Blood of Victory

A CALL TO ARMS

On 24 November, 1940, the first light of dawn found the Bulgarian ore freighter Svistov pounding through the Black Sea swells, a long night’s journey from Odessa and bound for Istanbul. The writer I. A. Serebin, sleepless as always, left his cabin and stood at the rail, searched the horizon for a sign of the Turkish coast, found only a blood red streak in the eastern sky. Like the old saying, he realized-red sky at morning, sailor take warning. But, a private smile for that. So many ways, he thought, to drown in autumn. The Svistov creaked and groaned, spray burst over the bow as she fought the sea. With cupped hands, Serebin lit a Sobranie cigarette, then watched the dark water churning past the hull until the wind drove him back to the cabin.

As he pulled the door shut, a soft shape stirred beneath the blanket. “Ah, mon ours,” she said. My bear. A muffled voice, tender, half asleep. “Are we there?”

“No, not for a long time.”

“Well then…” One side of the blanket rose in the air.

Serebin took off his shirt and trousers, then his glasses, slid in beside her and ran an idle finger down the length of her back, over the curve, and beyond. Smooth as silk, he thought, sleek as a seal. Bad poetry in bed, maybe, but she was, she was.

Marie-Galante. A fancy name. Nobility? It wouldn’t shock him if she were. Or not. A slumflower, perhaps. No matter, she was stunning, glamorous. Exceptionally plucked, buffed and smoothed. She had come to his cabin, sable coat and bare feet, as she’d promised at dinner. A glance, a low purr of a voice in lovely French, just enough, as her husband, a Vichy diplomat, worked at conversation with the Bulgarian captain and his first officer. So, no surprise, a few minutes after midnight: three taps, pearlescent fingernail on iron door and, when it opened, an eloquent Bonsoir.

Serebin stared when the coat came off. The cabin had only a kerosene lantern, hung on a hook in one corner, but the tiny flame was enough. Hair the color of almonds, skin a tone lighter, eyes a shade darker- caramel. She acknowledged the stare with a smile- yes, I am — turned slowly once around for him, then, for a moment, posed. Serebin was a man who had love affairs, one followed another. It was his fate, he believed, that life smacked him in the head every chance it got, then paid him back in women. Even so, he couldn’t stop looking at her. “It is,” she’d said gently, “a little cold for this.”

The engines hammered and strained, the overloaded steamship-Ukrainian manganese for Turkish mills-was slow as a snail. A good idea, they thought, lying on their sides, front to back, his hand on her breast, the sea rising and falling beneath them.

Serebin had boarded the Svistov at the Roumanian port of Constanta, where it called briefly to take on freight-a few crates of agricultural machinery cranked slowly up the rusty side of the ship-and a single passenger. The docks were almost deserted, Serebin stood alone, a small valise at his side, waiting patiently in the soft, southern dusk as the gangway was lowered.

Earlier that day there’d been fighting on the waterfront, a band of fascist Iron Guards pursued by an army unit loyal to Antonescu. So said the barman at the dockside tavern. Intense volleys of small arms fire, a few hand grenades, machine guns, then silence. Serebin listened carefully, calculated the distance, ordered a glass of beer, stayed where he was. Safe enough. Serebin was forty-two, this was his fifth war, he considered himself expert in the matter of running, hiding, or not caring.

Later, on his way to the pier, he’d come upon a telegraph office with its windows shattered, a man in uniform flung dead across the threshold of the open door, which bumped against his boot as the evening wind tried to blow it shut. Roumania had just signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany, political assassinations were daily events, civil war on the way, one poor soul had simply got an early start.

Dinner, in the freighter’s wardroom, had gone on forever. The diplomat, Labonniere, a dry man with a fair mustache, labored away in university Russian- the weather, quite changeable in fall. Or the tasty Black Sea carp, often baked, but sometimes broiled. The Bulgarian captain did not make life easy for him. Yes, very tasty.

It had been left to Serebin to converse with Madame. Was this on purpose? He wondered. The wife was amusing, had that particular ability, found in Parisian women, to make table talk out of thin air. Serebin listened, spoke when he had to, picked at a plate of boiled food. Still, what could any of them say? Half of France was occupied by Germany, Poland enslaved, London in flames. So, all that aside, the carp. Madame Labonniere wore a cameo on a velvet ribbon at her throat, from time to time she touched it with her fingers.

