Aimie Runyan - Daughters of the Night Sky

“Do you mind at all, Mama?”

It was usually she who opened these conversations with a query about school or the goings-on with my friends. Given that I had stolen her chance of seeing my wedding, I figured opening the chat was my duty this time.

“Mind that you married an intelligent, handsome, talented young man of good family and solid prospects who also happens to worship the ground at your feet? Not in the least. That I wasn’t there to see it? Perhaps a little. That your father wasn’t there to give you a proper wedding breaks my heart.”

“So you approve of Vanya?” I asked, closing my eyes as she tilted my head and poured the warm water over my red tresses.

“My dear, who could not approve of such a young man for her daughter? And your father would have, too, which is the greatest compliment I can offer.”

“Thank you, Mama.”

“I must confess, I worried you’d never marry or have a life outside your studies. It seemed you’d spend your life shifting from having your nose in a book to having your head in the clouds—quite literally.”

“You always warned me that boys were the fastest course to a derailed dream. You saw it so many times on the stage in Moscow with the other dancers.”

“I worried I drove that message to heart a little too well at times,” Mama said with a chuckle, her long fingers easing months’ worth of tension from my scalp. “Your father cut short my dancing career by a few years—probably not even that much—but I never regretted it. A career, no matter how noble it is, can’t be the whole of your life, Katya. You need to have something to work for .”

“Vanya understands my need to fly,” I said, breathing in the deep notes of honey and herbs wafting from the soap. “I don’t think I would have been able to marry him if he didn’t. Not with the war on, especially.”

“He’s a remarkable young man, and I am so happy you found him. You deserve some happiness after your hard work in school. I’m just sorry this infernal war will cut it short.”

A pall had been cast over Mama’s voice. I could offer her platitudes. Tell her that we’d repel the Germans back to their borders by the new year, but I couldn’t lie to my mother. That hadn’t been the case in the last European War, and it wouldn’t be the case this time.

“There were times I wondered where you learned your tenacity,” she said. “You must have inherited it from your father. I wanted to be a good role model for you, but I didn’t know if a laundress could raise a pilot for a daughter. I’m glad you got that gift from him.” I heard a sniff and felt a hand disentangle itself from my mane to wipe away a tear.

“Mama, how can you say that? A less tenacious woman would never have been able to keep food on this table for the past ten years.”

“Thank you for saying so, Katinka. I just wanted to give you the best life I could. I couldn’t bear to see you at the washing tub next to mine.”

“I’m none too proud for that, Mama. But I am glad you urged me to further my studies. Do you remember coming to school to tell Comrade Dokorov I would be studying math and science with the boys?”

“Such a sniveling rat of a man. I heard the party finally gave him a talking-to about how he separated the girls from the boys in the ‘serious’ subjects. I expect he’s changed his curriculum—the party won’t ‘talk’ to him a second time.”

“You went in a laundress,” I said. “He saw your clothes and your red hands and dismissed you like a scullery maid in a great house. Then you opened your mouth and he saw you were no mere washerwoman. You spoke with eloquence and poise he hadn’t expected, and you demanded my education. You were a dragon. If I learned anything about tenacity, it was from you.”

Mama wrapped my hair in a towel and motioned for me to sit up. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed my cheeks. With her arms encircling me, I didn’t think of all the embraces I’d missed as a child, but of how grateful I was for this one.

A vision of children—little boys with dark hair and little red-haired girls—playing in front of a warm fire flashed in front of me. I had never planned for children, but now they seemed as inevitable a part of my future as taking my next lungful of oxygen. I hoped the war’s tide would quickly turn, and I could make sure my children lived in a world where their mother wasn’t too broken by work and grief to love her children the way she longed to.

October 1941, Moscow, Russia

“If I never see a train again…,” Taisiya muttered after a clanking sound from the next compartment stirred her from a shallow slumber.

“It can’t be far now,” I consoled her, stowing my novel in defeat. Moscow. As the train propelled itself toward the capital, I felt my head throbbing in time with the incessant rattle of the wheels against the rails. Neither reading nor conversation was tolerable, so we both settled in to rest as best we could.

The journey should have only taken two days, perhaps three with bad timing, but we were now on our fifth day. I had always valued Taisiya’s friendship in our three years together, but I’d never been more grateful for her presence in my life as on the trek to the capital. At almost every stop anyone who was not an enlisted soldier heading to the front was displaced to the next train. Four nights trying to sleep in drafty train stations, hoping our cadets’ uniforms would ward away anyone who might see two women traveling alone as targets.

Since our would-have-been graduation, Taisiya and I had spent two hours each day writing letters to anyone who we thought might listen, begging for our chance to go to the front. There were women at academies and flight clubs all over Russia doing the same. I had hoped our numbers would spark a change, and it seemed that they had. More likely the German troops that had all but waltzed through the western part of the country before arriving just outside the capital had scared Stalin and his men into accepting that they needed us not just in the kitchens, the bedrooms, and the factories, but also behind the wheels of ambulances, in the trenches, and in the air. There is nothing like coming within a hairsbreadth of losing the capital to inspire our leaders to espouse their own ideals of equality.

The letters from the army recruiters finally came in October, and we had to get ourselves to Moscow for interviews to be considered for placement in one of the three airborne female regiments. While they were taking any man or boy able to stand, we had to prove our worth for a few hundred coveted spots. I couldn’t think about the odds as the train lurched on, creaking ever forward on the rusty tracks. I couldn’t even think about the fact that I was finally returning to Moscow. It had given Mama a smile to think I would be returning home, even if it meant war—or rejection. I wasn’t sure which fate she dreaded more for me.

I had thought I might enjoy the three months with my mother between graduation and my deployment, but her eyes looked haunted every time she saw me. And though he was still in training, my worry for Vanya overshadowed everything. I wanted to go to the front and do my part to end the war.

“You’re so much like your father,” she would say, her dusty blond curls shaking as she chopped the potatoes for the evening soup. “Bound by duty and honor. You will do your country proud, Katinka.”

Behind her pride, there was unvoiced fear: Don’t let your fate be the same as his.

She sent me off to the train station with a hug as warm as she’d ever given me. She’d had so little warmth to spare since Papa died, and I thought I had done well enough with the love she’d had to give. As I took my place on the train and felt the engine groan to life, propelling us to Moscow, I felt an emptiness settle into me. What would it have been like to spend my youth with a mother who sang and smiled? What if I had known the strength of my father’s embrace, and not just from faded memories? The images of a childhood—brighter, purer—stole the oxygen from my lungs. One question loomed larger over all the others: Would I be on this train, prepared to fly, to fight, to be a warrior, if a stray bullet hadn’t claimed my father’s life decades too soon?