David Robbins - Last Citadel

‘Grab that bucket.’ She pointed to Leonid.

Katya waved to Masha, elbow-deep in another U-2 from their squadron. She stepped up on trig wing root of her own plane and paused to admire the patchwork Masha had done. The squares of cotton had even been blotched brown and green to match the rest of the wings. Leonid came behind her and whistled at the number of holes she’d brought back from last night’s mission.

Katya climbed into her cockpit. She called down to Leonid, ‘Set the prop.’

He dropped the bucket and did as he was told, shoving the propeller into ready position, where the starter could grab it and heave it into rotation. Katya shouted behind her, ‘Clear!’ and nodded at Leonid. He shoved down on the propeller. The magnetos whirred. The propeller flung itself over once, twice, then the engine caught with a spitting sigh of smoke. Katya sat in the jouncing cockpit, smiling down at Leonid, who stood hands on hips, a handsome, admiring young man.

She let the motor run for three minutes, then shut it down. She climbed out of the cockpit, took the bucket off the ground, and held it under the radiator. Vera came running across the field, holding another empty bucket and a small packet.

‘Leonya,’ Vera said, shoving the bucket at him, ‘be a dear and go fill this with cool water.’

Leonid raised his eyes into his brows and turned to attend to this chore.

‘He’s nice,’ Katya said.

‘You own him,’ answered Vera.

The navigator unwrapped the paper packet and held up the new bar of soap she’d received in last week’s mail. Katya opened the cock on the radiator and filled the bucket with hot water. Big Masha came up, black from her shoulders to her knees.

‘You know you’re not supposed to keep doing this,’ she told Vera.

‘Yes,’ Vera said.

‘You know I have to refill that radiator.’

‘Yes, Mashinka.’

‘We’ll let you wash your hair, too,’ cajoled Katya.

‘But dear Masha, please, let us go first. There won’t be any soap left.’

‘This is the last time.’ Masha narrowed her eyes at Vera, always the jester.

‘Yes, Mashinka.’

‘I mean it.’

‘We know.’

‘Use cold water.’

Leonid returned with the bucket of well water. His boots were sloshed.

‘And you,’ Masha said to him, spinning on her black heels. Katya looked down, a greasy spot on the trampled grass marked where the mechanic had stood.

‘What did I do?’ the fighter pilot protested.

Vera took the bucket. She liked Leonid, and encouraged Katya in his direction. Vera had her own boyfriend, a navigator in a Boston A-20 – one of the Lend-Lease bombers from America – based on the northern shoulder of the Kursk pocket.

Katya mixed the hot and cold water in the empty bucket. She pulled off her tunic, down to her green undershirt. She bent over and Vera poured the warm water over her raven hair, cut short above her ears like that of all the Night Witches. Together, the two women washed each other’s hair, rubbing in the soap hard, while Leonid sat on the wing watching, saying nothing. Within minutes, several other women pilots were in the seats of their own cockpits, revving their engines, heating bathwater, and arguing with their mechanics. Katya and Vera were the ringleaders; Leonid chuckled at the influence they had in their squadron. Several male pilots walked by, probably, Katya thought, to get a look at the laughing girls in the wet undershirts. A few made snide comments, one said something to Leonid about him being the ‘Witches’ bath house boy,’ but he did not rise from his place on the wing nor even answer. Vera heaved a bucket of cold water in the jeering pilot’s direction, and Leonid had to go back to the well.

When the women had washed and rinsed their hair, they combed it flat against their heads and sat in the sun to dry it. Vera produced a small pocket mirror and the comb; the soap and these sundries were gifts from her bomber pilot. Gazing in the mirror, Katya noticed on her forehead and around her eyes her first scars from the war, the fine lines chiseled into her face from the constant strain and concentration of night flying, of wincing into the darkness to spot the smallest glimmers of targets and home, of sopping away tears on rough shirt sleeves. And though she would not admit it, she and every other Night Witch struggled and yearned to win the acceptance of the male pilots, so she flew sometimes harder and more recklessly than she otherwise might. Every one of her black, gliding missions, every friend who didn’t reach the landing lights at dawn, every flak burst and averted crash, even the sneers from the male fighter pilots, was etched in her face. Looking at herself in the mirror for those seconds, she relived it all.

Leonid sat on a bucket, kicking out his ankles in a mimicry of the gopak , the Cossack dance. Masha rambled back and topped off the radiator without saying a word. The two women reclined in the sun. Around the base, planes fired up and shut down, some took off, bombers flew high overhead on some mission to worry the Germans before the coming battle. In the command hut, the next mission for the Witches was planned, the objectives often were arrived at by information from the partisans. After an hour of leisure, Leonid left them, then Vera went to write a letter. Katya stood beside her bi-plane, watching Leonid walk to his Yak-9 in his flight suit, watched him take off to fly his shift of patrol duty over the aerodrome. He waggled his wings as he rose, and she knew that was for her.

High clouds had moved in late in the day and stuck. There had been some afternoon thunder but no rain. Only pieces of moonlight shoved through the thick cover and the Witches sailed through a darker, better world for their mission.

Katya cruised, the third plane in line. The target was a new supply depot discovered and reported by the partisans. The U-2s’ bombs would rip open crates of medicine and bandages, foodstuffs, clothes and blankets. No fireworks tonight, no fuel barrels or ammo stacks. Onions don’t blow up. That’s what Germans eat, Katya thought, their breath stinks of onion.

She watched the unlit earth slip by below, listening to the engine sounds muted through her quiet headset – Vera studied her maps and the ground in silence, the only times in the day she had her mouth closed – and wondered why she believed this. She had not ever met a German, though she’d bombed them for almost a year. Why was it necessary to hate them for what they ate, or what they looked and sounded like? This was Soviet thinking, Soviet propaganda playing in her head, the barking commissars always lumbering around giving out speeches and pamphlets. It was enough simply to despise the Germans because they were invaders on Russian soil, not for their difference. Katya grew up among men and women of every walk: farmers, riders, poets, brigands, musicians, there were Circassians, Tatars, Kalmuks, Khazars, Slavs, Russians, all came to the Kuban to become Cossacks, difference was the lifeblood. I’ll blow up the Germans’ onions tonight, she thought, and their breath will smell like mine, then we’ll kill as many of them as we can, not because they stink but because they are here where they don’t belong. And the commissars can lumber off to hell.

She glanced over her shoulder at Vera. Her navigator held a flashlight across her lap, a stopwatch rested in the folds of her map.

‘It’s quiet, don’t you think?’ she asked Vera.

‘Yes, it’s quiet. Leave me alone.’

Katya let moments of engine and wind and night fly past.

“I don’t like it. I’m thinking too much.’

‘So stop thinking. And while you’re at it, stop talking.’