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 happened 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.

As soon as she was in the woods with Inga, her partner, Florence again found her strength ebbing. The breakfast ration of watery porridge had sustained her only through the difficult walk. She tried not to think about the pain in her right foot, the ankle flesh swelling up against the rubber, blackening her vision with each step. It was like stepping on a bayonet with your heel.

Florence’s job was to hold the box saw steady while Inga did the sawing. But even this proved an impossible task, since it required her, if nothing else, to keep both feet planted firmly on the ground. Inga’s strength was at once a salvation and a malediction: it had kept Florence from slipping into the penal food category, but had forced her to keep up with Inga’s movements even as her own muscles trembled. Inga’s effort, diligent and tragic, reminded Florence of when she had first arrived in Perm and tried to work “honestly and conscientiously,” in order to be rewarded with an extra food ration. Before long she’d come to understand that it was working toward the extra ration that would kill you—help starve you quicker on an extra four hundred grams a day. She had only survived her first winter in Perm thanks to their brigade leader, an old kolkhoznitsa who knew all the tricks and let them gather old timber, cut the winter before, to add to their incomplete norms, and taught Florence to stack her wood in loose piles that looked full from the outside. She’d manipulated the books to show full quotas until some higher-ups got wise to it and assigned them a new gang leader indifferent to their fortunes.

“You’ll have to work faster than this,” Inga said.

Florence felt dizzy. The nausea of hunger had been assailing her earlier and earlier each day since the pain in her leg had started. She smiled. “Work isn’t a wolf. It won’t run off into the woods.” She’d heard this joke herself when she arrived, and now she repeated it. There was nothing new to say in this place.

Inga glared at her with her flat Estonian face, flushed with exasperated effort. None of the women in the brigade were “true” Russians, aside from a few who’d been ordered by the army to serve in the Nazi-occupied areas and, as a reward for their loyalty, were accused of being collaborators. They were referred to as “fascists,” as were all the politicals indicted under Article 58, including Florence.

“Keep it steady,” Inga warned.

Florence had come across only a handful of women who’d worked in the forests for more than two years—that was how long it took for the quotas to turn a convict into a corpse. This was Florence’s second winter. Fresh prisoners like Inga were shipped in seasonally to replenish the living corpses, and were themselves replaced the following winter. This knowledge slid across Florence’s consciousness like a worn proverb; she could not find in herself the will to be either outraged or consoled by it.

The pain in her boot continued to slice into the thin meat of her leg. It cut deeper still. It refused to be ignored.

“What is it now?” said Inga.

“My leg. I can’t move it.”

“Which one?”

“It’s probably the frostbite. But it’s swelling.”

“That don’t swell. Let’s see it.”

“It’s stuck in the boot.”

“What do you mean, ‘stuck’?” Inga glanced through the pine trunks toward the clearing, where a guard’s cigarette smoke hung in a dirty gray cloud above the snow. She pulled the boot off while Florence sat on a log. Florence’s torn footrags were caked with blood and pus from her frostbitten toe, but the pain was elsewhere. The middle-lower portion of her calf was purple.

“Holy mother!” She knew what it was before Inga said it. “That’s a scurvy ulcer, it is.”

For two weeks she had been touching the tenderness at night and praying it away. Now it was as hard as a winter apple. Florence pressed her finger into the bruised flesh. The white indentation remained and did not go away.

“You’ll need a raw onion,” said Inga.

“Where do I get that?”

“Put that thing back in the boot before you freeze.”

“It doesn’t fit. I told you. It’s too swollen.”

“Jesus. We’ll need to cut the boot.”

“My boot! I can’t! What with?”

Inga walked deeper into the forest and returned with a sharp rock. She threw her coat on Florence’s leg and split the rubber with the stone blade. It wasn’t hard to slice; these boots were summer footwear. “It’ll fit now. Then you can go to the infirmary.”

“I’ve gone, I’ve gone. You don’t get a bed unless you’ve got a ‘septic’ temperature.”

Inga placed her rough naked hand on Florence’s forehead and shook her head. “All you need is a raw onion. A raw potato will do fine. Drive off the scurvy.”

