The Debriefing

by Robert Littell

  Several of the women shoppers, struggling with packages and dog tired from queuing, eye with obvious envy her pleated trousers tucked, paratrooper style, into her expensive Italian boots, the wide web army belt with the red star on the polished brass buckle, her waist-length fur jacket, salvaged from an elegant coat that had scraped the ground when it began its life forty years before.

  “You’ll have to get close to her to confirm the next item,” Clandestine Residences warned. “Her pupils are so enormous, people think her eyes are black. Actually, one’s green, one’s khaki. Don’t look at me like that, Stone! That’s what the air attaché who slept with her swears.”

  Stone is close enough now to see for himself: enormous pupils, one eye green, the other khaki. And something else in her eyes, something he remembers seeing in the eyes of his grandfather as he peered, night after night, at old photographs of the civil war: a hunger that doesn’t come from not eating enough.

  “Who gives you a permit to stare?” the girl demands. The nose, the jaw, jut arrogantly. “If you’re interested, make me an offer I can’t refuse. If you’re just licking windows, move on.”

  Stone manages a broad grin. “I’m interested,” he says slowly. “What will ten rubles buy me?”

  “She’s extremely independent,” Clandestine Residences warned. “If she doesn’t like your looks, that will be the end of it.”

  The girl studies Stone from head to toe. “Me, for starters, with a glass of vodka thrown in if you’re not rough.”

  “I need more,” Stone says. He draws her back out of the flow of pedestrians. “I need a roof over my head.”

  “Try a hotel,” the girl shoots back mockingly.

  “Hotels don’t suit me,” says Stone. “They want to see all kinds of papers. I need something more discreet.”

  “At any given time,” Clandestine Residences explained, “there are thousands of Russians in Moscow illegally—selling or buying on the black market, bribing officials, avoiding the draft, hunting for large shipments of raw materials for their factory, what have you. The ones who don’t have relatives usually move in with prostitutes to keep out of the limelight. It’s just a matter of paying them enough so that they won’t tip off the militia.”

  The girl, all business now, asks, “How long do you plan to stay in Moscow?”

  “Depends on how my work goes,” says Stone. “What will twenty-five rubles buy me?”

  The girl says, “Twenty-five a day, paid in advance, will buy you a warm bed, a warm breakfast, a warm me and no questions asked.” Suddenly her face lights up in a smile. “I’m the curious type—I may make an educated guess or two.”

  Stone offers his hand. “There’ll be another hundred in it when I leave if I haven’t been bothered by the militia,” he promises her. “My name is Pavel.”

  “I’ll bet.” The girl laughs, sealing the bargain with a handshake. “I’m Yekaterina. Friends, of whom I have more than I know what to do with, call me Katushka.”

  She links her arm through Stone’s and sets off in long purposeful strides toward Gorky Street. “You’re in luck,” she tells Stone conversationally. “I just finished my period. When I have my period, I only sleep with women.”

  Katushka leads Stone to her small Zhiguli, the Russian-made Fiat. “Hungry?” she asks. Stone nods, and she says, “I can organize something at the Writers Union, if it suits you, or a private dinner at the apartment of a woman I know. Cost you twenty rubles for the two of us, which includes a bottle of Polish vodka and a Georgian red, though I prefer beer if it’s all the same to you.”

  The meal, served in the ground-floor apartment of a building in one of the satellite communities twenty-five minutes out of the city to the north, is home-cooked and the portions are generous. A small boy peeks in from time to time, and clears away the dirty dishes when Katushka signals to him. A phonograph record of Russian folk songs plays in the background, and the room is lighted by candles. Katushka stares into them—Stone again notices her enormous pupils—without talking for a long while.

  “Why do you wear your rings with the stones on the palm side?” Stone asks.

  She comes out of her reverie. “I wear them this way because my mother wears hers this way. And she wears them this way because palms don’t age.” She laughs gaily. “They say a woman’s palm always looks fifteen.” The candle flames, which are squat and steady, suddenly thin out and vibrate gently, as if they are being breathed upon. “The spirits are in the room with us,” the girl whispers. “There”—she motions with her eyes—“above our heads, hovering, listening.”

