“I have no people here, Henry. I don’t anymore,” she clarified, remembering what she’d told him about her made-up bootlegger father. “My son is in a children’s home.”
“What’s that, an orphanage?”
“More or less.”
“Must be a mean way to come up, without your mama.”
“I know how you’re feeling, Henry. You miss your family.”
“You don’t know a thing,” he said sharply, but without any real malice. He still didn’t look at her. “My wife, Judith—her mama and daddy died when she was ten. She was passed around among relations. It was never exactly high cotton. We got a little girl, Bertha. We were expecting another when I got called up. Going to name him Virgil if he was a boy. I guess I’ll never know now. This plan that Kachak’s got…It’s all prevarication, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know, Henry. It could be a real chance.”
“You believe him?”
“I believe,” she said, “that Kachak wants to get out of this place as much as anyone. If you do your part, then…”
“Hell!”
“A new life. In Moscow…”
“Not my life. I’d never see my family again….They’d never know what happened….”
“They’ll know you died honorably as Captain Henry Robbins. And it’ll be true. Here you’ll be somebody else.”
“If I turn…”
“Don’t think of it that way. Whatever knowledge you have about that plane, they’ll have it too, sooner or later. Time will march on. Get on that bus ’fore it’s gone.”
“I’m an American, Florence….”
Rage was prickling up her neck and ears. He was like she’d been seventeen years ago, unable to see the situation clearly, blinkered by his principles. “Henry, listen to me,” she said, taking his icy hand. “I tried to leave for years—I did. I looked for every way to come back home. I thought Russia was barricading us in. But I couldn’t even get a foot in through the American embassy. And that’s when I learned something about our great land of liberty….America didn’t want us back—deserters were all we were to it. You think it’s different with you ’cause you’re a soldier. But I am telling you, Henry, even if they knew where you were…we’re flotsam now. We’re lost to our people.”
He studied her, the expression in his hooded, bruised eye stern, and the one in his good eye curiously bemused. “You can tell your commandant I ain’t saying another word to him until he informs the United States government that U.S. Air Force Captain Henry Robbins is a Prisoner of War in the Soviet Union.”
“Goddamn you, Henry!” Her whole despairing will was being annihilated by his pigheaded refusal. “Damn, damn you, Henry. It won’t matter a whit if the You-Nahted States knows you’re a POW,” she said, mercilessly mimicking his inflections. “Even if this war ever ends, you won’t be returning home. Not after what you’ve seen of our network of health resorts. This—right here—is the secret to the Soviet miracle. You think they’ll ever let that little piece of propaganda slip out?” She didn’t care if her voice was rising to a screech. “But you can live now. You’ve got the power over them now….Use it, for heaven’s sake!”
He watched her with his cadaverous Anglo-Saxon face. And finally, he said, “You still don’t get it. I don’t care about being returned. Don’t you think I know I’m never going back to Carolina again, or seeing my family? Goddamn it, I don’t care about livin’—can’t you see that? Them’s whom I’m thinking of—Judy and my kids will never know what happened to me. She’ll be waiting, and waiting on it. ‘Missing in action’ is all she’ll be told. I can’t leave her in the darkness like that. I don’t expect you to understand, but I ain’t opening my mouth to say another word till I see that confirmation letter from Uncle Sam.”
“As you wish,” she said.
—
“WELL,” SAID KACHAK. “What answer are we to receive today?”
“He wants the Americans to be informed. He wants his family to know,” she said. She did not care if he broke her arms and tossed her atop corpses. She was obliged to die here, so let it be. “He wants confirmation,” she said. “An official letter back from his government.”
“So write one.”
She permitted herself to look up into his eyes. They were lucid and serene. Had he sobered up? “You can type it up yourself,” he said, grinning.
“You don’t mean…”
“There must be standard wording….Our security organs can find you some official American stationery. But let me ask you, what do you think will happen once he gets his ‘confirmation,’ umm? Do you think he’ll talk then?”
