Five rows away from me, someone stood up suddenly. From where I lay she was silhouetted against the sky in the moonlight, six feet tall and skeletal, with a shock of spiky, short white hair like an old man with a crew cut. She didn’t say anything, just stood with her head thrown back, staring up at the passing planes. The moon lit her bristling hair like frost.
The woman next to her pulled at her skirt, trying to get her to lie down. She completely ignored this, and after a minute she raised one arm to the sky with her fist clenched – not raging, but saluting the airmen above her. Then suddenly she started to shake with sobs. I couldn’t hear her – the noise of the next wave of planes overhead and the sirens on the ground drowned out everything else – but I could see her shoulders heaving, and after a moment she stuffed her clenched fist against her mouth to shut herself up.
The other woman was still pulling at her skirt fearfully, and the tall one snapped at her angrily and reached towards the sky again. This time her hand was open, grasping – as if she were trying to snatch the planes out of the sky like King Kong, or trying to catch hold of them to pull her away with them.
I burst out unthinkingly, ‘Don’t cry!’
She turned to look for me. She didn’t lower her arm.
‘Ne pleure pas!’ I repeated in French, because it was the only other language I had a chance in.
She answered me in French that was worse than mine, heavily accented and without any real grammatical connections.
‘It hurts me that I do not know the planes. These are new since I became a prisoner. The big ones are maybe American? I do not know. They could be my own, I would not know. It always makes me cry.’
‘They’re American,’ I agreed.
She lowered her arm.
‘You know this?’
‘I’m a pilot.’
She burst out in joyful laughter and swore incomprehensibly in her own language. Then she took five long strides over the huddled bodies between us and came to lie down next to me – on her back beside me, squeezed in between me and Lisette, so that the two of us were lying side by side looking up at the sky like stargazers on a beach.
‘American planes,’ she said. ‘What kind of planes?’
‘The big ones –’ I didn’t know the French for ‘bomber’ either, so I just said it in English. ‘The big ones, the bombers, are B-17s, Flying Fortresses.’
‘Four engines,’ she added. You could see them.
‘Wright Cyclone engines,’ I told her. ‘Crew of ten. The little planes, what-do-you-call-them, I don’t know the French for fighters, I think Mustangs.’
She hugged me passionately and I gave a surprised yell of agony as my hands got knocked out from beneath my thighs and my backside hit the rough ground.
‘Oh! What?’
‘Fünfundzwanzig,’ I gasped. ‘Last week.’
‘Sorry!’
She inched away respectfully. She knew it was pointless to try to help (she did know how it felt). She said, ‘I am Irina Korsakova.’
Ró?a, flat on her face beside me, hissed, ‘Don’t talk to her – Russian scum!’
The timing was bad for Ró?a and Irina. Usually the Poles and the Russians in Block 32 got along pretty well – they were united in their disdain of the French, who were shy about undressing and rouged their faces with carefully saved slivers of beetroot. Block 32 was split down the middle with the French all on one side and the Russians and Poles on the other. But when Irina first threw herself into our row, the Warsaw Uprising had just come to a disastrous conclusion and all summer the Soviets had done a lousy job of giving the Poles any useful support. When the Germans finally beat the rebellion down, they practically destroyed the city – Block 32 knew perfectly well what was happening because imprisoned Polish women and children from Warsaw had been pouring into Ravensbrück for the past two weeks. So when I met Ró?a, she was holding a grudge against the whole of the USSR. Also, she was just by nature a jealous little thing.
On the other side of me Irina asked in a bored voice, ‘What did the fucking Rabbit say about me?’
‘She told me not to talk to you.’
They had a brief argument in Russian (I think), spitting and hissing like a pair of cats.
‘Fucking Poles,’ Irina said to me in French.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did you say? What did she say?’
‘Fucking Russians,’ Ró?a half-translated. (Ró?a taught me to swear like a sailor in about half a dozen European languages. The Polish students from Lublin spoke everything. It made me feel so stupid sometimes, this uneducated American who could only speak English and barely scrape by in French.)
‘Go ahead and talk to her,’ Ró?a sneered permission. ‘Witch. That’s what the Germans call those Soviet girl pilots – Nacht Hexen. Night witches. Go ahead and listen to her propaganda.’
I couldn’t imagine what kind of propaganda I was going to get from a girl who’d been in prison so long it had turned her hair white. In all the time I knew Irina, I never heard her say the words ‘communist’ or ‘party’ without turning away from me and spitting. But most of the Russian women at Ravensbrück were Red Army soldiers. Irina was a little different.
Her lanky height and hollowed face and white crew cut gave her the look of a grim, battle-worn king – Macbeth, maybe – someone competent and ruthless and experienced.
‘I’m not a Night Witch,’ Irina murmured low in my ear. ‘I never flew those tired old sewing machines except when I was training students. I am in Soviet Air Force 296 Regiment, based at Stalingrad. Men and a few women, flying Yaks, chasing together.’
‘Chasing together?’ I pictured a school dance, everyone running around after other people’s partners. ‘Chasing what?’
‘Chasing the Fascists.’ She always said ‘the Fascists’ when she was talking about the Germans. ‘Chasing Fascist aircraft.’
The French word doesn’t mean chasing – it means hunting. Irina was a hunter pilot. In English we say fighter, not hunter.
She was a combat pilot.
I was so thrilled it took my breath away. It was like meeting Amelia Earhart. Irina was a woman, and a fighter pilot.
‘What’s your score?’ I asked breathlessly.
She hesitated, trying to think of the right word. ‘Eleven?’
‘Eleven?’
That couldn’t be right. Shooting down five enemy aircraft makes you an official Ace. She’d said eleven – a double Ace.
She held her hands up so they were silhouetted black against the bright moonlit sky – ten fingers. Then one more, shaken for emphasis. ‘Eleven kills. Decorated Hero of the Soviet Union. Have you many kills?’ she added casually, as if we were comparing notes. She called them kills – a hunter bringing down prey.
‘No, I’m a transport pilot.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I was –’ I didn’t know the French for intercepted. ‘I was caught – caught in the air by Luftwaffe jets. Jets? Fast planes. I had no guns.’
‘When my guns were empty, I made a taran. Straight into a Fascist bomber, a fast dive from above. They did not know what hit them. Lost my –’ She didn’t know the French for propeller – she sketched a tight, fast spinning circle in the air above our faces. ‘Forced to land in Poland, and Fascist soldiers picked me up with a face full of glass and half my ribs broken.’
‘You made a taran!’
She must have thought I didn’t know what she meant. She smacked the palm of one hand with the fist of the other. ‘In the air. Like this –’
Ró?a’s high voice pitched in suddenly at my other ear in fluent French. ‘Taran is a Polish word.’
‘I know! My friend Felicyta told me about it! Aerial ramming!’ And in an agony of excitement I punched a fist at the sky.
Taran. It is the same word in Polish and Russian. There is a technique to it, which Irina showed me – her hands became planes, wings spread and rigid, above our faces in the sky.
Irina had the most beautiful hands!
Triolet for Irina
(by Rose Justice)
Rigidly spread, like taut wings, fly
her open hands. Above her head
mute ruthless fingers slice the sky
rigidly spread like taut wings, fly
while forty thousand women lie
in frozen cinders, blind with dread,
rigidly spread. Like taut wings fly
her open hands above her head.