  Stone has the impression that she is inventing herself as she goes along. “Do you believe in spirits?” he asks.

  The small boy carries in a plate of kurniki, made of chicken and pastry and green peas, and places it before Stone. The boy’s mother, who is doing the cooking, sets a second plate before the girl.

  Katushka talks with her mouth full. “I am the seventh child of a seventh child. I am a spirit. I read palms, entrails, tea leaves. I can get news of someone by opening a book at random. When I dream, I dream someone else’s dreams—I’ve been trying to find that person since I was a child. I always put sweaters on inside out for luck. You think I’m joking. Say it; you don’t offend me. Here, give me your palm.”

  Stone hesitates, but Katushka insists. She studies it for a long while in the candlelight, tracing lines with the tips of her fingers, turning the palm over to observe his nails, then back again to stare some more at the lines. Finally she looks up. “You don’t work with your hands,” she says softly, “which means you work with your head.”

  “Anybody can see that,” Stone scoffs.

  Katushka smiles faintly. “You proceed slowly to avoid the arrival because it’s the journey that intrigues you.” She pauses. “You have the sense of being home again.” Again she pauses. “You’ve had bad luck in your time, but good luck comes to you as a matter of course. You’ve had so much, you think it’s your due. Me, I have to work at it day in and day out. I have to manufacture my good luck. It makes me sick.” She touches with a finger a place where one line on his palm meets another and forks off. “In Moscow, you will find what you’re looking for, but you will not use it.”

  Outside, in the Fiat, Katushka abruptly says, “I am pleased with you for leaving the boy a ruble.” She uses the intimate ti almost as if it is a reward, but slips back immediately to the more formal vui. “Would you enjoy to hear dance music now, or do you prefer to make love and go to sleep?”

  Stone indicates he would rather call it a day, and she heads for home, an apartment on the top floor of a building overlooking the Moscow zoo. “It has certain advantages,” she explains, “for someone in my business. It is centrally located, the two people I share the flat with are discreet, and you can hear the braying of the animals below when they are in heat. It is a very arousing sound.”

  “Is that how you divert yourself,” Stone asks, “listening to animals in heat?”

  “I divert myself as best I can,” she answers. “When I was young and cared a great deal about things that no longer interest me, I tried to sabotage the dance bands that played that awful Soviet music. I would walk up to the orchestra”—she leans on her horn, swerves around a slow-moving car and jumps a red light—“and suck on a lemon in front of them. It made the horn players salivate and ruined the song.”

  “And now?” Stone asks.

  Katushka doesn’t understand the question. “And now what?”

  “What do you do for diversion now?”

  Again she smiles, though it has a sadder quality this time. “Now I hypnotize myself with maybes. For instance, maybe our universe with its billions of galaxies drifting through endless reaches of space is a molecule in a grain of sand in some gigantic world. What’s so absurd about it? Every time our scientists look into a microscope, they see smaller and smaller worlds. Why shouldn’t it be the same when they look into a telescope?”

  They tiptoe through the lobby
of the apartment building, past the night guardian, whose great head has sunk to the open page of Pravda on the desk. His goat cheese and bread and thermos of tea are in a basket next to his feet. “Some say he’s so old he worked for the KGB when it was still the Cheka,” whispers Katushka. She motions with a finger on her lips for him to be quiet. They walk up the five flights because the elevator would wake the old man. She inserts her key in the lock, leads him by the hand down a long dark corridor to the bedroom. “The toilet’s there, the kitchen here,” she whispers. “You’ll meet my roommates in the morning.”

  Katushka snaps on the light and Stone takes in the bedroom. “Normally you can’t tell what taste Russians have by the things in their apartments,” Clandestine Residences warned Stone. “That’s because they don’t buy what they want, but what’s available. She’s the exception to the rule. She never buys; she barters. Services rendered for items that catch her eye. Would you believe she’s even building a greenhouse on the roof?”

