Sapphire Skies (17 page)

So Natasha had seen me after all.

That evening, after we had been assigned rooms for the night, I found Natasha writing a letter to her mother. She lifted her eyes and, far from giving me the look of disdain I had been expecting, she stood up and threw her arms around me.

‘I’m so happy to see you again,’ she said. ‘I heard that they selected you to be a mechanic!’ So Natasha wanted to be with me as much as I wanted to be with her.

We reconciled after all those years with no recriminations. Just as I had never forgotten her, she had never stopped thinking of me. There was much to catch up on and we wanted to talk more, but the political officer ordered lights out and told me to go to my own room.

The following day, we were issued with our uniforms. The military pilots, like Marina Raskova and her chiefs of staff, already had smart uniforms, but as the decision to create women’s air regiments had been made at the last minute, no special provisions had been made for us. We were taken to a room and issued uniforms that had been made for men. Peals of laughter filled the air as we donned trousers that hitched up higher than our breasts and jackets with sleeves that dangled past our knees. We were even given men’s underwear! One girl modelled a pair of long johns with a fly opening while the rest of us rolled around the floor laughing. The worst thing, however, was the boots. They were gigantic. We stuffed newspaper into the toes but still we could only shuffle instead of walk.

‘How are we ever going to march?’ Natasha whispered to me.

That night we sat in our rooms with scissors, needles and pins, doing our best to make our uniforms fit. Many of the girls tried to adjust the pants by shortening the legs, but ended up with the crotches of their trousers down near their knees. Natasha, who was good at sewing, showed the other girls how to cut and resew the trousers so they fitted, but there was only so much we could do before lights out.

The next evening, those of us who had been selected marched to the station to catch a train to our airfield in the east. The platform was crowded with people evacuating Moscow as the Germans came nearer. They must have despaired at the sight of us. We shuffled along with our greatcoats trailing behind us, like unwieldy gowns. We lacked military discipline and chatted like schoolgirls departing for a picnic.

The trip to Engels took nine days. We sat in the icy rail cars according to our place in the regiment: pilots, navigators, mechanics and auxiliary staff. The train had to wait several times in the sidings to allow the passage of soldier transports heading west. Whenever we were allowed to stretch our legs, Natasha and I would find each other. Sometimes we read
War and Peace
together and sometimes we huddled up against each other in the weak autumn sunshine. Natasha wrote letters to her mother but also, I noticed, to a man named Roman whom she said was fighting at the front. I wondered if he was her fiancé but was reluctant to ask. Was that the change I had noticed in Natasha? Had she known physical love? It was only when we were stuck at one station for hours that I had a chance to ask her about Alexander. Tears came to her eyes when she told me that he had been killed in a shaft fire.

‘I wish I’d been there for you!’ I said.

Natasha grasped my hands in hers. ‘We will always be there for each other from now on. Always!’

We arrived at Engels at night. Everything was dark in the town because of the blackout. Even the Volga River was invisible. The cold air bit at our faces, reminding us that winter was on its way. The burly garrison commander at the airbase, Colonel Bagaev, showed us to our dormitory. ‘Sleep well,’ Marina instructed us, ‘for tomorrow you begin a new life, which will be very demanding. You must study hard and persevere because your examination will not be in a great hall but on the field of battle.’

We were exhausted and got ready for bed as soon as Marina left us. Uniforms were discarded and out came nightgowns and bed socks. Some of the women brushed each other’s hair and helped braid it. One girl took out a doll from her knapsack and sat it on the end of her bed, while another spread out a tapestry to work on until lights out. Natasha pinned her hair into curls and massaged cream over her face and hands. I suddenly understood the magnitude of what we had signed up to do. We were just girls, most of us weren’t even twenty yet. For many of us this was the first time we had been away from our families — and we were going to take on the mighty German Luftwaffe.

We were in the military now, but when the order came the next day to cut our hair to five centimetres all over, we were horrified.

