The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  As soon as she was in the woods with Inga, her partner, Florence again found her strength ebbing. The breakfast ration of watery porridge had sustained her only through the difficult walk. She tried not to think about the pain in her right foot, the ankle flesh swelling up against the rubber, blackening her vision with each step. It was like stepping on a bayonet with your heel.

  Florence’s job was to hold the box saw steady while Inga did the sawing. But even this proved an impossible task, since it required her, if nothing else, to keep both feet planted firmly on the ground. Inga’s strength was at once a salvation and a malediction: it had kept Florence from slipping into the penal food category, but had forced her to keep up with Inga’s movements even as her own muscles trembled. Inga’s effort, diligent and tragic, reminded Florence of when she had first arrived in Perm and tried to work “honestly and conscientiously,” in order to be rewarded with an extra food ration. Before long she’d come to understand that it was working toward the extra ration that would kill you—help starve you quicker on an extra four hundred grams a day. She had only survived her first winter in Perm thanks to their brigade leader, an old kolkhoznitsa who knew all the tricks and let them gather old timber, cut the winter before, to add to their incomplete norms, and taught Florence to stack her wood in loose piles that looked full from the outside. She’d manipulated the books to show full quotas until some higher-ups got wise to it and assigned them a new gang leader indifferent to their fortunes.

  “You’ll have to work faster than this,” Inga said.

  Florence felt dizzy. The nausea of hunger had been assailing her earlier and earlier each day since the pain in her leg had started. She smiled. “Work isn’t a wolf. It won’t run off into the woods.” She’d heard this joke herself when she arrived, and now she repeated it. There was nothing new to say in this place.

  Inga glared at her with her flat Estonian face, flushed with exasperated effort. None of the women in the brigade were “true” Russians, aside from a few who’d been ordered by the army to serve in the Nazi-occupied areas and, as a reward for their loyalty, were accused of being collaborators. They were referred to as “fascists,” as were all the politicals indicted under Article 58, including Florence.

  “Keep it steady,” Inga warned.

  Florence had come across only a handful of women who’d worked in the forests for more than two years—that was how long it took for the quotas to turn a convict into a corpse. This was Florence’s second winter. Fresh prisoners like Inga were shipped in seasonally to replenish the living corpses, and were themselves replaced the following winter. This knowledge slid across Florence’s consciousness like a worn proverb; she could not find in herself the will to be either outraged or consoled by it.

  The pain in her boot continued to slice into the thin meat of her leg. It cut deeper still. It refused to be ignored.

  “What is it now?” said Inga.

  “My leg. I can’t move it.”

  “Which one?”

  “It’s probably the frostbite. But it’s swelling.”

  “That don’t swell. Let’s see it.”

  “It’s stuck in the boot.”

  “What do you mean, ‘stuck’?” Inga glanced through the pine trunks toward the clearing, where a guard’s cigarette smoke hung in a dirty gray cloud above the snow. She pulled the boot off while Florence sat on a log. Florence’s torn footrags were caked with blood and pus from her frostbitten toe, but the pain was elsewhere. The middle-lower portion of her calf was purple.

  “Holy mother!” She knew what it was before Inga said it. “That’s a scurvy ulcer, it is.”

  For two weeks she had been touching the tenderness at night and praying it away. Now it was as hard as a winter apple. Florence pressed her finger into the bruised flesh. The white indentation remained and did not go away.

  “You’ll need a raw onion,” said Inga.

  “Where do I get that?”

  “Put that thing back in the boot before you freeze.”

  “It doesn’t fit. I told you. It’s too swollen.”

  “Jesus. We’ll need to cut the boot.”

  “My boot! I can’t! What with?”

  Inga walked deeper into the forest and returned with a sharp rock. She threw her coat on Florence’s leg and split the rubber with the stone blade. It wasn’t hard to slice; these boots were summer footwear. “It’ll fit now. Then you can go to the infirmary.”

