Daughters of the Night Sky

The acres of wheat lost would mean thousands of my countrymen would starve this winter. It would mean poor crops for years to come. Stalin was willing to send all of us to our deaths to save his country, and in that moment I couldn’t help but wonder if there would be anything left to save.

The German tanks below us rolled on over washboard roads toward a defenseless village, moving like a family of uncoordinated, greenish-brown turtles looking for the nearest entry point to their brook. Using the new chalk lines Renata measured out for me on the wings of the plane, I aimed my flare at the hillside next to a tank in the middle of the formation, hoping if Taisiya made her mark it would bring a fair amount of rock down around them. We wouldn’t be able to disable a tank, but we could make the roads impassable.

All I could do to support Taisiya was to throw grenades over the side when she released her payload. It wasn’t enough to cause damage most of the time, but it added to the chaos, which was the chief point of the exercise.

The whoosh of the descending bomb and the sickening rumble as the bomb made contact were audible even through our muffled ears. Taisiya pulled up as the bomb exploded, narrowly escaping the flying daggers created by the wreckage in the road. The tanks were now stranded in the rubble of the destroyed roadway. Once we were out of range, I took a calming breath and looked back to observe the destruction below. When I turned back around, Taisiya gave me a wave to let me know we were unscathed and that she’d seen our success.

Shards of metal and glass. Nothing more. I couldn’t allow myself to think that there were men inside those machines Hitler sent to flatten us. No more, I hoped, than they thought about the women protected by rickety wood and linen frames when they opened fire on us.

Our encampment, now farther west than where we’d trained and taken our first missions, was always buzzing with activity after dark. Summer nights in Russia were short, and we had to make each minute count. We had to coordinate our takeoffs and landings carefully, spacing them out by no more than ten minutes. Barely enough time to maneuver around one another.

As soon as we landed, Renata and Polina rushed to us. Using a code of their own invention, Taisiya updated Polina on the aircraft’s status while Polina assessed any damage Taisiya couldn’t have seen in flight.

After asking me about the quantity of my flares and grenades, Renata set to work replacing the bombs and ammunition. She lifted hundreds of kilos a night. The largest bombs weighed fifty kilos and required the help of two other armorers to load. In turn she helped load them for the other teams. She never stopped. Strong before the war, hardened by work on her family’s farm, now her arms were chiseled like the arms on a statue of a Greek god. I knew she ached—her efforts were inhuman—but I also knew she was proud, so didn’t attempt to coddle her.

When Polina gave us the all clear, we took our place in the rotation. It would be our fourth sortie of the night, and we hoped for seven. Oksana insisted that we make scrupulous records of every single sortie. The reporters were watching. The Kremlin was watching. Most importantly the men were watching. We had to show them what dedication looked like.

We slept on wooden folding beds in an abandoned school. There was little privacy, no decent shower facilities, and as we had to sleep during the day, no real quiet. We couldn’t expect the villagers around us to stop going on with their lives because we needed sleep.

Oksana still kept to herself, but her dour expression had softened somewhat. Either that, or it had simply become the neutral expression we all wore and was therefore just less noticeable. We bunked in our four-woman teams, and Oksana’s crew had claimed the four bunks next to ours, which might have given us the chance to become better acquainted if Oksana had been more open to conversation.

Oksana pinned her hair up to curl like the rest of us but was less skilled, perhaps not having the practice the rest of us did.

“Would you like some help?” I asked one morning. The dawn was still weak, and we all rushed to fall asleep before the sun shone in earnest.

“I suppose,” she said, tossing the comb at me with a fatigued sigh. “I don’t usually fuss about this sort of thing, but it seems smart to follow your lead in this.” She gave me a martyred look, but I smiled upon seeing it was mostly insincere.

“It’s good for the spirit,” I said, taking the comb in my hand and smoothing her thick locks of fine, silver-blond hair. I took a section of hair, just long enough to reach her collar, between my thumb and forefinger, and twisted it up with a pin and affixed it to the top of her head. Her tresses were soft, and I found the monotony of the task soothing.

“You’re right,” she answered as I worked. “They like to look like women, even if we do a man’s job.”