On a shelf in the wardroom was a green steel radio with a wire mesh speaker at the center shaped like a daisy. It produced the transmissions of a dozen stations, which wandered on and off the air like restless cats. Sometimes a few minutes of news on Soviet dairy production, now and then a string quartet, from somewhere on the continent. Once a shouting politician, in Serbo-Croatian, who disappeared into crackling static, then a station in Turkey, whining string instruments and a throbbing drum. To Serebin, a pleasant anarchy. Nobody owned the air above the sea. Suddenly, the Turkish music vanished, replaced by an American swing band with a woman singer. For a long moment, nobody at the dinner table spoke, then, ghostlike, it faded away into the night.

“Now where did that come from?” Marie-Galante said to Serebin.

He had no idea.

“London? Is it possible?”

“A mystery,” Serebin said.

“In Odessa, one never hears such things.”

“In Odessa, one plays records. Do you live there?”

“For the moment, at the French consulate. And you, monsieur? Where do you live?”

“In Paris, since ’38.”

“Quelle chance.” What luck. For him? Them? “And before that?”

“I am Russian by birth. From Odessa, as it happens.”

“Really!” She was delighted. “Then you must know its secrets.”

“A few, maybe. Nobody knows them all.”

She laughed, in a way that meant she liked him. “Now tell me,” she said, leaning forward, confidential. “Do you find your present hosts, congenial?”

What was this? Serebin shrugged. “An occupied city.” He left the rest to her.

7:20. Serebin lay on his back, Marie-Galante dozed beside him. The world winked at the cinq-a-sept amour, the twilight love affair, but there was another five-to-seven, the ante meridiem version, which Serebin found equally to his taste. In this life, he thought, there is only one thing worth waking up for in the morning, and it isn’t getting out of bed and facing the world.

From Marie-Galante a sigh, then a stretch. Fragrant as melon, warm as toast. She rolled over, slid a leg across his waist, then sat up, shook her hair back, and wriggled to get comfortable. For a time she gazed down at him, put a hand under his chin, tilted his head one way, then the other. “You are quite pretty, you know.”

He laughed, made a face.

“No, it’s true. What are you?”

“Mixed breed.”

“Oh? Spaniel and hound, perhaps. Is that it?”

“Half Russian aristocrat, half Bolshevik Jew. A dog of our times, apparently. And you?”

“Burgundian, mon ours, dark and passionate. We love money and cook everything in butter.” She leaned down and kissed him softly on the forehead, then got out of bed. “And go home in the morning.”

She gathered up her coat, put it on, held the front closed. “Are you staying in the city?”

“A week. Maybe ten days. At the Beyoglu, on Istiklal Caddesi.”

She rested her hand on the doorknob. “Au revoir, then,” she said. Said it beautifully, sweet, and a little melancholy.

Istanbul. Three-thirty in the afternoon, the violet hour. Serebin stared out the window of a taxi as it rattled along the wharves of the Golden Horn. The Castle of Indolence. He’d always thought of it that way-melon rinds with clouds of flies, a thousand cats, rust stains on porphyry columns, strange light, strange shadows in a haze of smoke and dust, a street where blind men sold nightingales.

The Svistov had docked an hour earlier, the three passengers stood at the gate of the customs shed and said good-bye. For Serebin, a firm handshake and warm farewell from Labonniere. Sometime in the night he’d asked Marie-Galante if her husband cared what she did. “An arrangement,” she’d told him. “We are seen everywhere together, but our private lives are our own affair.” So the world.

So the world — two bulky men in suits lounging against a wall on the pier. Emniyet, he supposed, Turkish secret police. A welcoming committee, of a sort, for the diplomat and his wife, for the Bulgarian captain, and likely for him as well. The Surete no doubt having bade him good-bye at the Gare du Nord in Paris, with the SD-Sicherheitsdienst-and the NKVD, the Hungarian VK-VI, and the Roumanian Siguranza observing his progress as he worked his way to the Black Sea.

