Tin Sky by Ben Pastor

the old man dangle a little longer, and climbed to Tibyetsky’s room instead. There, he found Khan fast asleep, so he had the guard place the trunk by his bed, and walked away without waking him up.
    Gleb Platonov looked like death. Grey-faced, haggard, he sat with the photograph of his relatives face down on the table. “Where was this taken?”
    Other than his name and identification number, it was the only sentence Bora had ever heard him speak. “I’m not required to say,” he answered dryly.
    “Who had it taken?”
    “Not required to say that, either.”
    “It shows this month’s date. Has to be your doing; German doing.”
    “Does it?”
    “I demand to know —”
    “I’m not accepting demands, General.”
    “I ask to know —”
    Bora moved his head from side to side, an indifferent sign of refusal. Platonov must be in a state of absolute turmoil at this time. Whatever Stalin’s reason for making him believe his women were dead, right now he had no way of knowing whether they were imprisoned (they weren’t); he couldn’t even be sure they were in German hands, since the calendar in the snapshot was Russian – Bora had made a point of it. For all Platonov knew – and this must be the cruellest doubt in his mind – they could have been executed in the days since the photo was taken. Keeping the image face down was meant to lessen the unavoidable pain of enquiring about them. Bora turned it face up. There was a kind of ache for him as well in seeing them: the women were beautiful, and affected him in his own way. Platonov’s love for them was legendary; he’d reportedly tried to kill himself in prison when told of their deaths. It stood to reason that if his women were now brought forward, they were alive, and in German hands. Clear-minded logic suggested it. But Platonov might be other than clear-minded this evening. After his release, he’d fought for nearly two years in the name of a system that had stripped him of all ties and shreds of hope, forging him at last into a war machine out of his utter, infinitelack of expectation. But now… Bora felt a stable lack of pity, which didn’t mean he ignored the man’s feelings. To him, it was a matter of getting what he wanted, taking care not to show that he had no intention of harming the women; if on one pan of the scales lay Platonov’s anguish for them, the other was weighed down by his stoicism in Stalin’s jail, when he thought he had nothing more to lose.
    Platonov could not bring himself to say out loud that he’d believed his family lost until today. Under his breath, he mouthed, “I thought – it’s the first time in six years I’ve seen an image of them.”
    “I can have them safely escorted here to meet you.” Bora’s only sign of familiarity (intentional, as everything was in his behaviour with prisoners) was that he stood there with his hands in the pockets of his breeches. His fingertips met the button from Krasny Yar, and for a second the dead in the woods, the cut throat, the severed head were with him in the room.
    “Swear to me it’s true, Major.” When Bora said and did nothing, the prisoner’s voice turned grave and low, like a repressed sob. “What do you want in exchange?”
    “My needs haven’t changed.” From the briefcase at his feet, Bora took out a questionnaire he’d typed in Russian, a number of sheets held together by a paper clip, which he laid on the table. Platonov ran his eyes over the first page, and pushed it back in disgust.
    “Bring my family to me.”
    Bora firmly replaced the questionnaire under Platonov’s eyes. They stared at each other across the narrow space separating them. After confronting Khan’s physical exuberance in the afternoon, this was the cut-out, the abused leftover of a man; a few hours and a single photograph had crushed what remained of one who’d withstood torture. Bora had to think of his Stalingrad days to summon bitterness and avoid all empathy.
    “No. I don’t