Sapphire Skies (21 page)

Luka steered her through the crowd and brought her to a stop in front of four people sitting on lounges under an artificial palm tree. ‘Hi, guys,’ he said. ‘This is my Australian friend, Lily.’

A pretty girl with black hair and a long nose stood up. ‘I’m Tamara and this is my boyfriend, Boris,’ she said pointing to a young man in a Lacoste shirt.

The other two were an English girl, Jane, who was in Russia working for an IT company, and another Russian named Mikhail, who was a dentist.

The band got louder and Lily couldn’t hear anything Luka said, so they gave up talking and just danced. He was a good lead, putting her on the correct foot and taking care not to spin her into the path of other dancers. The music was festive and Lily found herself having much more fun than she’d expected.

Afterwards, Luka invited everyone back to his apartment. He lived in the Meshchansky district. One look at his sleek Scandinavian furniture and Lily regretted not having done anything about the tacky décor in her own apartment.

‘Come in, everyone,’ Luka called to his friends, who were walking down the corridor from the elevator. ‘Please, Lily,’ he said, indicating an egg chair, ‘have a seat. I’m going to throw something together in the kitchen.’

Luka’s living room was lined with ceiling-to-floor shelves filled with books and objets d’art. One wall was dedicated to studies of Russian history, while the other shelves held books on animal physiology — which Lily would have expected — as well as books on art and poetry.

Two panther-like cats emerged from the bedroom. ‘Hello, Valentino,’ said Tamara, picking up the all-black one and giving him a cuddle, which, from the blissful expression on his face, he enjoyed. ‘You look muscular and boyish but you’re a softy,’ Tamara told him.

The other cat, Versace, who was black with white whiskers and tuxedo markings, made a beeline for Lily’s lap. Lily stroked his silky fur and Jane leaned over to scratch his chin. Luka came out of the kitchen with a platter of bruschetta. He smiled at the women fussing over the cats.

‘Valentino and Versace always go for attractive women. They aren’t stupid!’

‘How long have you had them?’ asked Mikhail. ‘I don’t remember them being here last time.’

‘They were hiding then,’ said Luka, bending down to stroke Versace. ‘Lily’s friend Oksana gave them to me. They were strays from the street. You wouldn’t think so looking at them now.’

‘No,’ agreed Jane. ‘They’re so handsome!’

Versace nuzzled Lily’s stomach and purred. If he was once a feral cat, she thought, there’s hope for Mamochka.

‘I’ve got a dog too,’ Luka told Lily. ‘He’s a Samoyed mix. I keep him at my parents’ place. They have a garden and my mother has time to walk him every day. I’d have more animals if I had more space. Is it true that in Australia everyone lives in a house with a big garden?’

Lily smiled. ‘Not everyone, but that is the Australian dream; although these days it’s more like a big house with barely any garden — unfortunately for our wildlife.’

Luka poured everyone a glass of wine then returned to the kitchen to whip up some
blini
. Lifting Versace from her lap, Lily gave him to Jane to cuddle before following Luka. The kitchen was white with pale wooden counters. One wall was taken up by framed sketches of animals.

‘Did you do those?’ Lily asked. ‘They are so lifelike.’

He nodded. ‘I draw the ones that I can’t save. They inspire me to study more and become the best veterinarian that I can be. And by remembering them, I keep their spirits with me.’

Touched, Lily turned away to collect herself. With his animal work and relic hunting, Luka was clearly someone who believed he could make a difference to tragic situations. She herself had once been like that. But since Adam’s death, she’d lost faith in her ability to change anything. She tried to — by helping the old women in the underpass and the colony cats — but she didn’t have a sense of optimism about her actions. Perhaps that was why she was becoming drawn to Luka. She needed a friend who could remind her what hope felt like.

‘Your apartment is fabulous,’ she told him. ‘With your interest in relic hunting I expected you to have guns and helmets on display.’

Luka cracked eggs into a bowl and added milk and flour. ‘I don’t keep that stuff. It goes to the relatives or to a museum or stays where it is.’ He nodded his head in the direction of the living room. ‘But I take photographs and make sketches. I’ve got albums on the shelf underneath the coffee table. I’ll show you later if you like.’

Lily saw an opportunity. ‘I’ve been following the news story about the recovery of Natalya Azarova’s plane and remains. It all sounds fascinating.’

‘Indeed,’ said Luka, smiling at her. ‘But with Natalya Azarova it’s difficult to separate the romanticised accounts from the reality, as it is with all heroes. I was on the recovery dig for her plane. A friend of my uncle’s invited me.’

‘Really?’ Lily, sat down on a stool. She would have liked to talk to him about Svetlana, but it wasn’t her secret to share.