But Florence had not spoken the full truth, which was that the female doctor had all but spat on her and told her she was lucky they were feeding her at the state’s expense. The fifty-eighters didn’t get beds.

—

IN THE AFTERNOON THE prisoners built two bonfires, one for themselves and another for the guards. Like primitives they stared in silence into the fire. The dribble from their noses hissed as it fell into the cinders. From a pocket she’d sewn into her jacket, Florence removed the remains of her morning’s ration, forty grams of bread, frozen solid. She gnawed and sucked on the bread, then spat out a wad of bloody saliva on the snow. Her teeth were shaky in their gums. It was another sign. She didn’t know where she would get a raw onion, or a raw potato. A simple, terrifying thought came into her head: the descent toward death was an escarpment drop to which she had finally been delivered. In a matter of weeks she would be one of the disgraced—too weak to keep her cap from being stolen off her head, indifferent to the lice that sucked her blood, abused for the amusements of the criminals, eating penal rations and searching for rotten scraps in the frozen-over urine behind the mess hall. She would enter the ranks of the “wicks”—those who’d come to the end of life’s sorry candle.

In truth she had no desire to live, and yet she continued to go on living. She thought of nothing but food. According to an arithmetic only the mind of the starving has the will to pursue, she measured the distance to death in grams of black bread and pieces of herring floating in her soup. Once demonstrative and exuberant, she’d become a miser of movement, expending as little as possible of her energy, physical and mental. Living, Florence had come to understand, was only another habit. The most stubborn and difficult to break.

Animals survived because they possessed no memory. She too had made herself dead to the past. Here it was not hard to believe that her old life had never existed. If this sinister cold and weak fire was where all those previous lives had led her to, then they could not have been real, but only canceled dreams yearning for an expired god. Forgetting had always been her great talent. She had forgotten everything. Moscow. America. The voice of her thoughts was no longer English, for she no longer grappled with the sort of thoughts that required the tangle of language. From time to time she remembered that she had a son. This painful knowledge would burrow through the metastasized sheathing of her mind and settle there like a small hungry animal. Florence told herself that Yulik was being taken care of, well fed. She had been allowed to receive letters, in which he had written, “I am dressed appropriately for the season.” She believed this, for it was her only comfort. Other times, the idea that she had a son who was alive somewhere was as remote to her as the thought of spring.

To forget meant to discard the future as well as the past.

The Perm winter had sucked her dry of all affection, had poisoned her soul with overwhelming indifference. She was conscious of this and powerless to alter it. It was, in its own narcotic way, a kind of spiritual peace.

—

AT SUNSET THEY MARCHED back to the camp with their tools. Less than a mile out one of the women in the group collapsed in the snow. She was an old, frail Armenian who had been in the brigade for only a few months. For the past week she’d had difficulty making herself understood, not because of her Caucasian inflections but because of her swollen tongue and dementia. She was believed to be suffering from pellagra, a vitamin deficiency that the natsmen of the warmer climates always fell prey to first. Florence and another prisoner were given the ignoble but not difficult task of carrying the Armenian back to the zone. By the time they arrived, she had no pulse.

The woman had slept on a berth below Florence’s, and now Florence felt afflicted by the unfortunate circumstances of her death. Had the woman expired in the night in their barracks, Florence and the others would have contrived a way to arrange her body so that they could keep receiving her portion of bread for at least a day or two. The death had been a waste.

—

IN THE MORNING SHE was pulled out of roll call by the gang forewoman. “You’re to see Scherbakov,” she said in an amused tone that might have been sinister or congratulatory.

“Who’s Scherbakov?”

“Who’s Scherbakov? He’s the commander of the guards, you imbecile.” She pointed to the guard who was already there to escort her, his rifle barrel gleaming.

Fat Scherbakov sat at his desk when she arrived. With him was another man in uniform, slender and younger, whom he introduced as Lieutenant Something. (Florence’s sheer amazement and fear at being called in made her forget his name as soon as it was spoken.) “Name, statute, date of birth,” Scherbakov said, hardly looking at her. On the corner of his desk was a cup of tea in a saucer that held the rind of a slice of lemon. “Is she the one?” said the young lieutenant. He seemed disbelieving. The distaste on his face was more physical instinct than emotion, like pain or sleepiness. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and drew it to his nose. “I’m not taking her like this. Send her to the bathhouse. Commandant Kachak doesn’t like the smell of these convicts.”

