The Debriefing

by Robert Littell

  “Katushka,” Stone calls. He hurriedly checks his shoulder bag and the lining in his jacket, finds both untouched, dresses quickly, slips in stockinged feet into the hallway, listens. There is the sound of dishes being noisily set out on a table, of breakfast being produced. Normal sounds, not alarming. Stone, cautious, tiptoes to the kitchen door and opens it a crack. “It’ll send a shiver up your spine,” Clandestine Residences said, “even though I’m warning you. He’s the spitting image, a perfect double. He even keeps the mustache trimmed, though he seldom goes out because of the danger of being roughed up. My air attaché suspects he is stark raving, but harmless.”

  And there he is in the flesh, Joseph Dzugashvili, better known as Stalin, eighty years old if he is a day and still going strong, patiently turning the toast in the old-fashioned toaster and piling the finished slices on a serving plate. “What a book he could write,” Clandestine Residences marveled. “Imagine being the stand-in for Stalin during all those years. Appearing at the Bolshoi while the great man locked himself behind the Kremlin walls and ran the war. Taking the salute of the soldiers trooping sixty abreast through Red Square. Shaking all those hands on the receiving line. During the war, Stalin used to stay up every night until dawn with his generals, moving his units around on a giant battle map. He was too tired to appear in public in the morning. So his double became known in the inner circle as the Morning Stalin.” Clandestine Residences winked. “He’s gay, of course, our Morning Stalin. Fluffy robes. Eye makeup. Dyes his gray hairs. And just wait until you see the other half of the couple!”

  The other half of the couple, as Clandestine Residences called it, is a transvestite who turns up as a he sometimes (who goes by the name of Ilyador Aleksandrovich), and sometimes as a she (Isadora Aleksandrovna). Ilyador (he is going through a male phase now) is a puffy, out-of-shape fifty-year-old, with one sparkling gold tooth and a permanent depression, the way a woman is after childbirth or before her period. Now, meticulously folding paper napkins into triangles, he catches sight of Stone at the door, nudges Morning Stalin with an elbow.

  “It’s here, dear,” he says. They both stop what they’re doing to size up Stone.

  “Toast’s burning,” says Stone. “Where Katushka?” He stares again at Stalin’s double, unable to believe his eyes.

  Morning Stalin slowly elevates his chin toward the roof. “She’s puttering,” he says loftily. After all those years of impersonating the great man, some of it has obviously rubbed off. His gaze is cool and confident. He speaks the way people do who expect others, as a matter of course, to hang on their every word. “I told her she was planting the begonias too early, but she’s an independent fig; she does what she feels like doing.”

  Stone finds the door leading to the ladder and the roof. Katushka’s greenhouse postdates her brief but well-documented affair with the American air attaché. Clandestine Residences knew that it was her dream to have one; knew, too, that she was already “bartering” her services for the raw materials she needed. And here it is, a fait accompli, double panels of glass enclosed in a thick wooden frame, a kind of lean-to greenhouse built against the side wall of the apartment building next door, which rises three stories higher than the one Katushka lives in.

  “Come on in,” she calls cheerily from inside the greenhouse, “—if you don’t suffer from allergies, that is—and visit my act of defiance.”

  “What are you defying?”

  “Winter!”

  Stone leans against one of the greenhouse radiators, which has been hooked up to the building’s central heating system, watching her as she cleans the sickly leaves of a Medinilla magnifica with a bit of moist cotton, murmuring words of encouragement all the while to the plant, which has survived a Moscow winter. “I feel like one of my plants after winter,” Katushka tells Stone, looking up, smiling in a sad, distant way. “I need to be scrubbed and coaxed back to life.”

  “Nobody,” comments Stone, “likes winter very much.”

