The circumstances of my arrest may have some bearing on my case, and,therefore, I will relate them to you.
OnNovember 9, 1983, I was on the Kolsky Peninsula near Norway. I wasmaking a survey of the border fortifications in advance of my escape attempt thenext day. By chance I saw a man gunned down as he fled across the forbiddenzone. I escaped back into the forest on the Soviet side, but somehow the KGBfound me, and I was arrested the next day. Two days after that, I was sent to LittleRock and put under the care of Dr. Lazda. I never had a trial or a commitmenthearing.
My life here is a daily nightmare. My first month, I was interrogated every dayunder the influence of sodium Amytal. That was only the beginning. After that,the treatments began in earnest. For three months, I was given large doses ofinsulin that gave me seizures and left me in shock. I awoke from these seizureswith severe memory loss. I would recover my memory as time passed, but nevercompletely. Parts of my body fall numb from time to time and remain that wayfor weeks.
After three months, I don’t know why, they changed my treatment and startedme on aminophenomyl three times a day. It makes me so lethargic. I find it hardto concentrate. It is so painful to the muscles where they give the injection that Ican’t sit or lie down for hours afterward. Though I am tired all the time, I stayawake at night because, in my drug regimen, that is the only time when I havefull use of my faculties. It is at such an hour, with the asylum asleep, that I writethis letter begging your aid.
I do not believe that I can live much longer under these conditions. The onlything that keeps me from taking myown life is the hope of seeing my wife andson again. I ask you to get word to Western agencies, to ask them to publish thedetails of my plight. Perhaps Western pressure can protect me in ways our ownlaws have failed to.
Do not inform my family about my conditions. I have my reasons for this, andI ask you to respect them. If I die in here, then let them think I died in Afghanistan, as Dr. Lazda assures me they have been told.
I am sorry to lay this burden on you. But I do not know where else to turn.
Sincerely,
Anton Borisovich Perov
The letter was dated April 10, 1984.
Almost three months ago.
“Do we go to Yevgenia, now?” asked Oksana that evening at Victor’s apartment.
“No,” said Victor. “I have to see him first. It’s the only way. I’m going to Perm tonight.”
“I’m going with you.”
There were no seats on the eastbound night train from Moscow’s Kazan Station, so Victor bribed a conductor. Oksana slept in the conductor’s cabin, while Victor was put in a compartment with three steelworkers who drank vodka and ate smoked fish all night.
They arrived in Perm at noon, carrying two large backpacks and Victor’s telescope. They hailed a taxi and paid the driver handsomely to take them to the asylum. Victor’s money had run out weeks ago, and he was now living off money from the sale of household goods to black market vendors Valery knew. So far, Victor had sold a full set of Czechoslovakian china, a Polish crystal bowl, and two oil paintings by the celebrated impressionist Sergei Fuzin. The items were all Yevgenia’s, and there would be hell to pay when she discovered them missing.
The taxi driver took them east out of Perm into the countryside. After a half-hour, the land began to rise, and the road narrowed. They were moving into the Urals. The air grew cooler as their altitude rose. At last, the car came over a rise, and the driver pointed into a valley.
“There it is,” he said.
Little Rock.
“Stop the car,” said Victor.
They got out and Victor surveyed the scene. Little Rock Special Psychiatric Hospital was nestled in a shallow depression in the hills. A cement-and-barbedwire wall enclosed five barracks, a guard tower and several other smaller buildings. It was just as Gennady Obolensky had described that night in Oksana’s apartment.
“Where do the workers live?” Victor asked the driver.
“There’s a village about a mile east of here.”
“What’s it called?”
The driver shrugged. “I don’t think it has a name. We call it the ‘village near Little Rock.’”
The road ahead wound another mile to the asylum’s front gate and then around the compound. It disappeared over a hill in the distance. To the east, along the road to the asylum, a lonely hill rose to a rocky outcrop.
“Take us there,” Victor said pointing.