The lieutenant was waiting when she came out of the bath hut, wearing the same clothes she’d had on before, only damp now from the disinfection chamber and no more deloused. “Get in the truck.” A guard threw back the canvas tarp from the pickup truck’s bed.

“Where are you taking me?”

The lieutenant gave no sign of hearing her.

—

THE ICE ON THE ROAD was dirty and packed down. The desolate landscape was barely visible in the windblown snow. She sensed she was being driven in the direction of one of the main labor camps. Every five or ten kilometers a watchtower on stilts peered out through the fresh blizzard. It was like leaving one’s planet and learning there were dozens more like it in the solar system, each with its own planetary rings of barbed wire. After a while, just north of a very large camp, the truck turned off the highway. They had entered the especially high-security zone known only to select guards as the Zone of Silence, so called because it held British and American soldiers captured in Korea, and even those kidnapped by the Soviets from divided Berlin. Florence, of course, did not know any of this. What she saw when the driver slowed the truck was a stone building that looked like a monastery. It had once been one. Converted by the Bolsheviks to a transit prison, the building had since become too small for that purpose and now served as the headquarters of the secret police for all the camps in the area of Molotov. Its frozen basement, once the monks’ cells of the friary, was a gallery of interrogation rooms whose vaulted ceilings sucked up and sealed for eternity the wails of the condemned.

The room Florence was led to had a heavy wooden door with a low barred window used for observation by two guards. She was told to wait outside while the young lieutenant took his leave. She glanced through the bars. The creature inside the cell sat on a wooden chair in the center of the small room, wearing a dull and listless expression on his angular features. His shaved hair was growing back in a pale stubble. There was little time to look at him, as the lieutenant strode back with another man, a person of obviously higher rank, neatly uniformed and closely shaved, but with a crop of black hair sprouting from under his military blouse, open to the chest as though he were a Mediterranean lover. In this dank basement of a prison he carried with him a formidable odor of eau de cologne and real tobacco, of health, serenity, and contempt. A tetrad of brass knuckles glinted like jewelry on his hairy fist. This, no doubt, was Kachak, the commandant the lieutenant had spoken of earlier.

“This one will repeat what I say to the spy,” he said, addressing a third man, who, in spite of the pulpy suit that hung from his bones, Florence immediately recognized as a prisoner-slave like herself. It took Florence a full moment, however, to realize that the commandant was speaking about her. “Yes, yes, yes,” said the suited convict, eyeballing Florence curiously. His eyes glistened with the faithfulness of a beaten dog. This, Florence would soon learn, was Finkleman, a former “engineer-physicist” plucked from the bottomless jaws much like herself, called on to assist the Motherland one last time.

“Nu, chto!” the commandant barked at her. “You’ve forgotten Russian already?”

“I haven’t,” she denied, though every word roared at her today had been unintelligible in its suggestion of a turn of luck too good to be anything but another delusion. “You will repeat to the spy what I say in English. No more, no less,” the commandant said. “If you don’t understand his responses, explain to him.” He meant the convict in the suit. In the convict’s hand Florence glimpsed a sheaf of graph paper and the most prized of all possessions in the camps: the stub of a graphite pencil. An undercurrent in her mind was wondering how she might get her hands on the pencil stub and trade it among the criminal element for an onion or a pair of socks; she was fantasizing about this even as far greater riches were being dangled before her in the form of the spy, now slumped sideways like a cripple, with his hands roped to the chair he sat upon. The commandant opened the big door and led the two of them into the room, but it was only when he sat down across from the tied-up man and launched into an artillery of questions that the coma of Florence’s astonishment was broken by a more frightening mental paralysis. “Tell us which controls on the gunsight supply the correct deflection for the radar eye,” Kachak demanded, expecting her to translate. “Is this done by the pilot or by means of cybernetic feedback?” There seemed to be a touch of hysterical impatience in his voice, barely suppressed, as if he had already asked this inconceivable question a dozen times and was now only daring the half-dead man instead of questioning him. Florence could not comprehend, let alone translate, the question. The exertion of keeping the words together in her head brought on a hunger-nausea as vicious as when she had marched half starved in the snow. But there was only one way forward. She had believed that, in her almost two years in the camp, she’d driven English out of her memory, along with everything else. But here it was, emerging from the thawing permafrost of her frozen brain.

