The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  “For years I wondered what would have happened if our family had stayed here, you know? Never emigrated? Maybe I would have grown up tougher, not so soft and guilty all the time. But the thing is, I’m not one of them. I’m not like Irina, or like Sasha Zaparotnik. I’m…”

  “American,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He and I had never talked like this. Now I wished we had.

  “So you wanted to try out the alternative?”

  He looked at me. “It sounds crazy, right?”

  “It doesn’t.” How many times had I wondered who I would have been had I grown up in America, the son of a mother who’d never left? “Look, you haven’t had it easy,” I said. “I faced some stern blows in my life, but when I failed I always had an ennobling excuse: The system was rigged. I had the Soviets to blame. It gives you a less critical view of yourself.”

  I’d never exactly recognized this before, but now, saying it, I thought about how it might be true. In my own circumscribed youth, I—and so many of us—had been allowed to retain a sufficient sense of our own virtue, even if the constrictions we faced couldn’t be overcome—especially if they couldn’t. “The thing America doesn’t tell you about a life of freedom,” I said, “is that sooner or later you’re bound to feel like your problems are all your own fault. Even if maybe you just got unlucky.”

  “They should put that on the warning label,” Lenny offered.

  I remembered Valentina’s words on the road back to the dacha: I had warned Lenny, but failed to prepare him. Could I honestly claim she was wrong? What I’d up to now failed to see was that, in issuing all my warnings, I had struck a devil’s bargain against his success. Standing on the sidelines of his struggle, my arms crossed, I had been waiting all these years for the moment when he would fall on his face. So that when he got up again, humbled by his defeats, he would at last be ready to be converted to my fatherly wisdom.

  But if this was the path that I’d imagined for my son, what place was there in it for me? By attributing his problems to his stubbornness, I had released myself from a greater responsibility to stand by his side.

  We passed a kiosk of toys for sale. Lenny picked up one of the stuffed animals and said, “You know those toy bunnies with long arms and Velcro paws that hug each other? That was how Ira and I were when we were six. We’d run into the bathroom and hide under the sink when you and Mom were getting ready to leave the Ostrovskys’ apartment. We’d hide in the bathroom like that, hugging each other so you couldn’t separate us.”

  “First love,” I said.

  “But it was more than that. She really knew me. I didn’t need to be cool or cynical or anything with her. I could be who I was. And, yeah, on some level I knew she was using me to come to New York, but I didn’t think it would end like that. With her coming home at midnight smelling of Calvin Klein while I stayed awake on the couch playing video games. She was screwing her boss right under my nose and I didn’t have the guts to let go of her. It’s like I knew I couldn’t walk away from that with anything, not even two percent of my self-worth. So I just held on.”

  He gazed out at the mostly vacant shops again. “I always do that.”

  “Do what?” I said.

  “Hold on to whatever it is, past the expiration date. Even with all the distress signals, I stay in that boat to the bitter end. I know that sounds very fatalistic to you.” He gave me a brief scoffing smile.

  I was tempted to smile back. That had long been my own estimation of his predicament, the root of so many of his struggles. Even so, I was happy that he was coming to his own conclusion about it, and that I had done nothing to prompt it except to listen.

  On the bitter, blue November morning when Captain Henry Robbins landed in Seoul, he recognized almost no one. Reservists were distributed piecemeal among the regular units. The men who were to be his fellow pilots were all young. They were boys in their twenties who, having missed their first chance at a war, had eagerly signed up for the next one. They had come of age in a time of ticker tape parades and welcome bands. Everything they’d learned about battle came from Sunday matinees starring Robert Mitchum and John Wayne.

