The Night Witches: 02

Author's Note: My spiritual mother, Colonel Marina Raskova, founder of 588th Night Bomber Regiment -- what the Germans in WW2 called "Die Nachthexen," the "Night Witches" -- once asked me, "what is the purpose of prose if not poetry?" She delighted in French Avant-garde theater, Dada art, surrealistic verse, and so do I. If stream of consciousness bores you, dear reader, you might want to read elsewhere. Since erotica is, by its very nature, fantasy, writing about women warriors in an erotic setting, even set during the Siege of Leningrad, can be helpful. For one, it allows me to bypass certain sexist ideas that, surprisingly enough, remain in effect even today. National Public Radio recently ran an article "Women In Combat: Inevitable?" (02/16/12) where a surprising number of readers wrote in with comments that seemed to be based on some sort of odd 1950s-era, Father Knows Best, gender determinism. While my Night Witches are based in the realm of the erotic and the fantastic, that does not take away from the fact there have always been women warriors and there always will be. As always, these stories are dedicated to those of us who have survived.

* * *

[a dream, half wild: the naked ambition of war brides]

A room in a peasant's cottage on the Ukrainian front. A large fireplace dominates the right. On the left sits a heavy oak table with benches. Woven mats litter the floor. A door at left leads into a bedroom. In the corner rests a cupboard. At the back of the room a wide window with blood-red geraniums poking up here and there, beyond that, an open door. A few rifles are stacked near the fireplace. There is an air of homely interest and care, even tidiness, about the room.

Through the open door women can be seen stacking grain. Others pass by carrying huge baskets of apricots, still more others are loaded down with wood. Every now and then, in the distance, a bugle blows or a drum beat can be heard. A squad of soldiers, none over the age of sixteen, march quickly by the open door. Everywhere there one can feel the tense atmosphere of dread, the anxiety of the approaching war.

Pizlina Katzev, a slight, flaxen-haired girl of seventeen, enters the room. She brushes off a couple stray stalks of hay from her jacket, walks over to a small travel bag with an air of secret determination. Her mother passes by the window, stops, silently appears in the doorway. She is old, work-worn, cranky but sturdy. She carries a heavy load of wood on her back, looking even more weary. She casts a sharp eye at her daughter.

"What are you doing, girl?"

Pizlina jumps, puts the bag in the cupboard and turns to face her mother.

"Who's going away? They haven't sent for Zhorah yet?"

"No."

"Is all the hay in?"

The old woman sighs, drops her load on the hearth.

"Yes. I put in the last load. All the big work here is done, so ..."

Pizlina turns, looks at her mother, hesitates, while the old woman begins sorting the wood into kindling.

"I'll do that, Mother."

"Let me be, girl. It keeps me from worrying. What were you doing with that bag? Who were you packing it for?"

"Myself."

Her mother turns, anxious, "What for?"

"Listen, Mother, be still while I tell you ..."

"Is there any news?" her mother asks quickly. "Chop-chop! Tell me!"

"Not since yesterday. Only they say Brody is at the front. We don't know where Jurg or Karolek are, there's been a battle ..."

Her mother sways a bit, closes her eyes.

"My boys, my boys."

"Don't think like this, Mother! They might come back."

Far off a cheer can be heard. Despite the war someone, somewhere, is celebrating.

"What's that?"

Pizlina looks out the window, shrugs.

"They are cheering the war brides, that's all."

"Aye," her mother nods. "There's been another soldier's wedding ceremony. Someone will ask you soon, too."

"O Mother," Pizlina cries. "That isn't what I want to do."

"What is there that's better than having boy babies for the Motherland?"

"Colonel Marina Raskova has called for volunteers all across the country--"

"Oh, her." A dismissive sniff.

"Kamenka, Bratrumila and I saw a newsreel of Colonel Raskova down at the theater yesterday. The Germans are calling them Die Nachthexen, The Night Witches!"

"My daughter, the witch."

"Yes. That is what I was going to tell you just now. That is why I was packing the bag."

Pizlina goes over to the cupboard, removes the little bag.

"I-- I want to go to Moscow, to volunteer. I want to go tonight. I can't stand this waiting."

"You leave me, too?"

"I want to go to the front with Brody, Karolek and Jurg, to drop bombs on the Nazis, to help push the invaders out of our country. Why not, I, too, must do something for my country."

"Nonsense, you are a girl. Who has ever heard of a female soldier? Fiddle-faddle."

"Look, Mother, the apricots are plucked. The hay is stacked. You can spare me. I have been dreaming of it night and day."