Luka heated a griddle pan and ladled some of the
blini
mixture over its surface. ‘He’s a professor at Moscow University and interested in the cult of national heroes. He wrote a book on Natalya Azarova. I’ve got it there on my shelf. I’ll lend it to you.’

Luka flipped the pancake with a spatula. ‘He’s updating it for a new edition. He’s been given access to previously confidential files. Natalya Azarova’s father was the chief chocolatier of the Red October factory. He was executed as an enemy of the people, but who denounced him has never been made public before.’

Lily felt a tingle run down her spine. ‘Is that so?’

Luka must have noticed her reaction. ‘I can get us together for coffee if you like — or dinner. Yefim loves to talk about his research. He’d be thrilled that someone all the way from Australia is interested in his work.’

‘I would love to meet him,’ said Lily. She couldn’t believe her luck. Since Svetlana had made her startling confession, Natalya Azarova had become a subject of absorbing interest to Lily. Now she was going to meet an expert on her.

She helped Luka carry the platter of
blinis
, with their feta cheese and marinated bell peppers and eggplant accompaniments, to the living room.

‘So, Lily, how did you meet Luka?’ Tamara asked. Lily explained about the colony cats, and everyone nodded approvingly.

‘He’s a great guy,’ said Mikhail. ‘We went to school together.’ Lily glanced at Luka. He
was
a special person. Apart from being handsome and showing impeccable taste, he was talented, intelligent and kind. She glanced over to the shelves for a telltale photograph of a boyfriend but she couldn’t see one. Surely he has someone who appreciates how great he is, she thought. Then she remembered that Moscow wasn’t like Sydney. Gay people couldn’t be open here without the risk of abuse or physical attacks. Perhaps he did have someone but they played it low key and didn’t go dancing together.

The gathering was friendly and they asked Lily about life in Australia. Boris was interested to know about the beaches and about the venomous snakes and spiders. When Lily had told her Australian friends that she was going to work in Russia they’d reacted as if she was hauling herself off to the Wild West. ‘Russia is a dangerous place,’ they’d said. Lily now realised that there were Russians who viewed Australia in the same way.

When it was time to leave, Luka took Yefim’s book from the shelf and handed it to Lily. ‘I’ll call him tomorrow and find out when he’s free.’

Luka dropped Lily off at her apartment. Before she got out of the car he kissed her on her cheeks. ‘It’s been a great night, Lily. Would you like to come out with us again? I think my friends liked you.’

‘Sure,’ said Lily. ‘I liked them too.’

As she changed into her nightdress and brushed her teeth, Lily thought about how going out with friends was like picking up a book again after a long interval of not reading it and trying to recall the threads of the story. Only she still wished Adam had been there to enjoy the night with her.

She climbed into bed with Pushkin and Laika and looked at the cover of Yefim’s book. His last name was Grekov and the book was titled
Sapphire Skies: Natalya Azarova, Russia’s War Heroine
. She looked up Svetlana’s name in the index and saw that she wasn’t mentioned until Natasha was posted to Stalingrad, and then only briefly as her mechanic. Lily realised that she knew more intimate things about the pilot than even the foremost authority on the subject. It seemed Yefim was unaware that Svetlana and Natasha had been childhood friends. In the chapter that recounted the day Natasha went missing, Yefim claimed that Svetlana had disappeared too, gone in search of her pilot:

‘Well, he’s wrong on two counts,’ Lily said to Laika. ‘One, your mistress is most definitely a survivor. And two, she did find Natalya Azarova. How else could she know what really happened to her?’

Lily closed the book and turned out the light. She had to be patient and wait until Svetlana was ready to tell that part of the story.

T
he doctors at the military hospital tended to my shoulder as best they could, then sent me by train to Moscow for more surgery. It was then I heard the news: Marina Raskova had been killed when her plane crashed in a snowstorm. The woman who had inspired me and who had turned me into a fighter pilot was dead.

A nurse from the hospital in Moscow accompanied me so I could file past Marina’s urn with the thousands of other citizens who came to the Civil Aviation Club to pay their respects. I hadn’t believed it was possible for my heroes to die. But as the war went on, die they did. Marina’s ashes were later placed in the Kremlin wall, near Polina Osipenko’s grave, the co-pilot on their historic flight in the
Rodina
and who had been killed in a training accident along with Anatoly Serov, the husband of my film idol, Valentina Serova.

A week after my surgery, I was allowed to go to my mother’s apartment to recuperate. Mama now lived in the Arbat district again with a red-furred puppy she’d named Dasha. She’d found her wandering the street, half-starved and with sores on her feet.

