The Forbidden Zone

by Michael Hetzer

  The ballet ended at nine o’clock. The group gathered around Olga, submitted to a head count and then went outside to the square in front of the theater. They started to cross the street to the Metropol Hotel where they were to have coffee, when Katherine spoke up.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I just want to go back to my room.”

  Olga gasped. Then she began to argue. Katherine simplycouldn’t miss the special Russian coffee. And the atmosphere —superb! The hotel was anhistoricmonument, the same one used in the filmDr. Zhivago.

  But Katherine would not be dissuaded. Several members of her group shot her envious glances, but none showed the courage to stand up to Olga. It would have been like joining a mutiny. Finally, Olga relented. But now the question became: How was Katherine to return to the hotel? Katherine insisted on walking alone, a suggestion that horrified Olga. For an instant, Katherine felt sorry for her guide. Olga was like a mother duck whose ducklings were paddling in opposite directions.

  “Are you sure you will be all right?” Olga asked doubtfully, and Katherine knew she had won.

  Katherine pointed to the Intourist Hotel over the tops of the city buildings.

  “I can see it from here,” Katherine said. “How could I get lost?”

  “Don’t forget, we meet tomorrow in the lobby at eight-thirty,” said Olga.

  “I won’t. Good-bye.”

  Katherine started toward the hotel along Karl Marx Prospekt. It was exciting to be alone on the streets of Moscow, liberated from Olga’s anxious gaze. She reached Gorky Street, but instead of turning right, up to the Intourist Hotel, she kept on going along the great asphalt square that had once been Moscow’s merchant district. She threaded her way through the hurrying Muscovites, thrilled to be part of the bustle. It was the best part of her day. Ten minutes later she came toward an unpretentious, two-story building with a sign that said, “Library of V.I. Lenin.” It was the Lenin Library, the largest library in the world. In front of the building, under a glowing-red letter “M,” Katherine spied a medium-built man in a black parka and a bright red “1980 Olympics” ski hat. He paced to the foot of the library’s stairs and then turned back to the “M.” He looked like a man trying not to took like a man waiting for someone.

  “Maxim?”

  He looked up. “Katherine!” He kissed her three times, alternating cheeks. “Any problems?”

  Katherine shook her head.

  “Good. Everything is on. Let’s go.”

  The letter “M,” it turned out, stood for “metro.” They descended the stairs into the subway, the Moscow Metropolitan of V.I. Lenin, the obiect of so much praise in Katherine’s guidebooks. Maxim pressed a metal token into Katherine’s hand, and she dropped it into a gate and passed through.

  “Stay close to me,” Maxim whispered.

  They rode two stops, got off and then wove through the tunnels to another platform. They caught a second train. They rode it nine stops, about twenty minutes, and then stepped onto a platform in a station called Shchukinskaya. They stood a while in the dark (the streetlights didn’t work) with several dozen other Muscovites waiting for a tram. No one spoke, and it was strangely quiet. After fifteen minutes, they boarded a tram and were soon rattling their way across a long bridge over the Moscow River. Ahead, a gigantic housing project rose like the emerald suburb. Strogino.

  They got off the tram and plunged directly into Strogino. Katherine felt as though a door had closed behind her. In all directions rose monolithic buildings of mind-numbing sameness. All were concrete, obviously prefabricated. There was no landscaping. Grass tried to poke up in a few places, but mostly the ground was covered by alternating splotches of weeds, mud, snow and dirt. Clothes hung frozen on balconies. Though clearly tens of thousands of people lived in these buildings, it was quiet on the street except for the barking of dogs. She could not imagine how Maxim found his way.

  And then, just as she was concluding that there was something sinister — even unnatural — about Moscow, she came upon a sight that hinted of something deeper, the way bubbles on the surface of a pond portend life below. She and Maxim were passing through a yard between two low buildings. Outside the building to their right, atop a pile of dirty snow, three men were shouting up to a third-story window. A woman held a baby to the glass. The men began to dance and slap each other on the back. One man was weeping.