  In the years since the war, Robbins had worked to grow his small portrait studio into a full camera shop, selling lenses and easels, projectors and timers—a business finally beginning to turn profitable just as he was recalled. His renewed invitation from Uncle Sam caused a storm of distress in his soul that he was at a loss to put into words. If asked, he would not have admitted to feeling cheated. When his young wife pointed out that Mr. Truman’s new Selective Service rules permitted thousands to elude military service while he was being summoned a second time, Robbins did not indulge her. That he was not permitted to defer his enrollment because, unlike many of his GI friends, he’d gone to work instead of to college, was a point that likewise failed to elicit his outspoken bitterness. Though there were no more ticker tape parades, patriotism was still an inviolate sentiment in 1951, and Robbins was a man of his generation, accepting his privilege to disagree but not to disobey.

  And yet from the time he arrived at his Reserve Center in Charlotte, and even after he got to Korea, he found himself in the grip of foreboding. He’d had to scrape and hustle just to get his camera shop off the ground. Now he worried that in his absence his business would collapse, and his equipment and tools would be repossessed by the bank. He had a wife and a three-year-old, and another child on the way. His father was dead; his mother was old. He did not know how long this war would go on or if it was even a war. The generals called it “a police action,” which suggested he was being sent over to handcuff folks or hand out speeding tickets, when in fact he knew full well it was just going to be more killing.

  In spite of the jadedness creeping into his spirit, Robbins did not consider his sentiments political in nature. Over a decade would have to pass before Americans would begin burning up their draft cards in public for lesser grievances, and national sentiment would begin to swing in the opposite direction from sacrifice and duty. He tried to muster up old courageous feelings but all he could summon was a vague sense that he was being punished for his loyalty to his country.

  Then again, there was the jet. The F-86 Sabre had nothing in common with the B-24 he’d flown in the last war. Her takeoff was smoother than the fur of a cat, her wings tapering to the razor width of a Ritz-Carlton sandwich. Her new curved design got her racing almost to the speed of sound. In the anterior of the cockpit was hidden a trio of computers that let her radar eye aim at targets at night or in bad weather. Instead of aiming at the enemy manually, all Robbins had to do was center the target, correct for mirror tilt, and wait for the Sabre’s magic eye to supply range, deflection, and lead time, everything necessary for a good shot. If civilian life had taken the will of the warrior out of him, the jet was giving it back.

  Officially, Robbins’s squadron had been told they’d be flying against Korean and Chinese pilots. This was not so. It took Robbins two missions to understand what everyone knew: that the MiGs he was up against were being piloted by Russian aces who’d cut their teeth in the last war fighting the same enemy he had. In spite of the Sabre’s advantages, the lighter MiGs could climb faster and escape at the first signs of a good fight. At a distance, their contrails were like the waving cape of a matador taunting a bull in an open arena, luring the F-86s deep into enemy territory, until the moment the MiGs dropped their noses and disappeared over the Manchurian horizon.

  It was on Robbins’s sixth patrol mission, while flying wingman to a young commanding officer and getting another good look at the snowy mountainous Korean terrain (no decent markers, and nowhere flat enough to land in a pinch), that he saw them: a dozen MiGs speeding southward to where the American fighter-bombers were carrying out low-key operations against the communist communication lines. A cold moon was fading in one corner of the sky while the sun in the other made the Yalu River flash like a mirror.

  Robbins did not have time to be surprised about what happe
ned next. Ignoring the numerical superiority of the MiGs, the lead pilot, a twenty-five-year-old wild buck from Idaho, did then what might be described, in a history text or an obituary, with words like “indomitable valor” or “heroic spirit against formidable odds,” but which Robbins might have called, had he had time to think of any words while he turned the velvety controls to follow, “pointlessly dooming vanity.”

  —

  Colonel Timur Kachak was having a bad year. A Georgian of indifferent, but not irrational, brutality, Kachak considered his appointment to the top security post of Perm—made up of 150-odd labor camps near the Siberian border—a vicious insult. He had worked as a detective in the Cheka before being cherry-picked by Beria for interrogation work. He was not, in his own opinion, a dumb fuck who could be relegated overnight to being a glorified security guard in an Arctic wasteland from which nobody could escape if they were stupid enough to try.

