There was one thing shehad to know. She had waited through all their months together, hoping for the right moment, and now she realized if she didn’t ask the question right then, she would never get another chance.
“Why did you help me?” she said suddenly.
Sergei frowned. “I told you. I can’t let these bastards get away — ”
“No,” Katherine said firmly. “I mean from the very beginning. That day in the alley, and every day since. Why?”
His face hardened. “I have my reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“It’s not important. Forget it.”
“It’s not about me, is it? Or, at least, I’m only part of it.”
“Katherine, we have so much to worry about, why start — ”
“Please.”
Sergei dropped his eyes. She saw his chest rise and fall through two deep breaths. “Everyone’s got a story,” he said quietly.
“What’s yours?”
Sergei lifted his gaze, and what Katherine saw made her heart skip. His face was twisted with pain. His lip twitched as he struggled to contain his emotion.
“I’m a Russian,” he said. “The great-great-grandson of a Cossack ataman — did you know that? Pure Russian. Every drop in my blood; every cell in my body — Russian. They . . .” he said, invoking the RussianOnito signify the communists, “they have made me ashamed of what I am.”
His voice trembled as he spoke. Katherine listened frozen, afraid any movement would break the spell.
“This country — we call it the motherland, and that’s how I feel about it, like a son toward his mother. It gave me life. It protects me, comforts me, gives me a sense that I belong to something important, something beautiful. And how I love her! Her wide-open spaces, her rugged winters, her more-rugged people. I would give my life to protect her; it wouldn’t even be a question. Any Russian would.”
He sneered and pretended to spit. “Phooon these communists. Look what they’ve done to Russia. We’re a basket case. Corruption everywhere, the bureaucracy, the special privileges for Party members, the drunkenness, nothing works, nobody wanting to work. . . . You think we don’t know this? You think I haven’t seen the way you turn up your nose at our empty shops, at our tiny flats, at our bad teeth, at the way our people smell of cheap soap — ”
“Sergei, I didn’t mean — ”
“No, you’re right! It’s shit! Russia is shit!”
“It is not.”
“Oh no? I’ve picked up Helsinki television broadcasts in Estonia, so I’ve seen how it is in the West, maybe not everything, but enough. We’ve all heard foreign records at one time or another — the Beatles, Elvis Presley, jazz — and we can hear the freedom in the music. We know.”
He shook his head ruefully. “You want to know how stupid they are? Whenever one of your newspapers prints an article critical of U.S. policy,Pravda reprints itword for word. The idiots! They don’t think we’ll marvel that an American paper has the freedom to print such things. Such is their contempt for us, the People, the proletariat. God, how I hate them.”
Sergei looked exhausted now, and he put his head in his hands. He rubbed his eyes.
He said, “You think we don’t know these things? We know. I wish with all my heart we didn’t.”
Katherine remained still, waiting for Sergei to go on. But he was finished. He had no energy left.
“What does this have to do with me?” Katherine asked.
“You’re their enemy.”
“And any enemy of theirs is a friend of yours.”
“Something like that,” he said.
“So, in a way, you’ve been using me.”
“Does that bother you?”
She thought a moment. “No. It makes it easier. I’m sick of playing the damsel in distress.” She looked down at her hands and said, “I was worried that . . . well, not worried really, but I thought, maybe . . .”
“What?”
She flushed and looked straight into his eyes. “You know.”
He smiled, his blue eyes glowing with a light of their own in the dim room. He nodded slowly. “That might have been part of it.”
The doors to the port building were standing open when they returned at eight o’clock. They went straight to the ticket counter. Behind a Plexiglas booth, a young woman blinked at them with heavy lids.
“Sold out,” she said and looked down at the table in front of her as though the matter were settled.
Katherine’s shoulders sagged. Sergei was undaunted.
“Who’s in charge of tickets?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Ferry line captain.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s not here.”
“Why not?”
“Too early.”
“When does he arrive?”
“It varies.”
“Usually?”
“Eleven.”
“So late?”
“Maybe twelve.” Shrug.
Katherine wanted to scream. The horrid woman rolled her eyes after every question. After every answer she looked back down at her desktop. Katherine had an impulse to reach across the desk, take her head between her palms and force the woman to meet her eye. Perhaps it was no extravagance that the woman’s booth was encased in Plexiglas. She would need the protection.
In any event, her behavior didn’t seem to bother Sergei. Katherine wondered what gave Sergei the strength to calmly face the daily ignominies of Soviet life. Was it acceptance, or merely ignorance of the alternatives? It didn’t really matter. In the Soviet Union, endurance of the unendurable was currency.
“Where’s his office?” asked Sergei.
She rolled her eyes and pointed over their heads to the open-air second level.
They started toward the stairs.
“Sergei, if there are no tickets — ”
Sergei waved his hand with irritation. “Getting a ticket is not your problem.”
