Sapphire Skies (16 page)

Alexander guessed the reason for my hesitation. ‘Please don’t worry about me, Natashka,’ he said. ‘I like working on the metro. I’m building magnificent palaces beneath the city — ones that can be enjoyed by everyone.’

I nudged him affectionately. It was true that Alexander never complained about going to work, even though the long shifts gave him aches in his arms and legs. When the Mayakovskaya station was opened, he had guided Mama, Zoya and me around it with the pride of an artist showing off his best exhibition. The station was indeed ‘a palace’ with its elegant columns and arches. It was so ethereally beautiful and airy it was impossible to believe that we were deep underground.

‘Alexander Deineka created the mosaics,’ my brother told us, pointing to the ceiling. ‘They depict twenty-four hours in the Soviet Sky.’

I marvelled at the images of planes and parachutists, but I couldn’t forget that the station had been built to an unprecedented depth so it could be used as a bomb shelter if war broke out.

‘I’m glad you are happy building your palaces, Sasha,’ I said, standing up from the sofa. ‘It’s a lovely day. Let’s go for a walk. We haven’t done that for a while.’

Outside our building, I linked arms with my brother and admired his beautiful face. I thought he had never seemed more tranquil. I attributed it to his satisfaction in creating something everlasting with his hands, but later I would wonder if it was because he sensed what would happen next and was resigned to it.

Mama and I decided to go to the cinema that evening to see the film
Alexander Nevsky
. Zoya was away visiting her sister. We asked my brother to come with us but he had a shift on the metro. It wasn’t his usual paid employment, but volunteer excavation work to complete a tunnel section to meet the new deadline set by Stalin. People thought I was brave for going up into the air in a wood and metal contraption, but Alexander descended into the darkness of the narrow underground shafts on icy ladders. Sometimes the metro workers had to climb down for fifty metres, and even pass each other on the way up or down. The film Mama and I went to see was about Prince Alexander who saved Novgorod from invasion by the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth century. Halfway through it, Mama turned to me and grabbed my hand. Her face was deathly white.

‘He’s gone!’ she gasped. ‘I can feel it!’

‘Who?’ I asked, not understanding.

‘Alexander!’

At first I thought Mama was talking about the hero of the film but then she rose from her seat and clutched her face. ‘I can’t stand it! First Stepan and now Sasha!’

She began to wail and the other patrons turned to stare at us. I thought my mother had lost her mind. She was a nervous person and I wondered if the strain of the past couple of years had caught up with her. We didn’t have enough money for a taxi so I had to struggle home with her leaning on me like a deadweight. I tried to get her to sit down while I made her a cup of tea but she kept standing up and pacing the floor.

‘Sasha!’ she wept. ‘My firstborn! I will never forget the day I first held you!’

‘Mama, calm yourself.’ I placed the teacup on the table. ‘I will go to the work site now and find Sasha. You will see that all is well!’

I hated leaving my mother alone in that state, but it seemed the only way to settle her would be to present her with the truth.

The night air had a biting chill to it and I wrapped my scarf around my head as I crossed the river and headed towards Pyatnitskaya Street. The new excavation work was taking place near there. An eerie atmosphere had fallen over the city: shadows leaped towards me from doorways and the trolley buses that passed me seemed to be travelling at unnatural speeds. I imagined myself returning to Mama to tell her I had spoken to Alexander’s foreman and that he was fine. Poor Mama. She needed a rest. She got herself so worked up about those portraits of Stalin. I knew she wanted to do good work for him but it seemed to drain her.

I stopped in my tracks as soon as I smelled the acrid smoke. I knew that something was wrong then and ran towards the excavation site. A crowd had gathered around it. Policemen were pushing the people back to allow fire trucks through to join those that were already there. That was when I saw the flames leaping from the shaft.

‘No!’ I cried, falling to my knees.

The firemen were pumping volumes of water into the shaft but the flames shot higher into the air and dense halos of smoke engulfed the fire trucks and the crowd. I heard something I couldn’t identify: the roar of the fire or screams? I didn’t know. All I knew for certain was that no one in that shaft could survive such an inferno.