He was, after all, I. A. Serebin, formerly a decorated Hero of the Soviet Union, Second Class, currently the executive secretary of the International Russian Union, a Paris-based organization for emigres. The IRU offered meetings, and resolutions-mostly to do with its own bylaws-as much charity as it could manage, a club near the Russian cathedral on the rue Daru, with newspapers on wooden dowels, a chess tournament and a Christmas play, and a small literary magazine, The Harvest. In the political spectrum of emigre societies, as mild as anything Russian could ever be. Czarist officers of the White armies had their own organizations, nostalgic Bolsheviks had theirs, the IRU held tight to the mythical center, an ideology of Tolstoy, compassion, and memories of sunsets, and accepted the dues of the inevitable police informers with a sigh and a shrug. Foreigners! God only knew what they might be up to. But it could not, apparently, be only God who knew.

The Hotel Beyoglu, named for the ancient quarter in which it stood, more or less, was on a busy street, just far enough from the tumultuous Taksim square. Serebin could have easily afforded the Pera Palace but that would have meant people he knew, so he took one of the chill tombs on the top floor of the musty old Beyoglu. Home to commercial travelers and midday lovers, with twelve-foot ceilings, blue walls, the requisite oleograph of Mustafa Kemal, oil-printed in lurid colors, hung high above the bed, and, in the bathroom, a huge zinc tub on three claw feet and a brick.

Serebin undressed, shaved, then ran a bath and lay back in the tepid green water.

There are leaves blowing on the road now, there are people you don’t see now.

Late October in Paris when he’d written that. He’d waited patiently for the rest to appear but it never showed up. Why? Autumn had always been kind to him, but not this year. It’s the city. Paris had died under the German occupation, the French heartbroken, grieving, silent. In a way, he hated them. What right did they have to it, this soft, twilit despair? Like some rainy image floating up from Verlaine. In Russia they’d gone through nine kinds of hell, got drunk on it and sang their hearts out. Famine, civil war, bandits, purges, the thirty-nine horsemen of the Apocalypse and then you stopped counting.

So, he’d come to Istanbul. Couldn’t breathe in Paris, fled to Bucharest, that was worse. Got drunk, wandered into a steamship office. Oh, he had reasons. You had to have those. Some IRU business, and a letter from Tamara Petrovna. Of course I want to see you. One last time, my love. So you can tell me not to think such things. They’d had two love affairs; at age fifteen, and again at thirty-five. Then Russia had taken her, the way it took people. The letter mentioned money, but he didn’t have to come all the way to Istanbul for that, the bank in Geneva would have taken care of that.

The life of Istiklal Caddesi drifted in the open window-braying donkey, twittering birds, a car horn, a street musician playing some kind of reedy clarinet. Go back to Odessa. Oh, a fine idea, Ilya Aleksandrovich. That would finish his poem. Some of the emigres tried it, more often than anyone would believe. Off they’d go, deluded, fatalistic, hoping against hope. Their friends would wait for a letter. But, nothing. Always, nothing.

Serebin dried himself off, put on his other shirt, fresh underwear, and socks, then peered at himself in the steel mirror. Lean and dark, average height-maybe a little less, black hair, thick enough so that he could wear it hacked off short by whoever had a scissors-Serebin hated barbers-a muscle in the jaw that sometimes ticked. Tense, restless eyes. Pretty? Maybe to her. “Clearly,” a lover in Moscow once told him, “there is something on fire inside you, Ilya. Women know this, dear, they ‘smell something burning,’ and they want to put it out. Though there will be one, now and again, who will want to throw oil on it.”

Carefully, he tied his tie, took it off, threw it on the bed. Left the top button closed, looked like a Greek communist, undid the button, let it go at that. Poetic license. Put on his brown tweed jacket. Made in London, it endured, withstood restaurant adventures and nights in railway stations, would surely, he thought, outlive him.

His other side was not to be seen in the mirror. His grandfather, the Count Alexander Serebin, had died in a duel in a St. Petersburg park in 1881. Over a ballerina, the story went. Serebin unbuttoned a second button and spread the vee of his shirt. Now you look like a Lebanese raisin salesman. That made him laugh-a different man! He fixed the shirt, left his hat and trench coat in the armoire, and went downstairs to find a taxi.

In front of the hotel, the same driver who’d brought him to the Beyoglu was busy with a rag, polishing the dents and gashes in his old Fiat taxi. “Effendi!” he cried out, delighted at the coincidence, and opened the rear door with a flourish. Obviously he’d waited at the hotel for Serebin to reappear; a commercial instinct, or something he’d been paid to do. Or told to do. So the world. Serebin showed him an address on a piece of paper and climbed in.

