The Forbidden Zone

by Michael Hetzer

  A picket fence ringed Baba Krista’s yard. In the back, it opened up into a vegetable garden. There was an old shed that had once been the outhouse.

  Katherine got slowly to her feet and, hunched over, sprinted toward the house. She crept up to the foot of the fence, using the shed for cover. She squatted and peeked around to the front side of the house. The man was still on the porch smoking. He was an enormous man with a face that seemed to be slipping off his skull. A holstered gun was strapped to his side.

  “Comrade general Belov!” someone called from inside the house.

  He flicked his cigarette to the ground and disappeared into the house.

  So there were at least two of them.

  She circled the fence to the back yard and found the gate, gingerly lifting the latch and pushing it open. She checked the three windows on the back side of the house. Baba Krista passed in front of the middle window. She was at the kitchen sink (filling the tea kettle for her guests, perhaps?). Katherine waited until Baba Krista turned away, and then, keeping low, she sprinted through the garden toward her bedroom window. When she reached the house, she put her back against the shingles directly below the window and forced herself to slow her breathing. After a long minute, she peeked up through the glass. There was her bed, the icon of St. George on the wall and, through the door, the hallway and the bathroom. A man came through the bathroom door, still zipping up his fly. She ducked down. She waited a minute and then peered over the sill again. On the small table beside the bed laySoviet Latvia. She stood up and gently pressed up on the window. It didn’t move. She tried again, a little harder. Nothing. She looked up through the glass at the latch and saw why. She had locked it the previous evening.

  She slid back down to the ground. There was only one thing to do. She inched along the house to the kitchen window. She could hear someone moving around inside. Baba Krista? She raised herself up and looked in. Baba Krista was at the stove, leaning over a kettle of tea. Katherine stood so that her head and shoulders were visible. Baba Krista’s eyes caught the movement, and her head turned. Their eyes met, and the old woman froze. Then she raised three fingers and pointed behind her.

  Three men. In the living room.

  Katherine nodded and then mouthed the word “passport.” Baba looked at her quizzically. Katherine repeated it, but Baba shook her head. She didn’t understand. With her finger Katherine wrote “PASPORT” in Cyrillic letters on the window. Baba Krista read it and nodded. Katherine was about to wipe it away when a man came into the kitchen behind Baba Krista. Katherine ducked down as Baba Krista turned. PASPORT was still written on the glass.

  On the ground, her body trembled as she waited for the sound of voices raised in excitement at the discovery of what was written on the glass. A moment later she heard a tapping at the window and looked up. “Where?” was written on the glass.

  Katherine erased what she had written and so did Baba. Katherine held out her palms side by side, then closed and opened them like a book. Baba Krista nodded. There was no question aboutwhich book Katherine was indicating. There was only one book in Katherine’s life,Soviet Latvia.

  Katherine slid down and waited. Minutes passed.

  Then, over her head, she heard the window open.

  A hand appeared over the sill. It was the bony, clawlike hand Katherine had watched so many nights knitting in the living room. It clutched two passports. Peeking out from the cover of the international passport was Katherine’s exit visa.

  Katherine reached up and gave the old hand a light squeeze before it disappeared through the crack in the window.

  There was no time to lose now. Katherine backed out of the yard through the gate. She heard the familiar squeak of the front door being opened. Someone was coming! She darted for the shed. The porch floorboards groaned, and she dove into the dirt. She lay there a minute panting, bracing herself for the shouting that would indicate she had been spotted. Nothing. She listened hard, and she could hear men chatting. She didn’t dare peek around the corner of the shed; the men were just fifteen feet from her. She just lay there, waiting. They stayed on the porch for what seemed a very long time, and then a cigarette butt landed six inches from Katherine’s hand. She heard the men moving again on the creaky porch. The door opened and then slammed shut. She waited. It was quiet.

