She began to cry. Helplessly. She did not even have the strength left to be angry with herself. She simply sat and wept quietly into her hands, overcome by her weakness and certain that her life would never be fine again.
"Valya," the American said in his flat, flinty voice, "what's the matter? Can I do anything for you?"
Take me away. Please. Take me away to your America and I'll do anything for you. Anything. Anything you want.
"No," Valya told him, mastering her sobs. "No, please. It has no meaning."
His jaw no longer worked properly and it was hard to push out the words through his swollen lips. He stared up at his tormentor through the pounded meat around his eyes. The light was poor to begin with, and the beating he had taken made it almost impossible to focus in on the KGB major who paced in and out of the shadows, circling the chair where Babryshkin sat with his hands bound tightly behind him. The man was a huge thing, a monster in uniform, a devil.
"Never," Babryshkin repeated, struggling to enunciate, determined not to yield his last dignity. "I . . . never had such contacts."
The great shadow swooped in on him again. A big fist rushed out of the darkness and slammed into the side of his head.
The chair almost tumbled over. Dizzy, Babryshkin struggled to retain an upright position. He could not understand any of this. It was madness.
"When," the KGB major shouted, "did you first make contact with the faction of traitors? We're not trying to establish your guilt. We know you're guilty. We just want to know the timing." He slapped the back of Babryshkin's head in passing. This time, it wasn't a real blow. Just a bit of punctuation for the words. "How long have you been collaborating with them?"
Damn you, Babryshkin thought, hating. Damn you.
"Comrade major," he began firmly.
An open hand slapped his burst lips.
"I'm not your comrade, traitor."
"I am not a traitor. I fought for over a thousand kilometers ..."
Babryshkin waited for the blow, tensing. But this time it failed to arrive. It was so unpredictable. It was amazing how they established control over you.
"You mean you retreated for a thousand kilometers."
"We were ordered to retreat."
The KGB officer snorted. "Yes. And when those orders finally came, you personally chose to disobey them. Shamelessly. When your tanks were needed to reestablish the defense, you purposely delayed their withdrawal. In collaboration with the enemy. The evidence is conclusive. And you've already admitted disobeying the order yourself."
"What could I do?" Babryshkin cried, unable to control himself. He could hear that his words, so clear in his mind, slurred almost unintelligibly as they left his mouth. He tasted fresh blood from his lips, and shreds of meat brushed against his remaining teeth as he spoke. "We couldn't just leave them all. Our own people. They were being massacred. I couldn't leave them."
The major slowed his pacing. The desk lay between him and Babryshkin now, and the major walked with folded arms. Babryshkin was grateful for even this brief, perhaps unintended, pause in the beating.
"There are times," the major said firmly, when it is important to consider the greater good. Your superiors recognized that. But you willfully chose to disobey, thereby endangering our defense. What to disobey? And, in any case, you can't hide behind the people. You feel nothing for the People. You purposely delayed, looking for the opportunity to surrender your force to the enemy."
"That's a lie."
The major paused in his journey around the cement-walled office. "The truth," he said, "doesn't have to be shouted. Liars shout."
"It's a lie," Babryshkin repeated, a new tone of resignation in his voice. He shook his head, and it felt as though he were turning a great, miserable weight on his shoulders. "It's a lie. We fought. We kept on fighting. We never stopped fighting."
"You fought just enough to make a good pretense. Then you willfully exposed your subordinates to a chemical at-tack in a preplanned strike zone where you had gathered as many innocent civilians as possible.
Babryshkin closed his eyes. "That's madness," he said, almost whispering, unable to believe how this man in clean uniform, who obviously had been nowhere near the direct-fire war could so twist the truth.
"The only madness," the KGB officer said, "is to lie to the People."
Shots sounded from outside. The shots came intermittently, and they were always exclusively from Soviet weapons. Babryshkin realized what was happening. But he could not believe, even now that it might happen to him.
"So," the KGB major said after a deep breath. I want you to tell me when you first established clandestine contacts with the cadre of traitors in your garrison..."
