The Debriefing (16 page)
The older man at the window turns back to the others and accepts a glass of vodka from one of them. It is yellower than the usual vodka because of the dried walnut shells that were added to the bottle by the supply officer who runs the canteen. The older man holds his glass up to the light to study the color, judges that the walnut shells have been left in long enough, and downs the vodka in one quick gulp. “I’d give five years of my life,” he says lightly—but everyone understands that he is deadly serious— “to have had a seat at that Forty Committee meeting.”
He holds his glass out for a refill. The others, who have never seen him drink two glasses of vodka in a row before, take this as a sign of the strain he has been under since the defection of the diplomatic courier Kulakov
.
…
Moscow, where the heart’s fever burns
.
—From Akhmatova’s poem
“Boris Pasternak”
One wing of the Air France 747 dips gracefully, like a gull’s in free flight feeling for updrafts. The ground tilts into Stone’s field of vision. Birch forests slip past. The ice-patched Moscow River bends around a cluster of wooden dachas. The tall brick chimneys of a factory complex intrude into the sky; their thin shadows probe like fingers into the folds of the countryside. The snow, everywhere melting, persists in the plowed fields, giving the impression of enormous white napkins spread out to dry in the sun.
It doesn’t matter that Stone has never set foot in Russia before. Home is a question of recognizing the landscape of the heart. And Stone has the uneasy sensation of coming home. In his mind’s eye, he sees himself hurtling forward into his past, rediscovering roots that his father and his father’s father abandoned when they fled to China, one jump ahead of the Bolsheviks, so many years before.
Stone does his best to quell the curious mixture of fear and exhilaration that sets his head swirling; Russians out of Russia tend to be emotional cripples who have lost the habit of dealing with feelings and so usually suppress them. He concentrates on the plane’s shadow racing along the ground, growing larger, rising to meet them. The wheels touch, scorching the tarmac with black skid marks; scorching the landscape of Stone’s heart as well.
“I feel the same way,” whispers the buxom Frenchwoman in the seat next to Stone’s. She has been trying, with a noticeable lack of success, to strike up a conversation with him ever since he joined the group of French tourists at Le Bourget outside Paris. Now, seeing his expression, she leans toward him to take him into her confidence. “It’s thrilling to think that everybody out there is a Communist, isn’t it?”
Stone runs the back of his thumb along his mustache, adjusts his eyeglasses, smiles politely. “The museums are what attract me,” he tells her, “not the Communists.” He shrugs apologetically. “I teach art history in a lycée.”
The airport is exactly as Planes and Trains described it: Uzbeks, with bulging cardboard suitcases sprawling across benches and using their coats as pillows; electric clocks that tell different times; candy wrappers overflowing the few ashtrays that haven’t been stolen; whole families camping in corners waiting for planes that don’t appear on any timetables; women with dirty fingernails playing with shrill cries of triumph a card game called Imbecile.
Intimidated, but doing their best not to show it, the French tourists file by passport control. The young frontier officer behind the desk signals for Stone to remove his eyeglasses, then scrutinizes the passport photograph and the face confronting him for a long moment. Apparently satisfied, he thumbs through a loose-leaf notebook, stamps the passport page with the visa on it, closes the passport with a snap and hands it back to Stone. There is a long wait for the baggage, and when it finally arrives, a rush to line up before the customs inspectors. Stone selects the youngest of the lot, a woman with a bouffant hairdo and a ridiculously short skirt which draws snickers from the Parisians, who have been wearing theirs midcalf length for several years already. The first member of the group, a loud insurance salesman from Lyons with a wig, runs into trouble when the customs inspector comes across a copy of
Playboy
in his valise. She calls over her chief, and he carefully studies the centerfold before nodding gravely and returning the magazine to its owner.
When Stone’s turn comes, the woman makes a cursory inspection of his ancient suitcase and meticulously folded clothing. She is more interested in the two art history books she finds in his small shoulder bag, and the detective novel jutting from his jacket pocket. She strains to read every word of the blurbs on the back covers, then returns the books and fixes her expressionless gaze on the next tourist in line.
Stone, waiting for the others in the group to clear customs, watches absently as two young men, Muscovites from the sound of their accents, argue at another counter with a male customs inspector. He stands his ground and the two young men reluctantly begin to untie the ropes that bind their suitcases. The inspector’s heavy-lidded eyes come alive as he begins to pull from the valises an assortment of blue jeans, Japanese transistor radios, phonograph records, cassettes, wrist watches, men’s shoes with high heels, colorful scarves, and other bits and pieces of plastic junk that pass for treasure in Moscow. A crowd forms; two uniformed policemen impatiently wave people on. The chief inspector saunters over, fingers one of the silk scarves, tries to read the headlines in the newspaper used to wrap the cassettes, reaches into the leg of a pair of blue jeans and extracts a small red velvet sack with a Jewish Star of David embroidered on it. Then he finds a second, and a third. The mood changes. One of the boys begins to wipe his brow with a silk scarf.
