Journey Through a Dark Forest, Vol. II - Ursula Hartlein

While the whole world is in the throes of one of the most concentrated periods of Sturm und Drang in recent memory, the Konevs and their friends far and wide struggle to survive and make their way back to some semblance of a peaceful, ordinary world.

In Part II, The Right Path Appears Not Anywhere, the Konevs’ close-knit bond is torn asunder when Tatyana finally discovers the truth about her paternity on the eve of her eighteenth birthday. She believes Boris’s self-serving, selectively-reported version of events and wants nothing further to do with Ivan. As soon as she graduates high school, she moves in with Boris. To keep an eye on the situation, Nikolay moves in too. But the truth about Boris eventually starts catching up with Tatyana, and Boris’s latest schemes threaten to lead to his umpteenth undoing.

Meanwhile, in the USSR, the Konevs’ old friends are betrayed by the Revolution and sucked into the terrifying whirlwind of the Great Terror. Leonid and Georgiya are arrested for violating the infamous Article 58, while Inessa is left a young widow with going on three children and fights against the clock to get her family out of harm’s way and to America.

In addition to her own children, Inessa is also taking care of her old friend Inna’s baby nephew Damir while his father arranges defection for Inna, the elderly Mrs. Brezhneva, and some of the orphanage children and employees. Inna’s group ends up in Isfahan, Iran, the same place her old friends Alina, Ohanna, and Izabella fled to. Iran represents an entirely new world, unlike anything they’re used to, but it’s a welcoming haven for the dispossessed. The life Inna and her friends create for themselves isn’t always an easy life, but it’s a much better life than the one they fled from.

And back in America, Tatyana, Nikolay, and their friends are enjoying being young, carefree, and in love, even as storm clouds gather on the horizon and threaten to tear apart the world of tomorrow they’re so excited to step into. But whatever lies ahead in the uncharted world of tomorrow, and however many shocks, struggles, and adjustments it may entail, change has always been a part of life. To be born or create something new, one must first destroy the pre-existing world, for better or worse.