The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  Florence listened as the commandant spoke about the importance of secrecy when dealing with captured spies. And still, she remembered that the man had said he was a POW. She noted that Kachak was no longer wearing his brass knuckles.

  “What is it?” said Kachak.

  Only then did she realize that her mouth was open. She had no idea what she’d meant to say. Her only thought now was to ask him to obtain for her a raw onion, or potato, or a lemon—anything for her scurvy. But to bring up something so beggarly with the commandant would show her as homely and ill-bred. It would suggest she did not appreciate the significance of the topic at hand. And then there was this: If she admitted to being sick, would he find someone to replace her with immediately?

  “Well!”

  “Where shall I say I go?” she blurted.

  “What?”

  “What do I do when I leave the camp? I need a story.”

  Kachak rapped the nail of his middle finger on the desk. Was it possible he had not thought through this far? “You’ve been assigned to a mineral prospecting team,” he said finally, “because of your training in geology. The rest is classified.”

  —

  THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT USHERED her out. The truck was waiting in the snowy road, and, seeing it, she knew the terrible mistake she’d made. Her frostbitten cheeks and fingers began to throb, as did the toes wrapped in her threadbare footrags. She was being returned to hunger, to the coldness of the barracks, the boot kicks of the guards. The thought made the ache in her leg seize up in a spasm.

  “Get moving,” said the lieutenant, who was walking behind her.

  Her leg could not move.

  “Go on!”

  She was an animal, trapped, and now only the instincts of an animal could point to a way out. She let herself fall like a beast into the snow.

  “Get up!”

  “I’m unable!”

  She waited for the lieutenant to kick her, and when he didn’t, she undid her boot as quickly as she could and pulled up her pant leg. His face winced at the sight of her flesh. In the dimming light, her leg looked fully blue. “It’s atrophied,” she pleaded.

  “You can settle it when you get to your camp. Go to the infirmary.”

  “The nurse won’t give me a bed.”

  “Nonsense. Get up!”

  “They don’t give beds to politicals. Unless it’s a quarantine. You know that.”

  “So—what do you want me to do? Take it up with your authorities.”

  “I beg you. Keep me nearby. A day or two. Once I get a septic fever I’ll be of no use to you, or to your commandant. I’ll get the prisoner to talk. I can.”

  “Keep your voice down, you louse,” he said. And then: “Don’t leave this spot!”

  The cold snow burned her cheek. She shut her lids and it gave way under her body like a down comforter.

  —

  FLORENCE AWOKE AT DAWN on a real cot, in a hospital room with white-painted window frames. Her clothes were nowhere in sight. The flannel gown on her body was so thin and worn that it looked transparent in the cold light. Somebody must have changed her. She tried to rouse up some feeling of shame, but that too had long been driven out of her. All she could conjure was a dim memory of voices during the night.

  Take her to the fourth ward.

  No. Upstairs. He doesn’t want her near the criminals.

  She’s a hag.

  They’ll screw a hundred-year-old crone if you let ’em. She touched her leg. Someone had bandaged it tightly. Her fatigue was more powerful than the pain. She curled herself around the pillow like a sea creature and fell asleep.

  —

  FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS she stayed in the main camp’s infirmary and was taken out during the day to assist with the interrogation of the pilot. Each day Robbins was asked anew about radars and gunsights, and each time he gave the same responses—requesting that his government be notified of his status as a POW, and that he be reunited with his fellow officers inside the camp. Her only contribution to the interrogation was to make out from his slurring, Southern-inflected speech the same repeated request, which became less intelligible by the day.