“The commandant would like to know about a radar eye,” she said, too fearful to ask what a radar eye was. With ridiculous courtesy, she inquired about the “air-to-ground shooting range” and the “autopilot program.” But none of this prompted the most basic acknowledgment from the prisoner. She was starting to grasp the situation, which was not turning in her favor. “Does he really understand English?” she said, turning to the withered engineer-physicist, the one person in the cell she felt entitled to address with such a doubt. It was then that the prisoner opened his mouth and spoke as might a wind-up toy: “United States Air Force Cap’n Henry Robbins. I request that my government be notified of my status as a Prisoner of War in the Sof-yut Union. I thereto request to be returned to the company of my fellow officers in captiv’ty.”

And once more he was silent, as though he hadn’t spoken at all.

Speechless, she felt the white scorch of his words singeing into her consciousness. Prisoner of war? What war? The last one? That would mean he had been in captivity longer than she had—at least five years! But how could that be? Why would an American be a prisoner of war—hadn’t they been fighting on the same side? And what of his request to be reunited with his fellow officers? How many others were there? She was now entering her second winter in Perm and had heard nothing about any captured Americans. Florence now felt seasick, as she would feel once more almost thirty years later, stepping off the chartered plane at JFK Airport, the sensation of having come unmoored in the dimension of time, of having been sealed away while the world had sped on without her.

She quickly launched into a translation of Captain Robbins’s request. But Kachak needed no help comprehending it. Before she was through, his metal knuckles struck the side of Robbins’s cheek, making the prisoner’s head twist on his neck like a ribbon around a maypole. “No requests granted to spies,” he said and removed a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the blood off his fingers.

—

She was given dinner: a full bowl of thick pea porridge and half a loaf—almost six hundred grams—of bread, baked so recently that it had not yet turned to stone. It all but melted in her mouth and was gone before she’d even gotten used to the spongy taste. Afterward she was led through to another part of the monastery, where the commandant had his office.

“Sit,” he told her. He himself remained standing, gazing through the frost-shaggy window while he smoked. The sky had acquired the carmine aura of premature evening. Florence could feel blood pulsing in her leg. She had dragged it behind her like a rotted hoe. She was appalled at her body’s lack of gratitude. Here she was, out of the biting cold for the first time, and what had the abscess done but use the respite to blossom into glory! It throbbed viciously, in sudden rivets of pain.

“You will speak to nobody about today,” the commandant said finally, turning to face her. “You will not mention it to prisoners or anyone in the administration of your camp.”

Florence said she understood.

He ground his cigarette out on a saucer on his desk. “Even in a task like this you are entirely replaceable. Remember that.”

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 completely 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.”

She scraped up the last spoonful of porridge and fed it to him. “The commandant won’t allow me to meet with you alone for much longer, Captain.”

“It’s Henry.”

“I need to tell him something.”

“You can tell him I got nothing to say to him until my government is informed of my status as a Prisoner of War in the U.S.S.R.”

—

“Sugar?”

“Please.” She was stunned to be sitting across the desk from Kachak, to have him offering her tea.

“How many teaspoons?”

“Two,” she said, just as though she were back at home.

He had a meaty, striking if not exactly handsome face. His shirt was buttoned up to the neck this time.

“You’ve made progress.”

Florence couldn’t tell if this was a question or praise. “Yes,” she said. “He’s been eating. In a few days, I believe he’ll have much of his strength back.”

“We’ll resume questioning tomorrow.”

“No.” She’d spoken before she could stop herself.

Kachak blinked. “No?”