  “What is going on?” Katherine asked.

  Maxim smiled. “Maternity ward. Fathers are banned from delivery rooms for ten days.”

  Katherine was witnessing a father’s first look at his newborn child. At that moment, Moscow became real to her: Like a newly discovered species, it was now aliving mystery.

  They came to a pencil-thin, fifteen-story building like all the others, and Maxim said quietly, “This is it.”

  They went in and took the elevator to the seventh floor. The smell of urine and garbage was overpowering. Katherine looked at her watch. It was eleven-thirty. Right on time.

  Maxim led her to a door at the end of the hall and rang the bell. Inside, a dog barked. Footsteps approached. The lock turned and the door opened.

  A woman of roughly Katherine’s age gazed out at them. She wore a black evening gown and fresh makeup.

  “Lena Ryzhkova?” asked Maxim.

  The woman nodded and motioned them to come inside.

  Lena Ryzhkova’s apartment was more like a large closet. There was a single room, plus a microscopic kitchen at the end of a short hallway. Off the hallway stood two side-by-side doors leading to a toilet room and a wash room. And that was it. A bookcase was turned perpendicular to the living room wall to create a false wall behind which her eight-year-old son slept. The sofa was Lena’s bed. The furniture was tacky and didn’t match, but it was adequate. There were several nice paintings on the walls, books in the cabinets and, in the corner, a color television set. She did not live well, but she was at least comfortable.

  Lena was very pretty. Her dress, perhaps handmade, had a wide collar that was out of fashion by fifteen years. She wore high-heeled shoes and heavy eye makeup. Her hair was freshly styled.

  She seated Katherine and Maxim on the sofa. Cookies, chocolates and cheese were laid out on the coffee table with the precision of a magazine photograph. The serving dish was chipped, but was of attractive china. Lena excused herself and rushed to the kitchen to bring tea. She returned a minute later, her best tea set jingling atop a serving tray. Maxim flashed a grin at Katherine. He seemed amused by the girl’s desire to be seen by the American as a proper hostess.

  Lena Ryzhkova spoke no English, and Katherine was too shy to try her Russian, so Maxim had to translate everything.

  “This is all so wonderful!” Katherine exclaimed. “Like a picture!”

  Maxim translated, and Lena beamed.

  But her smile faded, and she said something to Maxim.

  “She asks how well you knew her father,” said Maxim.

  “Hardly at all,” Katherine said. “We met in Helsinki, at the World Astronomy Symposium, the day before he died.”

  Lena nodded. She spoke again and Maxim said, “You have some letters?”

  Katherine opened her purse and pulled out five sealed envelopes. Each was stamped in red ink, “RETURN TO SENDER.” Katherine handed them to Lena, who put them on the table beside her.

  “She wants to know how you got the letters.”

  “A month ago, after I decided to make this trip, I went to New York City to talk to your father’s colleagues at the New York Institute of Technology. I was hoping to — ”

  Lena interrupted. Maxim said, “She asks, is that where Vladimir lived? New York City?”

  “Of course. She didn’t know that?”

  Maxim shook his head. “After he defected, they told her nothing.”

  Katherine frowned. “Anyway, I went there to try to find your address. Nobody knew anything. They let me look through some of his personal effects from the office. That’s where I found the returned letters.” />
  Maxim finished his translation and Lena nodded. Then Lena began to talk.

  “Father was a dreamer. He used to talk seriously about things like living in outer space or on the far side of the moon. He was like a child. I remember being embarrassed at times to have such a father.”

  Lena’s eyes were misty. She wrung her hands in her lap. “A couple of years ago they appointed a new director at the institute, and things got real difficult for him. ‘Politics and science don’t mix,’ he used to say. But I am a simple girl. I don’t know about such things. I have my little boy to think about.”

  Lena dabbed her eyes with a tissue and took a sip of tea.

  Katherine asked, “Why did he defect?”