  “It isn’t only winter I don’t like,” reflects Katushka. “I don’t like summer too. I prefer transitional seasons.” She angles her head, peers myopically at him between the leaves, whispers conspiratorially: “I also would rather be en route than arrive.” Suddenly she brightens. “Would you be interested to know what my ambition in life is? My ambition is to give my name to a rose. I’ve never told that to anyone before.” She spoons fertilizer into a flowerpot, then gently waters it as she tests the sponginess of the earth with her thumb. “You will find, when you know me better, that I am the type of person who rises to occasions.” She looks into Stone’s face, and he feels the almost magnetic pull of her large pupils. “I only need someone to supply the occasion. I am pleased with you because you look like an occasion.”

  Morning Stalin systematically butters a slice of toast. “Excuse my hands,” he says as he passes it to Ilyador, who spreads a coating of honey across it and offers it to Katushka. Morning Stalin tells Ilyador, “I always knew you had it in for the old cheese.”

  “Contrary to what you think”—Ilyador yawns, reaching for another slice of toast—“I have nothing personal against Karl Marx. I find it rather endearing that at the overripe age of eighty he learned to read Russian to get at Pushkin in the original.”

  “You’re inventing again,” accuses Morning Stalin, agitatedly stirring a spoonful of strawberry jam into his tea. “I can tell from your lips. They give you away every time. They are always thin when you invent.”

  Ilyador’s feelings are hurt. “Every time I come up with something he doesn’t know”—he appeals to Katushka—“he says I’m making it up.”

  “You missed your calling,” Morning Stalin harasses Ilyador with glee. “You should be writing novels instead of installing telephones. Lot of good you do installing telephones anyhow. Half the people in the country are waiting for a phone, the other half are waiting for a dial tone. Ha! That’s rather humorous, if I do say so myself.”

  Everyone laughs except Ilyador, who concentrates on his toast, chewing tiny mouthfuls with his lips delicately pressed together, his eyebrows elevated.

  Katushka takes Ilyador’s hand in hers, leans over and kisses him on the cheek. “You have the soul of an artist,” she whispers in his ear.

  “Artist!” Morning Stalin almost chokes on his tea. “Some artist he is. He’s neither socialist nor realist.” And in the bored voice of a university lecturer, he adds: “There are two kinds of artists in this world—the innovators, and the finders and users. If this mushroom here is an artist, he falls into the second category. Something like a garbage collector.”

  “It’s not fair,” shrieks Ilyador, scraping back his chair from the table. “One minute he accuses me of inventing. The next he says I’m a finder and user.”

  Katushka turns to Stone, “Which group do you fall into? The innovators, or the finders and users?”

  Stone says, “I keep a foot in each camp.”

  “That’s a bright reply,” says Morning Stalin. He points to Stone with his chin. “Where did you find it?” he asks Katushka.

  “It found me,” she says with a laugh. “In the underground passageway.”

  “Typical,” sneers Morning Stalin with an air of superiority. “Men generally go out in search of experience, but women always sit back and wait for it to come to them.” He turns to Stone and explains with elaborate politeness. “That, in my humble opinion, is the essential difference between the male of the species and the female—the way they experience experience.”

  “Another theory!” snorts Ilyador.

  This time it’s Morning Stalin whose feathers are ruffled. “And just what do you mean by ‘another theory’? I read it in an article by none other than honored academician Anatol Jelizniakov.” Morning Stalin wags his butter knife at Ilyador. “You’re afraid of theories like this because it’ll show you up for what you are.”

  “And what, in your warped view, am I?” demands Ilyador.

  Morning Stalin pounces cruelly. “A mal
e of the species is what you are! And the proof is that you don’t wait for experience to come to you; you go out in search of it”—his voice rises to a hysterical pitch—“seven days a week, prowling the corridors of dilapidated tenements with anybody who jingles some kopecks in his pocket.”

  Ilyador’s nostrils flare. “I keep a foot in each camp,” he observes coquettishly.

  Katushka intervenes. “The difference between the sexes isn’t the way they experience experience,” she tells Morning Stalin, “but in the fact that women”—she looks pointedly at Stone—“commit themselves to a thing, to a cause, to a person, before they really know anything about it. Men must see a baby first before they’ll love it.”

