The attendant laid a hairy wrist across her stack of towels and looked up at Valya with a lifetime's accumulated hatred.
"Fifty kopecks," she said.
Surrendering, Valya stripped off her watch. The marvelous Japanese watch that Naritsky had given her on his return from one of his business trips. For being good, he had said. Naritsky the pig.
She tossed the watch at the woman's swollen waist. It caught, then slipped as the woman grabbed for it, settling in the well of skirt between her legs.
Valya took her towel.
She washed hurriedly. She tried to rinse out her mouth, to fix her hair as best she could. In the mirror, she appeared very pale. But not so very bad, she told herself. She simply felt acid and empty. With the sickness hardly ten minutes behind her, she could already feel her hunger returning. She told herself she would sit down calmly, smile, and pretend nothing had happened. Even if the American had been put off, she would at least finish her meal. She would have that, if nothing else.
She breathed deeply one last time. By the door, the attendant was struggling to close the watchband over her thick wrist. Valya launched herself back toward the dining room.
To her immense relief, the American was still sitting at the table, and he brightened unmistakably when he caught sight of her. She straightened her back and slowed her step, feeling a surge of confidence that everything just might be all right after all.
Then she noticed that the food was gone. The table had been cleared, and all that remained was the wine. And the half-empty packet of cigarettes she had ravaged in her nervousness.
The lovely, heartbreakingly lovely food was gone. Valya continued her march toward the table, struggling to smile, to assure her American that everything was all right. He stood up clumsily and hastened to draw back her chair for her, and she sat down like a mechanical doll. She stared in disbelief at the white desert of the tabletop. The beautiful food was gone. Her belly felt emptier than it had ever felt in her life.
She began to cry. Helplessly. She did not even have the strength left to be angry with herself. She simply sat and wept quietly into her hands, overcome by her weakness and certain that her life would never be fine again.
"Valya," the American said in his flat, flinty voice, "what's the matter? Can I do anything for you?"
Take me away. Please. Take me away to your America and I'll do anything for you. Anything. Anything you want.
"No," Valya told him, mastering her sobs. "No, please. It has no meaning."
His jaw no longer worked properly and it was hard to push out the words through his swollen lips. He stared up at his tormentor through the pounded meat around his eyes. The light was poor to begin with, and the beating he had taken made it almost impossible to focus in on the KGB major who paced in and out of the shadows, circling the chair where Babryshkin sat with his hands bound tightly behind him. The man was a huge thing, a monster in uniform, a devil.
"Never," Babryshkin repeated, struggling to enunciate, determined not to yield his last dignity. "I… never had such contacts."
The great shadow swooped in on him again. A big fist rushed out of the darkness and slammed into the side of his head.
The chair almost tumbled over. Dizzy, Babryshkin struggled to retain an upright position. He could not understand any of this. It was madness.
"When," the KGB major shouted, "did you first make contact with the faction of traitors? We're not trying to establish your guilt. We know you're guilty. We just want to know the timing." He slapped the back of Babryshkin's head in passing. This time, it wasn't a real blow. Just a bit of punctuation for the words. "How long have you been collaborating with them?"
Damn you, Babryshkin thought, hating. Damn you.
"Comrade major," he began firmly.
An open hand slapped his burst lips.
"I'm not your comrade, traitor."
"I am not a traitor. I fought for over a thousand kilometers…"
Babryshkin waited for the blow, tensing. But this time it failed to arrive. It was so unpredictable. It was amazing how they established control over you.
"You mean you retreated for a thousand kilometers."
"We were ordered to retreat."
The KGB officer snorted. "Yes. And when those orders finally came, you personally chose to disobey them. Shamelessly. When your tanks were needed to reestablish the defense, you purposely delayed their withdrawal. In collaboration with the enemy. The evidence is conclusive. And you've already admitted disobeying the order yourself."
"What could I do?" Babryshkin cried, unable to control himself. He could hear that his words, so clear in his mind, slurred almost unintelligibly as they left his mouth. He tasted fresh blood from his lips, and shreds of meat brushed against his remaining teeth as he spoke. "We couldn't just leave them all. Our own people. They were being massacred. I couldn't leave them."
The major slowed his pacing. The desk lay between him and Babryshkin now, and the major walked with folded arms. Babryshkin was grateful for even this brief, perhaps unintended, pause in the beating.
"There are times," the major said firmly, when it is important to consider the greater good. Your superiors recognized that. But you willfully chose to disobey, thereby endangering our defense. What to disobey? And, in any case, you can't hide behind the people. You feel nothing for the People. You purposely delayed, looking for the opportunity to surrender your force to the enemy."
"That's a lie."
The major paused in his journey around the cement-walled office. "The truth," he said, "doesn't have to be shouted. Liars shout."
"It's a lie," Babryshkin repeated, a new tone of resignation in his voice. He shook his head, and it felt as though he were turning a great, miserable weight on his shoulders. "It's a lie. We fought. We kept on fighting. We never stopped fighting."
"You fought just enough to make a good pretense. Then you willfully exposed your subordinates to a chemical at-tack in a preplanned strike zone where you had gathered as many innocent civilians as possible.
Babryshkin closed his eyes. "That's madness," he said, almost whispering, unable to believe how this man in clean uniform, who obviously had been nowhere near the direct-fire war could so twist the truth.
"The only madness," the KGB officer said, "is to lie to the People."
Shots sounded from outside. The shots came intermittently, and they were always exclusively from Soviet weapons. Babryshkin realized what was happening. But he could not believe, even now that it might happen to him.
"So," the KGB major said after a deep breath. I want you to tell me when you first established clandestine contacts with the cadre of traitors in your garrison…"
Babryshkin's mind searched through the scenes of the past weeks. A newsreel, eccentrically edited, played at a desperate speed. The first night the indigenous garrison stationed side by side with his own had almost overrun the barracks and motor parks of Babryshkin's unit. Men fought in the dark with pocket knives and their fists against rifles. All of the uniforms were the same in the dark. The fires spread. Then came the armored drive into the heart of the city to try to rescue the local headquarters staff, only to find them butchered. The repeated attempts to organize a defense were always too late. The enemy was forever on your flank or behind you. He remembered the terrible enemy gunships, and the wounded lost in the swirling confusion, the murdered civilians whose numbers would never be figured exactly now. He recalled the sudden death of the last refugees, and the bone-thin woman with her louse-ridden offspring in his tank. Valor, incompetence, and death. Fear and bad decisions. Desperation. It was all there. Everything except treason.