—
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 few 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.