"No, Pizlina! Having babies. That is our first duty. Anything else is ... unnatural."

At that there comes a knock at the door.

"Who's that?" her mother asks.

Pizlina, glancing out of the windows, whispers, "It's Vasya Pupkin."

The knock is repeated.

"Open, stupid girl! Don't stand there!"

The door creaks. Pupkin strides in, tall, with curious patchy skin. His voice, like the pink patches on his cheeks, grow husky and he labors for breath in-between each sentence. His lungs were once vast, now ill used. The blue of his eyes gleams with moisture and his lips lighten until they are no more than a thin purple suggestion, cutting his wide, unwashed face into a smile. Accustomed to having women wait upon him, he turns fondly to Pizlina.

"Well, well, well, well! Not one appypolly loggy. You snuck away from me yesterday!"

He is from Moscow and speaks a polyglot of teenage slang and ancient, Tzarist Russian. It sounds ridiculous. Pizlina glances, highly uncomfortable, at her mother, who does not look her in the eye. Finally she nods.

"This is my mother."

"Dobby day, Mama," Pupkin nods.

The old woman rises to her feet and attempts to execute a curtsey. There is something forlorn in the gesture.

"Where did you itty?" He demands of Pizlina. "Here she was, as baddiwad as promising that we were to be married today, my Mama."

"Oh, no!"

"Yes, yes, yes, yes you did. You let me lubbilub you full on the piggy tips, in front of everyone and Bog."

"No, sir," Pizlina says again, taken aback. "You simply fell out of the local tavern, I had the misfortune of passing by you in the street."

"And then," Pupkin continues, paying no attention to her, "when I itty to the church today, no bride for Vasya Pupkin. I must skazat, they had a bratchny smeck about that, for I had told everyone I had found the prettiest devotchka for me. But tomorrow ..."

"I won't."

"Oh, yes, you will." Pupkin cries, roughly taking hold of her, vodka fumes making the girl squint. "I won't bother you long. I'm off to the front any day now. Come, marry me! What do you skazat, my Baboochka?"

"Aye. I should like to see her wed," her mother says.

"There! You viddy? It's offical."

"But I don't know you."

"Smot me yarbles. Don't you think I am dobby enough for her, Mama? Besides, we can't stop to think of such veshches now, Pizlina. It is war time. This is an emergency measure. Then again, I'm a krovvy soldier, that ought to count for something, I should skazat, especially if you love the Politburo, you do, don't you, Pizlina?"

"..."

"Khorosho, then, we can get married, get acquainted afterward the war."

"I'm going to be a pilot."

"Chepooka!" Pupkin laughs. "Pretty devotchkas like you should marry. Uncle Josef, even all the generals, they all have commanded it. It's for the bezoomy Motherland. Shouldn't she have my baby, eh, Mama?"

The old woman nods, remote, a million miles from home.

"Of course. It is your patriotic duty, Pizlina. You're a queer one. All the cheekas are tickled at the chance. But you are the one I've picked aahhht. I am itty to have you. Now, you sweet devotchka – come with me!"

"And that," Pizlina Katzev laughs as she walks across the muddy ground of the aerodrome with her comrade, Florentina, by her side, "was the last I ever heard from that bastard. Someone said he choked on his own vomit later that day, wouldn't be surprised."

The day before it had rained and the fog kept the 588th Night Bomber Regiment grounded. Today the girls would resume their daily practicing. Even with having to go a whole day without flying, Pizlina remained cheerful by noticing that near the hangar where she normally climbed into the cockpit of her old biplane, there sat eight new airplanes none of the female pilots had seen before -- smaller crafts, with peculiarly curved tails; Yakovlev Yak-1s -- each with an up-to-date machine gun mounted just along side the top, right where any forward pilot could conveniently squint down the sights.

"Why, it's a thousand times better than our old 'Kukuruzniks'," exclaimed Pizlina on closer examination, using the Russian word for crop-duster, the ancient biplanes the Soviet air force had allotted their female pilots. "It says, huh, let's see." She squinted at the call letters. "Ee-dee nah hooy."

Just then Lily Litvyak and Tatyana Mozarov strolled up, hand in hand. Litvyak had a great green woolen greatcoat on that she had found somewhere. It was ridiculously large on her small frame, as well as a pair of shiny spit-polished kick-boots.

"Going out for a little spin, Piz'da?" laughed Lily, throwing open the hangar door so that the sun fell full and proper upon the single-seat war machines.

