Until I see you again, Raisa
Like dozens of other girls, Raisa had written a letter to the famous pilot Marina Raskova asking her how she could fly for the war. Comrade Raskova had written back: I am organizing a battalion for women. Come.
Of course Raisa did.
Da had been angry: he wanted her to stay home and work in a factory—good, proud, noble work that would support the war effort just as much as flying a Yak would. But her mother had looked at him and quietly spoken: Let her have her wings while she can. Da couldn’t argue with that. Her older brother, David, made her promise to write him every day, or at least every week, so he could keep an eye on her. She did.
Raisa was assigned to the fighter regiment, and for the first time met other girls like herself who’d joined a local flying club, who had to fight for the privilege of learning to fly. At her club, Raisa had been the only girl. The boys didn’t take her seriously at first, laughed when she showed up wanting to take the classes to get her license. But she kept showing up to every session, every meeting, and every class. They had to let her join. Truth to tell, they didn’t take her seriously even after she soloed and scored better on her navigation test than any of the boys. She never said it out loud, but what made Raisa particularly angry was the hypocrisy of it all. The great Soviet experiment with its noble egalitarian principles that was meant to bring equality to all, even between men and women, and here the boys were, telling her she should go home, work in a factory with other women, get married, and have babies, because that was what women were supposed to do. They weren’t meant to fly. They couldn’t fly. She had to prove them wrong over and over again.
Thank goodness for Marina Raskova, who proved so much for all of them. When she died—a stupid crash in bad weather, from what Raisa heard—the women pilots were afraid they’d be disbanded and sent to factories, building the planes they ought to be flying. Raskova and her connections to the very highest levels—to Stalin himself—were the only things keeping the women flying at the front. But it seemed the women had proven themselves, and they weren’t disbanded. They kept flying, and fighting. Raisa pinned a picture of Raskova from a newspaper to the wall of their dugout. Most of the women paused by it now and then, offering it a smile, or sometimes a frown of quiet grief. More dead pilots had lined up behind her since.
“I want a combat mission, not scut work,” Raisa told Gridnev. Didn’t salute, didn’t say “sir.” They were all equal Soviet citizens, weren’t they?
He’d handed her flight its next mission outside the dugout, in a blustery spring wind that Raisa hardly noticed. They were supposed to report to their planes immediately, but she held back to argue. Inna hovered a few yards away, nervous and worried.
“Stepanova. I need pilots for escort duty. You’re it.”
“The flight plan takes us a hundred miles away from the front lines. Your VIP doesn’t need escorting, he needs babysitting!”
“Then you’ll do the babysitting.”
“Commander, I just need those next two kills—”
“You need to serve the homeland in whatever fashion the homeland sees fit.”
“But—”
“This isn’t about you. I need escort pilots; you’re a pilot. Now go.”
Gridnev walked away before she did. She looked after him, fuming, wanting to shout. She wouldn’t get to kill anything flying as an escort.
She marched to the flight line.
Inna ran after her. “Raisa, what’s gotten into you?”
Her partner had asked that every hour for the last day, it seemed like. Raisa couldn’t hide. And if she couldn’t trust Inna, she couldn’t trust anyone.
“David’s missing in action,” Raisa said, and kept walking.
She opened her mouth, properly shocked and pitying, as Pavel had done. “Oh—oh no. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s nothing. But I have to work twice as hard, right?”
They continued to their planes in silence.
Raisa’s hands itched. They lay lightly on the stick, and she didn’t have to do much to keep steady. The air was calm, and they—Inna, Katya, and Tamara were in the other fighters—were flying in a straight line, practically. But she wanted to shoot something. They weren’t told who it was in the Li-2 they guarded, not that it would have mattered. But she imagined it might be Stalin himself. She wondered if she’d have the courage to radio to him, “Comrade, let me tell you about my brother …” But the higher-ups wouldn’t tap a flight of women pilots from the front to protect the premier. It wasn’t him.
Not that their VIP needing guarding. Out here, the most dangerous thing she faced was the other pilots slipping out of formation and crashing into her. That would be embarrassing.
Just before they’d left, the radio operator had brought news that Liliia had scored another kill. Six confirmed kills. The Germans seemed to be lining up for the privilege of being shot down by beautiful Liliia. And here Raisa was, miles and miles from battle, playing at guarding.
If she died in battle, heroically, with lots of witnesses, leaving behind an indisputable body, perhaps she might help recover David’s reputation. If she were a hero—an ace, even—he could not be a traitor, right?
She stretched her legs and scratched her hair under her leather helmet. Another couple of hours and they’d land and get a hot meal. That was one consolation—they were flying their charge to a real base with real food, and they’d been promised a meal before they had to fly back to Voronezh. Raisa wondered if they’d be able to wrap some up to stuff in their pockets and take back with them.
Scanning the sky around her, out to the horizon, she didn’t see so much as a goose in flight. The other planes—the bullet-shaped Yaks and the big Lisunov with its two wing-mounted engines and stocky frame—hummed around her, in a formation that was rather stately. It always amazed her, these great beasts of steel and grease soaring through the air, in impossible defiance of gravity. The world spread out below her, wide plains splotched in beige and green, trimmed by forests, cut through with the winding path of a creek. She could believe that nothing existed down there—a clean, new land, and she was queen of everything she could see, for hundreds and hundreds of miles. She sailed over it without effort. Then she’d spot a farm, rows of square fields that should have been green with the new growth of crops but instead held blackened craters and scraps of destroyed tanks.
If she focused on the sound of the engine, a comforting rattle that flowed through the skin of the fuselage around her, she wouldn’t think so much about the rest of it. If she tipped her head back, she could watch blue sky passing overhead and squint into the sun. The day was beautiful, and she had an urge to open her canopy and drink in the sky. The freezing wind would thrash her at this altitude, so she resisted. The cockpit was warm and safe as an egg.
Something outside caught her eye. Far off, across the flat plain they soared over, to where sky met earth. Dark specks moving against the blue. They were unnatural—they flew too straight, too smoothly to be birds. They seemed far away, which meant they had to be big—hard to tell, without a point of reference. But several of them flew together in the unmistakable shape of airplanes in formation.
She turned on the radio channel. “Stepanova here. Ten o’clock, toward