Babryshkin's mind searched through the scenes of the past weeks. A newsreel, eccentrically edited, played at a desperate speed. The first night the indigenous garrison stationed side by side with his own had almost overrun the barracks and motor parks of Babryshkin's unit. Men fought in the dark with pocket knives and their fists against rifles. All of the uniforms were the same in the dark. The fires spread. Then came the armored drive into the heart of the city to try to rescue the local headquarters staff, only to find them butchered. The repeated attempts to organize a defense were always too late. The enemy was forever on your flank or behind you. He remembered the terrible enemy gunships, and the wounded lost in the swirling confusion, the murdered civilians whose numbers would never be figured exactly now. He recalled the sudden death of the last refugees, and the bone-thin woman with her louse-ridden offspring in his tank. Valor, incompetence, and death. Fear and bad decisions. Desperation. It was all there. Everything except treason.
He had finally brought his shrunken unit into the hastily established Soviet lines south of Petropavlovsk, pulling in under the last daylight, radioing frantically so his battered vehicles would not be targeted by mistake. And then they were behind friendly lines, marching to the rear to rearm, perhaps to be reorganized, still willing to turn back and fight when needed. But the column had been halted at a KGB control point several kilometers to the rear of the network of defensive positions. Who was the commander? Where was the political officer? Where was the staff? Before Babryshkin could make any sense out of the situation, he and his officers had been gathered together and disarmed, while his vehicles continued to the rear under the supervision of KGB officers who did not even know how to give the correct commands.
No sooner had the vehicles departed with great plumes of dust than the assembled officers were bound, blindfolded, and gagged. Several officers, including Babryshkin, protested angrily, until a KGB lieutenant colonel drew his pistol and shot one recalcitrant captain through the head. The action so shocked the men, who had believed that they had finally reached some brief, relative safety, that they behaved like sheep for the rest of the journey to the interrogation center. Made to jump off the backs of trucks still blindfolded and with their wrists bound together, officers who had survived twelve or fifteen hundred kilometers of combat broke arms and legs. Their blindfolds were finally removed to achieve a calculated effect: they were marched into the courtyard of a rural school complex and the first sight that met them was a disordered mound of corpses—all Soviet officers—that had grown up against a wall. Those who had broken limbs in exiting the trucks were forced to drag themselves, unaided, past the spectacle.
Everyone understood its implication.
Babryshkin had heard that one of the rules of interrogation was to keep everyone separated. But there were not enough rooms in the building. They were herded en masse into a stinking classroom, already crowded with earlier arrivals. The windows had been hastily boarded shut, and no provision, not even a bucket, had been made for the waste of frightened men.
At times, the officers were not even kept separate during their interrogations. Babryshkin's first taste of the questioning began when he was thrust into a room where his political officer was already seated. The political officer's eyes were unbalanced, and he recoiled f
rom the sight of Babryshkin as if from the devil himself.
"It was him," the political officer cried. "It was all his doing. I told him to obey the order. I told him. And he refused. I told him and he refused. It was his fault. He even carried a woman on his tank for his personal pleasure."
"And why didn't you take command yourself?" the interrogator asked quietly.
"I couldn't," the political officer answered, terrified. "They were all with him. I tried to do my duty. But they were all in it together."
"He's a liar," Babryshkin said quickly, breaking his resolve not to speak out until he better understood what was happening. "I take full responsibility for the actions of my officers. The actions of my unit were the results of my decisions and mine alone."
The interrogator struck him across the face with a calloused hand that wore a big ring. "No one asked you anything. Prisoners are only to speak when they are asked a question."
"They were all in it together," the political officer repeated.
But the interrogator's focus had shifted. "So ... a commander who even carries a woman with him for his pleasure. It must be a fine war."
"That's nonsense," Babryshkin stated coldly. "The woman was a refugee. With a baby and a little boy. She was at the end of her strength. She would have died." The interrogator raised an eyebrow, folding his arms. "And you decided to rescue her out of the goodness of your heart? But why this woman, out of so many? What was special about her? Was she an agent too? Or was she merely pretty?"