The house he’d bought for Tamara was in Besiktas, a summer resort just north of the city. It was after five when Serebin’s taxi crawled through the old village, the muezzin’s call to evening prayer sharp in the chill air, long red streaks in the sky above the domes and minarets, as though the sun were dying instead of setting.

The driver found the address easily enough, an ancient wooden summer house, a yali, painted yellow, with green shutters, on a cliff above the Bosphorus. Tamara was waiting for him in the little garden that looked out over the water. Instinctively he moved to embrace her, but she caught his hands and held him away. “Oh I am so happy to see you,” she said, eyes shining with tears of sorrow and pleasure.

His first love, maybe the love of his life-sometimes he believed that. She was very pale now, which made her jade eyes bright in a hard face, the face of the bad girl in an American gangster movie. Her straw-colored hair looked thin, and she wore it shorter than he remembered, pinned back with a pink barrette. To give her color. She had dressed so carefully for him. There was a vase stuffed with anemones on the garden table, and the stone terrace had been swept clean.

“I stopped at the Russian store,” he said, handing her a box wrapped in colored paper.

She opened it carefully, taking a long time, then lifted the lid to reveal rows of sugared plums. “From Balabukhi,” he said. The famous candy maker of Kiev.

“You will share,” she said firmly.

He pretended to hunt for one that especially appealed to him, found it, and took a bite. “Also this,” he said. A bag of dry cookies with almonds. “And these.” Two bracelets of ribbon gold, from a jewelry store near the hotel. She put them on and turned her wrist one way, then the other, so that the gold caught the light.

“You like them? Do they fit?”

“Yes, of course, they’re beautiful.” She smiled and shook her head in feigned exasperation- what is to be done with you?

They sat together on a bench and looked out over the water. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I must ask you how you are.”

“Better.”

“All better.”

“Much better. Good, really. But, you know, the chahotka.” Wasting away, it meant, the Russian word for tuberculosis.

In 1919, during the fighting between Bolshevik and Czarist forces, she had served as a nurse in a Red Army medical unit and treated the sick and dying villagers in the shtetls of Byelorussia. She had not been ordered to do this, she had done it on her own. There was no medicine for the illness, all she had was a pail of heated water and a cloth. But, cold and wet, exhausted from advancing, retreating, working day and night, she persisted, did what others feared to do, and the chahotka came for her. She spent eight months in bed, thought the illness was gone, and went on with her life. But in the bad winter of 1938, it returned, and Serebin had arranged her departure from Russia and installed her in the house in Besiktas.

“You see the doctors,” he said.

“Oh yes. Spending money like water.”

“I have money, Tamara.”

“Well, I spend it. I rest till I can’t stand it anymore, eat cream like a cat-your ladies don’t leave me alone for a minute.” He had found two sisters, Ukrainian emigres, to live in the house and care for her. “Are you happy in Paris?” she said. “Very adored, I suspect.”

He laughed. “Tolerated, anyhow.”

“Oh yes. Tolerated every night-I know you, Ilya.”

“Well, it’s different now. And Paris isn’t the same.”

“The Germans leave you alone?”

“So far. I am their ally, according to the present arrangements, the Hitler-Stalin treaty, and a literary celebrity, in a small way. For the moment, they don’t bother me.”

“You know them?”

“Two or three. Officers, simply military men assigned to a foreign posting, that’s how they see it. We have the city in common, and they are very cultured. So, we can have conversation. Always careful, of course, correct, no politics.”

She pretended to shiver. “You won’t stay.”

He nodded, she was probably right.

“But then, perhaps you are in love.”

“With you.”

Her face lit up, even though she knew it wasn’t true. Or, maybe, only a little true. “Forgive him, God, he tells lies.”

Fifteen years old, in empty apartments, on deserted beaches, they had fucked and fucked and slept tangled up together. Long summer evenings in Odessa, warm and humid, dry lightning over the sea.

“And do you walk?” he said.

She sighed. “Yes, yes, I do what I must. Every day for an hour.”

“To the museum? To see our friend?”

