The Forbidden Zone

by Michael Hetzer

  Katherine smiled. Leave it to Victor to use the ascension of the Large Magellanic Cloud as the timetable for their meetings. It was their personal, secret language. Approximately once a month, the Large Magellanic Cloud would move from one sign of the zodiac to the next, a process known as ascension.

  On this night, the Large Magellanic Cloud was making its ascension.

  The next day at precisely noon, Victor would climb the bell tower in Zagorsk and wait for her. She wouldn’t come, but it made her feel less alone to know that he would be there, and that each month for as long as she was in the U.S.S.R., he would make the climb up the spiral staircase.

  Katherine stood a while longer looking up at the formation, imagining that Victor, too, was looking up from wherever he was. Their love of astronomy had brought them together, and now it was the only way they could be together. There was something fitting in that.

  Katherine felt her finger for the place where her amber ring had once rested. Sergei had long since sold the ring to pay for Katherine’s counterfeit documents. She missed the ring, but she was sure Victor would have understood her decision.

  She took a last look at the sky and then, almost reluctantly, she went back inside.

  Katherine had butterflies in her stomach that morning as she stepped into room 203. Twenty Russian faces looked up at her — farmers’ faces, young and old, skin coarsened by outdoor work. Clumsy, callused hands clutched pencils. The men wore suits and the women wore dresses, but still, they looked like farmers going to church on Sunday, the mud of the potato field still beneath their fingernails.

  Their eyes, however, were eager; they wanted to speak English. Well, Katherine would see what she could do about that.

  She put her books on the desk, turned to face the class and said, in English, “Good morning.”

  The room was quiet a moment. Then one voice said, “Goot mornink.”

  Katherine turned toward the source of the voice, a man of about thirty-five with rather thick glasses. “You speak English?”

  “A leettle.”

  “No one else?” she asked in English.

  She surveyed the blank faces. She smiled grimly and took a breath.

  “Good morningznachit ‘dobroye utro.’ Povtorite, pozhaluista ,” Katherine said. “Good mor-ning.”

  The class repeated. “Goot mornink.”

  “Very good,” said Katherine Sears. “Ochen khorosho.”

  And so it went. After class, Katherine went to Maya Timofeyeva’s office.

  “How was the first day?” Maya asked.

  Katherine shrugged. “I got through it. There are a few things that would help. First, a dictionary of agricultural terms. These students not only want to learn English, they want to be able to talk about fertilizer and wheat combine mechanics.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Maya.

  “Also, one of the students said the foreign-language library in Moscow subscribes to farming trade journals in English.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “I would like to borrow them.”

  Maya sighed. “Let’s not go overboard, Yekatarina.”

  “A lot of these students want nothing more than to be able to read about Western farming techniques.”

  “Our books are just fine for that. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but, please, just stick to the syllabus.”

  The next evening, Sergei came to Baba Krista’s. It was Friday, so they made their weekly drive to the collective farm office. Along the way, Katherine asked if he could help her get a library card to the foreign-language library in Moscow.

  “Absolutely not,” he said.

  “I would need documents?”

  “Yes,” he said tiredly.

  “Then, perhaps you could check out some materials.”

  Sergei groaned and rolled his eyes.

  Katherine didn’t respond. By now she had learned that Sergei, no matter how much he complained, loved intrigue. It was why he drove a taxi, it was why he dabbled in the black market, and it was at least partly why he was helping her. A fanciful part of Sergei saw himself as a Russian romantic in the eighteenth-century tradition, seated on a horse, arguing about the Enlightenment, poetry and the injustice of monogamy for males. Given his way, Sergei would die in a duel. But there was more to Sergei’s desire to help Katherine than whimsy. Something boiled within Sergei, something as hot and furious as lava. It compelled him to take these risks. She was Sergei’s weapon, and he was using her to get even.

  For what?

  Someday, Katherine hoped to ask precisely that.

  A few minutes later, they arrived at White Dacha. Katherine dialed Cameron Abbott, and a moment later she was speaking English to the American diplomat.

  “Your father missed the deputy secretary in Costa Rica,” Cameron said. “Now he can’t get an appointment with him for three weeks.”