The horror turned my blood cold and broke something inside me. Mama’s premonition had been right: my dear brother was dead.

T
he first Lily had heard of Natalya Azarova was the article in the
Moscow Times
revealing that her fighter plane had been found. But one glance at Oksana’s stunned face when Babushka revealed her identity and Lily realised that Natalya Azarova was of special significance to the Russian people, even those born after the war.

‘You were the mechanic to Natalya Azarova?’ Oksana asked Svetlana. ‘And you know what happened to her?’

Svetlana glanced at Oksana warily and nodded.

‘But people have been speculating about her disappearance for years,’ said Oksana, placing her hand on Svetlana’s arm. ‘Why didn’t you come forward and reveal what you knew?’

A look of mistrust shadowed Svetlana’s face and she shrank from Oksana’s touch. Oksana sighed and considered her with wise, compassionate eyes. ‘If you didn’t come forward,’ she reassured Svetlana, ‘you must have had your reasons. But if that knowledge is a burden to you and you would like to share it, we promise that nothing you say will go further than this room.’

The television sound went off again and the silence was heavy as Lily and Oksana waited for the old woman to respond.

Svetlana closed her eyes tightly, as if something caused her pain. But when she opened them again, she appeared to have gathered strength. She no longer looked pale and sick, but more like the woman Lily had first met in Pushkin Square: determined.

‘Natasha and I had been school friends but we were separated after her father was arrested as an enemy of the people.’ She looked at Oksana and then Lily. ‘But perhaps Natasha should be remembered for who she really was,’ she said.

Sensing something important was about to unfold, Lily turned the television off. She scooped up the broken cup and saucer and whisked them away to the kitchen while Oksana helped Svetlana up into a chair. Lily brought fresh cups of tea to the table.

‘I will tell you what happened to her, but in order for you to understand, I need to tell you this story from the beginning,’ Svetlana said. ‘You have to know who Natasha was … and what she meant to me.’

Lily and Oksana nodded. The old woman held them in suspense for what seemed an eternity before she began her story in a slow, deliberate voice.

‘Vladimir, that can’t be right!’ I heard one student challenge another. ‘Your French is poor. You have misunderstood. Comrade Stalin made a pact with Germany.’

‘I’m not worried,’ piped up another student. ‘The Soviet Union has the largest air force in the world and more tanks than all the other countries combined. If the Germans have attacked us, they will be sorry.’

But Vladimir was insistent. ‘I’m telling you, the mighty Soviet Air Force has been destroyed in a lightning attack on the airfields. The pilots didn’t have time to camouflage the planes. They were destroyed like rows of dominoes.’

Those of us who had not heard the foreign transmissions for ourselves did not know what to believe. A few hours later, our teachers told us to gather around radios in the lecture halls. An important announcement was to be made by Molotov, the minister for foreign affairs.

‘Today, in the early hours of the morning, without forwarding any grievances to the Soviet Union and without a declaration of war, the German armed forces attacked our country …’

‘So it’s true!’ I gasped.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Nadezhda, one of our Komsomol leaders, ‘the German people are civilised. It’s Hitler who is a brute. I’m sure if we explain to the German soldiers how they are being exploited by Fascism, they will not want to fight us. We are all comrades; all brothers and sisters.’

‘Civilised or not,’ said another student, Afonasy, ‘with modern technology it’s not going to be a long drawn-out war of attrition. It will all be decided in a matter of days.’

I looked from Afonasy to Nadezhda. I wanted to believe them but a sinking feeling in my heart told me that this catastrophe would be neither civil nor short.

