Criminals by Valerie Trueblood

unpronounceable border. And then she wouldn’t have him, of course. Her family stepped in. The father an officer. That was what was said.
    Strangely enough, though for days Holly was away from her desk all day being interrogated somewhere in the building, along with her father who had been called in from his base, in our corridor everyone shielded her. We pretended that it was all a matter of wild rumors having their origin in some other corridor. People from—where he was from. They’re paranoid. They’ll bolt. The secretaries even included Holly in the talk, bringing her coffee and aspirin, soothing and pampering her.
    â€œI got a letter.” She drew me into the auditorium and pulled the doors shut. She felt for the switch of the blue light, so that I could read it. There was Orlenko’s crested, beautiful script. “He’s gone, he’s hiding. No address. Even if I could write him a letter I couldn’t make him see it’s nothing .” She was biting her broken thumbnail. “Where can he go? He doesn’t even have his family with him. He thinks he’s running for his life, he doesn’t know what country this is.”
    And what country is this? I could have said, but neither of us would have known.
    â€œTerrible things happened to him in the war, you know. Terrible things.” Her violet eyes went black. “But he never gave in. He drew pictures. His hero was a poet, a famous poet from there—oh, I’ll get you the name—who drew pictures with a lump of coal when he was starving.” That war was only twenty years in the past, but they were our years—we were eighteen and twenty-one—and we were both gazing into a history as uninvestigated as calculus. We knew the Allies and the Axis. We were majoring in literature.
    â€œWhat else does he say?”
    She looked away. “My ‘beauty,’ is what he says, made him careless.” She held the envelope against her chest. I remember the crooked stamp and the elaborate capitals of her name: “Miss Hollis Baird.” It had been mailed right there in Washington. “He’s not here any more, though. I know it. He doesn’t trust anybody. Everybody over there hurt him, Russians, Germans, everybody. And this place, oh, God, I hate this place. These people in here. They’re the ones did it, up in Security, they’re the ones scared him.”
    All the rest of the summer Alex comforted her, listened, took her coffee, walked her up and down the corridors, stood with her while she cried in the hot parking lot, until we all went back to school. “I just told poor Alex good-bye,” she said on the last day. “She’s going to marry him,” the secretaries predicted. But she did not.
    She sees him now and then, just as she writes sometimes to me. She is the mother of three grown sons who attended the same private school as his two. I have read that she is a Washington hostess, though she has nothing to say in her letters about that.
    For some reason she got back in touch with me, years after this. For a while, she said, she went a little wild. “God, I went through the whole thing. In San Francisco I tripped, I marched, I hung around the Dead. I told my Daddy off.” Looking back, she was glad of it all, except for what she had done that one summer, might have done, might have caused to happen—because we never knew what happened—to Nazar Orlenko. “Do you think there’s a love of your life?” she wrote.
    In the last picture I have, you can see she is heavier, though she stands behind the three tall sons. The arms are plump, the blond hair short. We have all changed, and any of us may change again, although Orlenko, strange sacrifice, will never come to her again in her beauty, nor a secret list extract itself from a torso, nor the Pentagon wheel back up into the sky.

kisses

    O ne of the residents kissed Shannon. No one had done