She laughed at that, a loud, raucous caw. When she’d first come to Istanbul they had visited the neighborhood attraction, a naval museum. Exquisitely boring, but home to a twenty-three-ton cannon built for an Ottoman sultan called Selim the Grim. A painting of him hung above the monster gun. His name, and the way he looked in the painting, had tickled her wildly, though the laughing fit had produced a bright fleck of blood on her lip.

One of the Ukrainian ladies stood at the door to the terrace and cleared her throat. “It is five-thirty, Tamara Petrovna.”

Serebin rose and greeted her formally-he knew both sisters’ names but wasn’t sure which was which. She responded to the greeting, calling him gospodin, sir, the genteel form of address that had preceded comrade, and set a tray down on the table, two bowls and a pair of soup spoons. Then she lit an oil lamp.

The bowls were heaped with trembling rice pudding, a magnificent treat for Serebin when he was a child. But not now. Tamara ate hers dutifully and slowly, and so did Serebin. Out on the Bosphorus, an oil tanker flying the swastika flag worked its way north, smoke rising from its funnel.

When they finished the pudding, she showed him where the roof tiles had cracked and come loose, though he could barely see them in the failing light. “That’s why I wrote to you,” she said. “They must be repaired, or water will come in the house. So we asked in the market, and a man came and climbed up there. He will fix it, but he says the whole roof must be replaced. The tiles are very old.”

Is that why you wrote? But he didn’t say it. Instead, standing at the dark corner of the house, waves breaking at the foot of the bluff, he asked her why she’d said one last time.

“I wanted to see you again,” she said. “That day I feared, I don’t know what. Something. Maybe I would die. Or you.”

He put a hand on her shoulder and, just for a moment, she leaned against him. “Well,” he said. “As we seem to be alive, today anyhow, we might as well replace the roof.”

“Perhaps it is the salt in the air.” Her voice was soft.

“Yes. Bad for the tile.”

“It’s getting cold, maybe we should go inside.”

They talked for an hour, then he left. The taxi was waiting in front of the house, as Serebin knew it would be, and on the way back to the hotel he had the driver wait while he bought a bottle of Turkish vodka at a cafe.

A practical man, the driver, who had contrived to learn a few crucial words for his foreign passengers. When Serebin returned from the cafe he said, “Bordello, effendi?”

Serebin shook his head. The man had watched him, in the rearview mirror, as he’d rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. Well, the driver thought, I know the cure for that.

No, no cure. She had that damn photograph on her dresser, cut from a newspaper and framed, amid sepia portraits of her mother and grandmother, and snapshots of her Polish lieutenant, who’d disappeared in ’39, and her dog Blunka, descendant of every hound that roamed the alleys of Odessa. She showed Serebin the small room where she slept, and there was the famous photograph.

Taken at a railway station captured from Denikin’s cossacks on a grainy April morning. A gray photograph; the station building pocked with gunfire, one side of the roof reduced to blackened timbers. The young officer Serebin, looking very concentrated, with two days’ growth of beard, wears a leather jacket and a uniform cap, the open jacket revealing a Nagant revolver in a shoulder holster. One hand holds a submachine gun, its leather sling hanging down, the other, bandaged with a rag, points as he deploys his company. Bolshevik intellectual at war. You could smell the cordite. The photograph had been taken by the renowned Kalkevich, who’d chronicled young dancers, backstage at the Bolshoi, for Life magazine. So it was very good, “Bryansk Railway Station: 1920.” Was reproduced in French and British newspapers, appeared in Kalkevich’s New York retrospective.

“We remember your photograph, Ilya Aleksandrovich.” Stalin said that, in the summer of 1938, when Serebin, certain that he was headed to the Lubyanka, was picked up by two chekists in a black Zil and whisked off to the Kremlin at midnight.

To be praised, it turned out, for the publication of Ulskaya Street, and to eat salted herring and drink Armenian champagne. He could barely get it down, could still taste it, warm and sweet. Beria was in the room, and, worse, General Poskrebyshev, the chief of Stalin’s secretariat, who had the eyes of a reptile. The movie that night-he’d heard they watched one every night-was Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland. Stalin laughed so hard that tears ran down his face. As the torch-bearing hobgoblins marched, singing, out of Bo-Peep’s shoe.

Serebin went home at dawn, and left Russia a month later.

And when the writer Babel was taken away, in May of ’39, knew in his heart that his name had been on the same list. Knew it because, at a certain point in the evening, Poskrebyshev looked at him.

