Night Witches Read online

  The way Mama is talking, it sounds as if Tatyana is a thousand years old instead of eighteen.

  “Perhaps if I took up the violin again, you’d encourage me to go fly,” I say, trying to make a joke.

  “You had an ear; you just didn’t practice. You had as much potential as any one of my students.”

  “Not as much as Martina.”

  Mama reaches over and pats my hand. “Martina’s arrogance will spoil her musicality. Just you wait and see.”

  Wait and see? As if we have all the time in the world.

  “Do you think our violins survived?” Mama asks, then lets out a harsh laugh. “The violin survives so that the little Austrian corporal can fiddle on our graves like Nero.” Mama and Papa always referred to Hitler as the little Austrian corporal. As a major in the air force, Papa enjoyed demoting him from führer to corporal.

  I feel the grip of my mother’s fingers relax as she begins to stroke my shoulder and hum a fragment of something. A Mozart violin concerto. There is a long, melodic, dreamy passage in the second movement that Mama loves and plays so beautifully in concert. Her fingers lift and press on my shoulder, as if she were playing her violin. I have become her strings, her fingerboard. Her voice is soft, like a zephyr in the flak-riddled night. I feel a harmony push from my throat and I join her, a whisper riding on the zephyr, and lean my head into the curve of her neck. The vibrations grow stronger as she approaches the cadenza.

  Then the moment is over, and suddenly the sky bleeds light, followed by a sound so deafening that my guts rattle inside me. I gasp. It is as if the air has been sucked out of the city, out of me. Mama and I clutch each other. This is the end …

  The end of us, but not the calendar. Half of another wall tumbles down. Yet the calendar still hangs from the other one on its peg. Is it still here to taunt us? Mama and I remain clutching each other. How long? I am not sure. Finally Mama gets up on her knees.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, reaching for her.

  “Do you hear a baby crying? I worry it might be Andrei. Poor Polina!” I do hear a faint wail scratching the air. I close my eyes and try not to imagine little Andrei crushed under piles of debris. Mama has never really cared for Andrei’s mother, Polina. She thinks she is stingy and foul tempered, suspects her of hoarding, but is quick to excuse her, for after all, she has a baby to feed.

  The cries fade, and Mama returns to huddle next to me. Perhaps half an hour passes before we dare move. Finally Mama whispers, “Do you think it’s safe?” Then she gives me a withering look, as if to say “What is safe?” But at least we haven’t heard any more bombs. Mama scrambles up from the floor toward the blown-out window. From where I crouch I can see Polina skittering like a crab over a pile of twisted iron and fragments of concrete.

  “Polina, are you all right? How’s the baby?” Mama leans far out the window and calls.

  Those are her last words.

  The crack of a rifle shot rips through the air. Mama slumps over the windowsill, then begins to fall through the window, clutching her throat. The air is shredded with the staccato barrage of rifle fire. I am mute. Paralyzed. My eyes widen but cannot see. No. No. No. The single word echoes throughout my body, shivers down my bones. The full realization of this moment creeps through me and spreads like a slow poison.

  Mama is more than half out the window. Her knee appears hooked on the sill. There is still gunfire out there. I pull on her foot to bring her back in. Her shoe comes off in my hand, and then she falls the rest of the way out the window. I clutch her shoe to my chest. “Mama, Mama!” I whisper as I collapse on the ground.

  I think of the calendar. It is September 2, a Wednesday. Should I make a mark for Mama as she did for Babushka? The cold ache of loneliness fills my body. The screams finally break through my skin. My bones clatter with fear, with fury, but mostly with grief. I think of Mama bending over her mother. So tenderly arranging Babushka’s limbs, delicately putting the handkerchief over her eyes.

  I am in a free fall through a terrible eternity. I feel my screams but cannot hear them. My babushka died two days ago. My father is missing. My sister is up there, but for all I know, she’s been shot down. I am alone. I have been hollowed out like the buildings that stand around me. I am becoming a piece of dust, cosmic dust blown into the dark void of the forever. “Mama!” I whisper into the void. “Mama!” The words are swallowed into the nothingness.