  Florence had gathered from the chatter of the guards that Robbins had commenced on a hunger strike—that he was refusing to eat as well as to talk. She marveled at the dying man’s fierce will to let go of his last grasp on life. Having herself resolved to end her life many times, she knew that carrying out a plan to die—even in death’s own chamber—was not as easy as promised. Some small bit of joy or fortune—a sudden warming of the weather, the arrival of a letter from the orphanage—could undercut one’s will to end it all. She had seen fellow prisoners swallow too much snow in order to make themselves bloated and sick. Engineer nosebleeds. Rub dirt into a sore to get blood poisoning and spike their temperature to a fever. Urinate on their hands and feet to catch frostbite. But none of these inducements of illness was performed with the wish of dying. The aim was always to obtain admission to the hospital for some desperately needed rest. Self-mutilation was self-preservation. Few had the courage for the real thing. What little thought camp life had not driven from the mind was subordinated entirely to a dogged clinging to life.

  With Robbins it was the opposite—he’d become wise to the authorities’ desire to keep him alive, and so bedeviled them by trying to die. For some period of time each afternoon Florence stood peeking through the barred window of Robbins’s cell as Kachak bent over him, whispering menacingly or shouting threats. Each day the man in the chair became even more of a fragile ghost, his reddish hair growing longer as his graying skin hung looser on his bones. Like an old man’s, Florence thought, though he was obviously young. Her only hope now was that he would not die. If he did, she would be sent back to general labor in the women’s camp, sent back to toil and deteriorate and meet, at last, her own end.

  In a small upstairs ward of the infirmary, she was allowed to lie prone all day. On the fourth day of her stay she discovered, with some amazement, that her leg was improving. There was real herring in her soup instead of just fish bones. On that and a mere bowl of cereal the body could begin to revive itself, as long as it did not have to be sent to work. Twice inside her loaf of black bread she had found, hidden like a coin, a hard, sour pill of vitamin C. It had been hidden there by the camp doctor (himself a prisoner), the same one who had rescued Robbins by prying open his jaw and working a rubber tube down into his stomach. Florence would not know about these force-feedings until they were over. For four days, she would live in limbo, neither called into interrogations nor sent back to the women’s camp. It was on the fourth and final day of this stretch that the doctor came to alert her that he was certain of bad news. Robbins’s health was worsening; he was slipping in and out of consciousness. His throat and stomach had continued to react to the force-feedings with convulsive spasms, and he had begun spitting up blood. The doctor slipped Florence a vial of amber liquid. She was not, he advised, to trade or sell it for anything back at her camp. She understood this to mean he expected her to be sent back any day. The liquid was a vitamin-filled syrup. Florence was speechless as she held it. The doctor had acted toward her with more kindness than she thought imaginable in a place like this. Surely, she could not ask more.

  And yet she had to. The vitamin elixir, as precious as life itself, would not save her. She would have to sell it the very first day and use the money to buy bread. If she held on to it, it would get thieved immediately. One of the criminals would knock her over the head and rob her on the first day she was back.

  She looked into the doctor’s pitying eyes. They reflected what he saw: a haggard, reduced “wick,” her face covered in blood clots, her skin bitten by lice. Florence had known this moment would come; she’d planned to throw herself at the doctor’s mercy, offer herself up as an orderly who could clean latrines and mop blood, do anything if it meant she could extend her stay a bit longer. But looking into his eyes she understood that such imploring was useless and comp
letely idiotic. He had no jurisdiction over her. If she wanted to live she had to appeal to a higher force. Not God. The only god who reigned here was the cannibal god of human sacrifice, the black beating heart of the monstrous machine that had started devouring her years ago. Only from such a god, she thought desolately, could she ever seek her salvation. No sooner did she think this than she felt a flash of light showing her a way through the darkness. She gripped the syrup and gazed at the doctor. The idea she had to sell him was, after all, in his favor.

  Even as she uttered it, Florence did not really believe she was proposing the things that came out of her mouth. Yet the doctor listened.

  —

  How had she pulled it off? She had convinced the doctor, and he, in his turn, had convinced the commandant. “So you want to worm the hook yourself, eh?” Kachak said, before the door to Robbins’s cell was opened for her. “Well, why the devil not?” He spoke in a voice of pure satire. The force-feedings had become a burlesque. The smile on Kachak’s face looked, to Florence, slightly deranged. He had been drinking. Maybe he thought he had little to lose.

