Daughters of the Night Sky

A vision of children—little boys with dark hair and little red-haired girls—playing in front of a warm fire flashed in front of me. I had never planned for children, but now they seemed as inevitable a part of my future as taking my next lungful of oxygen. I hoped the war’s tide would quickly turn, and I could make sure my children lived in a world where their mother wasn’t too broken by work and grief to love her children the way she longed to.

CHAPTER 7

October 1941, Moscow, Russia

“If I never see a train again…,” Taisiya muttered after a clanking sound from the next compartment stirred her from a shallow slumber.

“It can’t be far now,” I consoled her, stowing my novel in defeat. Moscow. As the train propelled itself toward the capital, I felt my head throbbing in time with the incessant rattle of the wheels against the rails. Neither reading nor conversation was tolerable, so we both settled in to rest as best we could.

The journey should have only taken two days, perhaps three with bad timing, but we were now on our fifth day. I had always valued Taisiya’s friendship in our three years together, but I’d never been more grateful for her presence in my life as on the trek to the capital. At almost every stop anyone who was not an enlisted soldier heading to the front was displaced to the next train. Four nights trying to sleep in drafty train stations, hoping our cadets’ uniforms would ward away anyone who might see two women traveling alone as targets.

Since our would-have-been graduation, Taisiya and I had spent two hours each day writing letters to anyone who we thought might listen, begging for our chance to go to the front. There were women at academies and flight clubs all over Russia doing the same. I had hoped our numbers would spark a change, and it seemed that they had. More likely the German troops that had all but waltzed through the western part of the country before arriving just outside the capital had scared Stalin and his men into accepting that they needed us not just in the kitchens, the bedrooms, and the factories, but also behind the wheels of ambulances, in the trenches, and in the air. There is nothing like coming within a hairsbreadth of losing the capital to inspire our leaders to espouse their own ideals of equality.

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.