  Katherine got to her feet and inched back along the fence to the beet field. She reached it and, with a last glance toward the house, began to run toward the line of trees at the river. A minute later, she reached the trees and fell panting onto the river bank. She lay like that for a while. Then she got to her feet.

  Now what?

  She looked across the beet field toward the road, and her heart leaped. About two hundred yards away, moving very slowly toward Ivanovka, was a yellow taxi.

  Sergei.

  He was looking for her.

  She realized in an instant that if she hesitated, he would pass by. She had two choices. She could hurry along the path to a point where the river passed close to the road. This option had the advantage of keeping her hidden, but she was also likely to arrive too late to intercept Sergei. A straight-line course through the open field was her only chance. She leaped out of the trees at a full run. The ground was soft, and her pace was slower than she had anticipated. She came nearer, but the car didn’t slow. She could see the back of Sergei’s head now; he was looking the wrong way. He was already past the point where she had calculated they would cross paths. Desperation overtook her, and she tried to force her legs to move faster, but they only sank deeper in the loose soil. She waved her arms and screamed.

  “Sergei!”

  His head whipped around, and the car screeched to a stop. The passenger door flew open. She reached the pavement, went around the back of the car and leaped in. Before she could even get the door closed he hit the gas.

  “They found me!” she cried over the roaring engine.

  His jaw was set, and his hands clutched the steering wheel.

  He shook his head. “They foundus. ”

  37

  Sergei drove a quarter-mile past Ivanovka and then turned onto a tractor path.

  “Where are we going?” Katherine asked.

  Sergei kept his eyes straight ahead. “We have to get around the roadblocks.”

  “Roadblocks?”

  Sergei nodded. “That’s how I realized what must have happened. I saw the roadblock and looped back to the institute. I saw the police cars there and hoped you were somewhere en route.”

  He took the taxi along the path. Weeds scratched at the side of the car. A wood building, crumbling and half-burned, loomed ahead.

  “What is this place?” Katherine asked.

  “The old Ivanovka railway station.”

  They circled the station house. A sign lay tilted in the dirt. It said “IVANO.” The rest had decayed. Sergei took the car up a slight embankment to the railroad tracks. To Katherine’s amazement, Sergei turned right and started through the weeds along the old railroad corridor. She braced herself for the rattle of the railroad ties. It didn’t come.

  “It’s smooth,” said Katherine in wonder.

  Sergei nodded. His eyes were fierce with concentration.

  “They pulled up the ties a few years back,” he said. “They needed them somewhere else.”

  They went slowly along the old track. Trees lined both sides of the corridor. Neither of them spoke. After twenty minutes, they reached a crossing on the main road to Moscow. Sergei stopped, put the car in neutral and lifted the emergency brake. He shifted in his seat and, for the first time since she jumped into the car a half-hour earlier, he faced her.

  “That should put us clear of the roadblocks,” he said. “Now, what I recommend — ”

  “Take me to Tallinn,” Katherine said.

  “Tallinn?” Sergei exclaimed. “You don’t have your . . .”

  His voice trailed off, and his eyes widened with astonishment. Katherine was waving her passports at him.

&n
bsp; “You went back,” he said with amazement.

  She nodded.

  His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Your entry visa for Finland won’t be ready until next week.”

  “By then my papers will be invalid,” said Katherine.

  “They found you! Your papers are invalidnow! ”

  “Maybe not in Tallinn,” said Katherine. “It’s another republic, far from Moscow.”

  “Notthat far.”

  “Just listen a minute, comrade pessimist. It stands to reason that they can’t get word everywhere immediately. Even if they know I’m fleeing — ”

  “They know.”

  “ — they won’t know how or where. I could be planning to swim to Turkey for all they know.”

  Sergei said nothing.

  “There is a ferry out of Tallinn tomorrow at two o’clock,” said Katherine. “If I can just get on the ship before they receive word from Moscow about me, then I can have someone from the embassy waiting for me at the port in Helsinki when I arrive.”

  “I don’t know,” he said doubtfully.