“Bald Top,” said the driver, and they got back in the car.
They reached the base of Bald Top, and the driver pulled onto the grassy shoulder. Victor paid the fare plus a generous tip. They stood on the roadside with their backpacks and telescope as the taxi did a U-turn, spun its wheels in the gravel and sped away. It got very quiet. Wind howled through the valley like air blown into a soda bottle.
Victor and Oksana hiked for an hour to the summit of Bald Top. Then Victor crawled to the edge of the cliff and peered down. About a quarter-mile away stood Little Rock.
After they put up the tent, Victor assembled the telescope. He positioned it behind a boulder, which provided natural cover. The tent was far enough back on the summit that it would be invisible from the asylum. They had chosen a perfect observation point.
An hour later, and just twenty-four hours after Maria Danilova had pulled Anton’s letter from a shoe box, Victor was peering through his telescope at the exercise yard of Little Rock Special Psychiatric Hospital.
The days passed like a long, miserable road trip. The first night, the temperature dropped to forty-six degrees. It was even colder the second night. On the third day it began to rain. It continued to rain, day after day, without pause. After a while, everything was so soaked it seemed that the rain was rising out of the ground. They could get neither warm nor dry. When they weren’t taking their turn behind the telescope they were huddled in their sleeping bags. Oksana shivered so badly sometimes that she had trouble keeping her eye over the eye-piece. She never complained, and Victor was too fearful of the lioness to suggest he relieve her before her shift was over.
They used heat tablets to boil water for coffee, since they didn’t dare build a fire. They ate like mice, nibbling on a slab of cheese roughly the size of a cement block. They also had a dozen sausages that Victor sliced with a pocket knife. On the back slope of Bald Top, Oksana had found mushrooms and dewberries, which, along with six loaves of bread and the water Victor brought from a stream two miles away, completed their diet.
The asylum’s regimen revealed itself early along. Prisoners were brought out in shifts to one of two yards bounded by the wards themselves. First came A ward, then B ward, V ward, G ward, D ward, and so on, according to the Russian alphabet.
The first day, the inmates were outside for half-hour shifts. Anton was not among them. After that, the shifts were cut to fifteen minutes because of the rain. Again, Anton was not to be found. The rain kept up, and soon it was their new enemy.
On the last night of the first week, Victor lay in the dark tent in his damp clothes in a damp sleeping bag listening to the hiss of rain on the canvas. He was just wondering if Oksana was awake when she blurted out, “Perhaps he was moved.”
They both understood what she was really saying: Anton was dead.
“How the hell would we know?” Victor snapped. “This goddamn rain — ”
“Victor!”
And so began the second week.
On the tenth day, the rain stopped. Victor awoke with excitement and threw open the flap of the tent. He peered out, groaned and fell back inside. Thick fog lay over everything. Victor didn’t even bother to set up the telescope that day, or the next day when the fog persisted. They stayed in the tent most of those two days, finishing up the sausage and bread.
The twelfth day broke sunny. Victor and Oksana scrambled out of the tent and went to work. Victor went to fetch water while Oksana prepared a breakfast of cheese, mushrooms and coffee.
She handed Victor a metal cup. “That
’s the last of the coffee.”
“If he’s here, they’ll bring him out today,” said Victor. “This is the first decent weather in ten days.”
B ward came into the yard through the east door at exactly 11:25 A.M. Bent over and looking through his eyepiece, Victor could make out puddles in the yard, footprints of the inmates, and even the muzzle of the gun in the guard tower. Visibility was excellent. The inmates filed out in a line and then scattered. They reassembled in small groups. There were several men in wheelchairs. They were a motley bunch, full of twitches, tumors, disturbed expressions, pocked complexions and bad teeth — at least as bad as Victor had seen in Leningrad.