Back at the hotel, the night clerk handed him an envelope. He took it up to his room, had a taste of the vodka, then another, before he opened it. On cream-colored paper, a note. A scented note, he discovered. And not only did he recognize the scent, he even knew its name, Shalimar. He knew this because he’d asked, the night before, and he’d asked because, everywhere he went, there it was, waiting for him. “Mon ours,” she wrote. Friends for drinks, at the yacht club, slip twenty-one, seven-thirty. She would be so pleased, so delighted, if he could join them.

A cloudy morning in Istanbul. From Serebin’s window, the Bosphorus was gray as the sky. The room service waiter was long departed, and Serebin had become aware that Turkish coffee was only a partial ameliorant for Turkish vodka-a minor lapse in the national chemistry-and had to be supplemented with German aspirin. The fat slice of pink watermelon was an affront and he ignored it.

In Constanta, waiting eight days for the Bulgarian steamship to make port, he’d wired the IRU office in Istanbul and let them know he was coming. Life as an executive secretary had its particular demands; Serebin had learned this the hard way, which was pretty much the way he learned everything. As a writer, he’d been a free spirit, showed up where and when he liked, or didn’t show up at all. A visit from the muse — or so people wanted to believe, a permanent excuse. But, as an administrator, you had to announce yourself, because a surprise visit implied inspection, you were trying to catch them at it, whatever it was. The last thing Serebin ever wanted, to catch anybody at anything.

10:20-time to go. He made sure to take his briefcase-emblem of office-though there was hardly anything in it. No matter, they were sure to give him paper enough to fill it up. He only then realized, too late, that he had no paper to give them. He went downstairs to the lobby, started toward the main entrance, then changed his mind and left by the back door. Hurried down a side street and out onto the avenue, then put ten minutes of distance between himself and the Beyoglu. Forgive me, my friend, I do not mean to cause you difficulties. Truly, he didn’t know why he’d evaded the driver. Nameless instinct, he told himself, let it go at that, stepped into the street and hailed a taxi.

In heavy traffic, they crept across the Golden Horn on the Galata Bridge to the old Jewish district of Haskoy. This was only the most recent address of the IRU office. It had moved here and there since its founding, in 1931, as had the offices in Belgrade, Berlin, and Prague, finding its way to Rasim street a year earlier, across from the loading yard of a tannery.

They were now in two comfortably large rooms on the second floor, at one time the office of the emigre Goldbark, who’d become rich as an exporter of tobacco and hazelnuts and was now one of the directors, and chief financial supporter, of the International Russian Union: Istanbul chapter. The building itself was ancient and swelled alarmingly as it rose, leaning out over a cobblestone lane.

At the top of the staircase, a sign on the door in Cyrillic, and one in Roman letters. Inside, magnificent chaos, Russian chaos. A steamy room with a radio playing and two women seated at clacketing typewriters. Two old men with long white beards were working at a bridge table, addressing envelopes with nib pens and inkwells. On one wall, drawings from the Russian kindergarten, mostly trains. Flanked by Pushkin in profile, and Chekhov in a wicker chair in the yard of a country house. A dense oil painting of the Grand Bazaar, in vibrant colors. A brown and black daguerreotype of a steppe.

On the adjacent wall, a mimeographed schedule for the month of November, which Serebin, for the moment left alone, felt he might as well read. A lecture about wool, a meeting of the stamp club, Turkish lessons, English lessons, meeting for new members-please sign up, memorial service for Shulsky, and a film, Surprising Ottawa, to be shown in the basement of the Saint Stanislaus church. Tacked up beside the schedule, underlined clippings, news of the Russian community cut from the IRU Istanbul’s weekly newspaper.

“Serebin!” Kubalsky, the office manager, hugged him and laughed. “Don’t tell anybody you’re here!”

Kubalsky took him around the office, introduced him to a bewildering assortment of people, sat him down at a table, pushed aside stacks of newspapers and files, and poured him a glass of tea from an ornate copper samovar.

“Life’s being good to you?” Serebin said, offering Kubalsky a Sobranie.

“Not too bad.” Kubalsky had a long, narrow face and deep-set eyes that glittered like black diamonds. Twice, in Berlin, he’d been beaten up as a Jew, which made him laugh, through split lips, because his grandfather had been a Russian Orthodox priest.

