The NKVD man flinched, shocked. He quickly regained his composure, circled back around the table, and sat down. “You see, then? That was not so difficult. The truth is much easier.”
“Absolutely, Comrade.”
The NKVD man picked up a pen and twisted off its cap. “You say you joined the Young Pioneers to be with him. Why? Did someone force you? A foreigner?”
“I was in love with him.”
Again, for the briefest moment, Karen saw shock wash across the face of the NKVD man. Karen realized with some satisfaction that this interrogation was not going as he had planned. Perhaps the old saying was right; perhaps the truth really would set you free. But this time it was not Karen’s truth. It was Inna’s.
“You joined when you were eight.”
“Sasha was nine.”
“And you claim to have already fallen in love with him?”
“Desperately.”
“You were not yet mature enough for romance.”
“You do not need to be mature to love someone.”
“And am I to believe the two of you… an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old… were, what, sweethearts?”
“No, comrade. Sasha Portnov barely knew I existed.”
Inna had told Karen the story at least half a dozen times. It was a quaint story, and cute, one that Karen loved. Inna, as a little girl, had taken off her gloves to admire a necklace. It was a cheap piece of jewelry, with a tiny beaded doll serving as its pendant, but to young Inna it was magical. She had wanted to feel it, to run her fingers over the beads, so she had removed her gloves. She so coveted the pretty jewelry that she completely lost track of the world around her. She was distracted, and someone used that distraction to steal her gloves.
Inna knew that when she got home her father would ask about the gloves, and Inna would be punished for letting someone steal them. So Inna didn’t go home. Instead she just sat on the stoop and cried until a boy came and asked her what was wrong. That boy was Sasha. He said he was in the Young Pioneers, and that part of his code was to help someone once a day. He gave Inna his gloves.
As Karen told the story to the NKVD man, she remembered Inna telling the story to her. It had been such a small thing, a common thing, a moment motivated by a child afraid of a spanking. But the good deed and the handsome boy had turned it into something special for Inna. Without realizing it, Sasha had also turned it into an act of romance, because from that point forward Inna was obsessed with him. Her love for Sasha went unrequited for eight long years. Inna couldn’t help but smile when she told the story to Karen and now, when Karen retold it, she couldn’t help but cry.
The NKVD man looked puzzled. “Why are you crying?”
What could Karen say? That she missed Inna and Sasha? She couldn’t tell the NKVD man that. Or could she? The truth will set you free.
“Because he is gone,” she said.
The NKVD man put down his pen, sat back in his chair, and stared at her. “Gone where?”
“I don’t know. But I think he’s dead.” Karen sobbed then. She couldn’t help herself. They were real, these tears. Until now she had never had a chance to mourn for Inna, to grieve. It had been such a senseless death, but also a beautiful one—beautiful in its selflessness. So she grieved now, and her sorrow came out in convulsive sobs that shook her body and turned her empty stomach.
The NKVD man stared at her in silence. Then he stood up again and circled the table. He was going to hurt her again. Karen knew she had to get hold of her emotions, stop crying, say something to prevent the NKVD man from torturing her. But she couldn’t. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop crying.
The man stood above her and reached into his pocket. He was going to cut her, Karen realized, or stab her or worse. She’d read that in stories: torturers forcing blades under their victims’ fingernails.
But the NKVD man didn’t draw a knife from his pocket. He took out a handkerchief. He handed it to Karen, who didn’t hesitate to use it to wipe her runny nose and blot the streaming tears from under her eyes. The cloth was oddly comforting, as was the closeness of the strange man. He leaned against the table next to her, stoically watching her as she regained her composure. She drew one last sniffle before handing back the handkerchief. “Thank you. I think I ruined it.”
The NKVD man tossed the dirty linen on the table but ignored the comment. “Do you know what happened to him?” he asked.
Karen did know what happened to him. But she’d already told a lie to Inna’s sister, claiming that Sasha had stayed behind to collect wood. She couldn’t be sure the NKVD hadn’t already spoken to Inna’s sister, so she didn’t dare contradict herself. “No,” she lied.
“I spanked him.”
Now Karen was confused. What was going on? What was this interrogation all about? Why was this strange man talking about spanking? Spanking whom?
“He never told me he’d given his gloves away,” the NKVD man continued. “He said he’d lost them. So I spanked him.”
If Karen had any tears left, she would have cried again. She’d misjudged everything and everyone. This wasn’t about the black market; it wasn’t about profiteering. It was about Sasha, a boy she’d resented for wasting eight years of her best friend’s life. A young man she’d thought she had to trick into becoming Inna’s boyfriend. A hothead who’d gotten himself and his girlfriend killed for no reason.
But now Karen realized that none of those things had been true. The nine-year-old Sasha hadn’t given away his gloves because it was his duty as a Young Pioneer. He did it to impress a pretty little girl. Those eight years of love hadn’t been unrequited, after all. Inna had never needed Karen’s makeover. Sasha had always been attracted to Inna but had been as afraid to approach Inna as she had been afraid to approach him. It meant that Sasha hadn’t attacked that German out of blind, stupid patriotism. That, too, had been a misguided attempt to protect the girl he loved.
And the man sitting across from her? He was not just some impersonal State security officer.
“You’re Sasha’s father,” Karen said.
The NKVD man nodded, and Karen’s heart went out to him.
“Is he dead?” the man asked. He had to know the truth already, but he dreaded its confirmation.
“I hope not,” Karen reassured him. And then she told the story, about how she and Sasha had gone hunting for potatoes, about how they called themselves the First Potato Army, about how they’d almost been caught by a German sentry. This, however, was when Karen began to bend the truth. In her new version of the story, Sasha had been successful in the attack. He’d killed the German, and they’d escaped together back to Leningrad’s trenches. But there Sasha decided to stay behind. He told her he wanted to gather some wood. He gave Inna his potatoes and instructed her to go on ahead without him.
Karen could tell that the NKVD man was proud of his son, of his courage and of his patriotism. But he seemed to be ashamed of letting his son take such big risks, of failing to protect him. “There is nothing you could have done,” Karen reassured him. “Sasha purposefully kept it all secret because he was afraid you wouldn’t let him go.”
The NKVD man nodded, stoically. “Can you show me where? Show me where you left him, where he stopped to gather wood?”
“Of course,” Karen lied.