  Stone takes the metro to Kutuzovsky Prospekt, wanders around looking in store windows, then doubles back in his own tracks. When he is sure he isn’t being followed, he flags down a taxi heading back toward the center of the city. In a small park near the Kremlin, he stops to rest on the third bench from the end, and absently scratches the initials “DR” on the wood with the blade of a small pocket knife (manufactured in Russia, supplied by Clothing and Accessories). A solid grandmother with an overstuffed child in tow sails by, clucking her tongue at the sight of Stone defacing proletarian property. After a while Stone strolls over to a street wagon and waits his turn for a glass of kvass, then makes his way to a pay phone. A young woman is just finishing her call. “Genuine mohair,” she tells someone happily. “No, I asked for red, but they gave me the next color that came up, which was green. Green’s not the end of the world, is it? All right. All right. Don’t panic. If you really can’t support green, I’ll sell it for twice what I paid. No. You get the bread; I have to see about repairing the iron.”

  The girl hangs up, spots Stone waiting patiently, smiles enticingly. “You wouldn’t be interested in some fantastic green mohair, would you?” He shakes his head, inserts a two-kopeck coin in the phone, dials 291-78-15. The phone rings twice, then a third time. A woman answers. “Please?” she says in memorized Russian. Stone coughs twice into the receiver, then severs the connection and turns back in the direction of the zoo. In an hour or so the American naval attaché (the one who supplies the admiral with Havanas) will break for lunch and wander through the small Kremlin park searching for the carved initials that will confirm that the strange bird from Topology has nested in Moscow.

  Katushka is silent most of the way out to the dacha, intent on her driving, glancing only occasionally out of the corners of her dark eyes at Stone. She leans on her horn, ignores a double white line and shoots past a black Zil with a chauffeur at the wheel and two stout women in the back seat. “Central Committee whores,” she mutters under her breath. “Their husbands all have chauffered Zils and dachas out here.”

  They pass through a series of small villages full of mud paths and neat wooden houses painted dark green, with hand-carved shutters and tended vegetable gardens. Near Nikolina Gora, they speed past a single-lane macadam road that angles off into a forest of white birches.

  “Did you see that?” says Stone, twisting in his seat to look out the back window. “There’s a no-entrance sign at the turnoff. I wonder where it goes to, that road?”

  “I had a client once who went there from time to time,” says Katushka. “He repaired code machines in the Ministry of Defense. I used to drop him at the turnoff on my way out to visit my mother at the dacha, and pick him up again on the way back to Moscow.”

  They pass a young policeman who peers at the car, recognizes it and the driver, and waves them on. Katushka waves back. “Over there—that one was Prokofiev’s dacha,” she tells Stone, pointing at a large wooden building set back from the road. “And that one’s Kapitsa’s.” She concentrates on her driving for a while, then asks suddenly: “Do people have dachas in England?”

  Stone says, “How would I know?”

  Katushka smiles at him knowingly. “We’re almost there,” she says. “You’ll like my mother. She only reads thin books because she thinks they’re more sensitive. She plants medicinal herbs as soon as the ground thaws, but nothing ever comes of it. She wears white lace gloves all the time so she won’t be obliged to touch anything Soviet. The dacha’s around the next bend.”

  “How is it,” Stone asks, “that she has a dacha? They are usually reserved for very important people.”

  “She has been given permanent use of the dacha,” Katushka explains distantly, “as a personal favor to me.”

  Katushka’s mother, tall, brittle as a dried flower, with white lace gloves and an ancient fox fur drawn high up on her thin neck, is hovering over a gardener who is hacking away at the just thawed earth with an old hoe. “Straight rows,” she instructs him, “are absolutely essential for medicinal plants. You’re weaving all over the map as if—” She turns at the sound of the car pulling in, starts in surprise, rushes forward to embrace Katushka, who falls into her outstretched arms. “I had a premonition you would come earlier than usual this month,” she tells her daughter. She catches sight of Stone emerging from the car and regards him with obvious curiosity. “You must have been born in a good year,” she says, offering a gloved hand. “Katushka has never brought a man friend here before. Greetings to you. I’m the prototype, which is to say I am the mother.”