  When I finally fall asleep, curled on the floor splattered with my mother’s blood, I dream of flying. I dream of the sky over the Sea of Azov, the shallowest sea in the world, and one of the most beautiful. We would go there for holidays, and as my father knew the director of the local flying club, we would fly half the day. Papa said it was the best place to train, for there was a peculiar magnetic anomaly that threw off the compass ever so slightly. Flying with a proper compass was easy, Papa said. But flying with one that has gone mentally cross-eyed is another thing entirely. In my dream I am no Night Witch. I am flying in the bright sunshine of summer. The glittering water of the sea is beneath me. There are the long stretches of beach that edge the water like a golden necklace. I skim low in the little biplane. In my dream I do the mathematics without even realizing it. The computations magically transmit to my hands on the control column and my feet on the rudder pedals.

  I fly over the Kerch Strait. The Black Sea unfolds beneath me. The water is like liquid sapphires, and the reflections of clouds drift lazily across the surface. I fly low and so very slow. That is the beauty of the U-2 trainer. It can fly slower than the stall speed of any plane in the world. It is like walking through air.

  I bank steeply and turn east. Dusk is settling across the land and over the steppes. A wonderful wild scent suffuses the air, for the steppes are in bloom. Tiny specks of color dot the long grasses. There is a sliver of moon that is magically growing fatter by seconds. By the time I am over the Sea of Azov it is full, and a pillar of moonlight stretches across the water. I see the shadow of my own wings printed against the moon. My wings are the smile in the moon’s face. Then the sky flinches. There is a hideous flare of white. Once more the night is bleeding light, and I wake up, my heart racing.

  There is no one to stop me now. No one to say I am too young—or at least not Mama. Not Papa. Not Babushka. I have lost everything, but I could join Tatyana in the sky. I could become a Night Witch. But how would I do it? Where would I go? Stalingrad is an island in this sea of war. We’re surrounded by Nazis, backed up against the river—trapped. The 588th Regiment of Tatyana’s has temporary airfields, but they are far outside the city. Hidden. There are no lights, nothing to reveal their location. I realize my idea is impractical, but it will not die. It begins as a little flicker but it quickly becomes a flame. I feel it burning within me. There must be a way.

  I look around at the ruined walls of the apartment. There is nothing here for me. Just rubble. I am not sure how long I sit there thinking, but it has grown dark. My heart flies into my throat as I realize I’m not alone. There’s a figure huddled by the calendar with a rifle aimed, not at me, but at what was once a window on Shkolnaya Street.

  “Stay down,” the figure hisses. There is the sharp crack of gunfire. I flinch and fall back. Then there’s a second shot. I see the flash from the rifle. “Keep down.”

  The air rings with more shots. The acrid smell of gunfire hangs in the dimness. Then there is a long silence followed by a shout. It’s a single word that I do not recognize, but it sounds slightly Turkic, the language of the people from the Ural Mountains. I can tell it was not German. For this I am thankful. The figure is now crawling toward me. Scraps of rifle smoke hang in the air.

  “You all right?” he says in perfect Russian. I blink. It’s Yuri, the boy often bullied in school. He was an easy target. Not only was he short, but his eyes tilted and he spoke with an accent. I must look completely stunned, because he doesn’t look like a bully’s target now. He has grown taller and his shoulders have broadened. His black hair slashes ac
ross his forehead. He looks dangerous.

  “Yeah, it’s me. Slit Eye. That’s what they called me during sniper training. ‘Hey, Slit Eye, you should be able to shoot.’ Damn right, I say.”

  A dreadful feeling floods through me. “You didn’t kill my mother, did you?”

  It’s as if his mouth tries to shape the words but they won’t come out, so he shakes his head. I relax ever so slightly. “No, not me,” he says finally. “When I got here I saw the Komsomol picking up a body from just outside your window there. That was your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  Yuri sighs. “Alex and I had just arrived when they were taking her and some others away. We thought Otto might be holed up in that building across the way.”

  “Who’s Otto?”

