(9 of 19)
"You're to leave for Gorky at once," Rekunkov said. "Your wife may accompany you."
I phoned Lusia. "I'm calling from the Procurator's Office. They picked me up on the street."
"Whaaat?"
"Police stopped our car; KGB agents got in and ordered us to drive here. I've been stripped of my awards, and I'm being banished to Gorky -- it's off limits to foreigners."
"Will you be coming back to the house?"
"No, I'm supposed to leave straight from here, but it's my understanding that you can accompany me." I hung up and mumbled to myself, "So this is it . . ."
Downstairs, I climbed into the backseat of a minibus with curtained windows, flanked by KGB agents. We were preceded by a police car with a flashing light and siren and followed by another car. Lusia arrived at Domodedovo Airport % more than two hours later. She told me that as soon as she hung up after my call, our phone went dead (service wasn't restored until December 1986). Soon afterward, police and KGB cordoned off our building and stopped correspondents and friends from entering.
Five minutes after Lusia arrived, an officer announced that our plane, a Tu- 154, was ready. A dozen KGB agents accompanied us on our special flight. We were too relieved at being reunited to worry about where we were headed -- we didn't care if it was to the ends of the earth. In Gorky we were loaded into another minibus. "Where are we going?" Lusia asked our anonymous escorts.
"Home," answered one, grinning.
Visit from a Gunman
After a long journey, we were deposited at a twelve-story building off what we later learned was Gagarin Avenue and taken to an apartment on the first floor. In a large room a man seated behind a desk said, "I'm Perelygin, deputy procurator for the Gorky district. I've been instructed to inform you of your regimen: you are forbidden to go beyond the city limits of Gorky. You'll be kept under surveillance, and you are forbidden to meet with or contact foreigners or criminal elements. The MVD will let you know when you're required to check in at their headquarters. If you have any questions, call the KGB, either Major Yuri Chuprov or Captain Nikolai Shuvalov." Perelygin left.
Lusia, meanwhile, had been talking with our "landlady" and had taken a look around the apartment, which had four rooms (one reserved for the landlady), plus kitchen and bathroom. The landlady told Lusia she was the widow of a KGB officer. (It took us six months to discover what her real duties were: to make sure that the window in her room was left unbolted to allow KGB agents access to the apartment from the street, bypassing the police manning a watch post.) As I appeared, she retired to her room.
At last Lusia and I were alone together.* She'd had the foresight to pack our transistor radio, and on the evening news my exile was the lead story, along with Afghanistan. For the next two weeks foreign broadcasts featured protests by writers, public personalities and -- of particular weight -- scientists, including the U.S. scientists Sidney Drell and Jeremy Stone. The intervention of U.S. National Academy of Sciences President Philip Handler and other prominent scientists might have forestalled further steps against me. My Soviet colleagues, regrettably, kept silent -- except for public attacks on me.