The Forbidden Zone Read online

  Michael Hetzer

  simon & schuster

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1999 by Michael Hetzer

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON& SCHUSTERand colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  ISBN 0-684-86789-3

  “Courage” by Anna Akhmatova and “We’re no good at saying good-bye” by Anna Akhmatova, fromThe Portable Twentieth Century Russian Reader, ed. by Clarence Brown, copyright © 1985 by Viking Penguin, Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Acknowledgments

  Part i

  Part ii

  Part iii

  Part iv

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  The earliest draft of this novel was written at Dom Tvorchestva,House of Creativity , a writer’s colony outside Moscow operated by the writer’s union of Russia. I am deeply indebted to the Russian novelists, journalists and poets who took such an interest in the first novel of anamerikanyets writing on a subject many of them would like to forget. Their passionate arguments shaped my first draft in ways I will never fully know.

  I also wish to thank:

  Alexander Podrabinek for his insights into Soviet psychiatric hospitals, and for the loan of his many books on the subject.

  (Ret.) KGB General Oleg Kalugin, for his tantalizing glimpse into the shadowy world of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the KGB.

  The Amsterdam-based group, International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry, for its invaluable publications and trove of verbatim transcripts of patient interviews.

  All my talented and dedicated colleagues atThe Moscow Times , but in particular Derk Sauer and Meg Bortin, who supported my year “on the road” in Russia without which this book would have turned out very differently. And to Doug Greene and Taylor Maxwell, who accepted my decision to write this book with a great deal more grace than I had a right to expect.

  My circle of readers — Janice, Anne, Walter, Steven, Conrad, Bob, Larry, Joe and Jana.

  Marysue Rucci, my editor at Simon & Schuster, who made the final stretch of the journey the best part.

  Victoria Sanders, my agent. In a perfect world, every writer would have such an agent.

  And finally, my wife, Tamara. We made this journey together, and her light illuminates every page.

  To the world, “sputnik” is a proper noun, the world’s first artificial satellite, harbinger of the space age. But in Russian, the word is ancient and means “traveling companion.”

  And so I dedicate this novel to the sputnik of my life, Tamara, my wife.

  The U.S.S.R. in 1983

  1

  April 3, 1983

  Oimyakon Province, Eastern Siberia

  . . . and beside our cabin a stream rushes over the icy rocks and brave weeds fivemiles down Suntar Ridge before emptying into the headwaters of the Upper TungaRiver. But on that stretch of river before the junction, where it passes by our cabin,it has never been named. So I would propose to call it Nadia’s River, after my wife.And because “nadia” is short fornadezhda,which means “hope,” the name alsocomes out River of Hope. Oh, what irony! And perhaps all my misery could bejustified if only there were to appear on Soviet maps, in the midst of this long-suffering, hope-starved land, a river bearing such a name.

  In the dim candlelight of the tiny cabin, the man with the stub nose put down his pencil and rubbed his old eyes. He had no desire to write this, to second-guess fate. What was the point? To live was to suffer. The only surprise was that any light at all should shine in the darkness.

  But he wasn’t doing this for himself. It was for Nadia.

  Stepan Bragin looked up from his manuscript and surveyed his cabin. It was built in the style of a Mongolian yurt — a hexagonal room with timber walls and no windows (which was why he worked by candlelight, though the sun shone outside). Furniture ringed the walls creating areas that passed for a bedroom, a kitchen and a den. In the center, an iron stove crackled pleasantly, filling the air with the scent of pine. The cabin was little more than a hunter’s hut, but in Siberia the supreme luxury was warmth, and in this respect the little yurt might as well have been a palace.

  Stepan went on with his work. It was excruciating. He wrote in English, so each word had to be exhumed from the cemetery of his mind. It had been decades since his thoughts had spoken to him in his native tongue, and now, to face the strangeness of those foreign words was to gaze back across a tundra of lost years to someone he barely knew, to a man he used to be.

  After several hours, he could write no more, and he put down his pencil. He looked toward his wife.

  Nadia lay on the pine bed he had built for her in a desperate bid to improve her comfort now that she was bedridden. Her eyes were open, and she was watching him.

  He smiled. “You’re awake.”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you,” she said. “You were so intent.”

  “Yes, well . . .” he said and slammed closed the book. He didn’t finish the thought. Instead he stretched his arms and yawned noisily.

  Nadia wasn’t fooled. “What were you doing?”

  Stepan knew where the question was leading, and he changed the subject. He pointed at the bed. “We never made love on this bed.”

  Nadia smiled wearily. “Some other time, dear.”

  Stepan blinked at that, and he looked at her as though for the first time. Her skin, pale from her long illness, was still as brown as milk chocolate. She had a round, dinner-plate face, and coal-black eyes that were oriental in shape. She was not a beautiful woman; her face was puffy and her eyes were too far apart. Her build, invisible beneath the blankets, was squat, like a large dwarf. But she would always be Stepan’s Mongolian angel, and looking at her then, as always, brought a lump to his throat.