They found the director’s office and sat down to wait. Those three hours passed like torture. In fact, physical torture might have been preferable to the mental parade of scenarios her mind forced her to abide, all against a backdrop of those ripples, those dogged ripples moving outward on the Soviet pond toward Tallinn, toward the port, toward theEstonia , while she sat like a fool on that oil-stained vinyl chair staring up at a door with a rectangular sign that said, “Captain Markus Yolonsky, Director, Estonia Line.” Steadily, a queue of about twenty people formed behind them.
Three hours later, at precisely eleven o’clock, a strikingly handsome man of about forty breezed up the hall toward the office. His powerful frame was encased in a neatly pressed navy uniform. Several insignia pins were attached to the uniform on the shoulderboard, the lapel and the chest.
The crowd bunched up behind Katherine and Sergei, forcing them against the office door. The smell of body odor and bad breath was stifling. Without a word, the captain pushed through the bodies to his office door. He unlocked it, went inside and then closed the door behind him. After another ten minutes the door swung open again, and the captain ushered in Katherine and Sergei with the air of a boyar consenting to entertain the grievance of one of his serfs.
The captain listened quietly as Sergei explained their problem. When he had finished, the captain looked at them with his blue eyes and said in a way that seemed to leave no doubt:
“We’re sold out.”
“My friend really has to get to Helsinki,” Sergei said.
The captain looked at Katherine and shrugged. “What is to be done?” The captain rose. “Perhaps tomorrow — ”
“What about seats for VIPs?” asked Sergei.
The captain sat down again. “Those are for VIPs.”
“Sell us one of those tickets,” said Sergei.
The captain sighed dramatically (ah, the burden of command!) and reached for one of the three phones on his desk. He began to speak in Estonian. Katherine’s heart was pounding. She knew that this was
all part of a game, but the knowledge didn’t help.
After a minute, the captain hung up and said, “It will cost you triple fare.”
“Done,” said Sergei.
The captain opened his desk drawer and pulled out a pad of empty tickets. As Katherine watched, he began to write. He was selling her a ticket!
But it was too early for celebration, and Katherine knew it. This man worked for the ferry company. Of course he was happy to sell another ticket and put the money in his own pocket. Sergei was right, getting the ticket was not the problem. Passport control was the problem. Katherine recalled the cold gaze of the passport officer in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo-2 Airport when she had arrived more than four months earlier. She shivered.
Without looking up, the captain put out his palm. “Documents.”
Katherine handed him her papers. He studied the international passport, then the exit visa.
“Finnish entry visa?” He said.
“I don’t have one,” said Katherine.
The captain put down his pen and looked up. “What?”
“She doesn’t have one,” said Sergei.
“Then she can’t get on the ship.”
“All we’re asking you to do is to sell us the ticket. Let us worry about the Finnish authorities.”
“What’s the point? The Finns won’t even let her disembark.”
“You mean they won’t let me through Finnish passport control,” Katherine corrected.
“No,” said the captain, irritated at Katherine’s presumption. “They won’t let you off the ship. The Finnish immigration officers motor out to theEstonia in the harbor, board her, and then cheek everyone’s documents before she puts in. We’re not cleared to dock until everyone has been cleared. We’ve had a lot of problems with defectors. You understand.”
“I thought I would at least be able to get off the ship,” Katherine said miserably. Her plan had been to have American Embassy officials meet her in the Helsinki port. But if she couldn’t even get down the gangplank . . .
“The ferry is Soviet territory,” the captain explained. “The Finns aren’t going to let you leave Soviet territory until they know you have a visa to enter Finnish territory.”
Sergei and Katherine exchanged glances. Katherine imagined herself on the ferry, looking out over Helsinki, but unable to leave the ship, trapped within Soviet territory for the lack of a single document. It was infuriating. The Finnish entry visa, of all things — it was the one document that was supposed to have been a formality.
“Sell me the ticket, anyway,” said Katherine.
“What’s the point?”
“Let me worry about that,” said Katherine.
“No,” said the captain. “I will worry about that. It looks bad when our people don’t have the right paperwork.”
Our people.
Katherine pushed the money across the desk to him. “Really,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. Please. Just sell me the ticket.”
“Sell the girl the ticket,” said Sergei.
The captain glared at them both a moment. His eyes fell to the money, and he pulled it to him. He slipped it into his pocket.
“I have a feeling I’m going to regret this,” he said and picked up his pen.
He finished writing the ticket and then tore it from the pad. It was blue and yellow, about the size of a dollar bill. The paper was thin and soft, almost like newsprint. Across the top, it said in Russian, “Welcome Aboard theEstonia. ” She slipped it inside her passport with her exit visa.
“Bon voyage,” said the captain without any enthusiasm.
They got up and left.
In the corridor, Katherine looked at her watch. It was 11:45 A.M.
An announcement signal, three descending tones, echoed through the hall. Then a voice on a loudspeaker said, in Russian:
“TheEstonia is now boarding for Helsinki. All ticketed passengers are requested to proceed at this time to customs inspection.”
“That’s you,” said Sergei.
Katherine nodded numbly. They went downstairs into an open hall like a small airport terminal. They stopped beside a metal barricade. Ahead, a man in a bright-blue uniform stood behind a high table. He was searching a man’s suitcase. Customs inspection.
