Daughters of the Night Sky

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said, remembering the German I’d learned before the academy. We’d all made an attempt to learn a little during our scarce free hours once we’d become confident we’d be crossing over the German borders, and I’d been called on to give a few tutorials for our regiment and others.

The girl said nothing, only scooted farther back into the brambles, her green eyes round with fear. She had seen too much to trust anyone with a red star on their uniform, and I cursed the soldiers, and the thousands like them, who had seen her as nothing more than the spoils of war.

I removed my small knapsack and opened it. We’d intended to eat lunch in the quiet splendor of the woods, but my stomach now rolled at the sight of the canned meat and hard bread in my bag. I offered her the modest meal, making sure both my hands were visible.

“Take this, please,” I said in my rough German. “You look like you need it more than I do.”

The girl looked at me, cocking her head to one side in appraisal, then looked at the food in my extended hands and accepted it, setting about devouring it before I could change my mind.

“I’m Katya. These are my friends, Polina and Renata.” I sat next to her on the bed of ground cover and patted the ground next to me, encouraging the girls to follow suit.

“Heide,” she mumbled in reply, still eating ravenously.

“You might want to slow down,” Polina encouraged in halting German. “You might make yourself ill.”

Heide considered the advice and slowed her pace.

Renata, never one to sit idle, gathered the buttons from the dirt and pulled a mending kit from her day bag. She removed her uniform jacket and motioned to exchange it for the girl’s spoiled blouse. Timidly she traded the garments, covering herself as best she could with her hands. She’d felt exposed enough for one day. Renata, with the same devotion and attention to detail as she used when servicing an engine, sewed the discarded buttons back in place. She examined the garment and, seeing none of the other damage was significant, handed it back. The buttons would never lie as neatly as when the blouse was new, but the girl could wear it back into town without shame.

With the girl continuing to look at us like a wary dog who expected a kick at any moment, we spoke cheerfully—alternating between our native Russian and broken German—to keep her at ease, but there was no way for us to quell her nerves.

“Would you like us to take you home?” I asked. “We don’t want you to come across any more trouble.”

She contemplated my offer, clearly understanding that the likelihood of more soldiers on the road was as certain as the impending sunset. But still she hesitated. Had she come across other Russian soldiers who had baited her with kind gestures only to cause her pain, or was it merely that she’d seen so much atrocity in the past five years that she’d learned to fear the red star on our uniforms just as we feared the ugly black spider on theirs?

“Please let us help you,” I prodded. “We just want to help you.”

“But why? You are Russian. I am your enemy.”

“Do you intend to fire a gun at me, my aircraft, or my comrades here?” I asked, my expression flat.

“No,” she stuttered, her face draining of color.

“Good. We don’t intend to hurt you, either, so we’re not enemies. The war is over. You have nothing to fear from us.”

She exhaled deeply and looked at each of our faces in turn, then pointed south down the path, in the same direction where the soldiers departed. They might be waiting for all of us behind any bush or tree, despite the fact that Polina, Renata, and I were their countrywomen. We’d insulted their pride, and at least the younger of them seemed the sort to exact revenge on any women who dared commit such a slight.

She led us to a house on the edge of town that would once have been described as quaint. It was fashioned from thin, rough-hewn logs and a few windows that would have let in the dappled forest sunlight had they not been boarded up to protect against stray bomb blasts and the eyes of lusty soldiers. She showed us inside the cottage, where two children with dirty-blond hair were playing on the unswept floor. At the sight of our uniforms, they jumped up and cowered in the far corner of the room. The little boy wrapped his arms around his sister, who wept onto the collar of his shirt. Though he could not have been more than seven years old, his nostrils flared and he looked at us defiantly.

“Your father or one of your brothers is here to keep an eye on things?” I asked, having noticed there was not another house within sight. The children’s raspy breathing seemed to calm as they parsed my German.

“No,” she said. “They’re gone. Drafted. My father died early on in France, and my brother was shot because he refused to—well, you understand.”

“I do.” More than a few of my own countrymen had met the same end when they refused to answer Stalin’s call, and Hitler was surely no more forgiving.