The Patriots
Page 57
She scraped up the last spoonful of porridge and fed it to him. “The commandant won’t allow me to meet with you alone for much longer, Captain.”
“It’s Henry.”
“I need to tell him something.”
“You can tell him I got nothing to say to him until my government is informed of my status as a Prisoner of War in the U.S.S.R.”
—
“Sugar?”
“Please.” She was stunned to be sitting across the desk from Kachak, to have him offering her tea.
“How many teaspoons?”
“Two,” she said, just as though she were back at home.
He had a meaty, striking if not exactly handsome face. His shirt was buttoned up to the neck this time.
“You’ve made progress.”
Florence couldn’t tell if this was a question or praise. “Yes,” she said. “He’s been eating. In a few days, I believe he’ll have much of his strength back.”
“We’ll resume questioning tomorrow.”
“No.” She’d spoken before she could stop herself.
Kachak blinked. “No?”
“I only mean,” she corrected, “I don’t think he’ll give in under strain. He hasn’t before. And he still insists that his request to alert the American government be carried out.”
“I see,” said Kachak. “So he’s found himself an advocate.”
She felt her two frostbitten fingertips begin to throb. Or was it only her fear? “I am nothing more than an interpreter,” she said.
“Is that what you are?” He was staring at her, one of his abundant eyebrows lifted challengingly. He slid a cigarette from his front pocket without taking out the pack and lit it. “I have a dozen interpreters here. I have enough Ivan Ivanoviches to translate all of Shakespeare.” He took a small drag to get the cherry glow going, then let the smoke out silently through his nose. His eyes were not telling her what he had; they were asking what she had.
And still she had nothing.
Or did she?
She had once, so long ago, studied mathematics, logic. All she’d retained from that now was a single insight: a negative outcome could be as useful to a problem as a positive one. Florence experienced this knowledge so fleetingly she did not even recognize it as a thought. But she said to Kachak: “It seems to me that Robbins’s conditions have changed. It’s true that his request to have his government alerted remains unaltered, but he is no longer asking to be reunited with the other Americans.”
Kachak let the smoke drift out of his mouth and nose. He was listening. “He is in no position to be making any demands.”
“Perhaps not. But I suspect his earlier request to be reunited with his fellow officers had to do with his isolation. Solitary confinement will make a man desperate for any contact with human beings.”
“And what do you suggest?”
“Just to keep him talking…”
“With you?”
“Yes, for the time being. He badly wants someone to talk to. I sense this.”
Kachak gazed up into the vaulted ceiling and smiled. “ ‘And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat….’ ”
He gave her until the end of the week.
—
Her association with the criminal world—even if it was the imaginary criminal world of America—had been useful in the camp, too. She was, of course, still a “fascist,” but when word got around that she was a bootlegger’s daughter, she was told to come to the barracks occupied by the blatnye, where the criminal women reclined on their bunks, undressed to their dirty bras in a barracks made cozily warm by fires or stoves stoked regularly by their court of prisoner-lackeys—civils or politicals like herself—who served the criminals’ every whim in exchange for a crust of bread or some protection. She was asked if she’d ever met Bonnie Parker. Or seen Al Capone. Somehow, the legends of these felons had made their way here without losing any of their glamour. She admitted frankly that she’d never seen any of these criminals face-to-face but related the stories she’d read in the papers, describing the string of heists and murders pulled off by Bonnie and Clyde as they darted around the country in stolen cars. With as much detail as Florence could recall after twenty years, she retold of the bloody battles between the Italian gangs of Capone and the Irish gangs of Bugs Moran, and how Capone’s men, luring the Irish crew to a warehouse full of cut-rate Canadian whiskey, unleashed a hail of bullets and then escaped in the guise of policemen—staging the massacre on the American holiday celebrating love.
After that, she was invited back to tell them about other gangsters, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. The half-undressed dyevkas listened while they slapped cards on their greasy pillows or picked lice out of their armpits like monkeys and tossed them to crackle in the fire. The guards, tenderly or sardonically, called them “girls,” and some of them indeed had the bodies of girls, and the faces of old women. They’d sometimes interrupt Florence’s stories with profanity-laced commentary of their own, spoken in shouts, of which Florence understood hardly a word. Outside, she was more or less left alone, for she had entered the dubious ranks of the camp’s “novelists”—the ones who entertained the criminals with recitations of the great classics, Dumas or Dostoyevsky. In her case, though, the “novels” were really double features she had seen years ago, with Sidney, at the Brooklyn Paramount or the RKO Albee—Tarzan, Mantrap, Flesh and the Devil, The Public Enemy—gangster films and sappy romances that the criminals ate up in equal measure. Half the time she had to improvise the plot, composing the script as she went along, just as she was doing now with Robbins and Kachak, adding colorful touches that might entertain or please in the moment.
When she wasn’t with Robbins, Florence stayed in the infirmary, firing the stoves, washing latrines, swabbing blood from the floor—the privileged, easy duties she would never have been given in the women’s camp. She was almost sure that once they’d used her up as a translator, they would pin another ten years on her for “fraternizing with the enemy.” Or simply shoot her. She did not care. As long as she was kept in soft work and fed eight hundred grams of bread a day, with some soup and fish on the side, as long as she could stay warm and not be out in the frozen woods, she would do whatever was asked.