Serebin blew on his tea. Kubalsky, prepared for the worst, drummed his fingers on the table. “So, what brings you to Istanbul?”

“Truth?”

“Why not?”

“I had to get away from Paris.”

“Oh. Claustrophobia.”

Serebin nodded.

“Have you seen Goldbark?”

“Not yet. How is he?”

“Crazy as a bedbug. Says he lies awake all night, worrying about money.”

“Him?”

“‘I make a fortune,’ he says. ‘Where is it? Where is it?’”

“Where is it?”

Kubalsky shrugged. “Thank God for the wife, otherwise he’d make us all crazy.” He tapped cigarette ash into a cracked cup used as an ashtray. “The real problem here, of course, is the politics.”

Serebin agreed.

“It’s a zoo. The city’s crawling with spies-Nazis, Hungarians, Zionists, Greeks. The German ambassador, von Papen, is in the papers every day, but so are the British. The Turks are scared. Hitler went through the Balkans like shit through an eel. Now he’s got Bulgaria-maybe he stops there, maybe he doesn’t. The Turks are neutral, officially, but, so far, they’re neutral on our side. Still it’s difficult to navigate. That old business about the Middle East-to walk across a square you have to make three moves.”

“What if they sign on with Germany?”

“We run. Again.”

Serge Kubalsky knew all about that. In 1917, he’d been a successful “boulevard journalist” for one of the St. Petersburg newspapers that lived on gossip and innuendo. Then came revolution, and the husband of the woman he was sleeping with that week rose, overnight, from clerk to commissar. Kubalsky got away with eighty roubles and a canary. Settled in Berlin but couldn’t tolerate the Nazis, so he went to Madrid in 1933. The Republican secret service booted him out in ’36, he went to Lisbon, was hounded by Salazar’s thugs and left in ’37. Tried Switzerland-sorry, no residence card. Sofia the following autumn, wrote the wrong thing about the king, so off to Amsterdam, sneaking in the back door just about the time the Wehrmacht was breaking down the front. “I no longer,” he once told Serebin, “speak any language whatsoever.”

An old woman with a cane came over to the table, kissed Kubalsky on both cheeks, then disappeared into the other room. Kubalsky finished his cigarette and stood up. “Well,” he said, “you’d better take a look at the finances.” He went to a file cabinet and returned carrying a ledger filled with spidery bookkeeping.

Serebin ran his finger down the expense column. Ah, Sanskrit. But he worked at it, found the stamps, the ink and paper and envelopes, the lifeblood, then came upon an entry for rent. “What’s this?” he said.

“Rental of office space.”

“I thought Goldbark gave us this place.”

“He does. But we pay the rent and he donates the money. It helps him with his taxes, he says. Turks are old-fashioned about taxes. The strangling cord may be out of style, but the point of view hasn’t changed.”

The following pages were given over to loans and gifts, it went on and on, small amounts, the names not only Russian but Ukrainian and Jewish, Greek and Tatar, many others, a history of migration, a history of flight.

“So many,” Serebin said, subdued.

“People wounded in the war. Sick. Drunk. Or just broken. We come from a brutal place, Ilya. The list would double, if we had the money.”

Serebin knew. In Paris, he gave more than he could afford.

“What we try to do,” Kubalsky said, “is to help the Russian community as a whole. The Turks are basically fair-minded people, cosmopolitan. Hospitality to strangers is a religion with them. That’s what Kemal was all about. He outlawed the fez, changed the alphabet, kept Islam out of government. Everybody had to have a last name-they had lists of suggestions nailed up in the public squares. Still, foreigners are foreigners, and Russia and Turkey have always fought wars. So, the community is suspected of harboring Stalinist agents, the NKVD is active here, and every time some plot blows up and hits the newspapers, we all get blamed. Old story, right?”

Kubalsky sighed. Why did life have to go like this? “Christ,” he said, “you have to live somewhere.”