“I only mean,” she corrected, “I don’t think he’ll give in under strain. He hasn’t before. And he still insists that his request to alert the American government be carried out.”

“I see,” said Kachak. “So he’s found himself an advocate.”

She felt her two frostbitten fingertips begin to throb. Or was it only her fear? “I am nothing more than an interpreter,” she said.

“Is that what you are?” He was staring at her, one of his abundant eyebrows lifted challengingly. He slid a cigarette from his front pocket without taking out the pack and lit it. “I have a dozen interpreters here. I have enough Ivan Ivanoviches to translate all of Shakespeare.” He took a small drag to get the cherry glow going, then let the smoke out silently through his nose. His eyes were not telling her what he had; they were asking what she had.

And still she had nothing.

Or did she?

She had once, so long ago, studied mathematics, logic. All she’d retained from that now was a single insight: a negative outcome could be as useful to a problem as a positive one. Florence experienced this knowledge so fleetingly she did not even recognize it as a thought. But she said to Kachak: “It seems to me that Robbins’s conditions have changed. It’s true that his request to have his government alerted remains unaltered, but he is no longer asking to be reunited with the other Americans.”

Kachak let the smoke drift out of his mouth and nose. He was listening. “He is in no position to be making any demands.”

“Perhaps not. But I suspect his earlier request to be reunited with his fellow officers had to do with his isolation. Solitary confinement will make a man desperate for any contact with human beings.”

“And what do you suggest?”

“Just to keep him talking…”

“With you?”

“Yes, for the time being. He badly wants someone to talk to. I sense this.”

Kachak gazed up into the vaulted ceiling and smiled. “ ‘And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat….’ ”

He gave her until the end of the week.

—

Her association with the criminal world—even if it was the imaginary criminal world of America—had been useful in the camp, too. She was, of course, still a “fascist,” but when word got around that she was a bootlegger’s daughter, she was told to come to the barracks occupied by the blatnye, where the criminal women reclined on their bunks, undressed to their dirty bras in a barracks made cozily warm by fires or stoves stoked regularly by their court of prisoner-lackeys—civils or politicals like herself—who served the criminals’ every whim in exchange for a crust of bread or some protection. She was asked if she’d ever met Bonnie Parker. Or seen Al Capone. Somehow, the legends of these felons had made their way here without losing any of their glamour. She admitted frankly that she’d never seen any of these criminals face-to-face but related the stories she’d read in the papers, describing the string of heists and murders pulled off by Bonnie and Clyde as they darted around the country in stolen cars. With as much detail as Florence could recall after twenty years, she retold of the bloody battles between the Italian gangs of Capone and the Irish gangs of Bugs Moran, and how Capone’s men, luring the Irish crew to a warehouse full of cut-rate Canadian whiskey, unleashed a hail of bullets and then escaped in the guise of policemen—staging the massacre on the American holiday celebrating love.

After that, she was invited back to tell them about other gangsters, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. The half-undressed dyevkas listened while they slapped cards on their greasy pillows or picked lice out of their armpits like monkeys and tossed them to crackle in the fire. The guards, tenderly or sardonically, called them “girls,” and some of them indeed had the bodies of girls, and the faces of old women. They’d sometimes interrupt Florence’s stories with profanity-laced commentary of their own, spoken in shouts, of which Florence understood hardly a word. Outside, she was more or less left alone, for she had entered the dubious ranks of the camp’s “novelists”—the ones who entertained the criminals with recitations of the great classics, Dumas or Dostoyevsky. In her case, though, the “novels” were really double features she had seen years ago, with Sidney, at the Brooklyn Paramount or the RKO Albee—Tarzan, Mantrap, Flesh and the Devil, The Public Enemy—gangster films and sappy romances that the criminals ate up in equal measure. Half the time she had to improvise the plot, composing the script as she went along, just as she was doing now with Robbins and Kachak, adding colorful touches that might entertain or please in the moment.