  While Katherine was digesting this information Cameron said, “There is some good news. A hard-line senator from your state gave a speech on the floor of the Senate about you.”

  “Really?”

  “Not about you,per se. But he cited your case as an example of Soviet treachery and diplomatic incompetence. I guess that got some journalists wondering, because after that your story appeared in several newspapers. Grayson Hines interviewed me today for a feature he’s writing for the Sunday magazine.”

  “You didn’t — ”

  “No, I didn’t say anything about our talks. But he does want to know if he can interview your father.”

  “That’s up to my father,” said Katherine. “Will all this publicity help?”

  “That’s the good news — it already has. The ambassador has an appointment with the Soviet foreign minister in three weeks. Your case has been put on the agenda. With a little luck, Katherine, the Soviets will drop their charges and issue you an exit visa. You could be home for the Fourth of July.”

  In the office, Katherine gave Sergei the thumbs-up sign.

  “Thank god,” she said.

  The following week, Maya Timofeyeva came to Katherine’s English I class and took a seat in the back.

  She began with the homework: verb conjugations. On the blackboard, Katherine wrote:

  I sit. You sit. He sits. We sit. They sit.

  After going through four more verbs, they moved to pronunciation.

  Irena Kilitova, a collective farm director from Stavropol, raised her hand. “Are we learning the English variant or the American variant?”

  “I guess you could say I’m more familiar with the American variant.”

  “What’s the difference?” asked Yegor, a quiet young man whose interest in English was closely linked to an interest in the Beatles.

  “The accent,” said Katherine.

  “The English spell differently,” said Igor, who was always eager to show his knowledge of the West. In fact, all the class, even the dour, communist types like Irena Kilitova, showed a barely contained fascination for anything Western.

  “That’s true,” said Katherine.

  “I wonder if there are different dialects even within the United States,” said Yegor.

  “Of course there are,” said Katherine.

  Something about the way Katherine said that made everyone inch forward in their seats. The room got quiet.

  “How so?” asked Katya, a pretty local girl, who was working toward a degree in accounting.

  Katherine said, “In the New England states, for example, they have a — ”

  “New England? Where’s that?”

  “You don’t know . . .” Katherine began, looking at the curious faces. She smiled thinly. “Of course you don’t.”

  Before she knew what she was doing, Katherine had stepped over to a map of the world and was pointing to the United States of America.

  In the back of the room, Maya Timofeyeva scowled.

  “In the northern states,” said Katherine, “they speak a harder dialect. Harder vowel sounds. Sharper consonants. In the south,
” she went on, “they use softer vowel sounds. Longer. It’s very pretty.”

  Forty eyes were glued to her. She had the class’s complete attention.

  “Can someone from the North understand someone from the South?” asked Katya.

  Katherine smiled. This was as close to travel as Katya would ever get.

  “Sometimes it’s difficult,” she said.

  Maya came up to Katherine after class.

  “Your knowledge of American dialects is quite impressive.”

  “Yes?” asked Katherine gathering up her books and papers. “It’s kind of a hobby, I guess.”

  “You’ve departed from the syllabus, Yekatarina.”

  “The syllabus is terrible.”

  “Be that as it may, these students have to take standardized tests.”

  “They do?” Katherine asked surprised.

  “Of course! How is it that you don’t know these things?”

  “Tell me about the tests,” said Katherine.

  “They take them in August. If they don’t pass, they have to wait another year, maybe two, for a place in this class — and that’s assuming their collective would vote to send them here again, which is doubtful.”

  Katherine thought about that. “Do you have copies of these tests?”

  “Old ones.”

  “May I have them?”

  That Friday, when Katherine called Cameron Abbott, a familiar voice answered the phone.

  “Oh, Dad!” said Katherine. Tears clouded her eyes, and her throat tightened. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”

  A month had passed since they had last spoken.

  “Yours sounds good too, Kat-Kat.”

  For once, the endearment didn’t strike her as condescending.

  “I heard about your trip to Costa Rica. I’m sorry about all that.”