With Oksana beside him, Victor scanned the faces in group after group in the yard. It took fifteen minutes. Nothing. But since the day was sunny, the men remained in the yard. Victor used the extra time to go back over all the faces. He was moving from one group to another in the yard when his tunnel vision fell briefly on a middle-aged man in a wheelchair. Something about the man made Victor pause. The man’s hair had been shaved off like all the prisoners’. He had a dull stare, and his head was tipped strangely to one side as though its weight was too great a burden for his feeble neck. Victor frowned and looked at the face. For nearly a minute, he squinted into the eyepiece. Then a cold chill crawled up his spine. He gasped and lifted his eye from the viewer.
“What’s wrong?” Oksana asked.
He didn’t speak. He just stood there. She pushed him aside and peered into the viewer.
“It’s just a . . .” she began, and then grew quiet.
Victor stood numbly beside her for two minutes while she looked. Then she stepped back from the eyepiece and turned her face toward Victor. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“No!” she cried, and threw herself at him. He put his arms around her. She struggled like an animal in his grasp.
“Who did this?” she cried and beat her fists on his chest. “Who did this? Who? Who?”
At last, exhausted, she collapsed. He held her close while she sobbed. Victor looked over Oksana’s shoulder, down at the distant asylum. He made himself a promise.
I will find out who did this. And when I do, I will make him pay. By god, he willpay.
34
It took Katherine Sears four months and six days to confront her memories of that night at the KGB safe house.
That was still a lot sooner than she would have liked.
All during those slow summer months in Ivanovka, Katherine was haunted by half-images and scraps of dialogue from that night. They flashed before her eyes like a strobe light, and left her trembling and disoriented. Almost anything could trigger an episode — a word from a student, the sight of a distant forest line at night, even the smell of a Soviet space heater. She felt like one of those Army veterans who dove for cover whenever a car backfired. A particularly bad flashback had come during a lecture, and she was forced to sit down while Igor rushed to get a glass of water. Instead of fading with time, the flashbacks were becoming clearer and more frequent. The reason was obvious — and terrifyingly unavoidable: As her knowledge of Russian grew, she was capable of understanding more and more of what had transpired that night. The memory was like a cut weed that kept coming back stronger because the root was intact and growing far underground. Her photographic memory, which she had always claimed as a gift, had become a curse.
Still, until that afternoon in late July when Sergei uttered the word that broke down her defenses, Katherine had managed to keep buried the memories of her ordeal — and with them the terrible truth about who was behind Anton Perov’s imprisonment. But with that single word from Sergei, she could resist no longer. It was as though a door opened, a magic door that could only be unlocked with the magic word.
The word waszhelezo.
It meant “iron.”
It was August 29, a month after the diplomatic fiasco between the American ambassador and the Soviet foreign minister. For Katherine, the month had passed in a lazy succession of sunny days and peaceful, cricket-chirping nights. Katherine lived by the natural rhythm of Bolshevichka: never hurried, never idle. During her days, Katherine taught English and attended her Russian classes. In the evenings, she prepared her lectures, did her homework and readSoviet Latvia, which she was using to build her vocabulary as well as to learn enough to maintain her cover as a Polish Latvian. Occasionally, she visited with friends, spending long evenings around a table of tea, cookies and sliced cucumber. Bit by bit, Bolshevichka came to life for Katherine, filling up with brave struggles and petty intrigues, courageous hopes and drunken desperation. At times, it seemed to Katherine that Bolshevichka life was more rural than Russian. At other times, as when someone would talk offhandedly about losing a family member to famine or Stalinist repressions, she was reminded of just what a stranger she was. She couldn’t figure out if Russians valued life less than Americans, or if they simply accepted suffering in a way Katherine never could.
So came the day at the end of August when Sergei and Katherine made a special trip to White Dacha. It was Wednesday, and Katherine was expecting news from her father about his last-ditch effort to force action from the State Department. She had expected to be connected immediately with her father, but Cameron Abbott had some surprising news.
“Victor called,” he announced. “He found Anton.”
Katherine closed her eyes and whispered, “Thank god.”
