Ralph Peters (39 page)

When did you first think of betraying the Soviet Union? Who were your earliest coconspirators? What did you hope to accomplish? Did you act out of ideology or for material gain? How long have you been plotting? With how many foreigners did you have contact? What are your current orders?

There was never any attempt to establish guilt or innocence. Guilt was assumed. Babryshkin had heard stories about such things happening back in the old days, in the darkest years of the twentieth century. But he had never expected to encounter such a thing in his own lifetime.

He sought to tell his tale honestly, in an unadorned, believable manner. He tried to clarify the simple logic of his actions, to explain to this starched creature from the rear area what combat was like, how it forced men to act. But his words only met with more blows. Sometimes the KGB major would hear him out before attacking him. At other times he would squeeze his swollen, ring-speckled fingers into a fist and bring it down hard at the first words out of Babryshkin's mouth.

Babryshkin tried to maintain his focus. He set himself the goal of ensuring that no blame passed to any of his subordinates, of establishing that each action had been the result of his personal decision. But it became harder and harder to form the words. And the intermittent shooting
outside tripped his thoughts. As the questions were repeated to him again and again, he found it ever more difficult to focus. And the interrogator exaggerated the smallest grammatical inconsistencies in his story.

When the beating was at its worst, he tried to close his mind to it, to think only of the thing he loved the most in the world. He had long thought that it was his military service, but he knew now, with utter mental clarity, that it was Valya. Not even his mother, who had died in the plague years, had meant so much to him. Dying was terribly frightening. And
yet.
. . he knew it was really nothing. There had been so much death. But it seemed needlessly cruel, unbearable, that he would die without ever seeing his wife again.

He was grateful that the questions posed to him were all of a military nature. The KGB major never once asked about his family or about his nonmilitary friends. Babryshkin guessed that those questions were for more leisurely peacetime interrogations. Now there was only the war. And he was glad. It would be all right to die. He would have preferred to die in combat, being of some use. But the manner of dying had come to seem increasingly a matter of accident. Perhaps, really, one death was as good as another. As long as Valya wasn't dragged into it, as long as nothing hurt her. He even knew—and remembered without malice—that she had been unfaithful to him once. Perhaps she was being unfaithful to him now. But it did not matter. She was such a special girl. And because he believed that she had been unfaithful that time out of spite, only to hurt him, it had not hurt so much. It was not as if she had really loved another. And he knew he had broken many promises, that he had failed her again and again. It was a country, an age, of broken promises. And he suspected that Valya was far, far more helpless than she realized.

He made a deal with God. Not with the brief, small god whose fist hammered him over and over again, but with the other God who might be out there after all, who
should
be out there. He would die willingly, so long as Valya was not harmed. So long as he became only another corpse and the affair ended at that. He thought of Valya: the smell of sex and lilacs, a woman always ready with a little lie, imagining herself to be so strong, and he filled with pity for her. He could not leave her much else. If only he could leave her safe from all of this.

He could not keep his thoughts under control any longer. Under the torrent of blows, Valya became the refugee woman, gaunt with beginning death. Everyone was dying. It was a dying world. Chaos. A woman shrieked across the death-covered steppes. All who were not dead were dying. To the music of a scream.

Babryshkin came to again. He raised his head, feeling as though his skull had grown huge and he were a small creature within it. Only one eye would open now. But he noticed that other men had joined his interrogator in the room.

Uniforms. Weapons. His soldiers.
They had come to rescue him. He would see Valya again after all. And they would walk across the river and up into the Lenin Hills, through the university gardens. And gray, sad Moscow would look beautiful in the sunlight.
Valya.
She was very close to him now.

He saw his interrogator bend over the desk, then right himself and hand a piece of paper to one of the soldiers.

"
Enemy of the People,
"
the officer said.
"
To be shot.
"

Ryder lay guarding one of the woman's small breasts with his right hand. His head reached high up on the pillow so that the tumult of her hair would not tease his nose and mouth. He did not bother to close his eyes. This darkness was not meant for sleeping, and he held the stranger firmly, bedeviled by the warmth and the buttery smell of her, by the musk they had spilled on the bedding, by her remarkable fragility. She filled his palm, then fell away with the rhythm of her breathing. He tried to concentrate, to burn the reality of her flesh into his mind so that he might keep her with him after she had gone. Yet, his mind strayed. He could not begin to tell why the presence of this foreign woman in his bed should conjure up so many memories.