  “No trouble at all,” he said. “When this is over, maybe we’ll write a book.”

  Katherine laughed. “Who would buy it?”

  “Are you kidding? You’re famous.”

  “I am?”

  He told her about the senator’s speech. “I had just seen him two days earlier. I told him about the problems we were having with the Embassy and it seemed to strike a chord. He called the foreign service ‘a breeding ground for ticks on the butt of the taxpayer.’”

  “That sounds like him,” said Katherine. “And to think I never liked him.”

  “After his speech, reporters started calling.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I thought the senator said it well, so I stuck pretty close to his view of things. All I said about you was that we had reason to believe you were still alive. Grayson Hines wrote the best article. His story is the only reason the sons-of-bitches around here are doing anything, pardon my French.”

  Katherine smiled.

  Jack said, “The ambassador’s meeting is in two weeks. It’s almost over, Katherine.”

  “I sure hope you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right! I told you I’d get you out of here. You just hold on and do like I said. Keep your head low and trust no one, you hear?”

  Katherine didn’t reply.

  Aquarter-mile from the American embassy, inside a KGB apartment on the Moscow Ring Road, two large spools of tape turned slowly on an upright recording machine. A man wearing headphones sat before the machine. He listened to the words “wait and see,” and then parting expressions of love followed by a promise to “touch bases” at the same time the following week. Two clicks signaled the end of the conversation.

  The man pushed STOP and picked up the telephone. A voice answered, and the man said, “Leo Yakunin, please.”

  The line began to ring again. An irritated voice answered.

  “It’s Eduard,” said the man at the recording machine. “We got another one.”

  “Good,” said Leo. “What about a trace?”

  “It was a secure line.”

  “Naturally. Anything significant in the transcript?”

  “Perhaps. She told him they would ‘touch bases’ next week.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I thought you knew English.”

  “I do. It’s not English. A code, perhaps?”

  “Get the cipher boys working on it. It may be important. And send the tape and transcript to me as soon as it’s ready.”

  30

  Two psychiatric hospitals down, four to go. That’s how May began for Victor Perov.

  On the May Day holiday, Victor, Oksana and Valery settled on their assignments. Valery would take Moldavia; Oksana, Kazan; Victor, Leningrad.

  “With any luck,” said Victor, “by the end of the month, we’ll know where Anton is.”

  On May 10, Victor left on the night train for Leningrad. In one hand he carried a suitcase for clothes and papers; in the other was a six-foot-long, hundred-pound wooden case.

  By ten o’clock the next morning he had checked into a hotel and was standing on Arsenal Street outside the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital. He looked up at the guard tower and the walls topped by barbed wire. He recalled his visit to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow and how he had been chilled by the sight of the barbed wire. It no longer had that effect on him. Not after Smolensk. Not after all the late-night interviews.

  Victor went into the guard booth and presented himself as a visitor. Each patient was permitted two visits per month.

  “Patient’s name?”

  “Anton Perov.”

  The guard checked his clipboard. “We have no patient by that name.”

  Victor hadn’t really expected it to be that easy. But by identifying himself at the outset, he was guaranteeing that a record of his visit would make its way back to the KGB. It was as he told Oksana the day he went to the Serbsky to confront Petrus Bruk: “Russians are suspicious when they don’t know your motives.”

  The KGB was a paranoid organization. Its agents would always imagine the worst, and then act as though the worst were true. For Victor, the safest course was to defuse that paranoia by announcing his intentions openly. The KGB wouldn’t arrest a Perov so long as his only motive was to find a brother everyone knew had been killed in Afghanistan. As far as the KGB was concerned, Victor was a harmless nuisance.

  “You must be mistaken,” Victor said to the guard with mock incredulity. “I’ve been here before.”

  The guard checked the list again. “No.”

  “Show me the list.”

  “Get lost, buddy.”

  “Then just show me the part of the list where ‘Perov’ should be.”

  The guard flipped some pages and pushed the clipboard in Victor’s eyes. “See?”

  The list went from V. Petrovich to S. Pozniak.

  “You’re right,” said Victor. “Sorry to have troubled you.”

  He left. The next day, he came back and presented himself to a different guard.

