Iris gives her the bag with the soiled diapers. Because what does she have to lose? If something happens to them, the bag will be thrown away. Nobody will look inside a baby’s soiled diaper. And maybe the bag will survive even if she does not. Maybe someone will come looking for her, and find this bag, forgotten in the mud. You never know.
The guards shout some more.
“What are they saying?” Ruth asks.
“They want us to follow them.”
Ruth puts her arm around Iris’s waist and walks with her at the end of the line. They’re walking on hard sand, by the feel of it. Iris can almost hear the rushing of the sea in her ears, unless it’s her imagination again. The voices bark in Russian to hurry along. They travel some hundred yards or so, then a guard orders them to stop and line up. They stop and line up. Iris turns to face the guards. There are two of them, holding their rifles, and a woman who stands a few feet away. The KGB woman. She stares at them coldly, one by one, ending with the girl.
“Where’s Fox?” Ruth shouts at her. “Where’s Digby?”
“This is not your concern,” the woman says, in perfect English. “After a thorough investigation, you have been found to have committed treason against the Soviet people. The penalty for this crime is death—”
“I hate you!” the girl screams.
The woman turns her head and stares at the girl. Not long, a few seconds only, during which not a murmur interrupts the cool, dark silence of twilight.
The woman makes a signal to the guards, who shoulder their rifles and aim them at the line of prisoners, women and children, newborn baby in the arms of his big brother.
Nobody moves. Nobody makes a sound, not even Claire. The shock is too great, the knowledge of instant death paralyzes them all. Iris feels the universe shrink and expand around her. Her flesh anticipates the thud of bullets and the spray of blood. She sees—no, not her life passing before her, but everything all at once—Sasha and Philip, the children, Ruth, Harry, her parents, all gathered into a single soul, like a star. She croaks out a soundless NO.
The woman opens her mouth and says, “—or exile.”
From the beach behind them comes another sound—a voice.
Ruth turns first, then the children, then Iris. A pair of men brace themselves in the sand, about a hundred yards away, illuminated by a sliver of moon. Behind them, a large rowboat rests on the ebbing tide.
“Go,” the woman says, in English.
Ruth
July 1952
Baltic Sea
The sun is just beginning to rise when we reach the fishing trawler.
Trawlers are the most unlovely things afloat, in my opinion—dirty white and clumsy as a gravid rhinoceros. But this one is perhaps the most beautiful craft I have seen in my life, all bathed in the fine pink otherworldly glow of a breaking dawn.
Everyone in the rowboat is stupefied, except the girl Marina. She sits in the stern and silently weeps. I only know this because I turned around once, during the journey across the fidgety, chopping waves, and saw the trails of tears along her cheeks. At one point, Kip tried to climb back and console her, but she shook her head and he stopped in his tracks. Sat back down and faced forward. I guess they understand each other, those two—like me and Fox.
The trawler is well out to sea, and it requires almost three hours of hard pulling on the part of those two sailors before we meet. All this time I’ve been pushing back any thought of Fox—or of Digby, for that matter—but especially Fox. It helps that my hands are full, keeping Claire from climbing over the side of the rowboat, trading off Gregory with Kip, checking anxiously on Iris, who curls at my feet, propped against the curving side of the boat, burning hot and restless, while Fox’s image clamors painfully at the back of my head. Three such hours can make anything look beautiful.
As we approach, one of the sailors hails the trawler. I don’t think it’s necessary. A rope ladder already hangs down the side, and a man stands there as though he’s prepared to dive in at the slightest signal. For an instant I imagine it’s Sumner Fox, by some extraordinary miracle on a night of miracles. I can almost see his big shoulders—his rough face soaked in sunrise. But as we draw nearer, my imagination dies away. These shoulders are no more than sturdy; the face is not as broad or as coarse; one side is marked with terrible scars, where he hasn’t got much of an ear left. He leans forward to catch the rope tossed up by the sailor, and his hair catches the light—pink and gold as the dawn itself.
One by one, the children go up the ladder and into the man’s arms. The boys seem to recognize him—Jack makes a squeal. Marina climbs carefully and doesn’t say a word of thanks. Then Claire goes up. He catches her tenderly and says something to her that makes her laugh. Her feet hit the deck and she scampers out of sight.