  “Nazi sniper.”

  “You know his first name?” I ask incredulously.

  “Of course. He’s famous.” Yuri gives me a small smile. “But not as famous as I’m going to be.”

  I remember hearing that Yuri’s father had been a hunter in the Urals. He came from a long line of hunters, and Yuri claimed to hunt with a bow and arrow. He was always talking about the woods being filled with live animals. In winter he wore a fur hood from a wolverine he had shot. We were all city kids. He was not. He looked so different and his accent was so odd. I felt sorry for him, but of course I was scared to say the slightest thing to him, for befriending the target of bullies could make me vulnerable. I feel ashamed now.

  Yuri shakes out a cigarette and lights it, cupping his hand to shield the flame from a breeze. The orange glow illuminates his face. I am looking at a sniper, I remind myself. And all snipers are part of the secret police, the NKVD. The very abbreviation seems dark, lethal. It was the NKVD that organized the various militias in Stalingrad. They are always alert for deserters, counterspies, and the civilians who aid the Germans. In short, collaborators.

  My friend Lara’s father was hauled off in the middle of the night by the NKVD and never seen again. Suspicion is the NKVD’s lifeblood. It pumps through their arteries from their darkest hearts. Two months ago the local NKVD came to our apartment building to organize the tenants for trench digging. No one refused. To refuse was to come under suspicion of being a collaborator. Not even Ekaterina Skolvich, who was close to ninety years old, refused.

  But in addition to being alert for spies and collaborators, they have a keen eye for young people from the Komsomol who might make promising snipers. Just before school finished for the summer, we were all given eye tests. There was a rumor that students with exceptionally keen eyesight were being considered for a special marksmanship division in the NKVD, and Yuri, it was said, was one of those.

  “Want one?” Yuri asks as he takes his first drag. It is a generous offer, as cigarettes have become very precious.

  “No. I don’t smoke. But thanks.” The thanks sounds puny, as if I am trying to make up for what happened in secondary school. Does it count that I did not join in the bullying but merely stood by and watched?

  “This has been going on for two days,” he says.

  I’m confused. “What, the war? The bombing?”

  “No, the duel.”

  “What duel?”

  “Alex and me and the Nazi sniper, Otto.”

  “You’ve been chasing one another for two days?”

  “This would have been our third night. But the Nazi fell for the oldest trick in the book. Alex raised his helmet on a stick just a bit above that pile of rubble across the way. Otto shot at it and the bullet ripped the helmet apart.” It seems strange to me that Yuri was on a first-name basis with the man he was trying to kill. “Then Otto reached up to retrieve his cartridge cases. The Nazis always do that after what they consider a successful shot. As Otto did. So I saw just a tiny wedge of his scalp. That was all I needed, a few centimeters. That did it.”

  “A few centimeters?” I reply, both impressed and horrified.

  “I told you I am a good shot. Old Slit Eye!” He winks at me.

  “Did Otto know your name? Are you that famous?”

  Yuri actually blushes, levels his hand, and waves it back and forth. “Maybe just a little bit. I’m getting there.”

  It is quiet outside now. No sniper fire, no Stukas screaming across the night, but through the silence I hear the distinctive purr of a U-2.

  “It’s a Night Witch,” Yuri says, and cocks his head toward the sky.

  “I need to be there.”

  “Where? Where do you need to be?”

  “Up there.” I tip my head. “In the sky, with them. With the witches and my sister.”

  Yuri and I talk far into the night, each of us propped against our own broken wall. The first night I ever spend with a young man. I tell him about my dream of flying and how I want to join my sister, who’s a Night Witch in the 588th Regiment.

  “It’d be difficult to get out of Stalingrad,” Yuri says. “And even more difficult to find the Night Witches’ airfields. They move them all the time.”

  “I know, I know. It seems impossible.”

  “I don’t believe in impossible.”

  “You don’t?” I almost smile. It’d been nice to lose myself in this talk of flying. It felt so good to tell someone of my dream after avoiding it for so long with Mama. But then something shrivels inside me as Mama’s face looms up. I’ll never see her again. This too seems impossible. I’ll never hear her voice, or her objections to me flying. I almost yearn for those objections just so I can hear her speak one more time.