Stone stares at the red velvet sack. A Jewish tallith! His heart aches with the memory of his grandfather formally presenting him, on the day of his bar mitzvah, with a tallith of his own.
Stone is shooed away with the others, and joins his group on the bus. A pert Intourist guide sitting on a swivel seat alongside the driver blows into a hand microphone to see if it is alive. “Welcome to Moscow,” she says in careful French. “The airport you landed at is called Vnukovo. You’ll be staying at the Hotel Rossiya, the largest hotel in the world, just off Red Square. The drive to the hotel will take three quarters of an hour.”
The drive into Moscow proves to be an exhilarating experience for Stone. The Forty Committee and its babblings about one and a half wars are a world away; even Kulakov seems like a
figment of his imagination. He is caught up in sights and sounds that stir faint memories; things he has never set eyes on before are painfully familiar. The first kvass wagons are on the streets, and the Muscovites are eagerly queuing up and counting out kopecks. The bus passes a parked truck piled high with cabbages from the nearest collective farms, factories with hammers and sickles and slogans plastered over their walls, prefabricated tenement clusters surrounded by potholes and mud paths with boards thrown across them to keep the residents high and dry. There is a huge statue of a thoughtful Lenin, and long lines of people at bus stops, and stores with their drab windows offering up a reflection of the road. Taxis and shiny black Zils with curtains over their passenger windows speed by. A policeman with white gloves and a baton holds up traffic so a kindergarten class, walking in double file with each child holding onto the coat of the child in front, can cross. A minor traffic accident between an Army truck and a taxi causes a jam at the Kaluga Gate, now known as Gagarin Square. Stone studies the crescent-shaped apartment houses on either side of the road. The Intourist guide doesn’t say so, of course, but the houses were constructed by prisoners, one of whom later described the experience in a book called
The First Circle
.
And then they are in the thick swirl of downtown traffic that flows in enormously wide boulevards around the Kremlin, the sinister fortress where the Tartar invaders planted their horse-tall standards six hundred years before. The huge white elephant, the Hotel Rossiya, looms ahead beside the Moscow River.
The game plan, concocted by Entries and Exits, is simple enough. Stone, traveling under a French passport made out in the name of Bernard du Bucheron, age forty-two, celibate, instructor in art history at the Lycée Carnot in Cannes, goes through the motions of getting his room assignment from the Intourist guide. “Dinner in one-half hour in the dining room on the corner,” she instructs her sheep, and they obediently trot off to unpack and criticize the plumbing and gawk at the colorful
onion-shaped domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Stone carries his own valise to his room, locks the door and quickly goes to work. He empties the valise, cuts away the lining, stuffs some of the rubles in his jacket pockets and the rest in his shoulder bag, along with changes of socks, underwear and several clean shirts. He lays out the four sets of Russian identity papers on the bed. Three of them he sews into the lining of his suit jacket; the fourth set—the identity he will start with—goes into his breast pocket. The mustache is peeled off and flushed down the toilet, the eyeglasses pocketed (he will throw them away at the first opportunity). Stone checks to make sure that a copy of
Grani
, the anti-Soviet magazine published by émigrés in Paris, is still in the cut-away lining of his valise; when the Russians get around to searching his room, they will come across the copy of
Grani
and (hopefully) assume that the Frenchman who came in under the name of du Bucheron was merely a
Grani
delivery man with a suitcase full of subversive magazines. This sort of thing happens all the time; the police will look for the delivery man, Entries and Exits guessed, but not very hard.
Stone runs a comb through his hair, changing the part, and studies himself in the bathroom mirror; the overcoat is old, nondescript, the shoes Italian (available on the black market), the hat that of a typical Russian bureaucrat.
He is ready to disappear in the madding crowd of Muscovites hurrying home to the anesthetizing shot (of vodka, of poetry, of lovemaking) that will mark the passing of yet another day.
She is the kind of girl who stands out in any crowd, let alone a Russian crowd. Stone spots her just where Clandestine Residences said she would be: lounging against the side of a kiosk in the underground passage that runs between Gorky Street and Red Square. “She is in the neighborhood of twenty-five, with the features of a beautiful boy,” Clandestine Residences (who had once been a beautiful boy himself) said. “My source, who was something of a poet
manqué
despite his military background, claimed she had all the innocence of a kitten looking
into a mirror for the first time. Look for a thin face, thin lips, a long, thin nose—I believe it is usually described as aquiline—thick eyebrows, no hips to speak of, absolutely flat-chested. Wears her hair short, tied back with a scarf. Clean features. Profile of a bowsprit—nose, jaw thrust forward”—here Clandestine Residences did a reasonable imitation—“kind of face that looks perfectly natural with a wind blowing into it, if you see what I mean.”
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.”