It was only when Mama had settled me into an armchair with a blanket over my legs and sat down herself that she told me Zoya was dead. She had been killed in an air raid in the last week of January 1942, when I had been training in Engels.

‘We were in the apartment with the other residents when the air-raid alarm sounded,’ Mama explained. ‘We all rushed to the cellar but the building collapsed on us. Ponchik and I were the only survivors.’

I was stunned by the news and couldn’t speak. I had been writing to both my mother and Zoya from the front. All this time I had thought she was alive.

‘Mama,’ I finally managed to say, ‘you told me about Ponchik and Roman, but not Zoya. Why?’

Mama rubbed her arms. ‘At first I couldn’t bring myself to believe she was dead. I kept thinking that I would wake up and there would be Zoya, cheerful as ever. But then I had other reasons too.’

Mama stood up and opened the drawer of a bureau near the window. She handed me a scrapbook of newspaper articles, similar to the one I’d kept as a teenager of my favourite aviators and film stars.

‘Zoya was like a sister to me,’ she said. ‘I knew that if you thought I was alone in Moscow, you wouldn’t be able to concentrate on what you were doing.’

I opened the scrapbook, curious to see what my mother had been collecting. The articles were about me — stories in
Ogonek
,
Izvestia
and
Pravda
. Reporters came to the airfield from time to time wanting to interview me. Colonel Smirnov told me to be circumspect. I answered the reporters’ questions and let them take photographs of me near my airplane, not thinking much of it and assuming they were paying similar attention to other women in frontline roles. Now, as I turned the pages of the scrapbook, I saw that I was being held up as a role model for girls, just as Marina Raskova had once been for me. I looked at my mother. She had tears in her eyes.

‘Papa, Sasha and Zoya would have been so proud of you!’ she said. ‘You’ve restored our family’s good name!’

I could see that the scrapbook meant a lot to my mother, so I didn’t express my true feelings, but I was horrified. When I was younger, I’d dreamed of becoming a famous aviator. Papa’s death had changed that. All I wished now was to defend the Motherland. Being famous meant that people wanted to know everything about you and I’d been able to become a pilot because I’d kept my past secret. Marina Raskova had been given the first State funeral of the war. Stalin had been a pallbearer at the funeral of Polina Osipenko. But even though I was the first woman in the world to become a fighter ace, Stalin hadn’t uttered a word about it. Not once in any of the articles did he refer to me as one of his eagles. Stalin knew that my past was best forgotten. He always understood everything perfectly. It was thanks to his genius that the tide of the war was turning.

Moscow had been in danger, but the Germans failed to capture it, and its citizens had been spared the horror of the blockade suffered by Leningrad, or having their city destroyed like the people of Stalingrad. Still, it had been a narrow escape and Muscovites were now making the most of life. Mama and I strolled along the streets with Dasha and looked at the people crowding the cafés and listening to jazz or dancing.

The heating in Mama’s apartment was unreliable but it was nice to snuggle with her on the mattress she spread out each night on the floor, with Dasha curled up at our feet. I woke up to the smell of coffee — mixed with acorn flour to make it last longer — and fritters made from potato skins. When my shoulder was better, we wrapped ourselves in our warmest coats and went to the cinema to watch Valentina Serova in
Wait For Me
, a film about a woman who never gives up hope that her husband will return to her, even after his plane is shot down by the Germans. We learned the song ‘Wait For Me’ and sang it with gusto at every opportunity.

These were simple pleasures and I relished them. At the same time, I worried that tasting civilian life again would make me too soft to return to the front. Sometimes the peace and quiet unnerved me and I longed to be in my Yak in the sky, fighting the Germans again. One day I came home from a walk with Mama and Dasha to discover a letter had arrived for me. It was from Captain Orlov himself. At first I thought something must have happened to Svetlana and my hands trembled, but the letter did not contain bad news at all.

I had often thought of Captain Orlov while I had been in Moscow. He had been attentive to me the day I was injured. The tone of his letter told me something I had begun to suspect: that under his cold and proper exterior lay a warm spirit. Even though there wasn’t a declaration of love in the letter, there was much more than a commander’s concern for his wingman. I was so happy that I read the letter over and over until I knew it by heart.

I showed it to Mama. She was quiet for a long time before she spoke to me. ‘Natasha,’ she said, then hesitated. I assumed that she sensed the same thing I had and I expected her to warn me to be prudent. To fall in love when the world was in the throes of madness could only lead to heartbreak. But she did not.

‘Natasha,’ she said, ‘seize every moment you can to be happy.’

In March, I was declared fit enough to return to my regiment. Mama came with Dasha to see me off at the station. She wore her hair in a fetching chignon, with a dusky pink scarf around her throat and matching gloves. She looked so pretty.

