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.
“I’ve given you ample opportunities to appeal to his reason,” he said now very straightforwardly. “And you have shown yourself less ingenious than promised. Or should I say, less committed to your persuasion of him than of me?” There was a rich hint of whiskey on his breath.
“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?”
“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.”