Daughters of the Night Sky

“Two weeks ago. Fully recovered. It wasn’t pneumonia, as they feared. He’s going back to the front and sounds anxious to do his part.” I could hear the smile in her voice as she spoke of sweet, gentle Matvei. I tried to reconcile the peaceable young son of a farmer who had sounded no better suited for war than a kitten with the reality that he was now a grown man and a decorated soldier.

“War has a way of surprising us. It makes heroes out of the unlikeliest of men, and villains of the ones you usually expect, as my father used to say.” I wondered what sort of man Taisiya’s Matvei would be when we all returned home. Would she know him? Would he be a broken man like Vanya’s father, or simply a wiser version of himself, as my father had become?

“That it does. How is your Vanya?”

“Just about the same. Captain now. I don’t see the pride in his words, just fatigue.”

“He’s earned his fatigue, Katya. You can be proud of him. And he of you.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said, looking at the patterns in the wooden planks on the ceiling. “I wanted this. So did you. And now that we’re facing it, I wonder if we weren’t fools to do this.”

“We didn’t want this,” Taisiya corrected. “Only madmen and sadists want war. We wanted to fly, and when the war came, we wanted to do our duty. It’s not foolish. It’s brave.”

I nodded quietly as the sweltering heat of late June stilled the air. Taisiya was as smart a woman as I’d ever met, and pragmatic, too. But I didn’t find myself reassured by her words. They could be either the truth that she believed to the core of her being, or the words she knew her navigator needed to hear. As I willed sleep to come, I made the compromise with myself that, like so much in times of war, it was neither one nor the other, but both.

“I need you to promise me something, Taisiya,” I said, keeping my words barely above a whisper. As though to project them into the world would make them somehow more tangible.

“No. I’m not making you any promises.” She sat up straight in her bed, glaring down at me. “I won’t listen to this kind of talk.”

“I’m not going to ask you to take care of Mama for the rest of her days or anything. I just want her and Vanya to be told properly—if the worst should happen.”

Taisiya tossed her pillow so it whacked me smartly across the face. “No.”

I sat up in turn and lobbed the lumpy mass back at her. “You can be rather heartless, you know.”

“Pragmatic. It’s a stupid request.”

“How can you say such a thing?” I asked, wishing I had something harder within arm’s reach to pitch at her. “Do you want your parents or Matvei to go months without hearing the news?”

“Of course I don’t, Katya. I’m not the one who can make you these promises. If you go down, I’m going with you. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Shaking, I pulled my own notebook and Papa’s fountain pen from my knapsack. I wrote words of love to Mama and Vanya. I had to believe they wouldn’t be my last but wrote as though they would be. With each carefully scripted letter, my trepidation seeped out onto the page with the bright-blue ink so I would not carry it with me.

The crews that were flying assembled around a blackboard, papered with a large map of the front and reconnaissance photos of the German munitions we were charged with destroying. Sofia indicated our heading and the calculations that determined how long it would take us to reach the target based on the Polikarpov’s cruising speed. I’d have to keep one eye on my compass to make sure we stayed on the right heading and the other on my chronometer to let Taisiya know when we were approaching. The weather report looked favorable as well—no crosswinds expected that might blow us off course or make flight impossible altogether.

Renata and Polina had our craft’s systems checked three times, bombs loaded, and every centimeter of the dilapidated crop duster freshly painted and in perfect working order. Like mothers loading down their children with baked goods and lovingly knitted blankets as they headed off to university, they buried their worry for us with constant activity. The plane looked better than the day it came off the assembly line, and I smiled broadly to see my name painted below the rear cockpit.

I embraced Renata, Polina having absented herself from the emotion of our departure. If I knew her, she’d be watching from the sidelines, near enough to be present when needed, but removed enough that she would not have to show her tears to her comrades. “She looks beautiful,” I said, patting the side of the aircraft, not embarrassing Renata by embroidering the compliment. “Thank you.”

“It was our pleasure,” Renata said, holding her chin high and smiling bright. I loved that about her. The pride she took in her work, the joy she still showed despite the inferno to the west.