“This is where we say good-bye,” said Sergei.
Katherine nodded. “You know what to tell Cameron Abbott?”
“Yes.”
Katherine smiled. “Sergei, I don’t know how — ”
Sergei raised his hands. “Before we get into all that, I have a kind of going-away present for you.”
Katherine almost laughed. “What!” They had fled Ivanovka as though it were under bombardment. A present?
Sergei held out his hand and opened it up. In his palm lay Katherine’s amber ring.
She began to cry; she couldn’t even say why. Maybe it was because the escape was nearly over, and she was relieved. Maybe it was because passport control was in front of her, and she was frightened. Or maybe it was because, from this point on, she would be on her own, without Sergei. Whatever the reason, she wept. She fell into his arms, and they held each other for a long time. They must have looked like lovers about to be separated.
They released and stepped back from each other. Sergei slipped the ring onto her finger.
She looked at it through blurry eyes.
“You didn’t sell it,” she said.
He smiled. “How could I do that?”
A rage at her own impotence rose up inside her. Maxim Izmailov, Lena Ryzhkova, Grayson Hines, Sergei, the blond in the Novodevichy convent, Cameron Abbott, her father — a chain of people to whom she owed a debt she could never repay. Where would it end?
She started to pull the ring off her finger. “I can’t let you — ”
Sergei placed his hand over hers. “You’ll pay me back someday.”
How?she wanted to cry out.
The one way she could repay him and everyone else who had helped her was to make it safely out of the U.S.S.R. The thought gave her strength. They embraced one last time. Then she turned and walked past a metal barricade toward the customs official.
Behind the tall tabletop, the agent watched her approach. Sergei stood a few feet away as the man inspected Katherine’s counterfeit Soviet passport. He flipped through the empty, crisp pages and asked, “First time abroad?”
Katherine nodded.
“Open your bag,” he said.
“I have no bag.”
“Money?”
She took out her wallet and opened it. He counted out exactly fifty U.S. dollars, the maximum a Soviet citizen was allowed to carry abroad.
He stamped her declaration, and then turned his attention to a woman who had come in behind her.
So far so good. She walked to the end of the customs area. To her left was a long corridor that went down to passport control. She could see the dreaded booths at the far end. That part of her journey would be invisible to Sergei, so she paused at the corridor entrance and waved. Sergei smiled and waved back. He pointed above his head telling her that he would be up on the observation deck. From there, he would be able to see her board the ship. Assuming she made it that far.
She started down the corridor. It went along for a hundred feet and then narrowed at the end to a swinging metal gate. Katherine stopped a few feet from the gate, behind a red line on the floor. Two people were ahead of her.
The passport control officer sat in a Plexiglas booth to the left of the gate, high up on an unseen stool. Katherine could see his profile through the glass. He was young, about twenty-five, with traces of acne on his jaw. He wore an olive-green uniform and a cap with a shiny black bill. On the front of the cap a gold military medallion glistened.
The boy had the heartless look of the officers in Moscow, all right. He spoke only to demand documents. He only looked up from his paperwork in order to squint at the face in front of him as he compared it to the passport photos.
Katherine’s heart
raced as she fretted about all the things that could go wrong. The passports could be detected as fraudulent. The officer could notice that the date on the exit visa had been altered. Or, as Sergei had warned, Yekatarina Yurgina’s name could already be on the “black list” of people sought by the KGB. Every passport control officer in the U.S.S.R. had a black list. How often was it updated? Sergei didn’t know. If her name was on the list, she would be arrested immediately. That much was certain. For a passport control officer to approve a black-listed person’s exit visa was unthinkable; it would probably mean his own arrest.
At last, the little gate swung open and the man in front of Katherine passed through. It was Katherine’s turn.
She stepped up to the gate and put her documents onto the shoulder-high counter.
“Hello,” she said in Russian.
The boy did not look up.
He slid the internal passport back to her and took the international passport, the ticket and the exit visa.
He worked at his desk a minute and then looked up to study her face.
It’s normal. Stay calm.
He looked down again and went on writing. Then, quite suddenly, his expression changed from bored to interested. He raised his head. Her heart sank.
He said something to her. The language was strange.
Had she just forgotten Russian? No, it wasn’t Russian. Why would he be speaking to her in a foreign language?
He repeated himself, and his face grew suspicious.
Katherine felt her palms go clammy. Then it occurred to her. Of course! He was speaking Latvian! She was Yekatarina Yurgina ofLatvia.
In Latvian, exactly as she had memorized fromSoviet Latvia , Katherine said, “I do not Latvian so well speak.”
“No,” he said switching to Russian. “You sure don’t.I’m Latvian.”
“Oh,” she said. She felt sick. During her long months in Ivanovka, she had pored over the pages ofSoviet Latvia for details to round out her background cover story, but she had never really expected to need it. She had never tested it on any of the citizens of Ivanovka; she had not even checked it out with Sergei, who was a native of the Baltics. She had no idea now whether it would hold up, especially to a Latvian — an immigration officer, no less! Of all the lousy luck . . .
The Forbidden Zone Page 38