Cameron went on for several minutes. Anton was in a place called Little Rock Special Psychiatric Hospital. Victor had bribed an orderly to stop the treatments and then gone to his mother, Yevgenia, who was using her considerable influence to get Anton transferred. From the orderly, Victor was already getting rave reports on Anton’s improving condition. Deadened nerves were healing, memory was returning. Anton no longer needed the wheelchair. Victor hadn’t seen Anton yet, but he hoped it would only be a few more weeks until Yevgenia could work that out.
“He said to say ‘thank you,’” Cameron said.
Katherine recalled all that she had read in Ithaca about special psychiatric hospitals. She shuddered.
“So it has not been for nothing,” she said.
“Victor also said to remind you he’s always ready to discuss poetry with Anna Akhmatova on the ascension of Magellan,” said Cameron, adding, “whatever that means.”
Katherine smiled. “Let me speak to Dad.”
Her father came on the phone. “Katherine?”
“Hi, Dad.”
“How are you, Kat-Kat?”
“I’m fine. So, what did they say in Washington?”
Jack groaned. “Washington — the place is a nest of rattlesnakes.”
“It’s all right, Dad. It’s not your fault.”
“You’ve been put on the agenda for the ambassador’s chat in two weeks.”
“I understand. Listen, Dad, I have a favor to ask.”
“Yes?”
“It’s a big favor, and I want you to promise me you’ll do it.”
“What is it?” he asked suspiciously.
“Promise.”
“Okay. Okay. I promise.”
“Go home.”
“Home?” he exclaimed. “No!”
“Please, Dad.”
Time was running out. Katherine could feel her enemies closing in. As time passed, she came to truly appreciate just how many different ways she could be tripped up. Someone could recognize her face from the newspaper, the phone line could be bugged, her repeated calls from White Dacha could arouse suspicion, her link to Sergei’s taxi park — anything could spell the end.
“I can’t leave you alone.”
“I’m not alone.”
“You’re not trusting these people?” he exclaimed. “I told you — ”
“Ya znayu to, chto ty skazal,” Katherine snapped.I know what you told me.
“Katherine?” Jack said, confused. “What the hell . . .”
She went on in Russian. “I’ve learned a few things since I’ve been here, Dad. I
haven’t forgotten your sermons, but they can’t save me now.”
Jack Sears was quiet a moment. “You speak Russian like a peasant,” he said in scholarly Russian.
“Promise me you’ll go home.”
“All right,” he said resignedly.
Katherine returned to English. “Thank you.”
“For what?” he asked miserably.
“I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, Kat.”
In the car on the way back to Ivanovka, Sergei bubbled with nervous excitement. “So, it’s set. There’s no turning back.”
Katherine shook her head, unable to share his enthusiasm. She was worried about her father; she had never heard Jack Sears sound so beaten as he had on the telephone.
“Don’t go soft on me now, Yekatarina,” Sergei teased. “This was your idea, after all. Where’s myzheleznaya amerikanka? ”
Katherine froze. Sergei had just called her his “Iron American.” Iron.Zhelezo. The word ricocheted in her head.
Zhelezo. Zhelezo. Zhelezo.
A door burst open and memories poured through. Katherine felt sick.
Sergei looked at her and said, “Yekatarina. Are you all right? Yekatarina . . .”
Zhelezo can go to my prick!” said the big guard. “Theamerikanka doesn’t speak Russian. What difference does it make?”
“We must stick to the prescribed precautions,” said the doctor. “No slipups.”
They were in the cabin. Katherine was in a chair with a hood over her head. Her hands were tied behind her back. The Tatar had left ten minutes earlier to intercept Sigmund. Katherine had the impression, even without knowing the language, that he had left on the orders of a fourth person: The leader, the one who whispered, the one they called Zhelezo. Katherine had heard him come into the cabin an hour before, and she had felt the tension in the room rise. Zhelezo was particularly interested in what Katherine had told Victor. Then Zhelezo was gone, leaving Katherine alone with the doctor and the big guard.
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