And she had! Those precious seconds in the bell tower had completed the moment destroyed that night in the library. Now it was time to move on — Titus was right about that. Tomorrow she would begin her long journey home. Somehow.
On her cot in the dark of the unheated cabin in Lubertsi, Katherine Sears fell asleep.
Day Three began with Katherine thinking about her next move. Without a passport and exit visa, she couldn’t leave the Soviet Union. There was always Victor, but she wouldn’t know how to go about finding him. And even if she could, what could he do? She decided there was only one place in Moscow that could help her — the American Embassy.
So just after dawn, Katherine Sears picked up her shotgun and started across a field in the direction of the trains she had heard from the cabin. Her cheeks were hollow, and her eyes had the glassy sheen of a drug addict. She still wore the clothes she had stripped from the doctor. She walked until she hit the railroad tracks. Then she turned west, keeping her feet on the ties. She passed through a patch of forest and threw the shotgun into some weeds. After an hour and a half, she reached a station platform. She had no money for a ticket, so when the train came, she just got on. After several stops, an officious, middle-aged woman in a navy-blue hat came into her carriage and began checking tickets. The train pulled into a station, and Katherine got off. She waited on the platform ten minutes for the next train. Then she was on her way again.
And so it happened that at nine-thirty, exactly a week after her arrival in Moscow, Katherine Sears stepped into the central hall of Moscow’s Paveletsky Station. A garbled voice on a loudspeaker made an unintelligible announcement. She stood a minute, looking around her like a peasant girl on her first trip to the capital. A group of a dozen men and women came toward her wheeling carts that overflowed with bags. They stopped to rest, using the bags as chairs. She spied a policeman checking documents, and she ducked toward a side exit.
How far could the embassy be? If she could just get inside the gates, onto American soil, she could get a new passport and work through the consular office to get an exit visa. She hoped to be taking a hot shower in an embassy apartment by evening. The thought made her impatient.
She circled the building. Along the edge of a wide stretch of pavement at the main entrance, dozens of taxis were parked. Men with derby caps and cigarettes dangling from their lips stood in groups chatting.
Titus Waal had once said that taxi parks were magnets for black marketeers. Katherine needed a black marketeer. She picked a group of three men and walked toward them, rehearsing her Russian. The men looked her over and went back to their conversation.
“Excuse me,” she said in Russian. “You help me?”
“A she-Polack,” one of them muttered.
The tall one looked at her over his shoulder and asked, “Where are you going?”
“I sell something.”
“This look like a bazaar to you?”
They all laughed and turned their backs on her again.
“Look,” she said and held up her right hand. She wriggled the finger that held her amber ring.
The tall man looked at the ring and shrugged. “So?”
“I want selling it,” she said.
The tall man whistled at a group of men a short distance away.
“Sergei!” he called.
A man turned. He was about five feet eight inches and stocky. He might have been a wrestler in his youth, but he was well past that now. Katherine estimated his age at forty-five years. Thin brown hair escaped around the edge of a corduroy derby cap. He took a drag from his cigarette, threw it on the pavement and threaded his way toward them through the bustle of the station traffic.
“Yes?”
The men spoke a minute. Sergei lit a cigarette and turned to Katherine. His dark blue eyes glistened as though something amused him.
He clucked and said in Russian, “What can I do for you, girlie?”
“I selling something.”
“So I heard.” He said something in Russian that she didn’t understand. She looked at him helplessly. “Where are you from?”
Katherine said, “Ya iz Estonii.”
“Estonian, eh?” He said something else, which, again, she didn’t understand. Now he squinted at her suspiciously.
Her heart raced, and she considered turning away. But then he smiled warmly.
“Come with me,” he said and led her to his taxi. She got in. He slid behind the wheel and they were off.
Katherine had not expected that. “Wait . . .” she began, but she couldn’t find the words to ask where he was taking her.
“Don’t worry, girlie,” he laughed. “I won’t rob you. It’s dangerous here. Railroad police everywhere.”
