“This is Zhelezo’s operation,” said the doctor.
Zhelezo, again.
No, Katherine’s memory was tricking her. The doctor hadn’t saidzhelezo. He had saidzhelezy. The last letter had changed to “y.” Why?
The flashback went on.
“Whore,” cursed the guard.
Now they were outside, walking along the path, dodging slushy puddles. Katherine was in the lead . . .
Marching to my grave.
She looked up at the stars. Her eye searched instinctively for the Large Magellanic Cloud. But it was invisible below the horizon.
In a few minutes, I’ll be dead.
The big guard poked his shotgun into her back, and she almost fell.
“I wonder if she-foreigners are any different,” he said ponderously.
The doctor was quiet a few seconds and said, “Forget it.”
“She’s built nice.”
“Yes,” agreed the doctor. “But what if Zhelezo finds out?”
“How would we get caught?” asked the guard.
“I don’t know . . .”
“Listen. It’s simple. We have some fun, and then we do the job. Who’s the wiser? Who’s going to tell Zhelezye?”
Here was athird pronunciation ofzhelezo. This time, the guard added a “ye” to the end. Why? It didn’t make sense.
And then Katherine knew. In the Russian language, word endings mutate depending upon the position of a noun in the sentence, the way, in English, an “M” is added to the word “who” in the interrogatory form “to whom.” In Russian, the grammar is far more complicated, with six possible singular endings for each noun. The endings depend not only on the position of the word in the sentence,but also on its gender. Zhelezo was a genderless word, yet the endings the two men had been using were feminine. That’s when Katherine understood. The doctor and the guard had unwittingly, with the instinct of native speakers, assigned a gender tozhelezo. The endings they had used — “y” in one case, “ye” in another — were feminine. Only now, after three months of Russian grammar at the Bolshevichka institute, did Katherine know enough to explain the mutating word,zhelezo: Zhelezo was a woman.
“Yekatarina?” Sergei was saying in the car. “Yekatarina?”
But Katherine did not answer. She was back in Ithaca, two years earlier, reading Victor’s letter advising her to go home for Christmas.
“I know about exacting parents,” he wrote, “my own mother is known as the Iron Perova.”
Iron.
Zhelezo.
Katherine gasped. “My god. I know who was in the cabin that night.”
“What are you talking — ”
“I’ve got to warn Victor,” she said. “Turn the car around!”
“I don’t understand.”
“Please. Now!”
Sergei shrugged and hit the brakes.
They sped back to the collective, and a few minutes later, Katherine was back on the phone with Cameron.
“I’ve got to speak to Victor,” Katherine said.
Cameron was groggy. “What? What’s happened?”
“It’s urgent.”
“I don’t know how to contact him,” Cameron said irritated. “He callsme, remember?”
“He never left a phone number?”
“What am I, the Yellow Pages? I thought you said it was too dangerous for you two to meet. What’s going on?”
“I . . . I don’t think I should say. It’s . . .” She was having trouble organizing her thoughts. Her mind leaped from memory to memory like a barefoot man on hot pavement — the sound of Zhelezo whispering, the feel of the shotgun in her back as the men calmly discussed raping her, the big guard lying on the floor with his chest blown open . . .
“What?” Cameron asked impatiently.
“I have to speak with him in person.”
“Tell him at your next meeting,Anna Akhmatova. ”
Katherine thought a moment. “But the next ascension is over three weeks away!”
“Is it so urgent?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, and she wasn’t. After all, Victor had told Cameron that everything was all right. But what if Yevgenia had gotten to the orderly? What if the reports Victor was receiving from him were bogus? What if Anton’s treatments were continuing? They could even be accelerated . . .
Katherine said, “If Victor calls, tell him . . .”
Tell him what?To meet was a risk. To not meet might be a bigger risk. To wait three weeks might make the decision irrelevant.
She made up her mind. She would have to trust that her news could wait three weeks. After all, it had waited this long.