Babryshkin thought of the dreadfully emaciated woman, remembering her screams when she emerged to see the devastation of the chemical attack. Well, at least she was safe now, deposited at a refugee collection point with her starving infant and the louse-ridden, broken-armed boy. And, as he thought of her, he found that her ravaged face grew indistinct, becoming Valya's fine, clear, lovely features. Valya. He wondered if he would ever see her again. And, for a moment, she had more reality for him than any of the surrounding madness.
"No," Babryshkin said flatly. "She wasn't pretty."
"Then she was an agent? A contact you were to meet and evacuate?"
Babryshkin laughed out loud at the folly of such a thought.
The KGB officer did not need any underlings to do his dirty work for him. He landed a square blow on Babryshkin's mouth that knocked in his front teeth. Unlike in films, where men fought forever without really harming one another, this man's fists did real damage each time they landed. First on the mouth, then on the side of the head, on the ear, beside an eye. In a flash of confusion, the chair toppled over, and Babryshkin found himself lying sideways on the floor. The major kicked him in the mouth. Then in the stomach. It was at that point that Babryshkin realized that he was, indeed, going to die, and he resolved at least to die as well as possible.
Through blood-clouded eyes he looked up at the cringing political officer. And he smiled slightly through his broken lips, almost pitying the weaker man in the knowledge that they would soon be together on the growing heap out in the courtyard, that nothing would save either one of them. The system had gone mad. It had begun eating itself like a demented animal.
Another kick left Babryshkin unconscious for an indefinite period, and when he awoke, he was alone with his interrogator. They were all wrong. Babryshkin decided. There is a God. And this is what he looks like.
Babryshkin had been set upright on his chair, and his hands had been rebound behind its straight back so that he could not slump and fall. The questions began again, insane, twisted questions, beginning with the truth and butchering it beyond all logic, making out of it a sinister new calculus that was so perverse it was almost irresistible.
When did you first think of betraying the Soviet Union? Who were your earliest coconspirators? What did you hope to accomplish? Did you act out of ideology or for material gain? How long have you been plotting? With how many foreigners did you have contact? What are your current orders?
There was never any attempt to establish guilt or innocence. Guilt was assumed. Babryshkin had heard stories about such things happening back in the old days, in the darkest years of the twentieth century. But he had never expected to encounter such a thing in his own lifetime.
He sought to tell his tale honestly, in an unadorned, believable manner. He tried to clarify the simple logic of his actions, to explain to this starched creature from the rear area what combat was like, how it forced men to act. But his words only met with more blows. Sometimes the KGB major would hear him out before attacking him. At other times he would squeeze his swollen, ring-speckled fingers into a fist and bring it down hard at the first words out of Babryshkin's mouth.
Babryshkin tried to maintain his focus. He set himself the goal of ensuring that no blame passed to any of his subordinates, of establishing that each action had been the result of his personal decision. But it became harder and harder to form the words. And the intermittent shooting outside tripped his thoughts. As the questions were repeated to him again and again, he found it ever more difficult to focus. And the interrogator exaggerated the smallest grammatical inconsistencies in his story.
When the beating was at its worst, he tried to close his mind to it, to think only of the thing he loved the most in the world. He had long thought that it was his military service, but he knew now, with utter mental clarity, that it was Valya. Not even his mother, who had died in the plague years, had meant so much to him. Dying was terribly frightening. And yet. . . he knew it was really nothing. There had been so much death. But it seemed needlessly cruel, unbearable, that he would die without ever seeing his wife again.
He was grateful that the questions posed to him were all of a military nature. The KGB major never once asked about his family or about his nonmilitary friends. Babryshkin guessed that those questions were for more leisurely peacetime interrogations. Now there was only the war. And he was glad. It would be all right to die. He would have preferred to die in combat, being of some use. But the manner of dying had come to seem increasingly a matter of accident. Perhaps, really, one death was as good as another. As long as Valya wasn't dragged into it, as long as nothing hurt her. He even knew—and remembered without malice—that she had been unfaithful to him once. Perhaps she was being unfaithful to him now. But it did not matter. She was such a special girl. And because he believed that she had been unfaithful that time out of spite, only to hurt him, it had not hurt so much. It was not as if she had really loved another. And he knew he had broken many promises, that he had failed her again and again. It was a country, an age, of broken promises. And he suspected that Valya was far, far more helpless than she realized.