He drove five minutes to a place along the river beside an old Orthodox chapel. The structure must have been lovely once, with four delicate onion domes rising into the sky, and a fresco over the door. But as Katherine looked at it from the taxi window, grass grew off a spot in the roof and the gold onion domes were as dull as brass. The fresco was an uneven brown, roughly the color of mud.
Sergei swiveled in his seat and asked to see the ring. She gave it to him. He looked at it a minute and shrugged noncommittally. “How much?”
Katherine figured the ring was worth a thousand dollars. “Five hundred rubles,” she said. That was about seven hundred dollars at the official exchange rate.
He nodded. “I’ll give you a hundred.”
She flushed. “Five hundred.”
He laughed and said something she didn’t understand. She glared back at him. They settled on two hundred rubles. He got out the money and gave it to her. She took one last look at the ring and passed it to him. He slipped it into his pocket. The deal was done.
“Now American embassy,” Katherine said.
“I am your servant,” he said. He put the car in gear, and they sped away.
He drove ten minutes and then stopped along a busy road near an underpass.
“Where is the embassy?” Katherine asked, alarmed.
He pointed.
And then she saw it. About a quarter-mile ahead the stars and stripes were hanging from the side of a yellow building. A lump swelled in her throat.
“It’s better here,” said Sergei. “Close, but not too close.”
Katherine nodded. He was right, of course. Not too close.
She said good-bye and started along the sidewalk, keeping her eyes fixed on the flag. She was about halfway there when she saw something that took her breath away. Standing on the sidewalk about thirty yards in front of her was the last person on earth she expected to see.
Jack Sears. Her father.
“Dad!” Katherine cried out.
He didn’t hear her over the street noise.
She couldn’t believe it. Her father! He was even wearing the sweater she had given him for Christmas! He was looking around with a face she recognized at once — disgust. He looked like a man sniffing bad fish.
She dashed toward him. “Dad!”
He turned in her direction. His face was puzzled. He knew the voice, but he couldn’t find her on the crowded street. Or perhaps he didn’t recognize her. No matter. In about ten seconds she would throw her arms around him . . .
From a driveway on her left, two men appeared. The first locked his arm around Katherine’s neck and slapped his hand over her mouth. The other grabbed her legs. She recognized the second man from the cabin: the man with the oriental eyes, the Tatar. In seconds she was swept from the sidewalk into the alley. She kicked and fought but they carried her wriggling deeper into the alley. The street noise faded. The alley opened into a small, gravel courtyard where several cars were parked. The men trotted toward a small, blue Zhiguli. They reached the car, and the Tatar set her feet on the ground while he fumbled with the trunk keys. She fought again, and a hand came free. She used it to pry the second man’s hand from her mouth. She screamed. A fist came down hard on her right eye. She collapsed.
The
y had the trunk open now. They lifted her over the side.
An engine roared behind them. Katherine looked over the side of the trunk. A taxi bore down on them. The driver’s door swung open and smashed against the second man. He was thrown ten feet to the ground as the taxi skidded to a stop. Gravel rained over the alley like hail. The Tatar let go of Katherine, and she rolled from the side of the trunk to the ground. The Tatar reached under his coat. The driver of the taxi — Sergei! — sprinted toward the Tatar with a pipe in his hand. He swung it at his head. There was a crunch, and the Tatar collapsed. A gun tumbled onto the gravel.
Sergei helped Katherine to her feet.
“Come on!” he said.
He pushed her into the back seat of his taxi, shut the door and leaped behind the wheel. Beside them, the men were getting to their feet. Sergei rammed the shifter into reverse and pounded on the accelerator. The taxi sped backward toward the alley entrance, nearly hitting a woman pushing a baby in a stroller. Then there was apop , and a bullet hole cracked the windshield just below the rearview mirror. Sergei kept his foot on the accelerator and they raced across the sidewalk. There was a secondpop followed by aclank from the front grill. They came onto the road directly in the path of a car. The driver leaned on his horn and swerved hard to the right. He struck the back of a truck, and his front grill exploded. Glass and plastic flew. Sergei spun the steering wheel to the left, which sent Katherine sprawling across the back seat. He shifted and hit the gas hard. Tires squealed. The car leaped forward up the ramp and back onto the main road. By the time Katherine managed to sit up, they were already past the American embassy. She looked back to where she had seen her father. She thought she glimpsed his figure in the crowd. The embassy fell away behind them. The last thing she saw was the flag. Then they passed under Mayakovsky Square, heading east.