  I look out the window, or what was a window and is now a fragment of a wall with a huge opening. I am not sure how many hours have passed, but it looks as if the dawn is breaking, and it is beautiful. How can that be? How can the morning after my mother’s death dare to dawn with this lovely glow in the eastern sky? How does this sun dare to rise? I look grimly out the opening and want to spit at the dawn.

  “You thinking of your mother?” Yuri asks.

  I nod. “My mother, and how I want to get out of this city. I want to fly.”

  “You know, Hitler has ordered the city cleared.”

  Hitler? Yuri speaks as if he is right here in Stalingrad. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the Nazis will order civilians out of the city and march them to a camp.”

  My eyes dart around the ruins of our apartment. “Then we’re trapped,” I say.

  “It’s true. There’s nowhere to run between here and the Volga.”

  “I’d sooner drown.” He says nothing. “Someone says the Nazis have killed forty thousand Russians every day since they reached the city. Is that true?” I ask.

  “I don’t know how many are left. I don’t keep count of how many General Paulus and his Sixth Army kill. I just keep track of my own kills. Which reminds me, do you have a pencil? I lost mine.”

  “There was one around here once. Look on the floor. It might still be there.” I point toward the calendar, and he crawls over to it. Despite his heavy boots, he makes no noise at all. He could have been a ballet dancer but instead he’s a sniper.

  “Ah, here it is!” His narrow eyes glitter with triumph. I wonder if they look the same way when he kills someone.

  He takes out a tiny piece of paper stuffed in a pocket and makes a mark. I am tempted to ask how many this makes but stop myself. If he’s proud of his accomplishments, I don’t want to know. Although it strikes me that he does not seem like a proud person, despite his comment about the Nazi sniper possibly knowing his first name.

  Yuri makes the mark, stuffs the paper back in his pocket, then looks up at me. “There might be an alternative.”

  “Alternative to what?”

  “Alternative to a forced march to a Nazi internment camp. There’s a rumor of another planned evacuation to the east bank of the river. It’ll be huge, though. You need to get down there early. Go now if you can.”

  “Now? Before an order is given?”

  A fierce light burns in his eyes. “You know what the commander of the
Russian Sixty-Second Army says, don’t you?” I shake my head. How would I know what General Vasily Chuikov says? “Chuikov says every person is his own general in this battle for Stalingrad. You should go before it is too late. No waiting around for orders, or else the next person who might be giving them to you could be Adolf Hitler.” He pauses. “You know the witches destroyed one of the big searchlights the other night?”

  “Really?” Maybe it was Tatyana who shot it out. I can imagine her zeroing in on a target, chewing her lip. That was an odd habit of hers. I wonder if after this war she’ll even have lips.

  If she were flying, her hand would be steady on the control stick, her voice crisp as she asked her navigator for her bearings. I know she would be calm. I suppose this is what Mama meant when she spoke about the pressure of air combat. But I too have great powers of concentration. I live in a city that’s been under constant bombardment for weeks. One shores up their house as best they can. You find what food you can. You take care of your dead as best you can.

  What Yuri says about leaving early, about how everyone is their own general, excites me. Maybe if I can get on this transport to the east bank, I’ll somehow find a temporary airfield, maybe the one with Tatyana. She’ll tell them how well I fly. She’ll tell them that I passed the navigation test with scores higher than hers!

  I turn to Yuri. “Maybe it’s my sister who shot out the big searchlight.”

  “That would make her very brave. Braver than any sniper.” He pauses a long time. “Look, Valentina.”

  “You know my name?” I don’t know why I am so startled, as we have now spent several hours together. But this is the first time he has addressed me by name.

  “Yes. Why does that surprise you?”

  “It just does.” I smile grimly. “I am not a famous sniper.”

  “I know your name because when kids bullied me in school, you would rush by and not look. I could see that you were ashamed. Ashamed of them.”