  “I’ve gone, I’ve gone. You don’t get a bed unless you’ve got a ‘septic’ temperature.”

  Inga placed her rough naked hand on Florence’s forehead and shook her head. “All you need is a raw onion. A raw potato will do fine. Drive off the scurvy.”

  But Florence had not spoken the full truth, which was that the female doctor had all but spat on her and told her she was lucky they were feeding her at the state’s expense. The fifty-eighters didn’t get beds.

  —

  IN THE AFTERNOON THE prisoners built two bonfires, one for themselves and another for the guards. Like primitives they stared in silence into the fire. The dribble from their noses hissed as it fell into the cinders. From a pocket she’d sewn into her jacket, Florence removed the remains of her morning’s ration, forty grams of bread, frozen solid. She gnawed and sucked on the bread, then spat out a wad of bloody saliva on the snow. Her teeth were shaky in their gums. It was another sign. She didn’t know where she would get a raw onion, or a raw potato. A simple, terrifying thought came into her head: the descent toward death was an escarpment drop to which she had finally been delivered. In a matter of weeks she would be one of the disgraced—too weak to keep her cap from being stolen off her head, indifferent to the lice that sucked her blood, abused for the amusements of the criminals, eating penal rations and searching for rotten scraps in the frozen-over urine behind the mess hall. She would enter the ranks of the “wicks”—those who’d come to the end of life’s sorry candle.

  In truth she had no desire to live, and yet she continued to go on living. She thought of nothing but food. According to an arithmetic only the mind of the starving has the will to pursue, she measured the distance to death in grams of black bread and pieces of herring floating in her soup. Once demonstrative and exuberant, she’d become a miser of movement, expending as little as possible of her energy, physical and mental. Living, Florence had come to understand, was only another habit. The most stubborn and difficult to break.

  Animals survived because they possessed no memory. She too had made herself dead to the past. Here it was not hard to believe that her old life had never existed. If this sinister cold and weak fire was where all those previous lives had led her to, then they could not have been real, but only canceled dreams yearning for an expired god. Forgetting had always been her great talent. She had forgotten everything. Moscow. America. The voice of her thoughts was no longer English, for she no longer grappled with the sort of thoughts that required the tangle of language. From time to time she remembered that she had a son. This painful knowledge would burrow through the metastasized sheathing of her mind and settle there like a small hungry animal. Florence told herself that Yulik was being taken care of, well fed. She had been allowed to receive letters, in which he had written, “I am dressed appropriately for the season.” She believed this, for it was her only comfort. Other times, the idea that she had a son who was alive somewhere was as remote to her as the thought of spring.

  To forget meant to discard the future as well as the past.

  The Perm winter had sucked her dry of all affection, had poisoned her soul with overwhelming indifference. She was conscious of this and powerless to alter it. It was, in its own narcotic way, a kind of spiritual peace.

  —

  AT SUNSET THEY MARCHED back to the camp with their tools. Less than a mile out one of the women in the group collapsed in the snow. She was an old, frail Armenian who had been in the brigade for only a few months. For the past week she’d had difficulty making herself understood, not because o
f her Caucasian inflections but because of her swollen tongue and dementia. She was believed to be suffering from pellagra, a vitamin deficiency that the natsmen of the warmer climates always fell prey to first. Florence and another prisoner were given the ignoble but not difficult task of carrying the Armenian back to the zone. By the time they arrived, she had no pulse.

  The woman had slept on a berth below Florence’s, and now Florence felt afflicted by the unfortunate circumstances of her death. Had the woman expired in the night in their barracks, Florence and the others would have contrived a way to arrange her body so that they could keep receiving her portion of bread for at least a day or two. The death had been a waste.

  —

  IN THE MORNING SHE was pulled out of roll call by the gang forewoman. “You’re to see Scherbakov,” she said in an amused tone that might have been sinister or congratulatory.

  “Who’s Scherbakov?”

