The War in 2020

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.

He had finally brought his shrunken unit into the hastily established Soviet lines south of Petropavlovsk, pulling in under the last daylight, radioing frantically so his battered vehicles would not be targeted by mistake. And then they were behind friendly lines, marching to the rear to rearm, perhaps to be reorganized, still willing to turn back and fight when needed. But the column had been halted at a KGB control point several kilometers to the rear of the network of defensive positions. Who was the commander? Where was the political officer? Where was the staff? Before Babryshkin could make any sense out of the situation, he and his officers had been gathered together and disarmed, while his vehicles continued to the rear under the supervision of KGB officers who did not even know how to give the correct commands.

No sooner had the vehicles departed with great plumes of dust than the assembled officers were bound, blindfolded, and gagged. Several officers, including Babryshkin, protested angrily, until a KGB lieutenant colonel drew his pistol and shot one recalcitrant captain through the head. The action so shocked the men, who had believed that they had finally reached some brief, relative safety, that they behaved like sheep for the rest of the journey to the interrogation center. Made to jump off the backs of trucks still blindfolded and with their wrists bound together, officers who had survived twelve or fifteen hundred kilometers of combat broke arms and legs. Their blindfolds were finally removed to achieve a calculated effect: they were marched into the courtyard of a rural school complex and the first sight that met them was a disordered mound of corpses — all Soviet officers — that had grown up against a wall. Those who had broken limbs in exiting the trucks were forced to drag themselves, unaided, past the spectacle.

Everyone understood its implication.

Babryshkin had heard that one of the rules of interrogation was to keep everyone separated. But there were not enough rooms in the building. They were herded en masse into a stinking classroom, already crowded with earlier arrivals. The windows had been hastily boarded shut, and no provision, not even a bucket, had been made