Consciously considered, the immediacy of their two bodies seemed to be everything of importance. But he lay in the mild damp of their bed remembering prairies and the sparse, anxious pleasures of being young in a small town long bypassed by the interstate. Laughing girls gathered in a convenience store parking lot, and the bitter combat of high school sports, briefly glorifying towns that had lost their way in every other sphere of endeavor. Clumsy, greedy lasses, starving kisses that ground on until suddenly, unreasonably, a nervous girl risked love. The acquired words would never do. No place on earth was lonelier or vaster than Nebraska on an October night.

Sometimes the girls pretended they did not know what you were doing, while others knew it all startlingly well. And the only things that ever changed were the new television shows or the shape of a new model car, and they didn't really change at all. Ryder could not understand why a Russian woman in a dowdy hotel room, so far from his home, should have the power to alert his nostrils to the dust of gone Saturday nights, or to fill his open eyes with the common failures of his kind.

He remembered a girl who told him in a voice all bravery and truth that she would, that she could love only him forever. She, too, lay beside him now, hardly an arm's length away, as he recalled the whiteness of her legs in a car parked late, far from town, far from the world. Only a moment before, he had clumsily worked himself into her body as she clutched and cried, afraid to help him, afraid not to let him, because she loved him and only him and only ever him, and her naked legs were so white under the luminous cloud-light, and her eyes were wet and dark, staring away, as she rested her head on the flat of the car seat. Children, he thought, smiling at the temperate agony of such a loss, only children. And he remembered that prairie voice:
"
Only you . . . only you...
"
He recalled dark hair and the cold wind off the plains. The wind tried to batter its way inside the car, to punish them. He recalled her sharp recoil as her child's hand accidentally touched him. He remembered her perfectly, acutely. Her good-family bravery and quiet. Then her worry over telltale marks on her dress, or in her eyes. But he could not recall her name.

The slender, different woman with him now moaned one foreign word in her sleep and stirred slightly. Calling him back to the vividness of their much more recent and far less innocent collision. No, he thought, that's too hard a judgment. Her very attempts at sophistication made her seem laughably innocent. In his room, in the wake of the first kisses, the coming to terms without words, she had done a pathetically inept striptease, making faces from a badly done film, closing her eyes in a cartoon of abandon, all the while taking obvious care not to damage any article of her clothing. In the poor light, she seemed more desperate than brazen, thin and cold in her briefs. He had taken her into his arms as much to end the embarrassment as to express his desire.

But, held against him, she came to life. In the physical acts that rampaged before sex itself, she was shameless, almost fierce. Where he might have gone slowly, gently, she hurried, despising his easiness. She seemed anxious to get through her repertoire of acquired knacks, almost masculine in her unspoken conviction that nothing short of sexual finality really mattered. Making love, she had little sense of him, as though he were a device for her to use. She bit hard and dug her strong, thin fingers into the small of his back until it hurt him so badly he had to knock her hands away. She moved herself quickly, unwilling to listen to his rhythms. It was not a challenge, as it might have been with an American girl. Rather, it seemed like a colossal hunger, driven by the fear that she might receive too little. She was a hard, bad lover. There was no luxury in pressing against her. Just the hardness of bone bruising on bone, the brief, deceptive glory and collapse. Warm, spent breathing, a shifting of hips that made them separate again. Then the feel of holding her back and rump against him, a woman so undernourished her body might have been a child's.

A sudden eruption of noise down the hall startled him. An American voice cursed harshly, and a sharp woman's voice stabbed back in a foreign language. Gently, Ryder smoothed his hand away from the woman's breast and laid it over her ear.

She was a hard, bad lover. And, sobered, he sensed that she wanted things from him that had nothing to do with his individuality. But it did not matter. In this wilderness of sheets, he was her protector. Charged to shield her from all pain.

The cursing faded off down the hall, and Ryder pitied those who had to fight in such a way. He felt peaceful, and even the bizarre scenes from the computer interrogation center had softened. He did not think of the war. The war would return soon enough. For these few hours, he simply wanted to hold this stranger and let these scraps of companionship cover him.