  “What choice do I have?”

  Sergei didn’t answer.

  Katherine said, “Now, if you could just drop me at a train station, I could — ”

  “Train station!” Sergei exclaimed. “That’s the first place they’ll look for you. You wouldn’t get through the front door.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “No you won’t,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”

  She shook her head. “No, Sergei, you’ve done enough.”

  “How will you get a ticket for the ship? You don’t even have a Finnish entry visa.”

  Katherine winced. This was the weak link.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Listen, I’m not going to just abandon you like this. These bastards can’t get away with this. I won’t let them. You know you need me. For god’s sake, let me help you.”

  Katherine closed her eyes. Sergei was right. She’d never get through without his help.

  She opened her eyes and looked at him gratefully.

  “Good!” he said and then gazed thoughtfully up the road. “Two o’clock tomorrow you say?” He looked at his watch.

  “Can we make it?” she asked.

  He released the emergency brake and put the car in gear. “We’ll see, won’t we?”

  He took the car off the railroad corridor and turned north on the single-lane road.

  They made their way northwest, snaking through rural, European Russia. Through the dirty windshield, Katherine watched it roll past. Some of the villages still had their musical, old-Russian names like Dolgorukovo (Long-Armed) and Sosnovka (Little Pine); others, like Bolshevichka, had clunky, Soviet names such as Elektrozavodsk (Power Station Town). But apart from the names, the villages were pretty much the same. Along the road stood heavily latticed wooden cottages in need of paint. They had roof-high wood piles with rickety picket fences and busted gates in front. Old women in babushka scarves and house slippers bent under burdens worthy of mules, while young men with dirty fingers and eager eyes squatted around bottles of vodka and plates of pickled garlic. And everywhere people worked in the dirt — not in the barren, rolling fields that stretched in every direction, but in the tiny, bountiful plots within the picket fences. This was the Russia Katherine had come to know in Ivanovka and Bolshevichka. To her, thiswas Russia. Moscow was an aberration.

  On they flew. Katherine felt as though a stone had been thrown into a pond and now she was the fish trying to swim ahead of the expanding ripples. She had a head start, but would the ripples overtake her before she got to Tallinn? How long would it take the search for Katherine Sears, alias Yekatarina Yurgina, to engulf the Tallinn port?

  They drove a long time, stopping only to fill the gas tank from two aluminum canisters that Sergei, like all Russian drivers, kept in the trunk. After three hours, Sergei pulled up to a gasoline pump at a collective farm. The pump was closed, so Sergei wandered off into the village to look for the station operator.

  Katherine found a market and bought bread and a can of tuna. Sergei returned a half-hour later, grumbling. He had failed to get gas.

  From a taksifon, Sergei phoned his neighbor at the dacha. He left a message that he was away on business and would be back in three days.

  “Will the KGB question her?” Katherine asked.

  He shrugged. “She’ll tell them I have a mistress.”

  Katherine frowned. “Is that what she thinks has been going on?”

  “That’s what I let her think.”

  “But why?”

  “Because she would believe it,” he said.

  Katherine didn’t ask if that meant Sergei had taken mistresses in the past. At her evening tea parties in Bolshevichka, Katherine had heard enough stories about Russian men’s infidelity, of young girls’ complicity, and of Russian wives’ tolerance of it. The whole thing confused Katherine. She knew Sergei adored his wife. Why would he cheat on her? Was it all part of his romantic view of himself? He had certainly never tried to take advantage of Katherine in that way. In her vulnerable position it would have been easy enough. There had been times when she had caught him leering at her in a way that made her wonder. She had worried at those times that there would be a confrontation, but Sergei had always behaved like a gentleman.

  So Katherine didn’t ask Sergei to explain. She accepted now that there were things about the Soviet Union she would never understand.

  They drove on. She used Sergei’s pocket knife to cut the bread and spread the tuna for sandwiches. They ate as they drove. Sergei kept glancing toward the gas gauge and muttering. Just as the gauge slipped into red, a tractor came around a bend toward them. Sergei flashed his lights and held out three fingers. The farmer flashed back.