‘You can go to the barber or do it yourself,’ Colonel Bagaev told us. ‘But I want to see you on parade this afternoon with your hair short and your boots polished.’

Natasha had shoulder-length hair but the rest of us still had our maiden’s braids, which we pinned up on top of our heads. ‘Why can’t we leave it in braids?’ asked one girl, who had beautiful hair the colour of honey. But we soon learned that an order in the air force was an order and we had to obey. Some of the girls kept their braids to send to their mothers.

Natasha cut my hair. She snipped it short at the nape of my neck and left longer strands around my ears and crown. ‘Pin those parts back,’ she said, wetting my hair and slicking the longer strands down. ‘Comb them forward when you are off duty so you don’t look entirely like a boy.’ Although I wasn’t happy about having my hair so short, she had managed to make me look fetching!

Natasha took obvious pride in her movie-star waves. When it was my turn to cut her hair, she held the mirror in her hand and gave me instructions on every strand I touched. Instead of five centimetres all over, she made it ten and then put her hair in rollers. ‘When it’s curled, it will be five centimetres all over,’ she said.

The other girls, who had already shorn their hair, looked at her enviously. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ asked one of them.

I had no idea how long curled hair took to set. I only hoped Natasha didn’t intend to go out on parade with her hair in rollers. She didn’t. But she did wear her lipstick and perfume. Marina noticed but didn’t say anything. Perhaps she realised that Natasha, like herself, was a person who paid attention to detail.

The training at Engels was a three-year course condensed into six months. The pilots spent fourteen hours a day in combat training as well as studying theory. The mechanics worked equally hard. We learned to repair, maintain and refuel planes in freezing winter conditions, which the windswept plain of the airfield readily provided. Some of the parts were in narrow cavities, so we had to remove our padded jackets to reach them and work in our field shirts or overalls. Our arms turned numb and we would slap them to get the circulation going again. Sometimes the bolts were frozen and scorched our fingers. To prepare us for battle conditions, Marina would sound the alarm in the middle of the night and we would have to leap out of bed and assemble outside. The first time it happened, Natasha didn’t have time to take the rollers out of her hair. Marina made her march around the airfield in the biting wind. The punishment didn’t stop Natasha curling her hair; she learned to use pins to style it instead of rollers, which she could hide flat underneath her cap if called out in a hurry.

Most of the male instructors were good to us, but one of the flight instructors, Lieutenant Gashimov, was antagonistic to our pilots. He did not believe that women should be trained to fight on the frontline. When he learned that Marina had used her influence with the Kremlin to secure Yak-1s for the fighter regiment and the latest Pe-2 bombers, he was livid. ‘There are experienced male pilots waiting for planes and we are giving new ones to a bunch of women who will turn back at the first sight of a German!’

When student pilots complained to Marina about Lieutenant Gashimov undermining them, she told them, ‘When I was at the military academy some of the men used to speak over the top of me or refuse to address me according to my superior rank. I learned that trust in myself rather than complaining conveyed an inner power that was disconcerting to those men. The bombers I have secured for the regiment require three people to operate them — the pilot, the navigator and a gunner. We will also require more mechanics. There isn’t time to train more women for these roles so you are going to have to get used to giving men orders and, if they don’t like it, too bad.’

The Yak-1 was a single-seat monoplane and, compared to the biplanes that the women had trained on, very fast. Marina supervised the candidates she was considering for the fighter pilot roles, including Natasha. No one was allowed to do more than take off and land for the first session. Only after they had mastered that were they allowed to circle the airfield. When Lieutenant Gashimov saw that the pilots weren’t daunted by the Yak’s speed, he became even more hostile towards them. He’d swear at the pilots, although Marina had forbidden the men at the airfield to use foul language in front of us, and did his best to reduce them to tears. He even went so far as to call Natasha a ‘painted-up tart’. Instead of being upset, Natasha, in her blithe way, showed she was amused by his insult, which infuriated him further.