"You can do anything with these uncontrollable cunts," joked Florentina, stubbing out her cigarette on the sole of her boot, "except fly to Venus. Do you think we'll all going to get one? Those motors will drag you to Hell ... or to the Nazi stomping grounds, whichever you choose. As for stunts, heh," and she spread her arms wide, "diving, dipping, playing dead, you have never seen the miracles of what a girl can preform who can work a joy stick while snot, blood and fire is erupting all around her. I only hope we go up in one soon. I hear there's a new raid on in the works then it's back to the old cardboard and twine Po-2s."

Drifting away from the crowd Lily moved into the shadow of the hanger as her friend ambled away, talking and laughing, oblivious to everything, musing on that day's hinted raid. Reaching the clubroom door, the gaggle of girls entered. There were a dozen or more of the flygirls inside, blue cigarette smoke tinging the air. Just as Lily hoped, Oksana Rzaev was working on the engine of a shot-up Ilyushin Il-2, her legs sticking out from underneath the small bomber's underbelly. Lily remember watching the mechanic's body before as she sweated under the boiling Ukrainian sun. She would put down her wrench, peel off her outer shirt, her breasts hanging loose in the skimpy t-shirt that all gunners, mechanics and armament specialists were required to wear, swish her mouth out with sun-warmed tea, then cock her head back, spit like a fountain into the puddles of grease that dotted the hanger's floor. Lily would finger herself at that sight, cumming all over inside her flight suit, as well as later, at the site of Oksana bending over an open engine hood, sweat dripping down her breasts, forehead, lips.

To the city girl Oksana was exotic and alien. Her mastery of the Russian language was terrible and, truth be told, she was probably a dozen or so years older than Lily, but that didn't show on her broad shouldered frame. She was short, like so many other of the Arctic women, had a welder's body packed into her boilersuit. Rumor had it she had been a professional boxer once, back in Helsinki, though, of course, such things were unheard of in the more lax warmer climes. She was a refugee from the Winter War. Lily loved to watch the muscle-bound Minerva, a modern-day Roman goddess of wisdom and war, hard at work. Every airplane was different to Oksana.

"Each engine say to me, er," and she broke into her native Finnish-Sami, the language of shamans, "nyt suunsa ja syö minun pillua." [1]

"Say what?"

"Eh, you know, pillua," and the older woman put the victory-sign of her index and middle fingers on either side of her lips and stuck her tongue between them. Lily's eyes bulged then watered as she tried not to snort coffee out her nose from laughing.

"What! You mean, working on an engine is like licking pussy?"

"Juu! Yes, poosy, leek, pillua!"

"I ... well, I never really thought about it like that."

"Metafora. Just like how every pillua wants to be leeked differently," Oksana confided. "In an areoplane her buzz only happens when you make her happy. Juu? Yes? Like a kiss – always sounds like a kiss."

There were few mechanics in the training camp that knew engines like Oksana. When she started to work on a small attack plane like a Kochyerigin DI-6 she would radiate delight at all its complexities, laugh at the Curtiss-Wright engineers who had obviously attempted to stump the Ural mechanic with problems of its radial motor. The whole hanger brought something different, there were female mechanics from every corner of the Soviet Union, but even when Oksana was doing something mundane, repairing a fixed landing gear, she was alive in every movement, as if she were leading a jazz combo, or present when Billie Holiday first hummed the tune 'These Foolish Things' under her breath.

When it got beastly hot she'd drag the engine into the deep, dark parts of the hanger, where no wayward eyes could see, then strip off the top of her uniform. Her breasts, arms, stomach would all ripple in the heat. When she worked on a classic engine, like the Petlyakov that Lily flew, she would literally cum. Lily once saw Oksana as she adjusted a bolt on a Peshka Pe-2. Her hips swaying, big black boots tapping out a tune that only she and the forces of the universe could hear. Once she even reached down between her legs with the flat side of a wrench and began rubbing her clit.

* * *

On the day that Oksana didn't hear Lily approach, she lay on her back, trying to wrestle a bolt back into place. When the shadow of the pilot in the immense greatcoat fell over her face, blocking out the sun, she stopped. Lily stood over the mechanic, one leg on either side of Oksana's roller board, cleared her throat, trying not to giggle, asked, "Synishku, do you want something to drink?" She purposely called Oksana a 'darling boy' just to see her reaction.

When the Sami shaman heard the pilot's voice, she couldn't help but smile. She had wanted Lily for a long time. She reached out to roll herself out from underneath the plane, found Lily's legs planted on either side of her shoulders. She used the girl's boots for leverage to pull herself out and as Oksana emerged into the sunlight she could see straight up the pilot's greatcoat, showing off her curvaceous, naked body underneath. The body of a killer.

