Magnitogorsk
February 1934
After dunking Aurora a few times, Shpak began to refine his technique. His hand rested lazily on the winch’s crank. He had noticed that he could raise her up just to the point where her eyes came out of the water, but her nose and mouth were still submerged. She could then blink the water out of her eyes and focus on that hand, willing it to move just a few inches forward and lift her nostrils into the air. In the meantime she could thrash against the restraints and try to jerk her head upward just enough to draw in a scrap of air. But the woman who had lashed her to the bed frame had done her job too well. Struggling against the restraints only deepened her oxygen debt. She must force herself to be still—nearly impossible at the beginning of a session when she had strength in her, almost inevitable later, when her lungs were half full of water and the world was narrowing and shading gray.
Judging just how long he could make her wait before she suffered irreversible damage had become a kind of scientific inquiry for him. Her brow tended to knit up when she inhaled water, and that was a signal he had learned to recognize. Sometimes then he’d give the handle a shove, yanking her entire head out of the water, and let her puke and breathe. This in turn led to further refinements as he got the timing down. The first thing she did, of course, after expelling water from her lungs, was to suck in the deepest breath she could, and if he dropped her back down in the middle of that it added pain to panic.
All of this curious experimentation meant that the rest of her was spending a lot of time fully immersed. So every few minutes he had to hoist her out and let her dangle in the air, fully exposed, soaking up the warmth from the red-hot stove, lest she perish from hypothermia. Or maybe he didn’t care if she died but just wanted her fully conscious for the next round of dunkings.
Anyway, “technical procedures” were probably more effective when they included a carrot—the exquisite warmth of the stove—as well as a stick.
As well as a third element: the bullet to the head, or the threat of it. This was the pocketknife. One gesture with it and the rope would snap, she would drop, the weight of the bed frame would drag her down into the river’s current, and she would be swept away beneath the ice. Fish would eat the flesh from her bones and no trace of her would ever be seen.
For the first few minutes after being pulled out she existed in a hazy dreamworld. Then riotous shivering consumed her whole being as her body temperature passed up out of the near-fatal range. During that time it was impossible to think. But as this subsided she had a few minutes of something like sleep as the warmth of the stove suffused her and her body relaxed. During these breathers Shpak would smoke his pipe and do paperwork. He had spread documents all over his lap and the tables flanking his chair. Whenever she regained awareness, Shpak was there, smoking his pipe and sifting through his notes, reading glasses down on the tip of his nose.
“For all you have told me, I feel we are only getting started!” he exclaimed. “It is a shame that my comrades from Moscow are so insistent on an answer today. ‘Shpak, we need to know,’ they say, ‘is she safe to use?’” He gave the crank a spin and lifted her a few inches higher. “‘Or did you liquidate her?’” He picked up the knife and slid its edge against the taut rope, watching curiously as a few threads popped loose. “Either answer is perfectly acceptable—further delay is not.”
“I would not have come back to the Soviet Union of my own free will unless I were a sincere revolutionary.”
“Or a spy, of course.”
“God. It’s like talking to my father.” He did actually look so fatherly, sitting there with his pipe and his pen.
This remark had at least brought a trace of amusement to Shpak’s face. “How so?”
“I told you. He sent me to Fort Myer to gather intelligence. And when I came back with intelligence, he accused me of being Patton’s dupe. A vector of misinformation.”
Shpak paged back through his notes, shuffled documents. “You find Patton abhorrent. And yet you agree with his appraisal of your character.”
“A better way of putting it is that I agree with his appraisal of the United States. That there is no place for me there. But here it’s a different matter.”
“Oh, I like that better.” He clenched his pipestem in his teeth so that he could strike out a line in a document, scribble a note. “You see? The advantages of privacy. I can change the wording. No one will know but us.”
Something told her not to say yes to this. It was so difficult to remain alert. So easy to mistake this for an actual conversation. “That sounds like a trap,” she said.
“How so?”
“If I agree, it’s proof that I am practicing deception. Slash, splash. Please put it all in.”
The beginning of this conversation with Shpak seemed like years ago. A few significant details were floating just below the surface of her memory. Trying to recover them was like bobbing for apples. No, that was the wrong analogy—too much the wholesome American pastime. It was like bobbing for chunks of ice in the Ural River. Or just trying to catch fish with your teeth.
He’d mentioned that important men were in town for a few days. The ones who were pressing him for answers.
Magnitogorsk was too primitive and too new to have real newspapers. But in each place where people gathered there was a Red Corner where something like a newspaper was tacked up to a wall. If you were literate you could stand there and read it. If you weren’t you could ask someone to read it for you, or just look at the crudely retouched photographs of Stalin and steel mills. In the last days before Aurora had been made prisoner, all the news had been about the 17th Party Congress in Moscow. Sergo Ordzhonikidze was there, naturally, as head of the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. His friend and fellow Georgian Vissarion Lominadze, who basically ran Magnitogorsk, had traveled there to take part. Aurora had lost count of the days, but perhaps the congress was over now? Perhaps some of those men had come down to Magnitogorsk to make inspections? Was one of them the strange man who had peered at her through the crack of the door?
She was brought back to the here and now by the squeal of the pulley above her. Rope was moving through it. She opened her eyes to see Shpak’s hand on the crank. “No,” she said. She was too exhausted to beg or scream, and so it came out in a conversational tone. “You don’t have to do this. I’m telling you everything.”
“How did you know?” Shpak asked. “Who told you that we were so interested in balloons?”