When the women began combat training on the Yak, Lieutenant Gashimov went hard at them from the first day, giving them no chance to practise their manoeuvres. He stayed in close on their tail and didn’t budge until they were forced to make the sign of the cut throat and land. He did everything he could to demoralise them.

‘I’m going to teach him a lesson,’ Natasha told me.

The way that Natasha could manoeuvre a plane was exceptional. She might be flying the same aircraft in exactly the same conditions as another pilot, but she had the reflexes of a cat. When a cat doesn’t want to be held it wriggles in all directions to free itself, and that’s what Natasha was able to do in the Yak. One training session, when Lieutenant Gashimov was trying to harass her into landing, she flew upwards and went into a spin, manoeuvring so that she was behind him. Wasn’t Lieutenant Gashimov surprised! He tried everything he could to shake Natasha off his tail but she stuck to him like glue and forced him to land.

When they were both on the ground he tore strips off her. ‘What the hell do you think you were doing up there? If you can’t follow a command you don’t belong in the air force!’

Marina, who had seen the whole episode, strode out onto the airfield. ‘She did exactly what we would want her to do in a dogfight!’ she reprimanded the lieutenant. But he could not be calmed. It wasn’t only Marina who had seen the exercise but every man on the base.

‘It might be one thing for her to fly a plane,’ he shouted before storming off, ‘but she can’t shoot to save her arse! This is a war not a circus show!’

Indeed, while Natasha was a natural pilot, her shooting skills were below standard. There was no point being a fighter pilot and performing all the aerobatics involved if you couldn’t bring the enemy down. The pilots practised by aiming at a drogue, but Natasha often missed the target completely.

‘I hate it when it’s Natasha’s turn to shoot,’ said the pilot of the plane that flew the drogue. ‘I’m scared she’s going to miss the drogue entirely and hit me instead!’

The day was drawing close when Marina and the chiefs of staff would have to select the pilots for the fighter regiment and I was sure that Natasha practised in her sleep. One day after another disastrous gunning practice, Colonel Bagaev came up with an idea. He fetched a cushion from the hangar, which he placed on the pilot’s seat.

‘Try again,’ he said to Natasha. ‘You’re so small I don’t think you’re sitting up high enough to aim properly.’

Natasha hit her targets perfectly, and after that she always flew with a cushion.

It wasn’t only Lieutenant Gashimov who gave us a hard time. The wives of the officers stationed at Engels made a complaint that Natasha, with her coquettish appearance, was distracting their husbands.

When Colonel Bagaev told Marina about the complaint she was furious. ‘Comrade Azarova is going to risk her life to protect those women. They can be quiet or go to the front themselves!’

When the other girls learned what the wives had said about Natasha, a group of them made a delegation to Marina to demand an apology from the women.

‘No one works harder than Natasha,’ they said. ‘While the rest of us are in bed she is still up studying.’

Natasha couldn’t have cared less what the officers’ wives thought of her, but when she learned about the delegation she was touched. She stopped isolating herself with her books and letters and began to socialise with the other girls more. She would sometimes entertain us by playing the piano and singing. She had a beautiful voice. I realised then just how much being ostracised as the child of an enemy of the people had damaged her. She had stopped trusting people.

‘Sveta, you must promise never to tell anyone that Papa was accused of being a saboteur,’ she said to me one day. ‘A friend lied for me so I could join the Komsomol. Because I was a member, the aero club didn’t search my records, assuming they’d already been thoroughly checked. It’s not anywhere on my papers. If anyone found out I would be arrested.’

‘Of course, Natashka,’ I assured her. ‘I would never do anything to hurt you.’

‘I know.’

I watched her walk away and my heart sank. You see, I carried a dark secret of my own.

The selections were made and our group was divided into three regiments. When I saw Natasha’s name on the noticeboard, listed as a fighter pilot in the 586th regiment, my heart leaped with joy. She had not come from a prestigious military background or an elite flying school and yet she had been given the role that everyone craved. I was overjoyed to see that I was listed as her mechanic.