  Stepan went to her and sat down on the edge of the bed. He straightened the blanket over her chest. “Are you cold?”

  “Stepan, I want to talk about what I said last night.”

  He grimaced. “All right. But first, let me get some wood for the stove.”

  “Don’t be long.”

  He jumped to his feet and hurried out.

  It was late morning on Suntar Ridge, and the sunlight danced on the snow. Stepan was relieved to be outdoors, away from the cloud of death that hung within the cabin. He had spent his life watching men die, yet his spirit had never wholly hardened to the pitiless brutality of that last desperate struggle, though sometime after his twentieth mass grave it did get easier. Leave it to Nadia to make him feel the pain all over again.

  The thought shamed him. It was a grim business, this, but grief was the price he had to pay for his return to the world of men. He had always known there would be a price. In a few minutes, Nadia would ask an even greater price of him, and he couldn’t think of how to refuse. It terrified him.

  Stepan crunched over the snow to the wood pile, where he spent several minutes picking through the logs for just the right mix, as though choosing well could somehow make everything right again. To his left, a small stream ran, the starting point for the melting snow’s violent, thousand-mile journey to the Arctic Sea. Stepan thought about what he had written that morning and realized he was pleas
ed with the portion about naming the river after Nadia. Of course, it was too much to hope that such a thing would ever come to pass, but what an idea! He smiled at his audacity.

  He looked at the stream. It had begun to flow briskly with spring runoff. It occurred to him suddenly that he had lived through another Siberian winter. The thought brought him no comfort.

  He filled his arms and went back into the cabin. He set the wood beside the stove and then pushed two logs into the hearth. He latched the grate and stood up to stretch his back.

  He turned toward Nadia, and his blood went cold. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her face was contorted in pain.

  “Nadia!” he cried and ran to her side.

  “Oh, god,” she said and arched forward into a sitting position.

  Stepan took her hand. Her grip tightened like a vise. She gasped and fought the pain as though it were an enemy trying to possess her body. Stepan sat helplessly beside her willing her sickness to pass through her hand into his body. But it would not, and the invisible enemy remained hidden within her.

  He cursed the cruelty of his fate. Here he sat, sixty years old and as healthy as a Siberian buffalo, while his young bride withered away before his eyes.

  The spasm passed, and Nadia fell panting back onto the bed. Stepan took a cloth from the bedside table and dabbed her forehead.

  “They’re getting worse,” he said.

  Nadia nodded.

  “Perhaps I could get the doctor to come out and see — ”

  “He won’t come.”

  He knew she was right. Their cabin rested in one of the most remote places on earth, the Oimyakon province of Yakutia in eastern Siberia. There were only two ways to reach them — by helicopter or jeep. No one was going to pay for a helicopter, and the eight-hour jeep ride . . . well, it wasn’t going to happen. Not for a terminal cancer patient.

  For the moment at least, Nadia was at peace. She looked at Stepan, and he braced himself for what was coming.

  “Have you thought about what I asked?” she said.

  Stepan dropped his eyes. He had thought of little else.

  “Oh, Nadia,” he said. “I’m so old.”

  “Stepan, look at me.”

  He raised his head.

  “I’m not dying,” she said.

  Stepan stared blankly at her.

  “It looks that way, I’ll grant you,” she said with a thin smile. “But that’s just our narrow point of view. What we call death is part of a migration, like a reindeer going to the taiga in winter.”

  This last analogy seemed to please her. Nadia was an Urguma Eskimo, a nomadic people who lived by herding reindeer across the tundra.

  Stepan smiled too. He loved it when she talked like this, even if he didn’t understand half of what she was saying. She had a reassuring voice that rose and fell like notes in a melody. Her pronunciation was strangely clipped, which betrayed that she was not a native Russian speaker. But then, neither was he.

  “We’re all gods making a great journey,” she said.

  “To where?”

  “Heaven.”

  Stepan sighed. He wished he could believe that with one-tenth of Nadia’s conviction. Like all her people, Nadia was animistic. Gods moved everything: the snow, the sun, the grass and the sky. Her Soviet education, with its foundation of atheism, had failed to dislodge this faith. And how could it? Nadia didn’t justbelieve in this world of the gods of the lower case, sheinhabited it. Stepan, on the other hand, had lived his life among men, and he had seen little there that could be called magical. Men were animals. They lived like animals; they treated each other like animals; and they died like animals.

  A gust rattled the door, but inside the cabin it remained warm. Stepan could hear the logs cracking in the hearth, logs he had split last summer, back when Nadia’s illness first began to reveal itself, back when there was still hope . . .

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said.

  “So you’ll do it?”

  He could, of course, say “yes,” and then not carry through. Who would fault him for a merciful lie made to appease a superstitious, dying woman? Anyone could see that her request was unreasonable. Stepan was not even a free man. The land his wife loved, the land of her gods, was the land of his exile. Siberia was Stepan’s prison. Its severe climate, isolation and unfathomable immensity kept him locked away behind walls more insurmountable than anything men could have built.