“That was no mugging!” said Sergei. “That man had a gun!”
“They were waiting for me,” Katherine said in English.
“Who are you?”
Katherine frowned at Sergei. “How did you know to come for me?” she asked in Russian.
Sergei didn’t answer. He looked angry.
“Tell me.”
“Curiosity,” he said bitterly. “You said you were Estonian. I’m Estonian. And you, girlie, are definitely not. So I followed you.”
“Curiosity,” Katherine repeated.Lyubopytstvo. Yes, she knew that word.
Sergei drove hard, snaking through residential streets, past mile after mile of dreary housing blocks. He braked hard and accelerated harder, pressing ever deeper into the concrete maze. At first, Katherine figured they were heading northeast, but after a while she lost track.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Sergei only waved his hand. She heard him mumbling to himself. She fell back into her seat. She was too tired to resist. She fell asleep.
When she awoke it was dusk beneath a thick blanket of gray clouds. The landscape had changed from urban-grim to rural-bleak. Untended fields rose to meet the sky in all directions. Mud and dirty snow competed for dominion over the surface. The wind howled indignation at the car, the only thing in sight to slow its progress.
Katherine closed her eyes, not to rest, but to shut out the world. She saw her father’s face combing the crowds for his daughter, then the Tatar, the trunk, the gun . . .
It was 4:30 P.M., nearly dark, when Sergei pulled his taxi onto a gravel road that led to a settlement of about a dozen wood cottages. Their lights twinkled invitingly. He pulled up to a cottage, more or less like all the others. Smoke rose out of the house’s single smokestack. Sergei turned off the engine, and the croaking of frogs came to her ears. Sergei twisted in his seat and looked at her. He spoke his first words in three hours.
“What is your name?”
“Katherine.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “You are Yekatarina Yurgina. You are Latvian. You live in Riga. Understand? You are from the countryside, which is why your Russian is poor.”
“What is this place?”
“My grandmother’s house,” said Sergei, speaking very simple Russian. “Understand? You were visiting a friend in Moscow. Understand? I offered to show you the New Yulia Chapel. It’s about a half-mile from here. Understand? But then my car broke down. So now you need a place to stay for the night. Understand?”
Katherine nodded throughout, grateful for the breaks in speech that gave her time to translate.
“Don’t worry about your Russian,” said Sergei. “Baba Krista’s is not much better. She’s Estonian.”
They went inside. The house was cozy and smelled of burning firewood and the rootiness of fresh vegetables. An old woman shuffled up the hall toward them. She was hunched over to about forty-five degrees, and looked at them over her brow. Her head was wrapped in a red scarf tied under her chin. Her eyes were wet and glistened with a light of their own in the dim hallway. They were Sergei’s eyes. Her face was carved with such a labyrinth of wrinkles that it seemed the whole murderous history of the twentieth century was etched there. Katherine could have studied that face for days. If she had the courage.
Sergei kissed the old woman’s cheeks three times and spoke in Estonian. The old woman replied in a gravelly voice.
They looked at Katherine and spoke for a minute. Katherine smiled uncertainly back at them.
“Meet Baba Krista,” said Sergei.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Katherine in Russian, offering her hand. The old woman looked at it, puzzled. Just as Katherine was about to pull it back, Baba Krista took it limply, as though it were the first time she had ever shaken a hand. Her skin was as coarse as asphalt.
They went into a cramped kitchen and sat on stools behind a small table. The wooden floor was uneven and everything rocked in its place: the chairs, the table, even the refrigerator from which Baba Krista retrieved a plate of butter. An orange cat jumped onto Katherine’s lap. It circled twice and then lay down to sleep. Katherine thought about her cat, Niels Bohr, in a kennel in Ithaca. Poor Niels. He hated the kennel.
