The Forbidden Zone

by Michael Hetzer

  Katherine smiled and took Sergei’s arm. “It’s time,” she said.

  He nodded, and they walked back to the house. They rode in silence to White Dacha’s headquarters, arriving at a few minutes to eleven. Sergei went to the corner, and Katherine sat down behind the desk. She took a deep breath. She was nervous.

  “Good luck,” said Sergei.

  She dialed and Cameron answered.

  “Yes, Katherine. I thought that would be you. Well. I’m afraid I have some bad news. The ambassador raised the subject of the Nicaraguan freedom fighters. It was not on the agenda, a kind of sneak attack ordered by the president himself. They spent more than half the evening on that alone. That put them behind schedule. Then the ambassador brought up the refuseniks, which sounded like human rights to the Russians, and well, all hell broke loose. I’m afraid the ambassador never got around to discussing your case.”

  Katherine couldn’t speak. She was numb.

  Cameron said, “There is another chat scheduled in six weeks. We’ll get you on the agenda, then. I promise.”

  Katherine’s ears had begun to ring, and she could barely hear him. Had he just said, six weeks?

  “Six weeks?”

  “I’m very sorry,” said Cameron.

  How could I have let my hopes get so high?

  She would have expected to fall apart, but strangely she accepted the news calmly. Her eyes fell on Sergei, and she smiled thinly at him.

  “Katherine?” said Cameron. “Are you there?”

  “Is there any guarantee this won’t happen the next time?” asked Katherine.

  “I assure you, I will do everything I can — ”

  “But there’s no guarantee.”

  “No,” said Cameron. “No guarantees.”

  “Thank you,” said Katherine. “At least, now I know what I have to do.”

  32

  On a hot day in July, Victor Perov stood in a dark corridor before the door of Pavel Danilov, the man he knew as Sigmund. He knocked and when his widow failed to answer his knock, he knocked again. Asecond time. And but for that minuscule act, he would not have found his twin brother. It was enough to drive a person mad! How very differently things would have turned out! Life was revealed to be infinitely interwoven — Katherine Sears, Konstantin Tarasov, Pavel Danilov, the man with the stub nose, Yevgenia, Oksana, Valery, Anton, himself. They were like cables in a suspension bridge, each bearing its share of a great burden. Cut any single cable and the forces in the remaining cables adjusted instantaneously to keep the bridge standing. The bridge stood, yes, but its mathematics were altered all across its span. An engineer with a calculator and several weeks’ time could have estimated the changes. But the bridge performed the calculation immediately and precisely, like a gigantic, mechanical computer. And so it was when Victor Perov knocked a second time — the great bridge trembled, and the forces changed. Fate was altered.

  Or was it? Could Victor have walked away from the door without having met Pavel Danilov’s widow? Perhaps, after all, this was how God manipulated the universe, with levers as small as the least decision of an inconsequential man. In a single moment, Victor’s old certainties vanished into a fog of doubt.

  Valery Bonderov had another theory — they were “due for a little luck.”

  Victor Perov had begun that fateful July day in Oksana’s cramped south Moscow flat. Victor and Oksana were in the kitchen, sitting on stools, drinking tea from cracked cups and talking about everything but what was on their minds, which was:

  It’s all up to Valery.

  Valery was due any minute from Orel, and he had promised to come directly from the train station. When the door buzzed, they both jumped as though it were a fire alarm. Oksana got up to answer it. Victor followed her up the narrow hall into the foyer. He was filled with dread.

  Valery came through the door carrying a sports bag with a broken zipper. His clothes were wrinkled and his hair was uncombed. He looked like someone who had slept in his clothes, which was probably the case.

  Valery threw his bag on the floor and shook his head with disgust. “He’s not in Orel. I’m . . . I’m sorry. Goddamnit.”

  Nobody spoke. At last Victor said, “Tell us about it.”