  Stone accepts her hand, which is extended to him in a way that gives him no choice but to kiss the back of it. Bending, he touches his lips to the lace—a gesture his father made him master on the day of his thirteenth birthday.

  Katushka laughs, whispers in her mother’s ear. “He is something special. He’s a foreigner!”

  Her mother, whose name is Tanya, observes Stone in this new light. “Oh, dear, how very original. He looks normal enough.” She turns brightly to Katushka. “Let’s decide not to hold it against him.”

  “Where did you find the gardener?” Katushka asks her mother as they start toward the dacha. Stone, forgotten, trails along behind.

  Tanya wipes her shoes vigorously on the mat before the wooden door, surveys the others to make sure they follow suit, heads for the kitchen to put up water to boil. “I heard about the gardener from the cousin of the ridiculous woman who runs the bread shop in Nikolina Gora. He had just moved in with a sister of his there, and was rumored to be looking for work. He has a fantastic story,” she says, licking her lips. And she sets about telling it: “Apparently the amount of lumber a log will yield is determined by the placement of the first cut in the log. A misjudgment of half a centimeter can reduce the yield by as much as a third. My man—you will have guessed it by now—was packed off to Siberia because he didn’t get the first cut right. They called it sabotage and gave him a tenner. He was released six months ago and went back to work as a first-cutter. He was making splendid cuts, but was replaced by a computer that scans the log with an electric eye and automatically positions the saw. Well, their loss is my gain! We’ve organized to grow medicinal plants together. With my know-how and his brawn, we’ll make a fortune. Oh, it’s so thrilling, private enterprise. I adore it, don’t you?” She smiles politely at Stone. “But then, you will have had a great deal of experience with private enterprise.”

  Stone says, “Katushka brought me all the way here so you could tell me about her father.”

  Tanya looks innocently at Katushka. “Which version am I to give him?”

  “The real one, mother. Tell him the truth, and for God’s sake, tell it so he’ll believe it. It’s important.”

  They settle into wooden chairs drawn up around the old tiled stove, which is still warm to the touch from the fire the night before. Katushka pours tea; her mother takes hers with slices of green apple in the glass. White lace curtains on the double windows filter the light, soften it. The voices too.

  When they leave, two hours later, the sun has set and the air is sharp. The first-cutter is still hoeing; he has set stakes in the ground and tied lines between them to keep his rows straight. From behind a double window, Tanya raises a white-gloved hand; her breath has fogged the wi
ndow in front of her face, and the fogged window blurs her features. Katushka waves back from the car as they set out in the twilight for Moscow.

  “Well?”

  Stone, still undecided, watches the birch trees slip past. “Well, what?”

  Katushka says, “We have the possibility of a perfect relationship, you and I. You’ll think you are using me. I’ll think I am using you.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Stone says, “why you want to help me.”

  Katushka looks at him in the darkness. “I don’t want to help you,” she explains. “I want to hurt them.”

  Katushka and Stone join the queue for the sausages, which is moving at a painfully slow pace. Muttering about being a seven-month baby who can’t support long periods on his feet, a frail man with a facial tic tries to cut into the line. Stone shrugs and steps back to make room, but Katushka delivers a healthy kick to the man’s shins and pushes him from the line. “The best thing for you, comrade line-jumper”—she laughs good-naturedly—“is to return to the womb for two months!”

  Outside the store, the sausages safely tucked into her handbag, Katushka looks triumphantly at Stone. “That proves you’re a foreigner beyond any possible doubt,” she says. “A real Russian would never let someone cut into line ahead of him!”

  In a spacious corner office on the fourth floor of the KGB complex on Dzerzhinsky Square, a quiet, pipe-smoking man of about sixty studies a dossier open on his desk. Finally he looks up at the two young men.

  “The name is obviously false” he says. “How did he get the magazines out of the hotel?”