The Forbidden Zone: A Novel - Softcover

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Michael Hetzer was founding editor of The Moscow Times, the first-ever English-language daily newspaper in Russia. Between 1990 and 1995, he also founded The Moscow Guardian, a weekly newspaper in English, and the monthly magazine Vitrina, which he edited in Russian. While living in Russia, he served as editor of the English-language edition of the Russian newspaper Kommersant. In 1996 he left journalism to write novels full-time. He now lives with his wife and two children in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

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The year is 1984. The place, the Soviet Union. A struggling country awaiting the cure of "perestroika." For too many Russians, this land has become the Forbidden Zone.

In the waning days of the Cold War, Victor Perov, a brilliant Soviet scientist, agrees to a joint Soviet-American astrophysics project. Victor's faith in Communism and the Party is unwavering, but his impassioned scientific alliance with Katherine Sears, an American astrophysicist, quickly becomes romantic.

When Katherine learns that Victor's twin brother, Anton, a dissident believed killed in action in Afghanistan, is actually imprisoned somewhere in the Soviet psychiatric gulag, she risks her life to inform Victor. With the KGB hot on her trail and the American Embassy in Moscow powerless, Katherine must flee into the Soviet countryside, and Victor is left to grapple with a truth that pits him against his own mother, a high-ranking Soviet minister known as the Iron Perova.

Everywhere Victor turns, he is met with icy communist silence -- and anyone willing to talk seems to be turning up dead. The further he searches, the deeper he must dig into a painful period of Mother Russia's history. His career, his family and his life at risk, Victor must learn whom to trust in this deadly game of Party politics in order to save the woman he loves and his twin brother.

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Chapter 1
April 3, 1983
Oimyakon Province, Eastern Siberia
...and beside our cabin a stream rushes over the icy rocks and brave weeds five miles down Suntar Ridge before emptying into the headwaters of the Upper Tunga River. 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 for nadezhda, which means "hope," the name also comes out River of Hope. Oh, what irony! And perhaps all my misery could be justified 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 pleased 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 just...