“He only wants his wife to know what became of him.”
“Touching.” Kachak shook his head. “You silly old bitch. He will never talk once he is persuaded that the Americans know he’s being held here! Whatever information we collect from him—his government will then know its source. Certainly. His family? The only fact of which they’ll be informed is that Robbins was a traitor. He’s been playing you for a cow, you sentimental biddy. I should have handled this myself from the beginning. Now I will.”
She wanted to speak but found she could not now form words without addressing the trembling muscles in her lips. It had been a helpless struggle from the beginning, and the absurd weight of her hopes had only clouded her mind to this possibility. Yes, she was a fool. But not a fool in the way Kachak believed. It was not the sentimentalism in Robbins’s doomed demand that had lit a dark corner of her soul, but an echo in it of something familiar—something she’d once felt herself, when, with eyes wide open, she had forsaken Essie, her closest friend. In her animal devotion to her family she had been ready to cross any line.
But she had made a mistake. She had spoken to Kachak of “country” and “family” as if they were one and the same to Robbins. That had been her error. She had misunderstood him. He wasn’t as blindly principled as she’d thought. He would do wrong by his country before he ever did wrong by his family. All along, that’s what he’d been trying to tell her, even if he didn’t know it himself yet.
“Give me one more chance to talk to him,” she said. “I know how to make him change his mind.”
“You’ve done enough.” Kachak motioned to the guard behind the door.
But Florence didn’t get up. “I can offer him something you can’t.”
Kachak looked irritated for having to rise to her bait. “And what’s that?”
“It’s not something I can say. You’ll have to trust me.”
Her insolence was bringing a hard glow to his eyes. His face said he was a man who could shoot her between sips of his tea. And yet, she persisted. “If he goes to Moscow now,” she said, “you never will.”
—
SHE WAS ALLOWED INTO Robbins’s cell to say her goodbye. He did not look up when she entered but repeated his unaltered request by rote, like an incantation.
“It won’t happen, Henry,” she said. “They’ll promise you anything, and tell your government you’re dead anyway. And soon enough, if you go on like this, you will be.”
“Well, ma’am.” He grinned at her unpleasantly. “One way or another, I’m not ever getting out of here alive, am I?”
She didn’t speak.
“You can tell me the truth, Florence.”
“No. You aren’t.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for that. It’s all I want. The truth. For my family too.”
“You aren’t,” she spoke again, “but I am.”
He fixed his eyes on her. His left one, almost healed.
“I can get out of here. And I will. I’ll get out and I’ll find your family—I’ll write them and tell them what happened to you. It won’t be soon, but I’ll find a way. But I can’t do it myself. If you don’t want to help yourself, help me. Tell me something. Something I can give the commandant. I’m only alive, Henry, because you’re still talking to me. And when you stop”—she coughed—“they’ll throw me back into that
pit of torture and filth…into that shore of corpses. And I will die. And any chance you have of your family ever learning what really became of you, it’ll be gone with me. But if you talk—drag it out for my sake and keep me alive—I’ll make contact, I’ll tell them whatever you want me to.”
—
IN THE EVENING SHE packed away what few miserable, priceless objects she’d scavenged in her weeks in the infirmary. Rolls of cheesecloth bandage for her feet. A dull syringe needle with which she’d maneuvered to patch up her padded jacket and boots. A tiny vial with a few drops left of iodine. A flask half full of rubbing alcohol. An aluminum spoon she’d swiped from the hospital kitchen. The vitamin syrup she still hoarded. Bits of cotton. This was her treasure to sell or trade when she returned to the women’s camp. The rubbing alcohol she’d offer up first to the top blatnye, who’d drink it up right away and after that, she hoped, leave her alone. She allowed these nervous, tactical plans to flick away the agony of her other thoughts—thoughts of her foreshortened future, such as it was. And thoughts of Robbins, who’d given no response to her madcap offer.