  “Who’s Scherbakov? He’s the commander of the guards, you imbecile.” She pointed to the guard who was already there to escort her, his rifle barrel gleaming.

  Fat Scherbakov sat at his desk when she arrived. With him was another man in uniform, slender and younger, whom he introduced as Lieutenant Something. (Florence’s sheer amazement and fear at being called in made her forget his name as soon as it was spoken.) “Name, statute, date of birth,” Scherbakov said, hardly looking at her. On the corner of his desk was a cup of tea in a saucer that held the rind of a slice of lemon. “Is she the one?” said the young lieutenant. He seemed disbelieving. The distaste on his face was more physical instinct than emotion, like pain or sleepiness. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and drew it to his nose. “I’m not taking her like this. Send her to the bathhouse. Commandant Kachak doesn’t like the smell of these convicts.”

  The lieutenant was waiting when she came out of the bath hut, wearing the same clothes she’d had on before, only damp now from the disinfection chamber and no more deloused. “Get in the truck.” A guard threw back the canvas tarp from the pickup truck’s bed.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  The lieutenant gave no sign of hearing her.

  —

  THE ICE ON THE ROAD was dirty and packed down. The desolate landscape was barely visible in the windblown snow. She sensed she was being driven in the direction of one of the main labor camps. Every five or ten kilometers a watchtower on stilts peered out through the fresh blizzard. It was like leaving one’s planet and learning there were dozens more like it in the solar system, each with its own planetary rings of barbed wire. After a while, just north of a very large camp, the truck turned off the highway. They had entered the especially high-security zone known only to select guards as the Zone of Silence, so called because it held British and American soldiers captured in Korea, and even those kidnapped by the Soviets from divided Berlin. Florence, of course, did not know any of this. What she saw when the driver slowed the truck was a stone building that looked like a monastery. It had once been one. Converted by the Bolsheviks to a transit prison, the building had since become too small for that purpose and now served as the headquarters of the secret police for all the camps in the area of Molotov. Its frozen basement, once the monks’ cells of the friary, was a gallery of interrogation rooms whose vaulted ceilings sucked up and sealed for eternity the wails of the condemned.

  The room Florence was led to had a heavy wooden door with a low barred window used for observation by two guards. She was told to wait outside while the young lieutenant took his leave. She glanced through the bars. The creature inside the cell sat on a wooden chair in the center of the small room, wearing a dull and listless expression on his angular features. His shaved hair was growing back in a pale stubble. There was little time to look at him, as the lieutenant strode back with another man, a person of obviously higher rank, neatly uniformed and closely shaved, but with a crop of black hair sprouting from under his military blouse, open to the chest as though he were a Mediterranean lover. In this dank basement of a prison he carried with him a formidable odor of eau de cologne and real tobacco, of health, serenity, and contempt. A tetrad of brass knuckles glinted like jewelry on his hairy fist. This, no doubt, was Kachak, the commandant the lieutenant had spoken of earlier.

  “This one will repeat what I say to the spy,” he said, addressing a third man, who, in spite of the pulpy suit that hung from his bones, Florence immediately recognized as a prisoner-slave like herself. It took Florence a full moment, however, to realize that the commandant was speaking about her. “Yes, yes, yes,” said the suited convict, eyeballing Florence curiously. His eyes glistened with the faithfulness of a beaten dog. This, Florence would soon learn, was Finkleman, a former “engineer-physicist” plucked from the bottomless jaws much like herself, called on to assist the Motherland one last time.

  “Nu, chto!” the commandant barked at her. “You’ve forgotten Russian already?”

