Over Fields of Fire

train station. Of course, mum had brought with her a basket of gifts. She sat down on the grass behind the barrier and began to watch what was happening in the air, and she was sitting quietly until my surname was announced. Then she got anxious and when I began to do aerobatics, mum rushed to the centre of the airfield shouting “My girl, you’ll fall down!” holding her festive lace apron as if she was setting it under me so in case I fell I would fall on it! Orderlies walked mum to headquarters. It was clarified who she was worried about — and then the head of the aeroclub offered her “a ride in an aeroplane”. But mum refused categorically…

After our students graduated we, the instructors, were awarded a river boat tour from Kalinin to Moscow to visit an agricultural exhibition. And soon we steamed down the Volga feasting our eyes upon the marvels on her banks. Then we sailed through the channel57: seeing the shipping locks for the first time, I was amazed and delighted. Then there was Moscow. We visited the exhibition, I also saw my family on the Arbat58. Now Katya worked as a knitter at a stockinet factory, Yurka was studying at school. We talked a lot. My brother took an opportunity to send a letter in which he wrote that they had sailed down the Yenisei river for a while on a barge with criminals. The ‘mobsters’ scoffed at the ‘politicals’ and took away their clothes and food, but the guards either noticed nothing, or didn’t want to notice. In Igarka they were put ashore and marched into the tundra. Many of them caught cold and died. Less than half survived…

The second stage of the Moscow Metro was already in operation and I felt a longing to see my station, ‘Dynamo’. Its columns were tiled with semi-precious onyx. There was a bench between the columns and behind it in a niche — a bas-relief of an athlete. It was beautiful!

In the Metrostroy I found out that nearly all my mates from the Metrostroy aeroclub had graduated from the flying schools and were now serving in the Air Force. Victor Koutov was a fighter pilot in an aviation regiment on the Western border. He’d been writing me letters in verse, asking a reply to each of them but as always I had had no time. After graduation from the school Victor had visited me in Kherson hoping to take me away with him but I didn’t even want to listen to him.

“Once I graduate I’ll come to you myself”, I responded back then.

“You won’t! I know you pretty well. You’ll have to be dragged to the altar.”

“You do that then!” I burst out angrily. Victor left, and I was very melancholy. I would walk to school in tears… maybe I had a premonition that I’d seen him for the last time in my life…

We spent five days in Moscow and when we got back home we set about work so intensely that there not even weekends any more. Through the whole pre-war winter we trained pilots drafted via a special call-up of pre- conscription-aged youth. They were fully exempted from work and studying in any institutions. The aeroclub paid them an allowance. By the spring we had trained all of them and all of them were recommended for accelerated transfer to flying schools. In fact back then we had guys from two call-ups — exempted from work and not exempted from work. The students who studied without exemption from work started flying in the summer — after the graduation of the guys from the special call-up. Day after day we helped them find their wings and not all of them had started to fly independently when the war broke out.

10. This is war, girls!

Flying had dragged on till evening and a June night comes late. I was already tired but couldn’t go home: I still had to do debriefing with the trainee pilots, and write up paperwork. As soon as I had sat at the desk my friend Mashen’ka59 Smirnova stuck her head in the door, “Don’t sit up late, Anyuta60, we’re going to the forest in the morning. We’ll have you up with the sun!” she said and flitted away.

“Of course”, I recalled, “It’s Saturday today!” So many weeks in a row we’d worked with no days off — we could afford one. The girls’ idea was a good one — off to the forest. The weather was as if ‘on demand’. And the area around Tver’61 is crawling with inviting places. And there’s no need to walk far — get on a tram and it’ll take you right to the pine-forest, the one beyond the ‘Proletarka’ Textile Factory.

When the first tram left we left with it. The instructors were glad — after all this time we’d got together. The car was filled with laughter, jokes and songs… The conductor was outraged, “You’re playing up like schoolkids — there’s no keeping you in check!”

There were five of us girls there: two aircraft mechanics, two Marias (Nikonova and Piskounova), two volunteer pilot instructors (Tamara Konstantinova and Masha Smirnova) and the two of us, pilot instructors via the Kherson aviation school: Katya Piskounova and I. Later, during the war, at night the latter would drop ammunition and provisions from her defenceless Po-2 down to the marines of a landing party at Eltigen.62

…But for now we were walking, feasting our eyes on marvellous spaces… The fading lilies of the valley showed through the grass in places — like a gift of nature… We came out on the Volga river, chose a comfortable spot on her high right bank and sat down, admiring the passing steamships. But usually music was heard from them and it was uncommonly quiet. And suddenly we heard the distinct voice of a radio announcer echoing in the forest: “We are at war…”

All nature’s colours faded then and there. Our cheerful mood had vanished somewhere. In a moment we became older than our years. All of us standing in that Sunday morning forest were certain: the country was rising to a mortal battle. And each of us who had mastered a military profession decided for herself not to stay out of it. Someone said briefly: “Time to go home”, but in less than an hour we all encountered each other at the city military commissariat. Our little ruse against each other hadn’t worked but our visit to the commissar’s office turned out to be futile.

“Do your job, girls”, the military commissar responded to our request to send us to the front. “You’ll have enough work in the rear now.”

I had enough patience to stay at the aeroclub’s peaceful aerodrome only for a month and a half. The alarming reports of the first days of war were stirring us up and at the same time we were informed that it had been ordered to evacuate the aeroclub into the deep rear. The day came when I walked to a train heading off to Moscow. Mousya Nikonova, my plane’s technician, saw me off. Her husband, a tankman, had been badly wounded and was dying in one of the city hospitals. Mousya didn’t cry but her beautiful face with brown almond-shaped eyes had become thin and dull. Another tanker who’d lost his arm lay in an adjacent ward. He was the husband of Tatyana Nikoulina, with whom we’d studied in the Metrostroy aeroclub. She’d come to him from Moscow, leaving her small daughter in the care of neighbours, and sat in the ward next to her maimed husband day and night, comforting and tending him as best she could. The war was already making itself felt — very brutally, sometimes irremediably…

At the train station Mousya Nikonova kissed me and putting a silver rouble into the left breast pocket of my blouse said quietly, “It’s a talisman. You’ll give it back to me when the Fascists are smashed.” This talisman… It would be with me through the whole war. By some miracle I saved it but managed to return it to Mousya only many years later. She considered me dead and only through one item in a newspaper got to know my approximate address and found me. I remember standing near the house gate and seeing a woman with a vaguely familiar face coming towards me from the bus stop. She came up and began asking if I knew where to find… and then she fell silent and began to cry, having recognised me…

But all this was a long way off and at the moment I was on my way to Moscow to the OSOAVIAHIM Central Council. I found my way with difficulty to Three Stations Square63, I noticed the camouflage on the buildings: they were covered with something like theatrical scenery. I was also astounded by the white paper crosses on the windows. The absence of the customary train station hustle and bustle was depressing. Men in military uniform walked about the station halls and words of command rang out loudly. When I was running across the square I nearly ran face first into a silvery gondola — soldiers were cautiously leading a balloon… I was also astonished by the flak guns in Krasnosel’skaya Street, these stood on the roofs of the many- storied buildings like cranes on long legs. And this was the atmosphere all along my way to Toushino: flak guns in parks, columns of troops, recruitment posters on the walls, a stern reserve in the behaviour of people in the streets. Not only the outskirts but the central thoroughfares of the capital were cluttered with lines of anti-tank hedgehogs64 and barred with barricades. Moscow — now a frontline city —