“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?”