“Tell him Anna Akhmatova is anxiously looking forward to discussing poetry next month.”
35
Tell him Anna Akhmatova is anxiously looking forward to discussing poetry nextmonth.
General Yuri Belov hit STOP on the recorder and looked up at Anatoly Podolok. “That’s it, comrade secretary.”
“And the Americans don’t know we’ve tapped this line?”
Belov shook his head. “They think it’s still secure. We had agents examine over twenty thousand phone lines before we found this one. It was an unprecedented search.”
“Did you get a trace?”
“Partial. The call originated in the Yaroslavl Oblast.”
“A pretty wide area. It would take weeks to find her.”
“Four, I figure. Of course, we might get lucky.”
“Only if our luck changes,” Podolok said morosely. He took a drag off his cigarillo and leaned back in his desk chair. “Double the agents on the case. Cut the search time to two weeks.”
Belov nodded. “What are we going to do with her when we find her, comrade secretary? The Americans will know we have her.”
Podolok blew smoke up into the room. “She will resist arrest. When she does, an unfortunate accident will befall her.”
On the third floor of Lubyanka, Leo Yakunin made his report to KGB Director Oleg Shatalin.
“Yaroslavl Oblast, huh?” said Shatalin. “The second Belov gets his hands on her I want to know about it. With Konstantin Tarasov dead, Katherine Sears is the only person who can tie together General Yuri Belov, Anatoly Podolok and the Iron Perova. I have to talk to that woman before Belov does something to shut her mouth — permanently.”
36
Katherine knew something was wrong the moment the stranger came into the classroom. By then it was too late to run.
It was a week after Katherine’s last talk with her father. In that time, the last pieces of her escape plan had begun fitting into place. She had already received her counterfeit internal passport and international passport. Two items remained to be gathered — the exit visa from the U.S.S.R., and the entry visa to Finland. Sergei had learned that the entry visa was a simple matter of applying to the Finnish Embassy. But first, she would need an exit visa, and Sergei had spent the last week combing the darkest recesses of the black market looking for a source. He was not optimistic.
“For a Soviet citizen like Yekatarina Yurgina to leave the U.S.S.R. you must possess a chain of paperwork a kilometer long,” said Sergei, who had spent weeks investigating the procedure. “I never knew what prisoners we all were until now. You can’t get an entry visa to a foreign country without an exit visa from the U.S.S.R. You can’t get an exit visa without an international passport. You can’t get an international passport without an internal passport. You can’t get an internal passport without a letter from your employer. And you can’t get a ticket on a ship without all of that. And every step of the way, there are queues leading to locked offices, corrupt bureaucrats, contradicting rules . . . ach!”
The morning the stranger came to class had begun as usual. She arrived at the institute at eleven o’clock for her Russian class. Her own English I class was at one o’clock, so she had passed the free hour rehearsing her meeting with Victor in two weeks’ time in the bell tower in Zagorsk. How would he react to her news that Yevge
nia Perova, his own mother, was the voice in the cabin that night, that she had ordered the execution of Pavel Danilov, the incarceration of Anton and, presumably, Katherine’s own death?
Katherine was at the front of her class when the door opened and Maya Timofeyeva and the stranger came through. The stranger was about forty years old, bald, wearing a gray polyester suit like all middle-level Moscow bureaucrats. He looked exceedingly serious. Her heart sank.
“Excuse me for invading your class,” said Maya. “But someone has come all the way from Moscow to make an important announcement.”
Katherine stepped aside to make room for the stranger. She rolled a piece of chalk nervously between her fingers.
The man cleared his throat. “Comrades. I have indeed come all the way from Moscow.” He turned to Katherine. “I have come to meetyou , Yekatarina Yurgina.”
The chalk broke in Katherine’s hand.
“I am the All-U.S.S.R. director for adult continuing-education schools. I have just seen the scores for the proficiency exams in English I. This class got the highest average score of any class in the entire Soviet Union. Three of the top ten scores came out of this class. For such an extraordinary achievement I felt I should come up and give the news in person. Congratulations.”