  Kachak (previously Kachakhidze) was one of Beria’s boys—recruited and groomed by Lavrenti himself. But Beria had fallen out of grace. Stalin had appointed Abakumov, another member of the Georgian Mafia, to curb Beria’s power. Now a battle for control was raging inside the secret police. An upstart by the name of Ryumin had bypassed both Beria and Abakumov and gone directly to Stalin with the report of something called the Jewish Doctors’ Plot—an expediently ingenious concoction that was certain to get Abakumov tried and brutally killed for “inaction.” Kachak had been transferred to Perm while Beria waited for the smoke to clear and tried to rebuild his position; if there was going to be a purge of the old guard, he needed a few of his men a good distance away from the guillotine.

  In Moscow, Kachak had had a three-room apartment overlooking Chistiye Prudi and access to a second flat, where he met with informants and screwed his girlfriends, one of whom was Abakumov’s wife. This, he believed, was the real reason he’d been sent to the end of nowhere. Now, instead of seeing the Clean Ponds out of his window, he woke to the sight of slag heaps and coal mines, enjoyed three hours of sunlight a day, and supervised men outfitted only slightly better than the slave-prisoners they were mandated to guard.

  The call came from Beria himself. A Sabrejet pilot had crash-landed near the Yellow Sea but had eluded capture by poisoning himself inside his cockpit. A hundred Chinamen had been conscripted to haul the plane out of the water, saw off its wings, and, under the cover of an overcast night sky, roll the wingless aircraft to a control center, where it was dismantled further and loaded in pieces onto a convoy. Now, the security organs believed, another American F-86 pilot had been sent as a prisoner to one of Kachak’s labor camps. Kachak’s job was to find him and send him to Moscow. Kachak watched the sun setting outside his office window as he listened to Beria’s voice. It was 2:00 P.M. He smiled. “Do you think I know each zek personally?” he told his old boss over the phone. “We get three dead Americans a week here. Let them come and search at the bottom of the mine shafts.”

  “I think you understand the consequence of this.”

  “If they wanted him so much, why didn’t they bring him straight to Moscow from Andong?”

  “They didn’t know the type of plane he was in.”

  “And now they do.”

  “The unit combed the hills and found parts. He’d been moved out by then.”

  “So the military let him slip through their fingers. Why should we pay for their mistake?”

  “This isn’t me you’re jerking around, Timur—it’s Koba himself. Stalin’s ordered the jet transported in pieces to the MiG design bureau.”

  “Then what do those geniuses need the pilot for?”

  “The dashboard is destroyed. Whoever was in there took a rock to the controls before he did himself in. They’ll need help reconstructing the panels.”

  “So Koba has a plane without a pilot, and we might have a pilot without a plane. But let me ask you this….If he told them nothing in Andong, what makes the MGB think he’ll talk in Moscow?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nobody even knows if he’s still alive….”

  “Paperwork says a shipment of Americans was sent through Vladivostok, then to you.”

  “If he’s alive, let me work on him here.”

  “This isn’t your specialty.”

  “I’ll find a way.”

  —

  Captain Henry Robbins first refused to talk and, later, to eat. The food brought by the guards to his cell remained untouched. After five days the American pilot lacked the strength to get up from his pallet and was carried to the interrogation room and tied to a chair. He knew from his army training that if one had no food it was still wise to keep one’s body mobilized, to do calisthenics and massage the limbs, in order to delay muscular deterioration. But he was under the reign of a single goal now, and that was to die. Robbins did not expect his requests to be granted by the filthy Russians, but he continued to repeat them with an unremitting insistence calculated to infuriate his captors. Day and night had started to replace each other without his noticing. His chest pains and weak pulse he read as promising signs that death was nearby. What he had not counted on was the prolonged, creeping tow of time. The same feebleness that pinned him to his pallet made the minutes like hours, the hours like days. Time was an impossibly heavy stone raking him underneath it as it scraped on endlessly. Robbins was discovering the great cosmic mystery that only the dying know: the closer a man is to the moment of finality, the slower time’s drag. This, his final test and torture.