  She sat down beside Robbins’s cot with a tray in her lap. She didn’t look toward the grate in the door, but was distressfully aware of the commandant’s eyes observing her. What she had proposed would have been the highest order of impertinence coming from her mouth; the doctor had presented it as his own idea, telling Kachak, “He won’t take the food from the guards, or any of us. He won’t touch it if we’re even in the room.” She, a fellow countryman, would bring it to him, persuade him to take some bites. Now she turned to Robbins’s back and spoke. “Captain—I’ve brought you a little tea. It’ll make you feel better.”

  He lay turned away, facing the wall.

  “There’s a nice bowl of fish soup here for you, with barley. Maybe you’d like some bread?” The tray had two slices of actual white bread, something she didn’t believe existed in the zone. “I promise I won’t try to make you talk,” she said. She glanced toward the barred window. “Unless you want to. You can probably say anything you like here—to be honest, I don’t think the commandant understands a word you say.”

  She stared at his scrub of reddish stubble. She felt she was talking to a dead body. Or to herself. This was insane.

  “You’re from the South.”

  No answer.

  “Yes, I could hear it in your voice earlier. Georgia? Alabama?”

  Nothing.

  “I know this isn’t bacon or collards.” She tried to make her voice lilt. “But you’re getting a feast by any measure of ours. I wouldn’t pass it up if I were—”

  Before she could finish, he’d lifted his arm and with whiplash speed delivered a swift strike that sent the enamel bowl of soup flying off her tray. It hit the floor with a crash and metallic ping; its contents splashed on the wall. A piece of herring lay on the floor, not far from her foot. She glanced backward at the little barred window. Kachak was not visible, but a guard stood in a posture suggesting readiness to put an end to the whole experiment. Florence raised a palm to indicate there was no need for distress.

  She breathed through her mouth to collect herself. “The farthest south I’ve ever been was Washington. I’m from Detroit myself,” she lied. “That was a long time ago, of course. Funny, you always think you’ll come back home.” Gently, she placed her fingers on the back of his shoulder. “You need to eat, Mr. Robbins. Or they’ll come and pry your cheeks open again. I don’t think you want that.”

  “You don’t know what I want.”

  She seized up. His voice was no more than a coarse whisper.

  “You’re right. I don’t know,” she said.

  “I got no business with traitors,” Robbins said, louder this time, but still without looking at her.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Captain. Neither of us is here on our own recognizance.” The story she told him then was one she’d told before. Her daddy had been a bootlegger during Prohibition. Being a stubborn man, and a greedy one, he never got with the county program by letting the police in on a cut of his profits. He was arrested and sentenced to an unjust term, but somehow managed to escape with the aid of his criminal friends. He’d been born in Russia, and was given citizenship on his return here, before calling for his wife and daughter to join him. “I was nothing but a babe. Turned seventeen on the ship,” Florence said. This story had served her well. She’d concocted it in prison, where she’d quickly wised up to the fact that the most reviled and punished group—among not just prisoners but also warders and interrogators—were the true believers. A special contempt was reserved for these earnest adherents, always the first to lose their grip on reality and start scratching at the walls. To admit that she had come to Russia voluntarily, out of political sympathies, would have been as suicidal as admitting she’d worked for the secret police. The truth was so ludicrous, Florence couldn’t even believe it herself anymore.

  “My daddy used to say he wished he’d stayed in prison in America,” she now said to the prostrate body beside her. “Would’ve been no different than here, except with better food.”

  He made a noise that sounded like a grunt. Or was it a laugh? Florence looked down at the tray. The bread was still there, and the sugared tea, getting cold. “Well, Mr. Robbins. If you’re not going to touch this sumptuous meal, I might have to. Even if they do accuse me of being in cahoots with a real live spy.”

  “I ain’t any kind of spy. I am an air force officer.”

  He’d spoken in a quiet but resolute tone of voice. Florence looked at the spot where his skeletal shoulder suggested itself through his tunic shirt. “Then how did you get here?”