  The room is soft, with apricot-colored cushions scattered in a heap at one corner next to the Japanese hi-fi set and the record collection. The rug, wall to wall, is off white. The mattress, which rests on a low wooden platform, is covered with a large patchwork quilt and another small mountain of pillows. There are double panes on the windows, and the space between is filled with moss spread over cotton, which keeps the windows from fogging over. On one wall is an exquisite eighteenth-century icon with a wafer-thin candle on either side of it. There is a low shelf full of books; Stone catches a glimpse of Pasternak poems and a rare volume of Mandelstam’s called, simply, Poems. Hanging over the bed, illuminated by a spotlight from across the room, is a large oil canvas of the Virgin and Child that is at once realistic and romantic. Katushka catches Stone looking at it. “The painter who did that was not permitted to sell his canvases,” she says. “The authorities who know about such things told him it was not art, and therefore to sell it would constitute a fraud. Several years later, when the painter emigrated to Israel, the same authorities told him he couldn’t take his work out of the country with him because it came under the heading of art. So he left this with me for safekeeping. I am pleased with you for liking it.”

  A coal-black cat, its back arched, its hair bristling, appears from out of nowhere and rubs against Katushka’s leg. She scoops it up and kisses it on the mouth. “This is my shadow,” she tells Stone. “I call him Thermidor. He has the distinction of being the only left-pawed cat in existence.”

  Stone settles onto the low bed. “How can you tell?”

  “Oh, I have an instinct for things like that,” she says mysteriously. She gently places the cat in the middle of a large cushion and begins to undress. “I have a special feeling for cats. They have the same feeling for me. Thermidor, for instance, knows without my ever having said it that I am frightened of thunder. I always visualize two great clouds crashing together, something like ships drifting into each other. Boom!”

  Katushka lights the candles on either side of the icon, turns out the other lights, puts on a cassette of Stan Kenton music she recorded off the Voice of America. Naked, thin as a rail in the flickering candlelight, her nipples casting long shadows across her flat chest, she sinks to her knees in front of Stone and starts to unlace his shoes. From somewhere below comes the distant sound of an animal braying.

  “It’s a zebra,” she explains with a half smile. “She’s in heat.” She looks directly at Stone, her head cocked to one side. “How do you enjoy to make love?” she asks.

  “Astonish me,” Stone replies.

  And she proceeds to do exactly that.

  “Get up.” Katushka pokes Stone in the ribs with her elbow. He rolls over on his side and buries his face in the pillow, but she insists. “Come on,” she coaxes.

  “What time is it?” Reluctantly, Stone turns toward her.

  She ignores the question. “I have figured it out,” she tells him.

  “What have you figured out?” Stone asks, irritated that she woke him. He pulls the blanket up to his chin. “My God, it’s freezing in here.”

  “Your Russian is what threw me off,” she explains. “You speak it very well. Where did you learn it?”

  Stone is instantly alert. “I thought our arrangement included no questions asked.”

  Katushka’s mouth is very close to Stone’s ear. “You’re not Russian,” she tells him excitedly. She puts a finger on his lips as he starts to deny it. “Don’t bother lying. It’s no use.”

  Stone finally manages to get a word in. He tries to keep the tone light, as if he is playing along with a good joke. “What makes you think I’m not Russian?”

  She smiles in the darkness. “First there is the way you eat. You treat food as if it were fuel. A Russian who has a meal like the one you had tonight savors every mouthful. Then there is the way you drink vodka. You don’t drink to forget, the way we do. You drink the way a mechanic puts grease on an axle—for lubrication. And then there is the way you make love. You don’t make love like a Russian. I have made love with Frenchmen and Germans and Finns, and once with an American. He cut his hair in the military style and said he was a businessman, but I found out he worked at the American Embassy. My foreigners were like you in bed—they attempted to give pleasure as well as get it. Our men don’t like so much oral sex, and they are very quick. Then there is this.” Katushka reaches under the sheets and traces the outline of his penis with her fingertips. “I have never before seen a Russian with a circumcised penis. Even the Jews I have made love with don’t have it, because they were born either during the period of Stalin, or during the German occupation, and it was dangerous to be circumcised. I have always wondered, do you feel less with a circumcised penis?”

