I felt easy and cheerful in the dream but suddenly I heard someone knocking on the door. I wanted to get up but couldn’t. But they rapped on the door louder and louder repeating my name. I somehow got up and walked, holding onto the wall. I fell over, sat up, fell over again. I decided to crawl — nothing was working. At last I reached the door and turning the key slid to the floor… It turned out I had been poisoned by charcoal fumes: the stoker had closed the stove damper too early. Fortunately our pilots were walking past my hut late in the evening. Noticing the light in the window they decided to drop in and began to knock on the door, but no one opened it. Then the guys understood — something had gone wrong… The guys carried me out to walk it off in the fresh air and walked me around outside all night long. By now crying, I begged them to let me go and have a rest, but the pilots would have none of it: they had their own ‘method of healing’ — the aviation one. In the morning I turned up for studies run personally by the regiment commander. He looked at me for a long time and then said briefly: “To the medical unit, immediately!”
In the medical unit Doctor Kozlovskiy again began to wail over me: “My sweet girl, what’s this bad luck pouring over you as if from a horn of plenty? Where did you manage to hurt your forehead so?”
“I fell on the door key…” I told the doctor about my dream and added: “I wish I hadn’t woken up…”
Kozlovskiy flung up his arms at me and began telling me off: “We’ll all be there but not everyone manages to live his life with dignity. Only infirm, weak-willed people with fragile psyches die of their own free will… Keep that in mind, girl!”
On the second day after the incident I came to classes as if nothing had happened, covering my grazes with powder. Those days everyone’s mood was excellent — at long last, after heavy defeats we were on the advance. We received brand-new silvery-painted planes each with a gunner’s cockpit in which a large-calibre machine-gun half-ring mount was installed. This innovation cheered us up. From now on the Sturmovik would be securely protected from the rear against the enemy’s fighters.
We were in a hurry to fly off to the front as soon as possible but the weather was holding up. It was March but the winter had gone mad and didn’t want to give way to spring. But then a light frost came, the sky became clearer and the sun appeared. We took off and headed towards Saratov.
Nothing boded trouble, rather the reverse, everything was festively cheerful — the clear blue sky, comrades in arms flying wingtip to wingtip… Saratov came in sight — we were supposed to land at the Razboishina aerodrome. Due to the long flying distance we were running out of fuel and it would be dangerous to do a second circuit. Straight after landing one had to taxi out quickly to vacate the airstrip. But someone suddenly hesitated and the pilot next in line went for another circuit. The engine stalled, the plane hung in the air and crashed to the ground at an angle… Junior Lieutenant Pivovarov lost his life. We all were shaken by our comrade’s death and landed our planes at random. I’d seen many deaths at war but here, deep behind the frontline, when the war had been forgotten, if only for a short time, it was hard to see a comrade’s death…
Only this morning we had sat with him in the canteen having breakfast and he, smoothing the fair hair hanging over his high forehead and casting a dark-blue eye towards me, said, addressing the pilot Sokolov: “Volodya, do you know who Egorova will be giving the hundred grams of vodka she gets for a combat sortie?”
“I will be putting my cup at the aerodrome by the landing T so that you and the other Bacchus worshippers will come home drawn by the smell, instead of going astray and landing wherever you feel like”, I had rudely replied then.
“What was I talking to him so rudely for?” I cursed myself now. “What for?” Some kind of alter ego sits inside me. This alter ego doesn’t listen to me. The first ego often keeps silent but the other one often asks for trouble. Once upon a time my brother told me that I had a ‘partisan personality’. He may have been right: although I try to make myself quiet I don’t always manage it. I’d snapped today again and now I was scourging myself…
The second part of our route was Saratov-Borisoglebsk. It was shorter than the first one and we flew it quickly. But what was that? My plane’s left undercarriage didn’t want to come down! The whole regiment had landed but I was still circling over the aerodrome trying to drop the jammed landing gear at different flight settings but couldn’t do it. I cast glances at the fuel gauge: I would run out of fuel soon. For the last time I tried to unfold the undercarriage by energetic aerobatics but all in vain. They were already ordering me from the ground to go for a belly-landing. But I felt sorry for the brand-new plane and took a decision to land on the right wheel only.
Closing in for landing, right before touchdown I carefully tilt the machine towards the unfolded undercarriage. The plane softly touches the ground and runs down the airstrip listing to the right. I do my best to hold the Sturmovik in this position for as long as possible. But the speed drops, the plane doesn’t obey the controls anymore, the list gradually disappears and now, having drawn a half-circle on the ground with the left wing and propeller my Il stops — there’s no more fuel…
People mobbed the plane but I was still sitting in the cockpit with its closed canopy, in a kind of stupor. Sweat poured down my face, my back and hands were wet… Captain Karev jumped up on a wing. “Climb out, why are you still sitting? I wanted to welcome you with flowers but there aren’t even any florist shops in Borisoglebsk. You may count on a bouquet from me!”
I got down on the ground and the first man I saw was the teacher of aerodynamics from the Kherson aviation school. It appeared that my alma mater had been evacuated to Borisoglebsk and merged with the local fighter pilot school where Victor Koutov, Louka Mouravistkiy and other Metrostroy guys had studied before the war… That same day the mechanics replaced the prop, fixed up and painted the wing and my Il-2 took its place in line with all the regiment’s planes, looking no different from the others.
In the morning we were on our way to the front. We topped up the fuel tanks in Tikhoretskaya and headed towards the end point of our route, Timashevskaya, for service in the 230th Ground Attack Aviation Division of the 4th Aerial Army. The stanitsa106 of Timashevskaya was called in Kuban ‘that one’: it was right there, where a woman lived seeing off nine of her sons to the front: Alexander, Nikolay, Vasiliy, Filipp, Fedor, Ivan, Ilya, Pavel and the youngest, Sasha who was born in 1923 and would become a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1943, posthumously. None of her sons came back home…
Our regimental staff had already arrived at the spot and quickly prepared us lodgings in a school. All the rest of us were looked after by the BAO (Aerodrome Services Battalion). Me they billeted in a hut not far away from the school where the flyers lived, hosted by a lovely young woman whose husband was at the front. Doctor Kozlovskiy as usual did his best to organise a Russian bath for us. But this time it was not in some hovel. A large panel truck arrived, parked near the river, pumped up some water, heated it up, and those who wished went there to steam, strictly observing a schedule set up by the regimental Chief-of-Staff and the Doctor.
23. The skies over Taman
It didn’t take long to get us into operation. We studied the operations area, familiarised ourselves with the intelligence data and, as the deputy comesk of the 2nd Squadron Pasha Usov liked to say, “we were off”. The newly-appointed Chief-of-Staff of the regiment Captain Leonid Yashkin, appointed to our unit in place of the departed Captain Belov, summoned all the flying personnel to the headquarters dugout for a briefing on the operational situation in our sector of the front.