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But first, let me get some wood for the stove." "Stepan, I want to talk about what I said last night." He straightened the blanket over her chest. Stepan went to her and sat down on the edge of the bed. But she would always be Stepan's Mongolian angel, and looking at her then, as always, brought a lump to his throat. Her build, invisible beneath the blankets, was squat, like a large dwarf. She was not a beautiful woman her face was puffy and her eyes were too far apart. She had a round, dinner-plate face, and coal-black eyes that were oriental in shape. Her skin, pale from her long illness, was still as brown as milk chocolate. Stepan blinked at that, and he looked at her as though for the first time. Stepan knew where the question was leading, and he changed the subject. Instead he stretched his arms and yawned noisily. "Yes, well." he said and slammed closed the book. "I didn't want to disturb you," she said. Her eyes were open, and she was watching him. Nadia lay on the pine bed he had built for her in a desperate bid to improve her comfort now that she was bedridden. 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.Īfter several hours, he could write no more, and he put down his pencil. He wrote in English, so each word had to be exhumed from the cemetery of his mind. 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. In the center, an iron stove crackled pleasantly, filling the air with the scent of pine. Furniture ringed the walls creating areas that passed for a bedroom, a kitchen and a den.
THE FORBIDDEN GAME EXERPT WINDOWS
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). Stepan Bragin looked up from his manuscript and surveyed his cabin. The only surprise was that any light at all should shine in the darkness.īut he wasn't doing this for himself. What was the point? To live was to suffer. He had no desire to write this, to second-guess fate. In the dim candlelight of the tiny cabin, the man with the stub nose put down his pencil and rubbed his old eyes. 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. And because "nadia" is short for nadezhda, which means "hope," the name also comes out River of Hope. So I would propose to call it Nadia's River, after my wife. But on that stretch of river before the junction, where it passes by our cabin, it has never been named. 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. 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. The further he searches, the deeper he must dig into a painful period of Mother Russia's history. 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.Įverywhere Victor turns, he is met with icy communist silence - and anyone willing to talk seems to be turning up dead. 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. Victor's faith in Communism and the Party is unwavering, but his impassioned scientific alliance with Katherine Sears, an American astrophysicist, quickly becomes romantic. In the waning days of the Cold War, Victor Perov, a brilliant Soviet scientist, agrees to a joint Soviet-American astrophysics project. A struggling country awaiting the cure of "perestroika." For too many Russians, this land has become the Forbidden Zone.