  Victor only half-listened to Valery’s story. Valery had done his job, no better and no worse than he and Oksana had done theirs. What consumed Victor’s thoughts was that Orel, the final asylum, had been stricken from the list. At the moment, therewas no list.

  “I was thinking,” said Valery. “Danilov might have waited a month before informing Amsterdam about Anton. That means the asylum would be, not on our list, but on the previous month’s list.”

  Victor nodded perfunctorily. That had occurred to him too.

  “But how would you get it?” asked Oksana. “Didn’t the man at the Dutch embassy say you should never call him?”

  “The problem,” said Victor, “is not getting a new list. I’m prepared to go to every asylum in the Soviet Union if necessary. The problem is time. Time is the enemy.”

  For the moment, there was nothing else to say. Oksana announced she was leaving to pick up Grisha from her mother’s apartment. For now there was no asylum to rush off to.

  “That’s Vykhino, right?” Victor asked. Vykhino was a suburb east of Moscow. It reminded Victor of something.

  Oksana nodded.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  They walked to the subway line and rode the train north for thirty minutes. It was Saturday so it was not crowded, and they sat side by side staring straight ahead. The train rocked them gently. When they reached the city center, they transferred to an eastbound train.

  Victor thought about the search. Where had they gone wrong?

  The answer was: It could have been anywhere. Anton’s asylum might not have been in Danilov’s February report. Perhaps, as Valery suggested, it was in the January report. Or the December report. Or perhaps it was in no report at all, as Koos van der Laan had warned that day in the park. Or perhaps it was in the February report after all, and they had simply not been thorough enough in their search. Anton could have died in the asylum. He could be in solitary confinement. He could be imprisoned under an alias.

  Or perhaps Anton Perov had died in Afghanistan, after all, just as Yevgenia had said. Perhaps she was right, too, about Victor’s motives — he was so desperate to have his brother back that he was prepared to believe anything.

  Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.

  After another twenty minutes, they neared Elektrozavodsky Station.

  “This is my stop,” said Victor.

  Oksana looked at him curiously. “What’s here?”

  “Something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time,” said Victor. “I’ll tell you tonight.”

  He got off and watched the subway train speed away into the tunnel. It grew quiet on the platform, and he got out his wallet. He found a scrap of paper. It said:

  Maria Danilova

  15/3 Little Decembrist Street

  Apt. 77

  Pavel’s widow. This was the vow he had made to Koos van der Laan that day in the park.

  “You’ll pass my information along to her?” Victor had asked.

  “Absolutely not,” said Koos.

  “Doesn’t she have a right to know her husband wasn’t drunk?” asked Victor.

  “Of course. But it’s not my place to tell her. You tell her.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  For weeks, Victor had intended to visit Maria and her young daughter. But he had procrastinated. He had lots of excuses. It was far from the center. It was a bad neighborhood. He was busy with his search. But the truth was, he hadn’t known what to say to her. Now, he thought perhaps he did.

  The Elektrozavodsky region was one of the Russian capital’s worst districts. Muscovites called it “proletarian,” which had once meant righteous but was now a disparagement. Muscovites had become snobs, and Victor supposed he, too, was a snob. But what human being would choose fre
ely to live in such an antiparadise? Factories and people existed side by side in a way that appraised human beings only as components of factories. A scientist by nature, Victor easily imagined the mathematics of the Kremlin’s Great Planner:

  Car Factory + Food + Water + People —> Cars + More Food + More Water + More People

  The machine was regenerative. Hail the socialist miracle!

  For the living components of the socialist miracle, Elektrozavodsk was an urban ghetto of a peculiarly Soviet sort. There was no starvation, no homelessness, no drugs, no gangs, no prostitution, little random crime. Children went to school and learned to read. It would indeed have been paradise on earth but for the squalor. And the desperation.