—
“YOU’RE LOOKING FINE, MISS FEIN,” Robbins said unexpectedly almost two weeks later. He knew her by her maiden name. “Got a little color back in your cheeks.”
Florence could feel her forehead flush. She had an urge to tell him it was all thanks to him. He had bought her a month of life, at least. Instead, she said, “You didn’t tell me how old you were.”
“I’m thirty-four. Maybe thirty-five by now. Hard to tick off time where there ain’t no calendars or windows.”
“Not so young for your common air force pilot.”
“Oh, I see what you’re thinking. They told you I’m a spy. Well, I ain’t no more a spy than you are a lumberjack. It’s not my first barbecue, is all.”
“You were a flyer in the last war?”
“The 254th Fighter Division,” Robbins said with some pride. He was cleaning out the remains of his bowl with the bread, strong enough to eat on his own now.
“Must have really liked all that fighting to volunteer again,” she said.
“Who said I volunteered?”
“Didn’t you?”
“I was a reservist. Would be out for good by now if I’d read the fine print….Just never thought we’d get into a new conflict this soon.”
This was something. So the patriot had a bone to pick with Uncle Sam, after all. Florence probed this sore. “That doesn’t sound quite fair….”
“Fair’s a place where pigs win ribbons.”
She had heard such sentiments before. Robbins had marched willingly, but not happily. This gave her hope. The hope felt like a valuable gemstone she had discovered in her pocket and was now secretly keeping warm.
After a while, Robbins said, “Anyway, when it’s all over
, if the communists or anyone else learns they can’t git away with invadin’ and takin’ over another country, then some good will have come out of it all.”
She arranged her face into a likeness of kindness. “Does it make it easier to believe that?”
“What?”
“That America believes in the freedom of other nations to determine their own destinies? Because, if it does, well”—she smiled disarmingly—“then it believes in such a freedom selectively. Manila? Mexico? Hawaii, for that matter?”
She herself believed only selectively in what she was saying. Long ago, she’d stopped caring about politics, and now her words sounded only like echoes of some ghost of her prior self. Still, she sensed that Robbins was tired of suffering, that he only needed permission to put aside his obedience and duty. She would give that to him. “I’m not convinced that the lives and futures of young men like yourself,” she said, “have been forfeited for any reason other than to bring glory and profits to the few. And I don’t think you’re convinced of it, either.”
The captain appeared to be weighing what she’d said. “My, my,” he said finally. “Aren’t you well informed?” His missing teeth gave him a sinister smile. “How’s that worked out for you, being so well informed?”
She could think of nothing to say.
“I don’t know what kind of religion you’re trying to peddle, Miss Fein, but I’ve heard better pastoring from a two-day drunk preacher.”
He thought she was ridiculous. Of course he did.
“Here’s a little more information for you,” Robbins said. “America’s got no interest in some squalid, insignificant scrap of Asia called Korea. We’re in this mess on account of your Soviets having the A-bomb now. Didn’t know that, did you? Yup. A few things have changed since you got here, Sleeping Beauty. Ain’t you curious how the Russians got their hands on it? ’Course you are. A couple of clever Yankee Yids like yourself—husband-and-wife duo—sold ’em the recipe for a bag of magic beans. Thought they’d balance the scales. And now here you and me are. So how’s about you take your red mouthwash and sell it somewhere else.”
—
WHAT AN IDIOT SHE’D been. What a stupe, with her phony indoctrination session, as though he were some adolescent YCL-er. As soon as she arrived in the Zone of Silence, she knew she could afford no errors, and now it had been four days since she’d been called to see Robbins.
Don’t let them send me back. Please, don’t let them….Her own childish pleas to the fates ran in her mind all the time now. What a fraud she was. All her life she’d been praying in this scattered hectic way in spite of her total lack of belief. Why have you plucked me from the abyss only to throw me back in again? From the gutters of memory she was recovering lost prayers of her childhood. Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, hagomel lahayavim tovot, sheg’molani kol tov. But such prayers for her were not the language of faith or aspiration, they were the cry of a trapped beast. At night, awake in the agitating lunar light, she could hear her heart raising its muzzle to the moon to release its high-pitched wail.
If she could only be pardoned for all she had done…
—
FLORENCE DID NOT KNOW about the phone calls being made, back and forth, between Kachak and Beria. Nor could she have known that the unmarked train bearing the partially shattered and disassembled F-86 Sabrejet was nearing Moscow. She could not have suspected, as yet, Kachak’s growing desperation to wring some valuable information from Robbins before he would be obliged to hand the pilot over to his seniors in Moscow.
And so it happened that when Kachak did again call Florence into the interrogation room, the sudden shift in his offer and tone struck her as some sort of supernatural turn of events. “Tell him I am planning to send him to Moscow,” he told Florence, who sat, along with Kachak, at the table facing the silent Robbins. “I am quite through with wringing water from this stone. I trust”—he turned to Robbins—“that my fellows in the Lubyanka will have more success with you.”