  “Ha!” Sergei cried victoriously.

  He did a U-turn and headed back up the road. They found the tractor pulled onto the shoulder a few hundred feet beyond the spot where Sergei had flashed. Sergei came beside it, and the farmer siphoned gas into Sergei’s tank and the two canisters. Sergei paid him triple the official rate, and the man put the money in his wallet. They were off again.

  “That should get us to Tallinn,” he said.

  She began to fret about the Estonian border. Would there be a document inspection?

  At 2:00 A.M. they rounded a corner, and a wood hut came into view beside a red-and-white-striped crossing gate.

  The border.

  She saw at once that the hut was dark, and the gate was raised. Sergei rammed on the accelerator, and they blew past the gate at eighty miles per hour.

  “Welcome to Estonia,” grinned Sergei.

  Sergei urged Katherine to sleep, but she declined — as she had done repeatedly since they set out. She was determined to stay awake to keep him company, not that he was very receptive to conversation. Sergei had been tired when they started the journey, and he had been driving hard now for twelve hours. Still, sometime after they passed the border to Estonia, Katherine gave over to exhaustion. She fell asleep, half-dreaming, half-thinking about Victor in the bell tower.

  Somewhere overhead, the Large Magellanic Cloud was in ascension.

  She awoke to daylight.

  This was to have been the day.

  “Good morning,” said Sergei.

  She looked at her watch — 5:30 A.M.

  “Where are we?” she asked, stretching.

  He pointed ahead. On the horizon, an enormous crane rose.

  “Tallinn,” he said.

  It was the loading crane for the shipyard.

  Signs directed them to the port, and they came to a stop in an empty parking lot. They walked to the port authority building, and Sergei rattled the doors. “Locked,” he said.

  Katherine didn’t hear him. Her eyes were on the ship that towered over the two-story building, a ship she had seen once before — in Helsinki.

  TheEstonia.

  Katherine gaped at it. She felt a rush of butterflies.<
br />
  Her freedom ship!

  The port opened at eight o’clock, two hours away. They decided to have breakfast, and got back into the car and headed toward the city.

  Tallinn sat atop a hill surrounded by medieval walls. Sergei parked outside the stone wall, and they walked through an ancient gate into the city. The sensation was of entering a castle. It had everything but a moat.

  Inside, Katherine found a fairy-tale setting of narrow cobblestone streets that wound as leisurely as footpaths through a maze of stone buildings. The skyline was like a bed of nails — dozens of near-vertical steeples stabbing the sky. After the self-effacing charm of Russia, outspoken Tallinn was something alien. It was hard to believe it was part of the Soviet Union — with one exception: the dilapidation. Ancient buildings on major streets stood empty. Bits of glass lay on the ground beside shattered windows. It was as though forty years ago, when the republic was absorbed into the U.S.S.R., Tallinn’s residents ceased to care, and became squatters in their own homes.

  Sergei found a basement café, and they sat down in a dark booth.

  Katherine studied Sergei across the table and said, “You look dreadful. You have to get some sleep.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I just need coffee.”

  The waiter brought brewed coffee, American-style, and Sergei grimaced when he tasted it. “This isn’t coffee.”

  To Katherine also, now accustomed to Russian coffee, it tasted as weak as tea.

  Sergei drank three cups, and they both devoured eggs, ham and toast. The food revived them. Katherine hadn’t had such a satisfying breakfast since Ithaca. No kasha. No fatty sausage. No fried potatoes. Even the service was good.

  They sat quietly for a while, enjoying the afterglow of a good meal, their minds occupied with thoughts of the ordeal that lay ahead. Strangely, it was not the risk of being caught that absorbed Katherine, but the realization that if everything did work out for the best, then she would never see Sergei again. There was so much she didn’t know about her benefactor, her savior, her friend.