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.