The class was applauding. Maya was applauding. Katherine saw that the man had put out his hand. She raised her hand numbly toward him. He gripped it and shook enthusiastically.
She was only half-listening as he went on to describe the honor she had won— the chance to represent Soviet teachers of English at an international teaching conference.
Later that evening, when she told Sergei the news, he let out a whoop that surprised her.
“What?” she asked.
He was grinning. “Don’t you see?”
She shook her head.
“The conference is in East Berlin!”
“Yes . . .”
“Germany!”
Then it hit her. “My god.”
He laughed. “That’s right. You’ve got your exit visa.”
That night Katherine and Sergei sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and going over the details of her departure.
It was perfect. She would hunker down four more months and then leave the country as an honored Soviet teacher. Once in Berlin, she would simply go to the American consulate and declare her true citizenship. The next day, Katherine would tell Maya Timofeyeva she needed the exit visa early; Sergei insisted she get the paperwork in hand as early as possible.
Katherine sipped her coffee. The coffee’s bitterness heightened her senses, and she found herself thinking about Sergei. The last weeks had taken a toll on her friend and savior. Gone was the sparkle in Sergei’s eyes that had made her trust him that first day at the train station. The man was exhausted.
And no wonder! His wife was staying at his dacha south of Moscow, so he was traveling hundreds of miles each day from his apartment in Moscow, to Ivanovka, to his dacha, to various ministries and embassies in Moscow, and then back to Ivanovka. Somewhere in this schedule, he managed to work a few hours at the taxi park at Paveletsky Station.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For everything.”
“Oh.” He smiled thinly. “My pleasure.”
“Someday, I’ll pay you back,” said Katherine, but the words sounded hollow.
There was a knock on the cabin’s front door.
Katherine and Sergei exchanged anxious glances.
“Who would be calling at this time of night?” Katherine asked. It was nearly midnight.
“You stay here,” said Sergei and got up. She heard him open the door and then speak a moment with someone. He came back into the room looking shaken.
“What’s wrong?” she asked anxiously. “Who’s there?”
“I think you had better go to the door,” he said.
Her heart pounding, she got out of her chair and went up the narrow hall. On the stoop was Maya Timofeyeva and four other teachers from the institute.
“Maya Grigorevna?” Katherine said.
“May we talk to you, Yekatarina?”
“Of course. Please, come in.”
“No,” said Maya, waving her hand. “It’s late and we can talk more on Monday. We’re just so excited we wanted to come over immediately.”
Katherine held on to the door for support. “What is it?”
“We’ve talked it over among ourselves, and I talked to the directors in Moscow, and I know we’re just a small institute for farmers, and Bolshevichka is not much of a village compared to a big city like Riga, but, well, we would be honored if you would consider joining our collective as a permanent member.”
For the citizens of Bolshevichka, there was no greater honor. Katherine gaped at them as her eyes filled up with tears of gratitude.
She couldn’t think of a thing to say.
The following week passed in a blur of paperwork. A bottle of Georgian cognac convinced a man at the Foreign Ministry to put his stamp on the visa despite Katherine’s absence. A carton of American cigarettes convinced a man at the Education Ministry that Yekatarina Yurgina, though not a certified teacher, was entitled to represent the U.S.S.R. at the conference. No bribe could expedite the KGB, which had to certify that Yekatarina Yurgina’s departure from the Soviet Union posed no threat to national security. That line went for three days.
At last, Wednesday arrived — the day before Katherine was to see Victor in the bell tower. She awoke refreshed and went to the kitchen for her usual large breakfast of potatoes, sausage and coffee with Sergei and Baba Krista.
When they finished, Sergei offered Katherine a ride to Bolshevichka. He was on his way to Moscow that morning to see a diplomat in the Finnish embassy.
“No thanks,” she said. “I feel like walking.”