Moscow transformed before my eyes. Only a few days earlier I had been to the cinema with some friends to see Valentina Serova in
A Girl with Character
and afterwards we had eaten ice-cream in a café. My mother had been packing for our holiday to the dacha, which we had planned to take as soon as I finished my examinations. Now everything was uncertain. Men between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-six were mobilised. Police and guards patrolled the streets, and buildings and statues were reinforced with sandbags. Queues, even longer than usual, formed in front of the shops, which quickly ran out of sugar, salt, matches and kerosene. Artists were called on to paint the streets so that they looked like rooftops, and fake aircraft and munitions factories were constructed out of canvas and wood while the real ones were moved east.

But for Muscovites the war seemed far away until reports of atrocities from the western border began to reach us: nurses shot while tending to wounded soldiers; prisoners of war taken with no intention of feeding them; villages razed to the ground with the inhabitants locked inside the buildings. Along with other students from the institute, I volunteered for civil defence. We learned that the German army was marching along the same route that Napoleon and his troops had taken when they invaded Moscow. The battle with Napoleon had been termed the Patriotic War; and now this new conflict was christened the Great Patriotic War. We travelled in trolley buses and then by foot to the outskirts of the city to dig anti-tank trenches, alongside elderly men and women and young children.

‘We are not the genteel British nor the delicate French,’ said Vladimir. ‘We are Russians and we will fight with every last drop of our blood for our land!’

‘Indeed,’ said Marya, another classmate, ‘Hitler regards us Slavs as an inferior race whom he can treat as he pleases. We, who have produced some of the world’s greatest paintings, music and literature! This is the country of Tchaikovsky, Pushkin and Tolstoy, and he deems us to be sub-human!’

We all agreed heartily. We were indignant at the treachery of the Germans in attacking us and secretly ashamed of not being better prepared.

Our group of volunteers had been digging for several hours when we heard the roar of planes approaching. The call went up: ‘Germans!’ We had nowhere to hide except in the ditches we had dug and nothing to protect us but the spades, which we placed over our heads. Bullets riddled the ground around me like hailstones. My heart thumped in my chest. We heard the planes fly off into the distance but stayed in our ditches until we were sure they weren’t returning. I looked at the other students’ faces, knowing that I must have appeared as shaken as they did.

Our little group was unhurt, but an old man and a woman had been killed and several of the children were wounded. Nadezhda burst into tears.

‘Why did they attack us?’ she asked.

‘We aren’t soldiers!’ We were sombre on our way back on the trolley bus. One of the other volunteers told us that Marina Raskova, the famous pilot, was forming women’s air regiments and had advertised for volunteers.

‘I’m a pilot in an aero club but I don’t want to be in the auxiliary services,’ protested Marya. ‘I want to go to the front and fight those bastards face to face.’

‘This isn’t the auxiliary services,’ the volunteer said. ‘These are regiments for frontline duty. Raskova has been given permission by Comrade Stalin to form exclusively female units. They aren’t only calling for pilots, but also mechanics, cooks and office staff.’

I remembered the poster of Marina Raskova that Natasha had hung on the wall in her room. Had Natasha learned to fly as she’d wanted? Or had everything been barred to her? I hadn’t seen Natasha since that awful day in the Arbat after her father had been arrested and my mother had forbidden me to speak to her. My parents transferred me to another school. For nights I cried bitter tears into my pillow. People had called us ‘the twins’. Being separated from my friend and thinking of her suffering was unbearable.

‘I’m going to volunteer for that regiment,’ I announced. ‘Where do I sign up?’

Marina Raskova was interviewing volunteers at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy. Nadezhda, as the Komsomol’s representative at the institute, wrote a recommendation for me. Not long afterwards I received a telegram summoning me to an interview and advising me to pack necessities. If I was selected for one of the air regiments, I would leave for training straight away.

I told my mother that I was going to stay with Nadezhda to work on a group project. She wouldn’t have let me go otherwise. When I was younger my mother and I had been close, but she had changed. She was more concerned about her status in society than her own family now, and there was little that I confided in her any more. But she was my mother and part of me still loved her.

As I left the apartment, she was hanging blackout curtains with the maid. ‘It’s a pity that because of the Germans we have to take down our pretty curtains and hang these ugly things,’ she said.