  The region was a veritable jungle of unsound buildings, aboveground pipes, rusty playground equipment, old cars and exhaust-spewing trucks. The people Victor passed on the street were all dressed poorly. They appeared to be less healthy than the average Muscovite but still more healthy than the average Russian. Though it was early afternoon, Victor saw at least a dozen people staggering under the effects of alcohol. Poplarpukh lay over everything.

  Victor asked directions three times, trying to locate Danilova’s building. At last, he found it and went inside. It reeked of decaying garbage. He climbed the chipped, concrete stairs three flights and crossed a dim corridor until he stood before a wooden door marked “77.”

  Victor knocked and waited. His mind wandered to that night on the wharf — the ambulance racing toward him, the vehicle sailing silently off the side of the wharf, the splash, the icy cold of the water when he jumped in, and Pavel Danilov, husband and father, sinking down into the cold, black Moscow River, a bullet in his head . . .

  No one answered the door. He raised his fist and knocked again.

  Apetite woman with bleached hair and a round, attractive face pulled open the door. She wore a threadbare robe and fuzzy pink slippers. She contemplated Victor Perov with wary brown eyes.

  “Maria Danilova?” Victor asked.

  “Yes?” she asked, slightly out of breath. She arranged her robe and fastened it with a sash.

  “My name is Victor Perov.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “I spoke with your husband — ”

  “I know who you are,” she said coldly. “What do you want?”

  “To talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “I will only be a minute.”

  “This apartment is being watched by the KGB,” she said.

  “So am I.”

  She glared at him. “My daughter is in the bath. I’m surprised I heard you knock at all.”

  “I can wait.”

  “No.” She started to close the door.

  Victor whispered through the gap, “Your husband was murdered.”

  The door stopped. Her one eye peered at him.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “Don’t make me talk about this in the corridor,” Victor said. “May I come in?”

  She looked over his shoulder, her face stolid, then opened the door just wide enough for Victor to turn his body and slip through.

  It was a small apartment, nearly identical to the one Oksana had in south Moscow. Every inch of wall space had been converted to shelving, which was crammed with books. The effect was of a cozy reading room in a library.

  “Thank you very — ”

  “You’re in,” she snapped. “Now, tell me what you just said.”

  “Pavel was murdered.”

  “How do you know this?” she demanded.

  “I was there.”

  “No one was there.”

  “I was. We were supposed to meet that night at Rechnoy Vokzal. I tried to pull him out of the ambulance before it sank. But he was already dead. He had been shot.”

  She looked at him with a blank expression he could not read.

  A child’s cry rose from the bathroom.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Have a seat. I’ll be right with you.”

  She hurried out. Victor went into the living room. Hundreds of books rose from floor to ceiling. Half were medical books, most related to psychology. Victor spottedForensic Psychology, the same text he had read before he began his search for Anton. The rest of the library was a hodgepodge of literature, science, the complete works of Marx and Engels, and a dozen novels in English. Victor was still browsing when Maria came into the room.

  Maria said, “She’ll play alone in the bath a while. I don’t want to talk about this in front of her.”

  “Of course.”

  Maria sat down on the sofa. She lit a cigarette and turned her head to exhale. “They told me he was drunk. Pavel didn’t drink.”

  Victor nodded. “How did you know about me?”

  “The KGB,” she said. “One of the fuckers told me that the son of a ‘higher-up’ — you — was involved, so if I didn’t want my daughter to grow up in an orphanage I had better stop asking questions and start answering a few. So I told the son-of-a-bitch everything. What do I care?”

  So, after all, it had been Maria who had given the KGB Koos van der Laan’s phone number and code name. Koos had been wrong in the park when he speculated that Konstantin Tarasov had gotten the information from Katherine Sears under interrogation. That meant Tarasov had been exactly what he said he was that day in Victor’s office: a KGB detective looking for an ally in Victor Perov.

  Victor told Maria Danilova everything he knew about the death of her husband. When he finished, Maria said, “So you’re saying Pavel was murdered to prevent him from telling you where your brother is?”