“The cat’s name is Pushkin,” said Baba Krista.
She began to lay out plates and silverware on the table.
Katherine leaned close to Sergei, “I should help her, yes?” she asked.
“Only if you want to insult her.”
They sat quietly and watched Baba Krista prepare their meal. Soon fried eggs, fried bacon and fried potatoes lay on plates before them. They began to eat. The smell of grease upset Katherine’s stomach, but she cleaned her plate anyway. Sergei poured vodka into an ordinary water glass and was about to drink when Baba Krista growled something at him. He pursed his lips and got up from the table. He opened the back door and splashed several drops on a pile of snow near the door. He sat down again and drank.
Katherine closed her eyes. She decided to give up trying to make sense out of this bombardment of images.
After dinner, they went into the front room and sat down. Baba Krista and Sergei spoke Estonian while Katherine stroked a purring Pushkin. After fifteen minutes, Sergei rose and came beside Katherine.
“You will be safe here,” he said and went out of the room. She heard him clanking in the kitchen.
Baba Krista sat in a chair across from Katherine and knitted, a feat Katherine would not have thought possible, having felt the coarseness of those ancient hands.
After about ten minutes, the cottage became quiet. A clock on the wall ticked pleasantly and the fire crackled inside the wrought-iron stove beside Baba Krista. Katherine asked where Sergei had gone.
“He left.”
Katherine almost jumped out of her seat. Only Pushkin kept her where she was. “Left? Where?”
“Moscow. He said something about replacing aperedneye.”
“A what?”
“The front window.”
Of course. The bullet hole in the windshield.
Katherine felt defeated. She had lost all control of what was happening to her. She was a child who could not
speak the language of adults, and who did not know the dangers that might befall her. She closed her eyes. Perhaps Sergei was going to bring the police. She didn’t care anymore.
“You want to sleep?” asked Baba Krista, who had watched Katherine shut her eyes.
Katherine nodded. The old woman led Katherine to a tiny bathroom. A single faucet swiveled between the sink and the bathtub. Baba Krista gave her a hand towel and pointed out the toilet room and Katherine’s bedroom.
Katherine closed the door and looked in the mirror. Her right eye was underscored by a purplish-black arc like a crescent moon lying dead on its back.
She washed and went into the bedroom. The heat from the stove did not reach her room, and she could see her breath in the air. She turned off the light. She stripped naked (she still had no underwear) and crawled under the half-dozen layers of mismatched blankets and afghans. Their weight was a comfort. A sliver of light slipped over the top of the door and fell on an icon of St. George and the Dragon beside a single red candle high on a shelf, almost to the ceiling. They seemed to glow. She remembered reading about the Russian Orthodox tradition of the Red Corner. It had been theoretical then, back in Ithaca, an example of Russian provincialism. Quaint. Far, far away. Now, here it was. She stared at it a long time through the mists of her own breath. She felt herself drifting off to sleep.
Katherine didn’t dream that night. She slept the sound, healing sleep of a soldier who, after weeks at the front, finds himself on a soft bunk far from the war, in a place where no shell may fall.
She woke the next morning to cat whiskers tickling her nose. She swept Pushkin off the bed and looked around. The bedroom door was slightly ajar. Light shone brightly through a single window. It felt late. The house smelled of strong coffee and fried potatoes. She heard voices in the kitchen.
She got up and found clean clothes hanging over a chair. She put on the underwear and scooped up the rest. She crossed the hall to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Her black eye had faded slightly. She washed with a bar of rock-hard soap then found some shampoo and washed her hair. She found a tube of toothpaste and brushed her teeth with her index finger. She slipped on her new clothes: a polyester dress with a blue, floral pattern, like cheap kitchen wallpaper. It wasn’t bad. She looked almost human. She felt almost human. She went out to the kitchen.
The Forbidden Zone Page 16