‘Goodbye, Mama,’ I told her. ‘I’m off.’ But she didn’t hear me.

The academy had the unruly atmosphere of a girls’ school on enrolment day. There were air-force pilots in uniform, civil air fleet pilots in flying suits, and students from the Osoaviakhim aero clubs wearing their helmets. Women who had never been near an airfield, as well as hockey and gymnastics champions, factory workers and secretaries also answered the call. I recognised Raisa Belyaeva who was a famous aerobatic stunt pilot.

Some of the candidates paced the corridors with their chins up and their hands behind their backs, while others clutched their flying gloves nervously. There among them, sitting on a chair and reading a copy of Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, was Natasha. She looked different from when I’d seen her last. Her face was sterner and she had a serious air. In the old days, she would have been chatting to the other girls, not isolating herself from the crowd with a book. But she still liked to stand out. She was wearing a dress suit with a pleated skirt and fitted jacket, and a polka-dot scarf tied around her neck. Her hair, blonder than I remembered, was curled under her crimson beret.

She glanced up, as if she had sensed someone was watching her, and I slipped back among the group. I was ashamed that I had not stood by her after her father’s arrest. I couldn’t bear for a reunion after all those years to be marred by a look of disdain on her prettily made-up face.

Marina Raskova and her selection committee interviewed the applicants individually. Most of the women wanted to be pilots, and fighter pilots especially, and were disappointed if they were assigned the roles of navigators. Pilots, in everyone’s eyes, were as glamorous as film stars. The women who were given preference for the pilot roles were professional airwomen. Students from aero clubs were only considered if they had been recommended as exceptional by their instructors.

I heard Natasha’s name called out and saw her rise to go into the interview room. I hoped that her dream of becoming a pilot would come true. An hour passed before she re-emerged.

‘What role were you given?’ the other girls pressed her. Natasha evaded their questioning but when they kept pestering she finally answered: ‘They selected me for pilot training, most likely in the fighter regiment.’ The girls regarded her with admiration. I was seized by an idea.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Natasha and I were placed in the same regiment? But women from universities and institutes were being trained as navigators for the bombers. The fighter pilots flew solo and did their own navigation. And the mechanics’ roles were being given to the girls from factories.

‘Svetlana Petrovna Novikova.’

I entered the interview room. Although there were three other women in there, it was Marina Raskova who caught my attention. She was even more beautiful than she appeared in photographs in the newspaper, with her clear bright eyes and her dark hair neatly parted in the centre and pulled back in a bun.

‘Before we begin,’ she said, a pained expression on her face, ‘you must understand we are not selecting women for summer camp. We are choosing women to fight for our country. Women who may be maimed or killed.’

Marina was softly spoken but exuded confidence. No wonder she was admired. I sensed that she also cared for our welfare.

‘I understand,’ I told her.

‘Good! Because your qualifications are excellent and you are the first candidate we have interviewed who hasn’t commenced by insisting that she be a fighter pilot.’

The woman next to Marina, the battalion commissar, said, ‘We need navigators for the bombing regiments.’

I had to think quickly if I wanted to be placed in the same regiment as Natasha. ‘But you see, I hoped to be a mechanic,’ I said.

The commissar’s chin rose. Marina Raskova regarded me curiously.

‘I’m scared of flying,’ I told them.

Marina bit her lip as if she were trying not to laugh.

‘You do realise that you have applied to an air regiment?’ the commissar asked. ‘When the regiment moves airfields, the mechanics and armourers are flown by transport planes.’

‘I will be fine when moving airfields,’ I said. ‘But every day, several times a day in a plane … I’d get airsick.’

The women exchanged glances. I could tell that they were impressed by my qualifications and didn’t want to lose me.

‘Does this have anything to do with Natalya Azarova?’ Marina asked me.

The mention of Natasha caught me by surprise.

‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘You see, Natalya spent half her interview time praising you and your ability to fix things. We need navigators but good mechanics are also worth their weight in gold, especially in the fighter regiments where the turnaround time is vital.’