The Debriefing (23 page)

A young man, completely bald but running his fingers across his scalp as if he has a full head of hair, steps away from one of the two groups the actors have divided themselves into. “Every time my mind snares an event,” he cries, backpedaling toward center stage, “my interest runs out like the string on a reel attached to a kite.” He tries to lift off the ground, to fly, then sinks back dejectedly. “I need more wind,” he sobs. “I need more wind.”

Nadia Kulakova drifts away from the group she is with, starts to speak with excruciating slowness, as if each word will be the last. “They are making preparations for a birth. My birth. Warm water is brought. Clean sheets too. The midwife is prevailed upon to wash her hands, which is a concession she makes to the master of the house, who is a member of the party in more or less good standing. My mother, who is religious, secretly crosses herself as the ordeal begins. When it is over, the umbilical cord is cut and I am hung on a clothesline in the sun to dry. A neighbor, notified of the joyous event by word of mouth, throws handfuls of artificial snowflakes from the roof of our building. One flake lands in my tiny palm, and I burst into tears because it refuses to melt.”

Nadia stares at her outstretched hand for a long moment, and then bursts into tears because the artificial snowflake will not melt.

Stone notices her nails, which are bitten to the quick, and her hair, which is uneven, as if someone had cut off handfuls with a sheep shears. Her voice is singularly without melody, without inflection, as if she is stuck on one wavelength. “They gave me haloperidol and triftazine, and once, after my father left the country, a treatment of sulfur. Sulfur raises the temperature— it’s as if you had a very high fever. You lie in bed and search hour after hour for a position that doesn’t hurt. But you never find one.”

“What was the play about?” Stone asks.

“Which play are you speaking of? There are many here.”

“The play you were performing downstairs,” Stone says.

“It’s thoughtful of you to ask,” Nadia says. “It began as a story about two psychiatrists who run asylums with opposing points of view. One holds that we invent the problems we enjoy not coping with. The other believes we can trace all our problems back to the trauma of our birth, which is etched in our memories the way circuits are printed in transistor radios. The play is a confrontation between the patients of the two psychiatrists.”

“Do you get to choose your camp, or are you assigned?”

“We are offered a choice,” Nadia says, “but when we make one, it is usually not honored.”

Stone is touched by the fragility of the girl sitting on the edge of her bunk. He remembers Kulakov’s despair when he spoke about her; he thinks suddenly of his own daughter, and then finds himself cutting off the thought before it becomes too painful. “Have you seen your friend Lina?” he asks.

Nadia is jarred by the question. “How is it you know that name?” she demands. When Stone doesn’t say anything, she shrugs. “I’m finished with all that,” she says. “They’ve fixed it so I don’t like girls anymore. I don’t like boys either.” She looks up with a pleading expression in her eyes. “I don’t even like myself,” she says softly.

Katushka is beaming with satisfaction. “I found her,” she tells Stone triumphantly. “I went to see her—”

“Found whom?” Stone demands, but Katushka, flushed with excitement, rushes on.

“I thought that as long as I knew where she was, I might as well talk to her,” she explains, sinking onto the cushions, stroking Thermidor.

“Talk to whom?” Stone asks in exasperation.

Katushka looks at Stone in bewilderment. “The girl in the photograph is whom,” she says as if it is perfectly obvious. “The one named Lina is whom.” She tosses the photograph onto the cushions. “She’s Polish, all right. Even speaks with an accent. Her father is a big shot in Polish Army intelligence. Lina’s a professional. You knew that already, didn’t you? Does nicely for herself too, judging from the layout she has—three rooms on the outer circle, a Mercedes, a dacha.”

“How’s her technique?” Stone asks sarcastically, but Katushka takes the question at face value.

“She’s good, but not great,” she says seriously. “She’s not spontaneous, not inventive. Just competent. She has a tendency to rely too much on paraphernalia.” She adds teasingly, “All you need to make love well is what you began life with—two hands, a tongue …”

Stone is not amused. “How did you find out so much about her?”

The question seems to surprise Katushka. “Why, by making love with her. How else can you find out about someone?”

They argue through dinner and most of the evening, and Katushka, near tears, goes off to sleep on a cot in Morning Stalin’s room. Stone waits a decent interval, then tiptoes down the hallway in bare feet, opens Morning Stalin’s door, to find the three of them, Morning Stalin, Ilyador and Katushka, asleep in each other’s arms.