He made a deal with God. Not with the brief, small god whose fist hammered him over and over again, but with the other God who might be out there after all, who should be out there. He would die willingly, so long as Valya was not harmed. So long as he became only another corpse and the affair ended at that. He thought of Valya: the smell of sex and lilacs, a woman always ready with a little lie, imagining herself to be so strong, and he filled with pity for her. He could not leave her much else. If only he could leave her safe from all of this.
He could not keep his thoughts under control any longer. Under the torrent of blows, Valya became the refugee woman, gaunt with beginning death. Everyone was dying. It was a dying world. Chaos. A woman shrieked across the death-covered steppes. All who were not dead were dying. To the music of a scream.
Babryshkin came to again. He raised his head, feeling as though his skull had grown huge and he were a small creature within it. Only one eye would open now. But he noticed that other men had joined his interrogator in the room.
Uniforms. Weapons. His soldiers. They had come to rescue him. He would see Valya again after all. And they would walk across the river and up into the Lenin Hills, through the university gardens. And gray, sad Moscow would look beautiful in the sunlight. Valya. She was very close to him now.
He saw his interrogator bend over the desk, then right him
self and hand a piece of paper to one of the soldiers.
"Enemy of the People," the officer said. "To be shot."
Ryder lay guarding one of the woman's small breasts with his right hand. His head reached high up on the pillow so that the tumult of her hair would not tease his nose and mouth. He did not bother to close his eyes. This darkness was not meant for sleeping, and he held the stranger firmly, bedeviled by the warmth and the buttery smell of her, by the musk they had spilled on the bedding, by her remarkable fragility. She filled his palm, then fell away with the rhythm of her breathing. He tried to concentrate, to burn the reality of her flesh into his mind so that he might keep her with him after she had gone. Yet, his mind strayed. He could not begin to tell why the presence of this foreign woman in his bed should conjure up so many memories.
Consciously considered, the immediacy of their two bodies seemed to be everything of importance. But he lay in the mild damp of their bed remembering prairies and the sparse, anxious pleasures of being young in a small town long bypassed by the interstate. Laughing girls gathered in a convenience store parking lot, and the bitter combat of high school sports, briefly glorifying towns that had lost their way in every other sphere of endeavor. Clumsy, greedy lasses, starving kisses that ground on until suddenly, unreasonably, a nervous girl risked love. The acquired words would never do. No place on earth was lonelier or vaster than Nebraska on an October night.
Sometimes the girls pretended they did not know what you were doing, while others knew it all startlingly well. And the only things that ever changed were the new television shows or the shape of a new model car, and they didn't really change at all. Ryder could not understand why a Russian woman in a dowdy hotel room, so far from his home, should have the power to alert his nostrils to the dust of gone Saturday nights, or to fill his open eyes with the common failures of his kind.
He remembered a girl who told him in a voice all bravery and truth that she would, that she could love only him forever. She, too, lay beside him now, hardly an arm's length away, as he recalled the whiteness of her legs in a car parked late, far from town, far from the world. Only a moment before, he had clumsily worked himself into her body as she clutched and cried, afraid to help him, afraid not to let him, because she loved him and only him and only ever him, and her naked legs were so white under the luminous cloud-light, and her eyes were wet and dark, staring away, as she rested her head on the flat of the car seat. Children, he thought, smiling at the temperate agony of such a loss, only children. And he remembered that prairie voice: "Only you . . . only you..." He recalled dark hair and the cold wind off the plains. The wind tried to batter its way inside the car, to punish them. He recalled her sharp recoil as her child's hand accidentally touched him. He remembered her perfectly, acutely. Her good-family bravery and quiet. Then her worry over telltale marks on her dress, or in her eyes. But he could not recall her name.
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