"Synishku, you didn't think I walked all the way here just to show off the latest Moscow fashions, did you?" Lily squat down, bringing her cunt inches away from Oksana's up turned face, asked coyly, "my little king, are you more hungry or thirsty?" Oksana reached up, grabbed Litvyak's scarred thighs with both of her dirty, greasy hands, brought Lily's clit right down to her face. She was hungry after a day of working with her hands and ready to sate her herculean appetites.

Oksana sucked all of Lily's cunt into her mouth at one go, like how one strips down the flesh of a kumquat with their teeth; however, she didn't break the surface, didn't leave a mark, only took the girl's clit between her powerful lips, as if to say 'my, look what I just discovered.' Soon she was rewarded with the first fingernail shiver running down Lily's entire frame. Oksana massaged Lily's ass, spreading her cheeks wide, bringing all of her down to rest upon her face. Those cunning Alices who consort with the taboo always develop feral, emphatic hungers. Lily knew what the older woman wanted, felt those strong, callous hands on her thighs bringing her closer still. The mechanic took her time devouring in, kissing up, licking down every inch. Then her tongue reached her Lily's asshole and for only the third time in her life Lily's short life she was startled, but then cooed for it felt so fucking good. No one had never tasted her there before. It sent shivers through Lily's battle scarred aura. The universe collapsed in on itself momentarily. She could feel her goose bumps spreading out in waves, infusing all the colors around her in orgasmic shivers.

Lily opened her coat wider, exposing her round ass. She wanted to give the mechanic full access. She loved the way Oksana's greasy hands left imprints on her legs, her feet, everywhere. Oksana went back to feeding, lightly biting Litvyak's clit, taking it in her mouth again and again -- sucking on it, humming – urging the quivers onward, forward, up, everything between heaven and earth that was in her power to drive Lily wild. The girl looked down just as she opened her eyes. Their eyes met. Oksana could see the lust in that down-turned face, Lily could see the radiant energy staring up at her. They exchanged smiles that pulsed like magnetic fields. They were both lost in their distant worlds, oblivious to the fact that the hanger door was still wide open, anyone walking by could see what they were doing.

Lily started grinding -- up, down, up, down -- as Oksana's tongue, her nose and chin, probed her deeper, deeper still. Pity the lover with an one inch tongue. The pilot was so wet. Her pussy was practically gushing. Oksana reached up, grabbed her tits in her boxer hands, massaging them, pinching her nipples, evoking out loud moans with each twist.

"Take off your coat," Oksana ordered hoarsely. Lily momentarily snapped back to reality. She looked out, around, noticed the hanger door with the shadows of people walking to and fro just outside.

"Synishku, the hanger door is open, anyone can see us," she moaned.

"Obey your mechanic," was all the other could get out.

There was no arguing. Lily let the coat fall to the floor, swayed momentarily, turned around, came down on her knees facing away from the older woman. She unzipped Oksana's boilersuit, ran her fingers down, between the valley of her breasts, over the little potbelly Oksana's first baby had left behind, down into the mighty hedge of pubes, a wall of curls and colors. She could smell her pussy juices, mixed with all the other smells of the hanger -- industrial paint, heavy-duty exhaust, diesel gas, twenty year old oil – all the birthing smells of machines of war.

Oksana stopped feasting on Lily's cunt long enough to slap her hard on the ass. From far away the tell-tale klaxon siren was winding up. Suddenly she hugged the pilot as if passion alone could somehow protect her. Their faces came together, she kissed, almost fearfully, while Lily caressed the mechanic's strong back, her biceps, the buzz cut of her hair. Then Lily stood, turned, the greatcoat now around her shoulders, buttoned to her chin, and walked out into the sunlight, taking nothing with her save two greasy hand prints on either of her ass cheeks.

* * *

The clubroom door burst open as the siren sounded off on the parade ground near a grove of trees. It was the general summons for squadron practice. From deep inside the cigarette smoke tinged the air the girls filed out, each in their full flying suits. They saw Commander Popova on the field, watching the mechanics roll out the Yakovlev Yak-1s. Each aviatrix at once mounted her own. Lily, as squad leader, had indicated that she wanted to pair off with Pizlina earlier that day. In the east, from over a monotonous expanse of scarred, war-torn country, came the sullen roar of artillery at the front, a stern reminder of what was close approaching.