It doesn’t occur to Stone until he is four hours into the flight to Alma-Ata that what has taken place was a lovers’ quarrel.
Stone is staring out the small oval window at the vast tracts of plowed land that stretch to the horizon—Khrushchev’s virgin lands, with endless rows of trees to break the winds that threaten to turn the region into a huge dust bowl. ‘Tm jealous,” Stone tells himself. “I’m actually jealous.”

Lake Baikal glistens under the left wingtip. When the plane banks, Stone can make out far ahead the white crests of the mountains that back up to the frontier with China. Next to Stone, a very fat major general in the artillery is recounting the battle for Berlin to a young girl in a miniskirt. “I was nineteen at the time, and thin as your pinkie,” he says. “We were crazy with excitement, you can imagine. They were fighting for every house on the street, and for every room in the house. Children, old men—that’s all they had left. Decaying corpses hung from lampposts with cardboard signs on their chests saying they had been executed for desertion. Desertion! There was no place to desert to. What was hard was seeing the last comrades dying a few hours before the end. They fought across the Ukraine, across Poland and Czechoslovakia, across the Oder into Germany, across Germany, to die at the doorstep of the Reichstag.” The general’s double chins vibrate with emotion. He turns to Stone. “The young people today, they don’t have the slightest idea of what it was like,” he complains. “Everything comes too easily to them. Isn’t it so, comrade? We sow and they reap.”

Stone fixes the general with a serious look. “It is in the nature of things that one generation always constructs for the next,” he lectures. “Lenin illustrated the formula when he instructed us to break down the wall between generations and become, all of us, simple builders of Communism.”

The girl in the miniskirt rolls her eyes in her sockets and turns back to her book. The major general nods vigorously in agreement. “Just so,” he says, squirming uncomfortably in his seat belt. “What a pleasure to come across someone who knows his Lenin. I take it you are a member of the party? I, too, have the honor.” He offers his hand. “Petrov, Nikolai. Major general of the artillery. Currently on an inspection tour of our frontier.”

From the way Major General Petrov smiles into Stone’s face, it is obvious he expects the same amount of information back— and once again a shadow of danger flickers across Stone’s field of vision. He remembers the three-quarter-hour wait before the passengers were allowed to board the plane to Alma-Ata. He remembers also that the major general took the seat next to him, not vice versa. Still, the idea that the other side—in training, the Russians were always referred to as “the other side”—has latched on to him, has then managed to plant one of their people next to him, is too far-fetched for Stone to accept.

“I am …” Stone gives him one of the names he hasn’t used before. “I am an assistant editor of children’s stories at the Central Publishing Combine in Moscow. I am going to Alma-Ata to meet with members of the Kazak Writers Union.”

The major general beams good-naturedly. “You might say we have something in common, you and I. I have edited for publication a manual on spotting the fall of cannon shot from the air. It is not as easy as you would suppose, because the point of view of the spotter is seldom the same as the point of view of the shooter, which is another way of saying that what looks short to the spotter can be long and to the right for the shooter.”

The major general is still trying to explain the intricacies of spotting when Alma-Ata looms out of the snow-covered mountains. In short order the Ilyushin is taxiing past rows of khaki-colored biplanes used by the collective farms for crop dusting. The terminal, a prewar poured-cement structure, seethes with people coming or going—Stone is not sure which. Long lines of Kazaks, pushing cardboard suitcases or burlap bags ahead of them, file past a harried official who barely glances at the documents waved in his face. Stone catches a glimpse of the fat major general ducking into a military limousine. With no taxi in sight, he regrets he hasn’t stuck closer to the author of the book on spotting; the worst that would have happened is he would have had another earful of technical jargon. Eventually Stone manages to bribe the chauffeur of a car belonging to the local cotton combine, and he heads into the city along broad boulevards lined with budding apple trees.

Alma-Ata is half city, half oasis. Shadows of leafy trees fall across the sidewalks. Miniature canals carry ice water (drawn from the melting snows of the nearby mountains) through the streets, giving to the atmosphere the freshness of a racing brook. Sidewalk vendors do a brisk business in vegetables grown on private plots. Stone, suddenly famished, pays off his driver, treats himself to a quick lunch at a workers’ canteen and a glass of kvass from a street wagon, then slowly wends his way toward the complex of prefabricated apartment buildings behind the party building in the center of town. At building number four, he checks the mailboxes in the lobby, finds the name he is looking for, mounts the stairs to the third floor, waits a long while in the stairwell as a precaution, then climbs one more flight to the fourth floor and buzzes once.