  Stone laughs uneasily. “I have nothing to compare it with.”

  “Where you come from, do girls take the sex of the man in their mouth as I do?” she wants to know.

  “How would I know such a thing?” Stone answers. He feels on the edge of panic; all the years of painstaking preparation, and he finds himself bedded down with a prostitute who is sure he’s not Russian because he is circumcised! Well, he has other identities, and other addresses.

  Katushka reads his mind. “Not to worry,” she tells him. “I am pleased with you for being a foreigner. I won’t give you away.” Oblivious to the cold, she leaps from the bed, snaps on the light, rummages in a straw trunk and comes out with a plastic folder, which she offers to Stone. “Here, you will read these,” she instructs him. “And then I will tell you the story behind them.”

  There are two sheets of paper, both brittle with age, inside the plastic folder. Each sheet is stapled to a translation written out in longhand. Stone makes it a point to skip the originals, which are in English, and read the translations, which are in Russian. The first item is a British citation for bravery made out to one Aleksandr Yefimov. The citation specifies that Yefimov, while operating as a partisan behind German lines in Poland, saved the lives of four British airmen whose plane was shot down while trying to drop supplies to Warsaw during the uprising. The second item is a handwritten letter to Yefimov from Flight Lieutenant Frank Peterson. The letter, dated March 4, 1946, thanks Yefimov for saving his, Peterson’s, life and organizing his escape to Soviet lines. Peterson ends his letter: “If you should ever come to London, you can be sure of a very warm welcome from my family. Our address is 4 Cambridge Gate, Regents Park, London. Yours faithfully, Frank Peterson.”

  “It’s this way,” Katushka says, curling up alongside Stone’s tense body, placing her now cold hand on his penis. “Aleksandr Yefimov was my father. He was taken prisoner early in the war, and spent three years in a concentration camp in Poland. He and several others managed to escape and joined up with the Polish underground. That’s when he saved Peterson’s life. Because he’d been a partisan, my father didn’t wind up in Siberia the way all the other returning prisoners of war did. But in 1946, he got a letter in the mail inviting him to come to the British Embassy to re
ceive a medal for saving the lives of four British aviators. My mother warned it would bring trouble, but my father was a very proud man, so he borrowed a suit and went. He came home with the medal on his chest and this citation, and the letter from Peterson. A week later he was arrested as a British spy and packed off to Siberia. My mother lined up once a week for six years to send him whatever she could scrape together—tobacco, warm socks, lard. When she came home, her lips were blue with cold and fear. She never knew if he received the packages. She never saw him again, and was only permitted to receive one letter a year. One day one of the packages came back stamped ‘Deceased.’” Katushka smiles sadly. “Here we never weep at sadness, only at happiness. That way we cry less.”

  There is a school of thought, backed up by a good deal of on-the-job experience, that holds that an agent operating in the field shouldn’t trust his own mother. There is another school, to which Stone has always been committed in principle, that claims you get just as many good breaks as bad ones, and you’d be a fool not to take advantage of them. Stone, concentrating so hard he forgets the cold and Katushka’s hand on his sexual organ, contemplates his “break”: he has gone to ground, as planned, with a prostitute who—and here is the bonus—who claims to be secretly anti-Soviet and has a cat she calls Thermidor. If he could believe her, it would open all sorts of operating possibilities.

  “If only I could believe you,” Stone says carefully.

  “I’ll take you to meet my mother,” Katushka whispers eagerly. “Then you’ll tell me what I can do to help you, my beautiful circumcised foreigner.”

  The morning rushes at Stone with a cold, sunny suddenness; streams of light flow through the double windows with the cotton and moss between them, washing out the apricot cushions to the point where they look like bleached sand. Katushka is nowhere to be seen, though she has left traces behind her: an almost imperceptible impression in the pillow next to Stone; pleated trousers, an army web belt, scattered where she tossed them the night before; and Katushka’s shadow, the cat called Thermidor, sulking on the washed-out apricot pillows, observing with a kind of bored detachment the latest in the long line of visitors to his lady’s bed.