Over Fields of Fire by Anna Timofeeva-Egorova

Author:Anna Timofeeva-Egorova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: HIS027130
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781907677557
Publisher: Helion and Company
Published: 2010-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

22

Wingtip to wingtip

At last we arrived at the plant where we were to receive brand-new planes and fly them to the front. In expectation of the machines the pilots lodged in a huge dugout, as big as a Metrostroy tunnel, with two tiers of bunks. Here I received a letter from Raya Volkova, a Metrostroy girl. She wrote that the construction of the Moscow Metro was continuing, that the third-stage line with the stations ‘Sverdlov Square’, ‘Novokuznetskaya’, ‘Paveletskaya’, ‘Avtozavodskaya’, ‘Semyonovskaya’ would start operating soon. “At all stations”, she wrote, “there will be bas-reliefs on the walls with the inscription: ‘Constructed during the Great Patriotic War’. There’s a war on but we are in peaceful construction work. It’s true many Metrostroy men are building defensive installations as well. We’ve helped the men of Leningrad erect fortifications, laid out the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga…The guys from our aeroclub are all at the front. Your instructor Miroevskiy and Serezha Feoktistov are fighting in Sturmoviks. Vanya Vishnyakov, Zhenya Minshoutin and Serezha Korolev, in fighter planes. Louka Mouravistkiy, Vanya Oparin, Sasha Lobanov, Arkadiy Chernyshev, Vasya Kochetkov and Victor Koutov have been killed…”

“Victor who?..” I felt as if I had been struck by lightning – everything grew dark: there was neither sun, nor people, nor this war there…It seemed there was nothing to breathe, my eyes couldn’t see, my ears couldn’t hear. When I had come to my senses I saw Doctor Kozlovskiy above me with a syringe in his hand. He kept saying:

“Have a cry now, sweetheart, have a cry. You’ll feel better straightaway…” But I couldn’t cry. Something unbearably heavy lay on my heart and would not ease even for many long years after…

A kind soul, our doctor! He looked after me and healed my soul back in that hard time of mine. And not only mine…In the regiment there was no man more caring and attentive to us. Kozlovskiy literally looked after each airman: how and what he ate, how he slept, what his mood was. He always organised a Russian bath for us along with a change of underwear. He would pick some shack on a riverbank, skilful mechanics would put together a stove out of rocks, put on it a petrol drum, heat plenty of water – and the bathhouse was ready! Doctor Kozlovskiy always requested that a ‘tub’ be prepared for me – in other words a separate drum of hot water, and demanded insistently that I sit in it for no less than ten minutes. We airmen called our doctor ‘Specially for You’. And here’s why: when giving out to us chocolate or vitamins he would call each of us aside in turn, look around and say secretively: “Specially for you!” Wags among the pilots, catching sight of the Doctor, without pre-arrangement would pull chocolate out of their map-cases and yell all together: “Specially for you!” The doctor would take no offence and would do exactly the same at the next distribution of chocolates or vitamins. Kozlovskiy wouldn’t refuse medical help to anyone where we were based.

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