  “I haven’t,” she denied, though every word roared at her today had been unintelligible in its suggestion of a turn of luck too good to be anything but another delusion. “You will repeat to the spy what I say in English. No more, no less,” the commandant said. “If you don’t understand his responses, explain to him.” He meant the convict in the suit. In the convict’s hand Florence glimpsed a sheaf of graph paper and the most prized of all possessions in the camps: the stub of a graphite pencil. An undercurrent in her mind was wondering how she might get her hands on the pencil stub and trade it among the criminal element for an onion or a pair of socks; she was fantasizing about this even as far greater riches were being dangled before her in the form of the spy, now slumped sideways like a cripple, with his hands roped to the chair he sat upon. The commandant opened the big door and led the two of them into the room, but it was only when he sat down across from the tied-up man and launched into an artillery of questions that the coma of Florence’s astonishment was broken by a more frightening mental paralysis. “Tell us which controls on the gunsight supply the correct deflection for the radar eye,” Kachak demanded, expecting her to translate. “Is this done by the pilot or by means of cybernetic feedback?” There seemed to be a touch of hysterical impatience in his voice, barely suppressed, as if he had already asked this inconceivable question a dozen times and was now only daring the half-dead man instead of questioning him. Florence could not comprehend, let alone translate, the question. The exertion of keeping the words together in her head brought on a hunger-nausea as vicious as when she had marched half starved in the snow. But there was only one way forward. She had believed that, in her almost two years in the camp, she’d driven English out of her memory, along with everything else. But here it was, emerging from the thawing permafrost of her frozen brain.

  “The commandant would like to know about a radar eye,” she said, too fearful to ask what a radar eye was. With ridiculous courtesy, she inquired about the “air-to-ground shooting range” and the “autopilot program.” But none of this prompted the most basic acknowledgment from the prisoner. She was starting to grasp the situation, which was not turning in her favor. “Does he really understand English?” she said, turning to the withered engineer-physicist, the one person in the cell she felt entitled to address with such a doubt. It was then that the prisoner opened his mouth and spoke as might a wind-up toy: “United States Air Force Cap’n Henry Robbins. I request that my government be notified of my status as a Prisoner of War in the Sof-yut Union. I thereto request to be returned to the company of my fellow officers in captiv’ty.”

  And once more he was silent, as though he hadn’t spoken at all.

  Speechless, she felt the white scorch of his words singeing into her consciousness. Prisoner of war? What war? The last one? That would mean he had been in captivity longer than she had—at least five years! But how could that be? Why would an American be a prisoner of war—hadn’t they been fighting on the same side? And what of his request to be reunited with his fellow officers? How many others were there? She was now entering
her second winter in Perm and had heard nothing about any captured Americans. Florence now felt seasick, as she would feel once more almost thirty years later, stepping off the chartered plane at JFK Airport, the sensation of having come unmoored in the dimension of time, of having been sealed away while the world had sped on without her.

  She quickly launched into a translation of Captain Robbins’s request. But Kachak needed no help comprehending it. Before she was through, his metal knuckles struck the side of Robbins’s cheek, making the prisoner’s head twist on his neck like a ribbon around a maypole. “No requests granted to spies,” he said and removed a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the blood off his fingers.

  —

  She was given dinner: a full bowl of thick pea porridge and half a loaf—almost six hundred grams—of bread, baked so recently that it had not yet turned to stone. It all but melted in her mouth and was gone before she’d even gotten used to the spongy taste. Afterward she was led through to another part of the monastery, where the commandant had his office.

  “Sit,” he told her. He himself remained standing, gazing through the frost-shaggy window while he smoked. The sky had acquired the carmine aura of premature evening. Florence could feel blood pulsing in her leg. She had dragged it behind her like a rotted hoe. She was appalled at her body’s lack of gratitude. Here she was, out of the biting cold for the first time, and what had the abscess done but use the respite to blossom into glory! It throbbed viciously, in sudden rivets of pain.

  “You will speak to nobody about today,” the commandant said finally, turning to face her. “You will not mention it to prisoners or anyone in the administration of your camp.”

  Florence said she understood.

  He ground his cigarette out on a saucer on his desk. “Even in a task like this you are entirely replaceable. Remember that.”