  He turned, rolling slightly over on his pallet. His eyes were gray-blue and redshot. They burned with rage. “How’d I get here? You playing me for a fool, lady? There’s a war on.”

  Her eyes widened. It was true, then.

  “So it’s happened? America has dropped the bomb at last,” she whispered. “Oh mercy.”

  Robbins studied her for a moment—some kind of mordant delight dancing in his eyes. Florence sensed they were reacting to something in her face, some magisterial ignorance on her part.

  “Shit—you really don’t have any idea, do you?”

  She stared at him.

  And for the first time that she’d seen, he laughed, helplessly, each gasp swallowing up the next as if he were struggling for air.

  —

  She’d been led out by the guard then, but she learned from the doctor that, except for the overturned soup, Robbins had eaten what she’d brought him. So the commandant, in spite of himself, was persuaded to let Florence back in the following day instead of the force-feeding team. Unbeknownst to her, Robbins had refused to touch any food unless she brought it. Though giving in to such a request caused the commandant inexpressible indignity, he had no choice. Florence had no way of knowing this, but Kachak had already taken a great personal risk in not handing the pilot over to MGB headquarters in Moscow. Beria would look the other way only as long as it served him. And if Kachak produced no results or, worse yet, let the man die on his watch, his earlier “insubordination” would be rapidly uncovered, and his exile in Perm, such as it was, would last a very long time indeed. Or be served out on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. Such things were known to happen.

  Kachak had taken this gamble knowingly. In Moscow he’d tortured confessions out of hundreds of people. But this was different—not the usual “stitch work” of writing up the right version beforehand and having the prisoner corroborate it while his fingernails were being pulled off. Getting a real confession—real intelligence—now, that was a more delicate operation. Kachak had no idea what he was hoping to find; he didn’t know a thing about gyros or radars or optics. Whatever the pilot confessed would have to be intelligible to the brains up at the MiG Aviation Design Bureau, with their plagiaristic lust for the F-86’s technology. It would have to be solid, verifiable, not the usual bullshit. Kachak didn’t approve
of this Robbins, lying on his cot like a dying king and giving him orders. But he’d have to stick to soft tactics until the time came again for hard ones.

  Inside his monk’s cell, Robbins allowed himself to be fed by the old woman’s hand. Spooning pea porridge into his mouth, Florence could not prevent herself from staring at the prisoner’s bristle-covered chewing cheeks, the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. It was the cruel irony of recovery that the more she herself was fed at the infirmary, the more she wanted to eat.

  “How old are you anyhow?” Robbins said, as if he’d been holding the question in for a while.

  “Forty-one.”

  His face got cloudy. He didn’t try to suppress his shock. Florence tried to guess from his expression how old he’d thought she was. Fifty? Maybe sixty.

  “Jeez.” He was looking at her hands, their gray scaly skin. The blistered, frostbitten tips of her middle and ring fingers had darkened and thickened while she’d been at the infirmary. She still had some trouble bending them. “What’ve they got you doing?”

  “Sawing trees in the forest, most of the time. Carrying wood.”

  “You don’t look like you could pull a twig.”

  Florence shrugged.

  “And you mean you really didn’t know about this war?”

  “I hardly know what month it is.”

  “Well, it ain’t like a real war anyway, more like a knife fight where you’ll swipe at your opponent’s arms and legs all day without being allowed to stab him in the vitals.”

  She did not exactly understand what he meant. Robbins still sounded delirious from his exhaustion and depletion. Florence glanced toward the bars in the door. The guard wasn’t visible. “You said there were other American officers with you…,” she whispered.

  “Five of us. Two other guys from Korea. Two from East Berlin. They were stationed there. Not POWs like us—kidnapped by your secret police. One guy they just picked up in a bar in the eastern zone, visiting his girl. Stuffed him in a car, and that was it for him. They claim we’re all spies. It’s against every international law. POWs they’re supposed to declare to our countries. But no one knows we’re here.”