A guard came for her in the morning and Florence did her best to tell herself that she’d done all she could. Outside the ice fog was so thick she could barely see the guard’s olive-clad back a few paces ahead of her. Her rasping breath told her it was fifty below. But instead of the truck, she was led once more to the interrogation room in the monastery. Her eyes, watery from the cold, took a moment to recognize the thin man who was there with Kachak. Once she blinked the frozen tears from her eyes she saw that it had to be Finkleman, the engineer-physicist. Robbins was there too, seated with his hands unshackled, limp like bait on the wooden table. “Let’s begin,” Kachak said.
—
EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT ten weeks she arrived to translate for the commandant as he, with surprising patience and knowledge, extracted from Robbins the mysteries of the Sabrejet’s radar gunsight. The sight was designed to compute leads at ranges of up to fifteen hundred yards. The extensive time of flight needed for the sight’s computer caused the sight to be very sensitive to aircraft motion at long ranges, which made it hard for pilots to keep the “pipper on the target” as they maneuvered close to the enemy. Much of what Henry said sounded barely like English to her, but after some time Florence began to understand his qualified extolment of the plane’s potency and even his tender gripes about its bad habits. She was nothing if not a good pupil, and within a few weeks she was as versed as the engineer-physicist in phrases like “ballistic solutions,” “range selector,” “radar value” fed to the “computer.” Out of Robbins’s memory, diagrams of the destroyed control panels of the F-86 were reconstructed. And when these were sent to Moscow, where the captured Sabrejet was being disassembled and copied, Robbins told them of the multitude of maintenance problems they were to expect, the power of rough runways to jar the delicate electronic components, what kinds of ground clutter could cause the radar to fail to work below six thousand feet. He did not have to tell them all this, Florence supposed. She suspected he was adding to the list of technical details for her sake, dragging things out to ensure her survival through the winter. She found herself imagining Robbins’s young family, out of loyalty to whom all his enthusiastic disloyalty was being transacted through her. With her own American family she’d had no written contact in almost five years. Ten months ago, her father had died of a heart attack, going to sleep and never waking up. This fact Florence would not learn for years to come.
—
AND THEN ONE DAY in April, when the sun’s radiance on the snow was almost blinding, she was summoned once more to Kachak’s office. She found him wearing his military cap, set at an informal angle meant to keep the sun out of his eyes, but that also seemed of a piece with his jaunty mood. It seemed that, like her, he could not prevent himself from feeling that spring was near. “Get ready to say goodbye to your American,” he announced, appearing to take pleasure in the worry on her face. “I am taking your pilot to Moscow. He will be assisting the engineers at the MiG bureau with the testing of their new planes. He is starting a new life, as am I. You do not look very happy, Flora.”
“I am only surprised, Colonel.”
“You did not think I was a man of my word? You insult me, Flora Solomonovna. Robbins has kept his part of the bargain, and I am keeping mine. It would be a lie to say it is a terrible sacrifice. I will be taking over the post on technological intelligence in Moscow. I am leaving this wasteland for good, in no small part thanks to you. I should like to thank you.”
“Thank me?”
“For your service to the country. It shall be noted when you apply for probation, once your sentence is up.”
Her heart sank again.
“It is not in my power to commute the sentence of a political traitor such as yourself. But I should like to do something for you so that your effort does not go unrewarded.”
“Let me keep working in the clinic. As an orderly. I have learned to make myself useful there.”
“You don’t want to be sent back to your old camp?”
“I would rather not.”
“Very well. We can arrange to keep things as they are.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” she said, standing up as he did.
“One more thing.”
“Yes.”
“You can go and say goodbye to your friend Robbins, if you like.”
“Yes.”
“He is, after all, your comrade now, such as things are.”
Kachak was still smiling at this when Florence stepped out.
—
HENRY’S EYES, THOUGH FULLY healed now, looked bloodshot. He made a motion for the guard to stay outside his room while he and Florence had their last moment.