  Lena thought a moment. “I knew he was unhappy, but the actual defection . . . I think it wasn’t planned. He was in Oslo, and I think he just saw the chance and took it. He was like that.”

  Lena and Maxim spoke a while. Maxim summarized. “It seems that the KGB came to her after the defection and interrogated her. It went on for several weeks. The poor girl didn’t know anything. The institute wanted its apartment back, so she was forced to move here about six months ago. She complains that it is far from the center and very small.”

  Lena said something very softly. Katherine could guess what it was, and Maxim confirmed it. “She wants to know: Why did he kill himself?”

  Katherine looked into Lena’s puffy eyes, and for the first time Katherine spoke in Russian. “I don’t know.”

  The room was quiet. They all took a sip of tea.

  Then Katherine said, “Tell her I’m a scientist — an astronomer. Until six months ago, I was working on a joint Soviet-American star survey.”

  Maxim translated. Lena nodded and looked at her, waiting.

  Katherine said, “The name of my Russian partner was Victor Perov.”

  Lena smiled. “You know Victor?”

  “Victor is the reason I’m here.”

  They had met five years earlier at the Josef Kepler Cosmology Conference in New York City.

  Like hundreds of attendees that year, Katherine had come to meet Victor Perov. The young Russian had just published a ground-breaking paper on the distribution of so-called Dark Matter in the universe, and he was being held up as the Soviet Union’s new superstar of the scientific establishment. Using measurements of x-ray emissions from the center of the galaxy, Victor had concluded that the amount of matter trapped inside black holes — Dark Matter — was far greater than anyone had previously estimated. If true, it would have enormous consequences for the future of the universe, virtually guaranteeing its eventual collapse to a single point in an event astronomers called The Big Crunch. Katherine admired his paper enormously: It was the work of a first-rate mind.

  It took Katherine three days to summon up the nerve to approach Victor with her idea. In constructing his theory, Victor had used just two data points — not enough to extrapolate with any precision. With a trembling voice, Katherine proposed to Victor a joint Soviet-American survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud — an area ripe for the formation of black holes. As an astronomer at Cornell University, she had access to the large radio telescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico. Victor, through his institute, could use the dish in Soviet Georgia. By combining the resources of the two countries, she argued, and using the diameter of the earth to magnify the accuracy of their measurements of x-ray emissions, they could accomplish in three years what would otherwise have taken decades.

  It was an audacious proposal. The year was 1979, not a good time to be launching a joint Soviet-American project. Relations between the countries were at a low. The year before, the U.S.S.R. had invaded Afghanistan, prompting then president Jimmy Carter to impose a slew of sanctions, including a boycott of the Olympic games in Moscow. Katherine’s own father had told her she was wasting her time. She had phoned him one evening at Princeton University, where he was working as a visiting conservative scholar, and he had assured her that Victor would never agree. The Perovs were good communists. His mother was the deputy minister of agriculture. Victor was a beneficiary of all his country’s system could provide. He would never risk embarrassing his country by sharing any potential glory with his Cold War enemy.

  To everyone’s amazement, Victor embraced the idea unreservedly. In fact, from the start he was more enthusiastic about it than she was. If politics caused him concern, then he concealed it well. Jack Sears concluded that Victor was either astonishingly naive, or so supremely confident of his country’s superiority that he saw no threat. Later, her father added a third theory: Victor was a spy.

  Katherine had laughed at that one, though she really didn’t have an explanation for Victor’s enthusiasm. So she simply assumed he was what he appeared to be: a scientist so afire with passion for his work that all other concerns receded to insignificance.

  As it happened, Victor’s Communist party connections were the greatest factor working in favor of the project. In the eyes of the Soviet apparatus, Victor Perov was a citizen above reproach, and even the KGB was unable to find a reason not to give the project a nod. And so, after nearly two years of excruciating negotiations, it began.