‘When I return,’ I told her, ‘we’re going to see many more films together and I’m going to grow my hair long again and wear it like yours.’

I kissed Mama’s cheeks and patted Dasha. It was a simple parting and one filled with the confidence of my safe return. I waved to Mama and blew her a kiss from the window as the train pulled out of the station. ‘Wait for me!’ I called to her. How was I to know that I would never see her again?

The train took me from Moscow to an airbase near Saratov, from where I was transported back to my regiment by a supply plane. Colonel Smirnov was out on a mission when I arrived, so I went to the mess bunker to see who I could find. None of the weary-looking pilots and crew that were eating there was familiar to me. I ran to the sleeping bunker I had shared with the other women and was relieved to find Alisa taking a rest. She jumped up when she saw me. ‘Natasha!’

I looked around the bunker. Margarita’s bed and her belongings were gone.

‘She was killed last week,’ Alisa said quietly, the pain of losing her comrade heavy in her voice. ‘Her plane exploded. There wasn’t anything of her left to bury.’

I threw my bag down and sat on my bunk. Margarita was gone? She had kept us cheerful during the darkest days. Her plane had exploded! Still that was better than catching fire and burning slowly — that was the worst way to die.

‘And the others?’ I asked.

Alisa understood who it was I was anxious about. ‘Svetlana is fine. Captain Orlov is out on a mission with Colonel Smirnov.’

I ran to the hangar to see Svetlana. We embraced fiercely and she filled me in on what had happened since I had been away. The Soviet Air Force had gained supremacy over Stalingrad and now the Germans were being more aggressive in their tactics. Their new strategy was to outnumber us in air combat and nearly half the pilots in our regiment had been killed or wounded.

When we heard the planes returning to the airfield, Svetlana and I went outside to greet the squadron. Valentin spotted us and performed a victory roll which blew off my cap. If any other pilot had flown so close to the ground, they would have been put in the guardhouse for a week.

‘You’ve changed him,’ Svetlana said. ‘He’s different because of you.’

When the planes landed and the pilots alighted, Valentin turned to me and our eyes met. It was as if nothing else existed; it was only Valentin and me in the whole world. Then Colonel Smirnov distracted him with a question and the spell was broken, but the fluttering sensation in my heart remained.

That evening, Colonel Smirnov threw a party in my honour. Everyone had been saving their chocolate, sugar and milk rations so the cook could bake a cake for my return. Colonel Smirnov played the piano while the rest of us danced. Because the women were outnumbered, some of the men partnered with each other. Valentin danced only with me and no one interrupted us. The happiness I felt was at odds with the reality that we were fighting against an increasingly desperate enemy who had annihilated so many of our comrades.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about all those we had lost in your letter?’ I asked him.

‘I didn’t want you to worry,’ Valentin replied. ‘I wanted you to get well and come back.’

The regiment asked me to sing the latest song from Moscow and I sang the one from the film I had seen with Mama.

Valentin’s eyes were on me and I knew the song was for us. As long as we loved each other and expected the other one to survive, neither of us would die.

Afterwards, Colonel Smirnov ordered us all to bed, as we were flying out to a new airfield the following day. I settled into my bunk, but after tossing and turning for half an hour, I decided to take a walk outside to clear my head. I slipped out of bed, wrapped my coat over my nightdress and tugged on my boots before going outside. I approached the sentry and told him I couldn’t sleep and wanted to stretch my legs.

‘Thank you for informing me,’ he said with a touch of irony in his voice. ‘Otherwise I would have shot you.’

The moon was full and the air was fresh as I walked around the airfield. There was no longer the smell of smoke that had choked the atmosphere around Stalingrad when I was first transferred here from the 586th. I thought about Valentin and how handsome he had looked as we’d danced together.

‘Natasha.’

I turned to see him standing behind me.

‘Did you enjoy your party?’ he asked.

‘I did.’

Valentin smiled with a tender expression in his eyes. ‘Are you glad to be back here … with me?’

I wanted to tell him that I returned safely because I’d known that he was waiting for me but I couldn’t get the words out. Instead I stepped towards him. He embraced me and kissed me softly, then with deepening passion. For a moment neither of us moved, then he stood back and took my hand. There was a hut next to the runway where the pilots would wait on the days the weather was too inclement for us to sit in our planes. He led me there. My body felt weightless and our steps were languid.

The hut was dark except for the glimmer of moonlight that seeped through the gaps in the walls and the window. Valentin closed the door behind us and took me in his arms. My heart pounded. His warm breath on my neck made my knees go weak. He moved away again, taking off his overcoat and laying it on the floor. Then he removed his boots before reaching down and taking off mine. I slipped my coat over my shoulders and gave it to him to lay on top of his.