“Hello, Henry.”
“Florence.”
“The commandant says you’ll be on your way tomorrow.”
His eyes stayed down, not meeting hers.
“Henry.” She touched his hand. “It’s very good. Please don’t be miserable.”
“I’ve done a terrible wrong, Florence.”
“No.”
“I’m a traitor. I’ve betrayed my country.”
“Go and don’t look back. I have great hope for you.”
He shook his head as if trying to dislodge this very idea from his brain. “I did what I’d sworn never to do.” He gripped her hands hard. “Promise me you will not tell them what I done—only what became of me. When you get out, you tell ’em I died an American. ’Cause it’s the end of the line for Henry Robbins here.”
She believed he meant that now he would have a new name. His old identity would be erased, communication with the past made impossible.
“Of course.”
“You remember the address.”
“I couldn’t forget it.”
“Lord bless you with a long life.” He placed his rough bony hands atop her head as though administering a blessing, but kept them there longer than any clergyman, holding on to her until his eyes, and hers, flooded with tears. “Goodbye, Florence.”
—
THE NEWS OF WHAT HAPPENED thereafter Florence did not learn for several more days. It was Konstantin, one of the male nurses, the one who on the doctor’s orders had begun to teach her how to find a vein on the arms of tuberculosis patients before injecting them with calcium chlorate, who delivered the news.
“Your American is dead,” he said. They were in the room where the corpses were collected for fingerprinting before they were taken to the morgue.
Florence struggled to feign incomprehension. She had been warned never to talk about what had happened. How did they know?
“Dead, dead,” said Konstantin the nurse. “Shot himself up right through the roof of his mouth…Oh, you knew him, all right.”
“But…he was going to Moscow.”
“All I heard is he was all packed up to be sent somewhere. The guard was escorting him out of his cell into the corridor. They hadn’t walked a f
ew paces when he turned right around and grabbed at that rifle, plain overpowered the guard, then shot himself in the mouth. Blew out his brains.”
She felt a black hole open in her heart, a conical void with no bottom. “He couldn’t have had the strength.”
“Must have been planning it for some time. Waiting for the right moment. No one else was in the corridor to stop him. It helped that the guard was just some kid. Even so, he had enough strength to wrestle that weapon right out of his hands.”
“It can’t be so.”
But it was. The news had come from the driver who took the bodies from the morgue and dumped them in common graves. The driver had seen the body himself. “But don’t you say nothing about it,” said Konstantin. “He mention anything to you about it?”
“Who?”
“The American!”
“Heavens, no!”
…Promise me you will not tell them what I done—only what became of me.
She shook her head furiously.
’Cause it’s the end of the line for Henry Robbins here.
But hadn’t he been talking about the American skin he was shedding and leaving in Perm before he became a different man in the capital? Oh, how stupid she was. He had alerted her, made his plan perfectly clear.
“He didn’t tell me anything.”
“Better not have,” said Konstantin. “The commandant is fired up like fifty pitchforks, questioning everybody.”
She understood that Konstantin was telling her this to warn her.
But the questioning didn’t come. By some grace, she was once more spared.
For weeks thereafter Florence worried that the incident would cost Kachak his escape from Perm to Moscow, and the reprieve he’d promised her. But whatever promotion he had exacted from the big wheels inside the MGB was honored. He kept his pledge to her. She stayed on the books as an orderly in the clinic. Until one day in March of the following year she heard, on the radio loudspeaker mounted in the main patient ward, a sound her ears had forgotten. Classical music! Not the celebratory marching kind, but a solemn and pristine movement, like the voice of angels. Was it Beethoven? Handel? The music was followed by a medical announcement, a complete report on Stalin’s vital signs, including an analysis of his urine. His urine! Like the music, the voices proclaimed grief but rang with ecstasy—speaking of a God who pissed and shat like all the rest of dirty humanity. And she knew it would not be long now.
The Patriots Page 58