Obediently, Florence translated. Robbins could not know what the Lubyanka Prison was, and she had no opportunity to tell him now, exactly. Florence sensed Kachak’s message was intended for her as much as for Robbins.
“You ought to know, however, that if you expect kinder treatment at their hands than you’ve had here, you’re quite mistaken. This is a children’s park compared to the handling you’ll receive there.”
Again, she translated. It produced no response in Robbins.
“You’d be wrong to think it gratifies me to hand you over into less merciful hands. You could say I’ve even come to admire your…tenacity. It will not serve you, of course. In keeping you here I have tried to spare you the worst that you are bound to encounter. I’ve never been partial to the tortures and sadistic habits the Mongols introduced into the Russian temperament.” He paused, giving Florence an opportunity to convey all this. She fully expected Kachak to go on and describe which Mongol tortures Robbins could look forward to, but he didn’t, trusting Robbins to imagine them.
“If you persist in being silent on the matter of the F-86, that is your business. You are no longer my responsibility. If, however, you decide to come to a realistic understanding of your situation and give me what I am after”—he now turned to Florence as though what he had to offer up next had to be mediated across a bridge firmer than mere language—“then I will personally advocate for him. He will get an apartment. Medical care. If this information proves to be worthwhile, arrangements can be made. A new identity. He can even teach at our Air Force Academy—air battle techniques, tactics—the MVD could open those doors.”
His tone was gamely and (she thought this later) alarmingly accommodating, as though Kachak could not quite believe he was saying these things himself. Florence interpreted to the best of her ability.
Then Robbins spoke: “All right, then why not ship me on to Moscow tonight?”
It was a taunt. A dangerous one. She had no wish to translate it for the commandant, whose offers had the scent of desperation. Robbins could smell it just as well as she. But there was more to Florence’s hesitancy: She did not want Robbins sent to Moscow; with him would be gone her only hope of staying out of the ravages of the camp.
In the end she did not have to translate; Kachak understood the gist quite easily himself. He said, “It isn’t so simple. He must show he is serious. Give me information I can verify with experts. Then I will give my word.”
The commandant told Robbins to think it over. A new life, if he wanted it.
But the following morning, having “thought it over,” Robbins put in a request to speak not with Kachak but with Florence, alone.
—
THIS TIME KACHAK DID not offer Florence tea.
“You’ve had quite a vacation, haven’t you?”
“I’m grateful with all my being to be of any use to you, Commandant.”
“So you are.” He stood up to take in the view of the soiled, muddied snow outside. There were rocks in the courtyard of the monastery, pieces of a fallen wall. Florence could see the spot where she had first fallen, deliberately, in front of the truck set to take her back to the women’s camp. “I loathe this place.” He spoke as though to himself. “Kolyma would have been better. The ground is frozen solid all year round there too, but the question of what to do with all these bodies wouldn’t be so irritating. There would be the mine shafts.”
She realized that by “bodies” he meant corpses.
“Abandoned mine shafts—perfectly suited for disposing of the dead. Here the pits get filled up as soon as they’re dug. I’ve been saddled with undertaker’s work. It’s quite dreary.”
His complaint was strategic. She had become used to Kachak’s bruised, flamboyant air. It occurred to her that he would not have been a bad stage actor, though this thought made Florence no less frightened of him. He turned around to face her. “I expect the right answer from Robbins. Do you understand?”
She gave a weak nod.
“That isn’t so. I have tried. I am trying!”
“It isn’t only the dead, you know, that we throw into shafts! Ours may not be as deep as Kolyma’s, but no one’s yet plowed themselves out with two broken arms!”
Her eyes had welled up. She was weeping, shamelessly, disastrously.
“Stop your blubbering!”
There was no handkerchief to speak of. She did not want him to see her wiping her nose with her sleeve. “I will try harder,” she said, nodding frantically, servilely.
But it was not the threat of dying with her arms broken atop a pit of corpses that had sent her into hysterics. It was something she could hardly acknowledge without exploding into more waterworks: she would never be done with this torment. Until her last gasp she would be appeasing, informing, cajoling, betraying, acceding to whatever nasty and impossible demands they gave her next. All she had ever wanted in her life was to breathe her own air! And all she had gotten in return was enslavement. Because she was not like Robbins. Because she lacked the courage of refusal—the price to be paid for true freedom.
“Enough!” Kachak said. “Go. You know what your job is.”
—
WHEN SHE WAS LED IN, Robbins was lying on his back, looking up into the ceiling. The stone bricks, Florence noticed, got smaller and narrower as they rose up the wall, and were thinnest along the vaults of the ceiling, almost like parquet tiles, scorched and blackened there—no doubt, by the nightly fires that the monks had lit.
She was fortunate that he spoke first. “Do you have children, Florence?”
She felt a voltaic jolt at the question. “Yes,” she said calmly. “A boy. He’s eight. You?”
He didn’t answer. “Is he with your people?”