” Taisiya had pulled out her notepad and pencil. I couldn’t imagine anything about the room or our situation worth committing to paper, but scratching away seemed to soothe her. She hadn’t spent much time on the hobby in Chelyabinsk, being too devoted to her studies, but she’d taken it back up again in Engels. It calmed her more than reading or writing letters to Matvei, so I encouraged it. Though watching her fill the blank pages—she sometimes shared her sketches, little poems, and anecdotes, both tender and bitter—I felt my heart ache for the dewy afternoon in the meadow with Vanya, when he made his poetry with paints and canvas.
A knock sounded at the door, and Taisiya opened it to find the mistress of the house on the other side.
“Girls, will you come join us for tea and medovik ?” Our host, Lina Utkina, was as sweet a woman as Russian soil ever saw and seemed genuinely pleased to have us with her. She could be no older than forty-five, but work and worry had aged her far past her years.
“You don’t need to go to the trouble, Comrade Utkina,” I said, sitting up and pulling my jacket straight. “We’ll be having dinner with our regiment before much longer.” Our mess hall was a row of tables set up under some trees, and we were just as happy for the meals in the great outdoors as we would have been for a proper refectory.