  “Patient’s name?”

  “Vladimir Petrovich.”

  The guard checked the list and frowned. “We have a Valery Petrovich.”

  “That’s what I said: Valery Petrovich.”

  “And who are you?”

  Victor handed over his internal passport. The guard opened it up. Inside lay ten rubles. The guard closed the passport and said, “I’ll have to hold on to this while you’re inside.”

  From his research, Victor knew that Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital had been an ordinary prison before its conversion in the 1960s. The asylum was still operated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The ministry, called the MVD by its Russian initials, was the U.S.S.R.’s security organ. It encompassed everything from the KGB, which was technically just a committee within the ministry, to the traffic cop who stood on the asphalt ruining his arches.

  Inside the asylum, the ceiling rose five stories like the atrium of a ritzy Western hotel. Along the edges were cages filled with people, who looked like wounded animals. Some just sa
t with their backs to their cell walls, curled up and rocking themselves. Others moaned, and their dissonant pitches clashed in the open cave. One man had his penis out and was masturbating. One lunged at Victor as he and his escort passed.

  Victor winced. He wanted to find Anton, but not here, not in this snake pit.

  Victor lagged behind the orderly systematically scanning the cages. His eyes could cover only a fraction of the men in that five-story atrium, perhaps 5 percent. Anton was not among that fraction. Victor was led to a room and left alone. A short time later a nurse came in with a tall man with a neck like a garden hose and a huge, pyramidal head.

  “Who is this?” Victor asked.

  “Valery Petrovich,” said the nurse.

  Valery Petrovich’s head jerked in a spasm at the sound of his name, and he gazed blankly at Victor. One glance told Victor that the man was seriously disturbed.

  “No it’s not,” said Victor.

  “It most certainly is,” said the nurse.

  “Well, it’s notmyValery Petrovich,” said Victor haughtily. The nurse huffed and took her patient out of the room. A few minutes later, the orderly led Victor back through the exercise yard to the guard booth. While in the yard, Victor surveyed the rooftops of buildings outside the compound. About a quarter-mile away, he spotted a yellow-and-white apartment building that would serve his purpose.

  The guard gave Victor his passport, minus the ten rubles. Victor stepped through the prison gate and was back on Arsenal Street, where he had begun less than fifteen minutes earlier. He took a deep breath and felt what every visitor to a prison feels once he has left the compound.Thank god it’s not me.

  It made him ashamed.

  The brief tour of the prison told him one important thing: There was only one prison yard for the entire ward. That simplified things considerably. It was time to get to work.

  The next morning Victor stood at the base of the sixteen-story yellow-and-white apartment building he had spotted from the prison yard. Over his shoulder was a backpack, and in his right hand was his heavy wooden case. He went into the building — there was no security — and rode the elevator to the top floor. From there, he ascended the staircase another half-floor to a dead end at a chain-link door. For once, Victor was grateful for Soviet prefabricated construction. All these buildings were the same, which had guaranteed that Victor’s assumption about the layout of this particular building would be correct. The door was locked with a puny padlock that Victor snapped easily with a metal rod from his backpack. Victor stepped through the door and wound his way through the maze of boxes and tools. He reached a steel ladder that rose a half-story to a metal grate in the ceiling. He set down his wooden case and climbed to the grate, pushed it aside and, a moment later, stood on the roof. He looked around. It took him several seconds to get his bearings and locate the psychiatric hospital. It was a distant speck between the smokestacks of a factory. He went back down the ladder and hauled the heavy wooden case to the roof. He found a place near the edge of the roof and snapped open the catches and lifted the lid. Inside lay the body tube of the telescope Anton had built for him twenty years earlier, along with all the lenses, counterweights, stand, locking mechanisms and other hardware. It took Victor ten minutes to set it up. Using the finder scope, he located the asylum and then moved his eye to the powerful main viewer. He used the positioning screws to zero in on the exercise yard. The scene came in clearly. He smiled. He could make out puddles, even a discarded soda bottle. Fanta. He locked the telescope in position. He got a thermos from the backpack and poured some coffee. He sat back to wait.