In the woods, I built a fire and burned them – one at a time, until there was nothing left. I didn’t start a new fire for each plait (we were tied close enough to withstand a little ash), but it was powerful enough that I was careful. I breathed steadily in and out; I thought carefully about nothing at all.
When I came back after dark, stinking of singe, Bershanskaya was standing outside the barracks and scanning the edge of the woods, waiting.
“Commander,” I greeted when I was close enough, and waited for whatever she would do to me.
For a long time she looked me in the eye until it felt like I was canvas stretched across a wooden frame, and I could feel the question building on her tongue in the space just behind her front teeth, where people’s worst suspicions lived.
If she asks me, I thought, she’ll have her answer.
(I could cut myself deep enough to bleed. Blood and tears would summon something, I could hope I had enough willpower to make her forget what I’d done.)
She stepped aside, eyes still on me, and as I passed she said my name low, like she’d checked my name off a very short list; like a spell.
Raskova would have asked me. I don’t know if that’s better or worse.
IN 1938, WHEN I was still in school, Raskova had flown across the country for glory with Polina Denisovna Osipenko and Valentina Grizodubova. When they were recovered after their landing, the news was everywhere: that she and her copilots had broken flight records in the Rodina, that it was a marvelous feat of flying, that they were heroes of the nation.
I didn’t find out what had really happened until Raskova told me herself. They had overshot in the mist, and when it parted they were suddenly over the Sea of Okhotsk, where the water in winter is the milky flat of a corpse’s eye, and they didn’t have enough gasoline left for the crossing – they’d flown too high to avoid being shrouded by the fog for a day and a night. They had to turn around and pray for landfall before they dropped out of the sky.
The navigator’s seat – a glass bauble at the front of the plane – would be torn to shreds in a crash, and they were hurting for altitude and out of fuel and gathering too much ice to carry.
Raskova marked a map and jumped for it.
Her copilots crashed into the taiga, the bottom of the plane in shreds from the landing, and waited for her. Even after the rescue crew got to them, they refused to budge. They took watch by the plane for two more days, until Raskova staggered out of the woods.
It had been ten days. She’d had no food or water with her, and no compass when she jumped.
(There was no magic in her – not the sort that I had – but you wonder about witch blood in some people, when they manage things that no one should have managed.)
But more amazing to me even than her ten-day journey was the ten-day vigil the other two had kept, sheltering with the plane that had tried to kill them, without enough supplies, without knowing if she would ever come.
Doubt gnawed at me whenever I thought about it, more doubts than I ever had about being shot at, more doubts than I had about my chances of loosing a bomb just where it needed to go.
How long would they have waited beyond ten days? How long would I wait when it was my turn? Would I walk ten days in the wilderness rather than lie down and die?
Osipenko was dead. Wasn’t even a strafing run; she’d just been going from one place to another, and her plane had turned on her.
Grizodubova had been sent elsewhere for the war effort. None of us had ever seen her. She was leading a defense and relief outfit near Leningrad, with real bombers and not crop dusters. She was commanding men.
I wondered if she and Raskova ever saw each other, or if they wrote – if it was safe to write. It would be easy to forgive if they had parted ways; it was wartime, and their duty to the nation lay before them.
But sometimes the nights are long and dark, and you feel so alone that you think everyone else must have someone closer than you do, and you think: If they don’t still speak, it’s because they’re both waiting for death, and can’t bear to come close and then be parted.
Then you stare up at the leaking roof and wonder if all each of them carried now was a phantom. When something wonderful or terrible happened, did one of them sometimes glance over her shoulder to look at the other before she remembered she was alone?
SEBROVA VOLUNTEERS TO be one of the three planes against the flak, and Popova volunteers second, and before I can do more than glance at Petrova for her agreement (she’s already nodding at me) I’m volunteering, too, because I have few enough friends here. Where Popova is going, I want to go.
It’s a foolish thing to do, volunteering to die on a German gun, but I volunteered for that a long time ago. I’m a quick draw on the controls, so I’ll be of some use, and anything’s better than sitting around waiting, wondering if Popova made it out.
Outside, I smoke a cigarette I won off Meklin at cards and watch the sun going down. I wish I had time to do everything that needs doing.
Popova sits next to me on the fence, lets out a breath at the streaks of gold and pink suspended just above the grass. When she taps me on the shoulder I hand her my cigarette.
She’s a marvelous pilot – light and nimble – but you’d never know it from the way she smokes a cigarette, single loud pulls that leave a cylinder of ash that drops wholesale to the ground.
After a little while she hands me a piece of chocolate from inside her pocket, grainy and already melting across my fingertips. I pop it into my mouth and lick my fingers clean, flushing a little at the bad manners, but Popova only winks. I wonder how long she’s held on to it, doling out to herself one piece at a time on nights she thinks she’s going to die.
“You’ll be all right,” she says.
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” I say. “It’s you I worry over.”
She casts me a look and half smiles. My lungs are acrid, suddenly. I pinch off the end of my cigarette to preserve the rest.
She shrugs. “We never let them get any sleep,” she says, jamming a pin into her cropped hair and wrenching her cap on over it.
(Petrova sometimes reaches behind her to smooth a braid that isn’t there. I’ve never seen Popova do it. I wonder what became of Raskova’s dark brown braids, gleaming and pinned to her head as she spoke to us and made us into soldiers.)
Golden hair sticks out just at the edges, half curls below her ears. “I’d hate to see us coming, too. Let’s hope they’re too tired to aim.”
I want to smile or laugh, but I’m staring at my plane and feeling ice down my spine. Why this should be so different I don’t know – slightly more impossible than impossible isn’t a measurement that has much meaning – but I look at the trees instead, after a moment.
“How did you decide to do this?”
I don’t know why I ask. We’re all meant to be without a past, and equal. They were carpenters and secretaries and farm girls, but they’re pilots now, and it shouldn’t matter how they got here.
Popova raises her eyebrows at the setting sun like it’s the one who’d asked the rude question. There are only a few minutes left until it’s dark enough to load up and set off. I should be going back to barracks and getting my gear.
She says without looking at me, “A plane landed near our house, when I was young.”
Young – she’s nineteen now, I think, but I don’t say anything. Rude to interrupt. Not that it matters; she doesn’t elaborate. It’s the biography of a masterful pilot who knows better than to waste a gesture.
She glances over. “And you?”
“Oh, I’m a witch,” I say. “Flying comes naturally.” And she grins as she drops from the fence, snaps her goggles into place.