When she wasn’t with Robbins, Florence stayed in the infirmary, firing the stoves, washing latrines, swabbing blood from the floor—the privileged, easy duties she would never have been given in the women’s camp. She was almost sure that once they’d used her up as a translator, they would pin another ten years on her for “fraternizing with the enemy.” Or simply shoot her. She did not care. As long as she was kept in soft work and fed eight hundred grams of bread a day, with some soup and fish on the side, as long as she could stay warm and not be out in the frozen woods, she would do whatever was asked.

—

“YOU’RE LOOKING FINE, MISS FEIN,” Robbins said unexpectedly almost two weeks later. He knew her by her maiden name. “Got a little color back in your cheeks.”

Florence could feel her forehead flush. She had an urge to tell him it was all thanks to him. He had bought her a month of life, at least. Instead, she said, “You didn’t tell me how old you were.”

“I’m thirty-four. Maybe thirty-five by now. Hard to tick off time where there ain’t no calendars or windows.”

“Not so young for your common air force pilot.”

“Oh, I see what you’re thinking. They told you I’m a spy. Well, I ain’t no more a spy than you are a lumberjack. It’s not my first barbecue, is all.”

“You were a flyer in the last war?”

“The 254th Fighter Division,” Robbins said with some pride. He was cleaning out the remains of his bowl with the bread, strong enough to eat on his own now.

“Must have really liked all that fighting to volunteer again,” she said.

“Who said I volunteered?”

“Didn’t you?”

“I was a reservist. Would be out for good by now if I’d read the fine print….Just never thought we’d get into a new conflict this soon.”

This was something. So the patriot had a bone to pick with Uncle Sam, after all. Florence probed this sore. “That doesn’t sound quite fair….”

“Fair’s a place where pigs win ribbons.”

She had heard such sentiments before. Robbins had marched willingly, but not happily. This gave her hope. The hope felt like a valuable gemstone she had discovered in her pocket and was now secretly keeping warm.

After a while, Robbins said, “Anyway, when it’s all over, if the communists or anyone else learns they can’t git away with invadin’ and takin’ over another country, then some good will have come out of it all.”

She arranged her face into a likeness of kindness. “Does it make it easier to believe that?”

“What?”

“That America believes in the freedom of other nations to determine their own destinies? Because, if it does, well”—she smiled disarmingly—“then it believes in such a freedom selectively. Manila? Mexico? Hawaii, for that matter?”

She herself believed only selectively in what she was saying. Long ago, she’d stopped caring about politics, and now her words sounded only like echoes of some ghost of her prior self. Still, she sensed that Robbins was tired of suffering, that he only needed permission to put aside his obedience and duty. She would give that to him. “I’m not convinced that the lives and futures of young men like yourself,” she said, “have been forfeited for any reason other than to bring glory and profits to the few. And I don’t think you’re convinced of it, either.”

The captain appeared to be weighing what she’d said. “My, my,” he said finally. “Aren’t you well informed?” His missing teeth gave him a sinister smile. “How’s that worked out for you, being so well informed?”

She could think of nothing to say.

“I don’t know what kind of religion you’re trying to peddle, Miss Fein, but I’ve heard better pastoring from a two-day drunk preacher.”

He thought she was ridiculous. Of course he did.

“Here’s a little more information for you,” Robbins said. “America’s got no interest in some squalid, insignificant scrap of Asia called Korea. We’re in this mess on account of your Soviets having the A-bomb now. Didn’t know that, did you? Yup. A few things have changed since you got here, Sleeping Beauty. Ain’t you curious how the Russians got their hands on it? ’Course you are. A couple of clever Yankee Yids like yourself—husband-and-wife duo—sold ’em the recipe for a bag of magic beans. Thought they’d balance the scales. And now here you and me are. So how’s about you take your red mouthwash and sell it somewhere else.”

—

WHAT AN IDIOT SHE’D been. What a stupe, with her phony indoctrination session, as though he were some adolescent YCL-er. As soon as she arrived in the Zone of Silence, she knew she could afford no errors, and now it had been four days since she’d been called to see Robbins.