  For the next two years, Katherine and Victor kept up a weekly correspondence as they worked jointly from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. Katherine’s standing at Cornell University rose dramatically as the astronomical data mounted and evidence grew in support of Victor’s theories. A revolution in cosmology was in the making.

  “We were so happy,” Katherine told Maxim and Lena. “Victor’s letters bubbled with excitement. This spring we were supposed to publish our results.”

  Katherine took a deep breath. “Then, last November, Victor’s letters just stopped. No explanation. I tried to contact the SAPO Institute where he works, but they wouldn’t take calls. The Soviet Embassy in Washington cited ‘reasons of national security’ for the dropped contact. The project, they said, had not been canceled. So I kept on working and sending my data through the embassy to Victor. But he never replied. I had no idea if he was even working on it anymore. It was infuriating.”

  Lena spoke and Maxim translated. “Did you say November was the month he stopped sending his letters?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s when Victor learned that his twin brother had been killed.”

  Katherine nodded. “Anton.”

  “How do you know about that?” asked Lena. “I thought you said he stopped all contact.”

  “That’s where your father came in,” said Katherine. “Last December, I read in the journals that Victor had won the 1983 Hubble Prize. It’s one of the highest honors in theoretical astrophysics, and I knew he would have to attend the conference. The presentation was set for Helsinki on December 21. Here was my chance. I registered for the conference and made the eleven-hour flight to Finland.”

  “On the plane I read in the newspaper that Yevgenia Perova had been appointed U.S.S.R. minister of agriculture. This made her a member of the Central Committee and a candidate for the Politburo.”

  “Lord,” breathed Maxim. “He’sthat Perov?”

  Katherine nodded.

  “Did Victor come to Helsinki?” asked Maxim.

  “He came, all right, but he was impossible to see,” said Katherine. “He was surrounded constantly by KGB and the other members of his delegation. Finally, I got so frantic I ambushed him in the hotel lobby on the way to the banquet where he was to receive his award.” Katherine smiled and shook her head. “I yelled out to him over all these people. It was ridiculous. I was like a groupie trying to get the attention of a pop star at a concert. He must have heard me, but he wouldn’t even meet my eye. One of the KGB agents actually shoved me. It was unbelievable. But not so unbelievable as what came next.”

  Lena said, “You mean, when Victor denounced my father.”

  “Right.”

  Maxim snapped his fingers. “Now I remember. I saw this on the news.”

  As the world media would repor
t, Victor Perov turned down the 1983 Hubble Prize. He complained that the award acknowledged the work of his former teacher, Vladimir Ryzhkov, Lena’s father. A year earlier, Ryzhkov’s defection had embarrassed the Soviet scientific establishment. Now came the payback.

  From the lectern, Victor delivered a blistering indictment of Lena’s father calling him a “parasite,” “an intellectual thief” and a “propaganda puppet under the control of the military-industrial complex of the United States.”

  “It was so absurd,” said Katherine. “I can see now that he had to distance himself from a defector for the sake of his mother. But at the time I was confused. I felt as if I didn’t even know him. I was still trying to figure it all out when I discovered a note on the floor by the door of my room. It was from Victor. It asked me to meet him in the children’s department of the Stockmann department store the following morning.”

  “Victor contactedyou ?” Maxim said, astonished.

  Katherine nodded. “I was so angry at him I considered not going. He told me to flush the note down the toilet but I just threw it in the trash can.”

  “What happened?”

  “I went, of course, and Victor was there, just like he said, looking at a toy fire engine for his nephew. Somehow, he had managed to be with just one other Russian. The two came over to me, and Victor pretended it was a chance meeting. We spoke for only a few seconds, but in his words he buried a message.”

  “How did he do that?” asked Maxim.

  Katherine closed her eyes. She could see Victor Perov as he had been that morning, his uncombed brown hair lying like a mop atop his head, his engaging grin and his intense blue eyes, which had seemed to Katherine to hold a touch of sadness she had not seen before. Katherine repeated Victor’s words exactly — going over them syllable by syllable, as she had so many times since that morning four months ago.