“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.