  —

  HE’D BEEN PICKED UP still wearing his G-suit, a holster strapped around his thigh, his suit pockets now almost empty of the candies he’d packed and sealed with friction tape in the event he would ever need to pull the ejection lever and punch out of the plane. For three days, he’d crawled down the rocky path that snaked east along the shrub-covered mountain. He tried to follow his wrist compass southward but could not be sure if he was in North Korea or across the Chinese border. He knew one phrase in Korean, nam amu jeongboga eobs-seubnida, which he believed declared a refusal to answer any questions apart from name, rank, and serial number. But the faces of the men of the anti-aircraft artillery unit that greeted him when he reached the bottom of the mountain path were neither Korean nor Chinese. The pistol strapped to his thigh was there to protect him in case he ran across a predator or an enemy soldier. But when he saw their number, Robbins understood that the gun was issued to him for a much simpler end—one he’d been too cowardly to take.

  —

  ON THE EIGHTH DAY his jailers arrived bearing strange instruments. From his bed, Robbins caught a glimpse of murky liquid sloshing around in a deep dish. A man in a white coat held a rubber tube in his hand. The guards sat him up. A warfare of faces swarmed around him. They were trying to squeeze the hose into his mouth. With an incomprehensible store of strength, he reached for the tube, but they twisted his wrists behind his back and grabbed his head in an armlock to keep him from shaking it. The man in the white coat pinched his nose, forced his mouth open with a spoon. They would let him neither live nor die. He was handcuffed and tossed on his stomach. His pants were pulled down, and the hose bearing life-giving nutrients was wedged up his rectum. He relaxed his muscles and thought, Let them, and soon after felt the wet, stinging comfort of his first shit in a week.

  Shortly afterward, the doctor returned with new implements. Robbins’s lips were pulled back, and clamps like small stirrups were jammed between his molars, rotated up and down until his jaw could be pried open enough to slide in the gagging tube. Slowly, it was pushed down, like a fishing line being lowered by a child. Robbins felt himself gagging—a pain more violent than anything before. But the tube was undeterred by the spasms in his throat and stomach. Like a drowning man he drew in air through his nose; above him, the doctor’s redshot face went black, like a cinder turning to ash.

  When Robbins came to, many hours later, it was with a cramp in his guts and the disappointing sensation that he was still alive. He sensed
he was not alone. Somebody was seated beside him on the berth. “Captain,” he heard, in a voice clearly that of an American, and even more surprisingly, a woman. “I’ve brought you a little tea. It’ll make you feel better.”

  —

  There were no thermometers in Perm’s Logging Camp ITSK-2. They weren’t needed. You knew the temperature by the density of the mist, which began to form at forty degrees below zero. It hung suspended like a new element, one you drew in with the pain of a thousand tiny needles and exhaled with a moist rasp. At such low temperatures there was always the threat of frostbite: Moisture on the tip of the nose froze as soon as it touched the atmosphere. One did not dare urinate in the snow. The trickle from Florence’s nose had been freezing over for a week now, and it was only November. She possessed no handkerchief or anything resembling one, and was forced to wipe it ceaselessly with the sleeve of her jacket while she steered her body behind the others along the now familiar four-kilometer path into the forest. Her regulation-issue rubber galoshes did nothing to protect her feet from the cold. Inside them, her toes were wrapped in rags tied with strips of other rags. The mug around her waist was a tin that had once contained Lend-Lease pork—SPAM—which the American allies had donated, along with grain and tractors, during the war. It had long lost its shape and been rubbed clean of the letters. It was her only possession and she guarded it fiercely.

  Walking the packed-down snow, Florence hoped it might still be dark when they reached the clearing. Then they would be allowed to hold off sawing and go instead to gather dead branches for a bonfire, which would give her a chance to rest a bit and warm herself with a cup of hot melted snow. But the winter sun was already filling the space between the trees with its scarlet aura when they arrived.