  “Yes.”

  She glanced anxiously toward the cupboard. She seemed to be thinking about something when a large splash came from the direction of the bathroom. Her daughter laughed.

  Victor nodded toward the bathroom door. “What’s her name?”

  “Julia,” Maria said. “She still asks for him. ‘Where’s Daddy? When’s Daddy coming home?’”

  She shook her head and smoked her cigarette. “Bastards.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Can you bring Pavel back?”

  “No.”

  “Then what can you do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Soviet Psychiatry Watch gave me some money,” she said. “Some Dutchman met me in a park and gave me a little envelope with some money. I lost my husband so I guess that means I have some money coming to me. I took it for my daughter’s sake. I don’t need money. I need my husband.”

  Victor watched her for a while and then said, “I’m going to carry on his work.”

  “You?” she scoffed.

  “Somebody has to.”

  “Why you?”

  “That’s the trap, isn’t it?” asked Victor.

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Throw away your life. You won’t change a thing.”

  “Pavel did,” said Victor. “Thanks to him, I know my brother is alive.”

  “You found him yet?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s changed?” Her eyes darted toward the cupboard again. She seemed troubled.

  Victor asked, “Why did Pavel work with the SPW?”

  Maria snorted and sat back in the sofa. “I don’t think Pavel knew. At first, I think it was only because he could, or because he was a Jew and couldn’t get into medical school. It might even have been because his father was a Stalinist, and he wanted to hurt him.”

  “I wish I could have met him. He sounds a little like my brother. Anton is a father, too, you know. He has a three-year-old boy, Grisha. He doesn’t remember Anton. Sometimes he gets confused, and he thinks I’m his father.”

  “Why is that?”

  Suddenly, Victor needed Maria to understand. Her predicament was so similar to Oksana’s that he found himself explaining more than he had intended. “His mother and I had an affair.”

  Maria blew smoke out her nose and stared at him.

  Victor went on. “
It was after they told us Anton was killed in Afghanistan. The grief was unbearable. I didn’t know anything could hurt so much. We shared our pain, and then one day our grief turned to love. Or at least I thought it was love. Now I see it was just more grief, but in a new form.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “Oksana? I’m not sure,” Victor said. “She must have known what we had wasn’t really love. But she’s very practical. It’s difficult to raise a child alone.”

  Maria nodded.

  “It may have been nothing more than gratitude and a certain fondness. I think women are just naturally more practical than men.”

  “Not women,” said Maria. “Mothers.”

  Maria snubbed out her cigarette and got to her feet. She went to the cupboard behind Victor and found a shoe box. She sorted through some papers until she found an envelope. She dropped it in Victor’s lap.

  “I got it about a month ago,” she said.

  Victor looked at it. It was addressed to Pavel Danilov. The postmark was Perm, in the Urals. It was already open.

  “What is it?” Victor asked.

  “It’s about your brother,” she said.

  Ahalf-hour later, Victor Perov stood at a taksifon not far from Maria’s apartment. He spoke to Oksana, who was still at her mother’s in Vykhino. Something in Victor’s voice must have alarmed Oksana. “Victor, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I have a letter from Anton!” he cried into the cracked mouthpiece.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We didn’t find him,” Victor said. “But he found us! Oh, Oksana! God knows how he did it, but he found us! Anton’s alive, and I know where he is!”

  33

  But their elation was extinguished as quickly as a match struck in a strong wind. The contents of the letter pretty much guaranteed that.

  Dear Pavel Danilov,

  I am writing to ask for your help.

  My name is Anton Borisovich Perov. I am at present Inmate 222 at Little RockSpecial Psychiatric Hospital. I have been here since November 12, 1983, when Iwas arrested for attempting an illegal border crossing into Norway. At the time, Iwas a deserter fleeing my regiment in Afghanistan. I was being falsely accused ofkilling a fellow soldier, and when I realized they intended to have me executed Ifled.