Daughters of the Night Sky

“Well, he’s better off at a military hospital,” I said. At least he’d have access to antibiotics. I didn’t say what was really on my mind at that moment—a death from pneumonia would be a blessing in comparison to what might await him at the hands of the Germans.

Taisiya said nothing but tucked the letter in her breast pocket and turned her attention back to her coffee.

Vanya’s letter, the familiar script scrawled on the envelope, weighed heavy in my hands. I wanted to read it as much as I craved my bed after one of our endless days, but stowed it away unopened in my own pocket as Taisiya had done with hers. The letter might be filled with triumph or regret, or worse, injury and despair, but his words would have to wait until I found the comfort of my bunk that night. In the meantime they would stay warm next to the beating of my heart.

Sofia saw what I had done and nodded her approval. She was a married woman herself. Her husband was a major in another division farther north. She mentioned him only rarely and was never seen poring over letters as some of us did. That she loved her husband, I had no doubt, but she forced herself to be present with us until she could claim an hour as her own.

A commotion among those in the flight yard demanded our attention, and we all wordlessly rushed to see what had caused it. A pillar of smoke off in the distance confirmed our worst fears.

Another crew landed a hundred yards from us and jumped from the cockpits, running to join our growing crowd.

“Irina and Lada,” the pilot, a spindly girl called Darya, sputtered as she regained her breath. “I couldn’t see what happened, but they were too low. I’m guessing the dive was too steep and Irina couldn’t recover in time. I circled overhead to get a look but couldn’t get close enough to see anything other than flames.”

Sofia ordered three medics to go out with her to the crash site to assess the situation. The rest of us were left to wait. Darya and her navigator, Eva, watched with tears streaming down their red, wind-chilled faces. My lungs were incapable of taking in their full capacity, and I knew it had nothing to do with the frigid air or the stinging pelts of the frigid raindrops that assaulted us. Darya and Eva had seen the crash, and their faces betrayed the fate of our sisters.

The reconnaissance crew managed to extinguish the fire in short order with help from the damp conditions. They claimed the bodies from the wreckage, which we hoped would give Irina’s and Lada’s families some solace. When we joined the fighting, any of us who were lost would be irretrievable. Our families would have to make do with form letters and telegrams if there was time to notify them at all.

Sofia’s face looked taut with restraint as she descended from the ambulance, and she did not make eye contact with anyone as she went off to the officers’ quarters to do her duty by Irina and Lada. No orders were given to the thirty-eight of us who remained, nor were any of us brave enough to ask for them.

“Let’s go back to the barracks,” Taisiya offered up. “We’re doing no one any good freezing in the hangar.”

Thinking of nothing better to do, we complied, our steps dragging as we went. I sat up on my thin mattress, wrapped my woolen blanket around my shoulders, but I still shivered, for the chill of the day seemed to have entered my marrow.

“It’s just awful,” Darya said after a time as she busied her hands embroidering her own socks. “It’s one thing to die in battle, but this seems like a waste.”

I took a deep breath and swallowed a rebuke. Darya’s need to break any uncomfortable silence was often ingratiating in good times. At the current moment it was maddening. She saw it happen with her own eyes, I reminded myself. Be kind. “She died in service to her country,” I replied, keeping the sheath on my razor tongue at some cost. “It’s as good a death as any of us can hope for.”

“Hear, hear,” Taisiya shot from her bunk. For once the tome in her hand wasn’t a technical manual, but a tattered copy of Anna Karenina that she’d had since girlhood.

“They ought to have us up flying,” Oksana interjected. She had a pen and notebook in her hands. Whether she kept a journal, wrote poetry, or was sketching figures, I knew not. My heart strained against my ribs as I thought of Vanya shivering in his barracks at the front, or more likely sleeping in the mud, sketching his comrades to distract himself from the misery.

“You are so unfeeling,” Darya said, not looking up from the tangle of blue threads that were slowly becoming a field of spring flowers. “If you can’t mourn for our sisters, stay silent.”

“Watch yourself,” I urged quietly. Oksana had assumed her place as second in command of the regiment when we deployed to the front. Angering her now could mean unpleasantness in the months to come.