The woman rustled against him, realigning her bottom. His body responded and he trailed his hand down over her hair to the hard collarbones, pausing briefly at the humble softness of her breasts, then crossing the prairie of her stomach until his fingers caught at damp tangles. He slid a finger into the wetness left over from their earlier lovemaking, and the woman began to turn toward him, locking his hand in place with the swell of her thighs. In the pale darkness, he could see that her eyes were wide open. She reached her mouth up for a kiss, stale from cigarettes and sleep. She laughed slightly, and he did not know why. Then she reached for him as she freed his captive hand.

Valya had long lain awake, pretending to be asleep, trying to take the measure of this latest man to whom she had given herself. She was anxious for him to make love to her again, not at all for the act itself, but for the reassurance that she really did attract him, that there was, after all, a chance that she might have her way.

She was certain that he did not understand her. He seemed so sure of himself, taking everything for granted. He smiled too much, and everything about him seemed too young, despite their like ages. Making love, he began with a gentleness she found disconcerting. She had come to expect far brusquer treatment from her lovers. Trying to move him, she soon got lost in the act itself, and let him follow as he chose. But she worried when she could not make him finish. He seemed to want to linger over the act, making it last as long as possible, instead of simply letting go. It was a very different business, and she was not certain she would be able to get used to it. There
seemed to be so little real feeling, so little passion or abandon to the American.

The worst part, however, was not his physical indifference to her efforts. Far more annoying was the sense that she had not reached him on a personal level. She scolded herself bitterly: What can you expect when you jump into bed with a foreigner like some tramp? She felt her anger growing against this man who seemed so annoyingly content to hold her in his arms. She doubted that he had ever felt any kind of physical deprivation. And whom was she trying to fool? American women were all whores, and he could have any he wanted. In fine clothes. Rich women. Perhaps, she thought savagely, she should count herself lucky that he had deigned to take her into his bed. She doubted that he had ever known real loneliness, the kind that was bigger than any single cause that could be put into words, the kind that made you into such a fool. The Americans were spoiled and insensitive, she decided. Every last one of them.

Suddenly, a vicious-sounding man's voice began to shout in another room. Or perhaps it was in the hallway, she could not tell for certain. But the sound frightened her. Then a woman's voice replied in Russian. Demanding money. Dollars. The unmistakable evidence of the company into which she had fallen chilled Valya.

Inexplicably, the American laid his hand over her ear. Why wouldn't he want her to hear what was going on? Perhaps, she thought, because the bastard didn't want her to demand money from him.

She wanted to curl up like a child. Alone. She did not know whether she was truly ashamed or merely disappointed by the situation in which she found herself. But she knew she was unhappy.

She nudged herself at the American, impatient for him either to make love to her or to go to sleep. If he went to sleep, she could eat the cookies he had left in an opened pack on the night table. If nothing else, she told herself, she should at least have a belly full of cookies for her night's work.

The American began to graze his hand down over the front of her body. He moved so that she could feel exactly
what he wanted. Then she felt him working a finger inside of her.

All right then, she thought.

She turned to face the American, to open herself to him. She touched him, feeling the leftover slickness. At least he found her desirable. Worth a second time. She had been afraid that he thought she was too thin, that he had already lost interest in her.

Perhaps there was hope. Perhaps something good would finally happen. Perhaps . . .

Unprovoked, she suddenly thought of Yuri. Her husband. And she laughed at her utter inability to ever really enjoy anything without spoiling it for herself. The American pushed a second finger into her, and she canted a leg to accept him. She groaned, keying up to him now.

Well, she hoped Yuri was all right, anyway. With his beloved soldiers. They could keep him. She did not want to see him hurt. She simply did not want to see him at all.

She tasted the American, feeling the roughness of his beard stubble, letting her body react on its own. But she could not get her husband out of her mind. She began to grow angry, furious, flailing her hips against the American.
Why
did it all have to be such a mess?

You don't understand,
she cried out in her native language, unsure now whether she was addressing the husband who had deserted her or this stranger who was taking her body away.
You don't understand, you just don't understand.
. . .