Don’t let them send me back. Please, don’t let them….Her own childish pleas to the fates ran in her mind all the time now. What a fraud she was. All her life she’d been praying in this scattered hectic way in spite of her total lack of belief. Why have you plucked me from the abyss only to throw me back in again? From the gutters of memory she was recovering lost prayers of her childhood. Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, hagomel lahayavim tovot, sheg’molani kol tov. But such prayers for her were not the language of faith or aspiration, they were the cry of a trapped beast. At night, awake in the agitating lunar light, she could hear her heart raising its muzzle to the moon to release its high-pitched wail.

If she could only be pardoned for all she had done…

—

FLORENCE DID NOT KNOW about the phone calls being made, back and forth, between Kachak and Beria. Nor could she have known that the unmarked train bearing the partially shattered and disassembled F-86 Sabrejet was nearing Moscow. She could not have suspected, as yet, Kachak’s growing desperation to wring some valuable information from Robbins before he would be obliged to hand the pilot over to his seniors in Moscow.

And so it happened that when Kachak did again call Florence into the interrogation room, the sudden shift in his offer and tone struck her as some sort of supernatural turn of events. “Tell him I am planning to send him to Moscow,” he told Florence, who sat, along with Kachak, at the table facing the silent Robbins. “I am quite through with wringing water from this stone. I trust”—he turned to Robbins—“that my fellows in the Lubyanka will have more success with you.”

Obediently, Florence translated. Robbins could not know what the Lubyanka Prison was, and she had no opportunity to tell him now, exactly. Florence sensed Kachak’s message was intended for her as much as for Robbins.

“You ought to know, however, that if you expect kinder treatment at their hands than you’ve had here, you’re quite mistaken. This is a children’s park compared to the handling you’ll receive there.”

Again, she translated. It produced no response in Robbins.

“You’d be wrong to think it gratifies me to hand you over into less merciful hands. You could say I’ve even come to admire your…tenacity. It will not serve you, of course. In keeping you here I have tried to spare you the worst that you are bound to encounter. I’ve never been partial to the tortures and sadistic habits the Mongols introduced into the Russian temperament.” He paused, giving Florence an opportunity to convey all this. She fully expected Kachak to go on and describe which Mongol tortures Robbins could look forward to, but he didn’t, trusting Robbins to imagine them.

“If you persist in being silent on the matter of the F-86, that is your business. You are no longer my responsibility. If, however, you decide to come to a realistic understanding of your situation and give me what I am after”—he now turned to Florence as though what he had to offer up next had to be mediated across a bridge firmer than mere language—“then I will personally advocate for him. He will get an apartment. Medical care. If this information proves to be worthwhile, arrangements can be made. A new identity. He can even teach at our Air Force Academy—air battle techniques, tactics—the MVD could open those doors.”

His tone was gamely and (she thought this later) alarmingly accommodating, as though Kachak could not quite believe he was saying these things himself. Florence interpreted to the best of her ability.

Then Robbins spoke: “All right, then why not ship me on to Moscow tonight?”

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.”

“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.

—

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.

She shook her head furiously.

’Cause it’s the end of the line for Henry Robbins here.

But hadn’t he been talking about the American skin he was shedding and leaving in Perm before he became a different man in the capital? Oh, how stupid she was. He had alerted her, made his plan perfectly clear.

“He didn’t tell me anything.”

“Better not have,” said Konstantin. “The commandant is fired up like fifty pitchforks, questioning everybody.”

She understood that Konstantin was telling her this to warn her.

But the questioning didn’t come. By some grace, she was once more spared.

For weeks thereafter Florence worried that the incident would cost Kachak his escape from Perm to Moscow, and the reprieve he’d promised her. But whatever promotion he had exacted from the big wheels inside the MGB was honored. He kept his pledge to her. She stayed on the books as an orderly in the clinic. Until one day in March of the following year she heard, on the radio loudspeaker mounted in the main patient ward, a sound her ears had forgotten. Classical music! Not the celebratory marching kind, but a solemn and pristine movement, like the voice of angels. Was it Beethoven? Handel? The music was followed by a medical announcement, a complete report on Stalin’s vital signs, including an analysis of his urine. His urine! Like the music, the voices proclaimed grief but rang with ecstasy—speaking of a God who pissed and shat like all the rest of dirty humanity. And she knew it would not be long now.