Someone in slippers shuffles toward the door. “Leave the lamp and slip the bill underneath,” a tired voice says. Stone pushes his KGB identity card under the door, and an instant later it opens and he finds himself face to face with Kulakov’s wife. She is very much thinner than Stone imagined her, thinner and tougher and angrier too. Her eyes have hollows under them from lack of sleep. Her mouth is grim. There is nothing soft or feminine or pretty about her. She looks at Stone and returns his card. “I prefer to speak to you when a third person is present,” she announces.

“I will note your preference in my report,” Stone replies. “For the moment, you are not being offered a choice.”

Kulakov’s wife controls her temper, steps back reluctantly to let Stone enter, indicates with her chin which room the interview will take place in.

Stone enters a combination bedroom-living room filled with modern plasticized furniture, a sideboard with glass doors, a small table with the dirty breakfast dishes still on it, a television with a magnifying lens clamped in front of it to enlarge the screen.

“Where is your tank commander?” Stone inquires politely.

“My tank commander,” says Kulakov’s wife, “ran off with his tank.”

Stone says, “What does that mean?”

Kulakov’s wife laughs without humor. “My tank commander disappeared just about the time Oleg disappeared. I haven’t heard from either one of them since.” A thought occurs to her. “Maybe they defected together. Maybe they’re sharing an apartment in Washington—the bastards, both of them!”

She turns away to struggle with the bitterness that rises in her like sap. When she turns back, Stone gestures to a chair and says, “May I?” Without waiting for permission, he sits down. Kulakov’s wife runs her fingers through her uncombed hair, leans back against the sideboard, lights a cigarette without offering one to Stone. She looks up at him through a cloud of smoke.

“I want to ask you,” Stone begins, “about various problems in your family life that may have influenced the defection of your husband.” And then, patiently and meticulously, he leads Kulakov’s wife over painfully familiar ground: the daughter’s lesbian love affair, the son’s arrest and expulsion from Moscow for using drugs, her own affair with the tank commander, which ended soon after she came to live with him in Alma-Ata. “I have given it a great deal of thought,” she tells Stone. “I am of the opinion that my husband didn’t defect because of the breakdown of his personal life. No. He defected to get even with me for leaving him. You people”—her tone drips with venom—“have deprived me of his pension rights, his medical rights. Even the apartment in Moscow was taken away. I couldn’t go back if I wanted to—I have no place to go to. After twenty years of marriage”—she is shrill now, and close to hysteria—“I have nothing to show for it. Nothing. No daughter. No son. No husband. No home. No money. Nothing. It wasn’t me that defected. But it’s me that suffers.”

At the door, Stone turns back to ask a last question. “Where can I find your son? Where is Gregori?”

A cloud of cigarette smoke separates them, and Stone has a sudden vision of her living in hell. Her voice, strangely distant, says, “You seem to know all the answers. You want to speak to Gregori, you go and find him.”

Finding Gregori is not difficult. Like all addicts who have been expelled from Moscow, he is registered with the local militia. “Sign here,” the militia captain instructs Stone, spinning the log around and holding out a cheap ballpoint pen. Stone is not happy about having to sign for the receipt of information; this is the first tangible record he has left of his presence. But once the militia captain—impressed with anybody who comes from Moscow, not to mention a member of the KGB—passes him the slip of paper with Gregori’s address on it, he can’t very well refuse to sign for it without arousing suspicion.

Gregori, it turns out, lives on the other side of the tracks—tracks made by trucks going to and from a suburban cement factory along a stretch of thin tarmac that has long since given way to dirt and crab grass. “Wait for me,” Stone orders his taxi driver, who has already been primed with a glimpse of his KGB card and a ten-ruble note. He climbs the wooden steps of the rundown house and knocks loudly on the door. An arthritic man who tends the coal burner during the winter in exchange for a rent-free room comes up behind Stone. “Isn’t home,” he tells him matter-of-factly. “Hasn’t been for days.” He spits on the floor.