The Debriefing by Robert Littell

nineteen.”

    “Was it difficult getting her committed?”
    “What do you mean, committed?”
    “You told me”—Stone checked a detail in the folder on his lap—“yes, you said you committed her to an asylum outside Moscow that more or less specialized in people with sexual problems.”
    “Ah, yes, committed. My wife’s brother-in-law had a brother who worked at the hospital. Normally you wait two years to get someone treated, but we pulled strings.” Suddenly Kulakov stood up. “It’s almost noon,” he said dully. “Enough for today.”
    The next day Stone began the session with: “You were saying you pulled strings to get Nadia committed. Did she object to going? Did she object to being separated from her … friend?”
    “At first she wouldn’t consider it.” Kulakov started off briskly. “We had some terrible scenes. The woman we shared the flat with—she was the widow of a wartime comrade of mine, actually—called the militia one night, and I had to take them outside and give them a couple of bottles of vodka before I could convince them it was a family argument. I worked on Nadia for weeks about the asylum. She resisted, but then she became unsure of herself. She knew I loved her more than anyone in the world. In the end she was very nervous. She had bitten her fingernails down to the quicks. She had an ugly rash that wouldn’t go away. She had trouble breathing—a pain deep in her chest. One day she shrugged and said she would go. And so I took her … I took my own daughter—” Kulakov’s voice broke. When he regained his composure, he said, “You know, the only difference for me between one day and the next is that some days are less sad than others.”
    After that session, over lunch, Kulakov turned suddenly to Stone and asked him if he had any children. Stone and Thro avoided each other’s eyes. “A daughter, yes,” he answered softly. Thro quickly changed the subject; she was trying, for the dozenth time, to explain to Kulakov how a checking account worked. Stone, watching them talk, let his mind wander; for no reason at all, he remembered how his daughter used to confusekissing with making love. When he would come in to say good night, she would giggle and say, “Let’s make love,” and start planting kisses on his mouth. The next morning she would proudly announce in her high-pitched voice that she and her daddy had made love fifteen times the night before.
    That happened when she was six. Now she was eight going on nine. Stone wondered if she still confused kissing and making love. He didn’t know. He hadn’t set eyes on her in two years.
    Thro’s end of it got off to a slow start; for the first few days, all Kulakov wanted to talk about was money. Thro was as reassuring as she could be, but necessarily vague. Kulakov grew suspicious, and then bitter. “What does it depend on?” he wanted to know. “How many secrets I give to your Mr. Simon? How many times must I tell you, I don’t know any secrets?”
    Thro was patient. She explained that he would get a lump sum settlement, and a military pension roughly equivalent to what a retired major, which was Kulakov’s rank, would receive from the United States Army after twenty-eight years of service. He would also receive private medical insurance, and be eligible for Social Security payments when he reached the age of sixty-five. Kulakov remained anxious. “What,” he asked, “is Social Security?”
    Thro questioned Kulakov closely on what he had done in the courier service (“I carried sealed diplomatic pouches from point A to point B for twenty-eight years”); what he had studied in the military academy (“Artillery; I was a specialist on how rifling affected the spin and accuracy of a projectile”); his hobbies (“What,” he asked, “are hobbies?”). She finally wormed out of him that during one of his vacations at a Ministry of Defense rest home on the Black Sea, he had borrowed a secondhand easel and started