  But could he betray Nadia, even with a lie of mercy? She had loved him,him! , the man with the stub nose, the man whose nose had fallen away from frostbite.

  What had she seen in him? He had often pondered that mystery. After all those years in the prison camps he had hardened into something that was only barely a man. He was like a piece of fruit whose pit had grown and grown until there was no fruit left at all, just the hard pit nobody wanted. But she had wanted him. She had married him and given him four years of happiness. After the misery of his life,there was a miracle.

  So the question of her extracting a promise had never really been in doubt. He would give her his word, and what’s more, the vow would be kept. That’s what the manuscript was all about. It was his insurance.

  Nadia believed that in order for Stepan’s soul to ascend to heaven, his earthly body had to be buried in the land of his birth. For Stepan, that meant a long journey to a place he had nearly forgotten, to a land where they spoke a different language, and where he was known by another name.

  Stepan smiled bravely and patted Nadia’s hand. “We swore eternity, my love.”

  Nadia closed her eyes and sighed. “Thank you.”

  And then from somewhere far, far away, she said, “The spirits have kept you alive for a purpose, Stepan. Perhaps in this quest you will at last find it.”

  Nadia fell asleep, and Stepan went back to his papers.

  That evening, she awoke feeling better. She sipped some reindeer broth and then told Stepan stories about her life as a child in an Urguma tribe. She laughed when she talked about her soft-hearted father, Yulan, and how awkwardly he carried the stiff-lipped banner of tribal chief. Gradually, her voice weakened, until at last she fell asleep. Stepan sat beside her a long time watching her chest rise and fall with increasing unevenness. The end was near. He held her hand and waited. As the night wore on, her breathing grew more and more labored.

  Suddenly, the howl of a faraway wolf echoed over the mountain, and Nadia stirred. Stepan searched her face, thinking she was about to open her eyes. Instead, she gasped once and then never breathed again.

  Nadia was dead.

  Stepan laid his head on her chest, and, for the first time in longer than he could remember, he wept.

  Dawn came slowly to Siberia, and the sun hid below the horizon like a shy child. In the gray light of predawn, Stepan carried Nadia’s body onto the mountainside and set it on the ice beside the stream. He dug until he reached frozen ground. Then he built a small fire to melt the soil. After the fire died to cinders, he dug with a pickax beneath the ash. He repeated the process four more times, sweating with the effort, but refusing to rest. His grief had given him a rare clarity, and from that he drew strength.

  After an hour, he had a rectangular hole about three feet deep — deep enough to keep away the wolves. He lowered Nadia’s body over the edge and placed it at his feet. The ground still steamed from the scars made by his ax. He climbed out of the grave and began to fill it up. Finally, he gathered rocks from the stream and piled them atop the mound in the traditional way of the Urguma people.

  He stood back to look at his work.

  Suddenly, a gust of wind swirled over the grave, lifting snow high into the sky. His eye followed it up, and that made him think about what Nadia had said the previous night. She was on her way to heaven, for her body rested in the land of her birth. The thought made him feel better. Then something occurred to him that made him smile. There might have been another reason he agreed to make the long trip to his own birthplace:

  What if she
were right?

  He raised his head from the grave and looked up into the pale sky.

  “Bon voyage, my love,” he said.

  For the next five months, the man with the stub nose traveled west. His route was a bit unorthodox, but it got him past the KGB checkpoints. It amused him to think of the mystery his escape from Oimyakon would present to someone in Moscow.

  Just ten miles east of the Norwegian border on the Kolsky Peninsula, 130 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Stepan Bragin came at last to a stop. He had been pushing through the swamps — an unfamiliar hazard — when he fell into quick-sand and nearly drowned. Though he was maddeningly near to his objective, he decided to camp beside a stream until the weather turned cold and the marshes froze. If nothing else, Siberia had taught Stepan patience and a respect for nature’s dispassionate regard for the frailty of man.

  He speared trout and snared rabbits, cooking them over low fires he built at night. Helicopter patrols passed over several times a day, but the slicingthumpa-thumpa of their rotors gave Stepan plenty of warning to take cover in the rocks. One morning, after a month, he awoke to find the ground covered by a thin layer of snow. He was once again on terrain he knew well. He moved on.

  He reached the border with Norway two days later. The forest suddenly ended, and he found himself looking across a man-made clearing about twenty yards wide. He frowned at what he saw: two barbed-wire fences, ten feet apart, and, between them, azapretnaya zona , a forbidden zone. It was just like in the camps; any man caught in the forbidden zone would be shot immediately. He had seen many men commit suicide that way. There was dignity in the death certificate that read, “Shot while trying to escape.” But there was no guard tower here, just a frozen road running along the outside of the first fence. The fences were each twelve feet high with long-needled barbed wire woven into the chain links like a pattern in a sweater. At the top and bottom, barbed-wire strands spiraled like thistled springs.

  He waited all day and night for sight of a border-guard patrol, but except for the helicopters, none came. Then he understood. The border guards were counting on nature to do their work for them. They hadn’t counted on Stepan Bragin.