She left a few minutes later, stepping out onto the creaky floorboards of Baba Krista’s front porch. The door slammed shut behind her, and she looked into the sky for clues about the weather. Cotton ball clouds dotted a pale sky. A breeze played with her hair and carried a smell that said “summer” but whispered “autumn.” There wouldn’t be too many more days like this one. Not this year.
She decided to walk along the river bank to the institute. It would take a little longer, but it was a beautiful day. She crossed the beet field to the line of trees that marked the river and then disappeared into the narrow band of foliage that hugged the river on either side. A dirt trail maintained only by the passing feet of fishermen and swimmers wove through the poplars, birches and scrubby pines, up and down the bank, two miles to Bolshevichka.
She felt good as she started along the trail. Her departure was all but certain. Four months of easy living in Ivanovka was all that stood between her and freedom.
She made her way along the bank, past the swinging bridge, toward the institute. The poplars closed in around her as the trail climbed up to the road. She had just stepped out of the trees when she froze. Two police cars idled in the parking lot. She took a step back into the cover of the trees and peered up through the branches. A black Volga was parked beside the police cars. Her heart raced.
It couldn’t be! Not now! Not when she was so close!
A strange man came through the front door. He glanced at his watch and looked up and down the road. He looked straight ahead, and his gaze fell on the foliage around her. She stopped breathing. He looked at his watch again and went back inside. She exhaled.
She took a few more steps backward, keeping the trees between her and the institute. A twig snapped under her foot, and she almost screamed. The institute disappeared into the foliage. She stood there a second, the river gurgling beside her. A crow cawed in the distance.
Her documents. She had to have her documents. They were in her room, stuffed between the pages ofSoviet Latvia. She turned and walked swiftly along the bank. She began to jog, and then to run. How did they find her? Her phone calls to Cameron — they must have traced t
he line. Sergei had warned her about that.
How much time did she have? She calculated. The men would wait a while at the institute, maybe a half-hour, then they would realize their ambush had failed, and they would go in search of her.
She stayed on the river bank, using the trees for cover. When she reached the clearing where the swinging bridge crossed over, she stopped and peered up the arc of the bridge. No one. She sprinted for the trees on the other side and kept on going, running as fast as she could, over the rocks, up the steep bank, then down to the flats. Her bare ankle brushed some nettles, and she was only vaguely aware of the sting. After twenty minutes, she reached the White Dacha beet field that stretched to Ivanovka. She came out of the protective trees and started across the field. She was in the open now so she walked, trying not to attract attention. The road was on her right, and Ivanovka was visible about a quarter-mile straight ahead. She drew closer, and Baba Krista’s house came into view along the grass street.
She was about a hundred yards away when she saw the man on Baba Krista’s side porch. He was smoking a cigarette and gazing at the horizon.
Katherine dropped down into the dirt. Just as she did, his eyes went to where she had been standing. He stood still a minute, looking, and then he paced around the corner to the front of the house. He was out of view.
Now Katherine guessed what must have happened. They had come for her right after she had left for the institute. Because she had taken the long way along the river, they hadn’t been able to find her. So they sent men to the institute to wait for her. Sergei’s taxi was gone, which meant that Sergei, too, had left before they came. They now had men positioned at both ends of her route. She was trapped.
But she had seen them first, and that was something. It might still be possible to go back to the river, follow it another half-mile to the road and hitch a ride to Moscow. And then what? She could go to Zagorsk the next day and ask for Victor’s help. But even if he could hide her, what would she do next? Assume a new alias and start all over again to get new passports, a new exit visa — this time without Sergei? No. If she acted fast, perhaps she could make it to Tallinn before the KGB realized that Katherine Sears, alias Yekatarina Yurgina, had an exit visa and might be trying to flee the country. Once they knew that, her documents would be of no use. Every passport control officer in the Soviet Union would be on the lookout for Yekatarina Yurgina. She had to move fast. And she had to have her documents.
The Forbidden Zone Page 36