The yacht club was in the village of Bebek, just north of the city, where Istanbul’s wealthiest citizens had summer homes. Serebin, with Marie-Galante’s note in his pocket, visited a bar by the ferry dock in Eminonu, thought about not going, then decided he might as well. It had been a long, long day in the world of the International Russian Union. He had left Kubalsky to have lunch with Goldbark, followed by a visit to the eighty-five-year-old General de Kossevoy, in a tiny room so hot it made him sweat, and by the end of the afternoon he’d had all the emigre business he could bear. He stood at the rail of the crowded ferry, watching the caiques and the feluccas sliding through the water, the oil lamps on their sterns like fireflies in the darkness.

He found the yacht at slip twenty-one. Sixty feet of teak and polished brass. La Nereide — Tangier was painted in gold script on the bow and two crewmen, in green uniforms with the yacht’s name on the bands of their sailor hats, waited at the gangplank. He wondered about the nationality of the Nereide, sea nymph, but Tangier, in the Vichy French colony of Morocco, could have meant anything, and he knew, from talk on the docks of Odessa, that some yachts never called at their home ports. A flag of convenience — the legal words better, for a change, than poetry.

One of the sailors led him onboard, down a corridor, and into the salon. The 16th Arrondissement. At least that, Serebin thought. Black lacquer tables, white rattan furniture. The cushions had red tulips on a pale red background, there was lemon-colored Chinese paper on the walls. People everywhere, a mob, chattering and yammering in a dense fog of cigarette smoke and perfume.

The aristocrat who hurried toward him-he could be nothing else-wore blazer and slacks. Trim body, sleek good looks, ears tight to the head, graying hair combed back and shining with brilliantine. The Duke of Windsor, as played by Fred Astaire. “Welcome, welcome.” An iron grip. “We’re honored, really, to have you here. It must be Serebin, no? The writer? God I thought you’d be, older.” The language French, the voice low and completely at ease. “I am Della Corvo,” he said. “But Cosimo to you, of course, right?”

Serebin nodded and tried to look amiable, was a little more impressed by the whole thing than he wanted to be. His life drifted high and low, but up here he found the air a trifle thin.

“Marie-Galante!” Della Corvo called out. Then, to Serebin: “A Bulgarian freighter. Extraordinary.”

Marie-Galante broke through the edge of the crowd, a drink in each hand, a cigarette held between her lips. “You’re here!” His stunning caramel. Little black dress and pearls. She raised her face for bisoux and Serebin kissed each cheek in a cloud of Shalimar.

“We’re having Negronis,” she said, handing Serebin a glass.

Campari and gin, Serebin knew, and lethal.

“You’ll take him around?” Della Corvo said.

Marie-Galante slipped a hand under his arm and held him lightly.

“We must talk,” Della Corvo said to Serebin. “All this…” A charming shrug and a smile-he’d invited all these people, now, here they were. Then he disappeared into the crowd.

“Shall we?” she said.

The beau monde of emigre Istanbul. Like a giant broom, the war had swept them all to the far edge of Europe.

“Do you know Stanislaus Mut? The Polish sculptor?”

Mut was tall and gray and irritated. “So nice to see you.” How about I choke you to death with my bare hands?

Why?

Marie-Galante introduced him to the woman at Mut’s side. Oh, now I see. Mut had found himself a Russian countess. Anemic, a blue vein prominent at her temple, but sparkling with diamonds. She extended a damp hand, which Serebin brushed with his lips while waiting to be throttled.

As they escaped, Marie-Galante laughed and squeezed his arm. “Does romance blossom?”

“I think it’s glass.”

A short, dark man spread his arms in welcome.

“Aristophanes!”

“My goddess!”

“Allow me to introduce Ilya Serebin.”

“Kharros. Pleased to make your gububble.”

“I often read about your ships, monsieur. In the newspapers.”

“All lies, monsieur.”

A tall woman with white hair backed into Serebin, a red wave of Negroni burst over the rim of his glass and splashed on his shoe.

“Oh pardon!”

“It’s nothing.”

“Better drink that, ours.”

“What in God’s name did that man say?”

“Poor Kharros. He’s taking French lessons.”

“From who?”

She laughed. “A mad language teacher!” Laughed again. “How would you know?”

Monsieur Palatny, the Ukrainian timber merchant.

Madame Carenne, the French fashion designer.

Mademoiselle Stevic, the Czech coal heiress.

Monsieur Hooryckx, the Belgian soap manufacturer.

Madame Voyschinkowsky, wife of the Lion of the Bourse.

Doktor Rheinhardt, the professor of Germanic language and literature. Here there was conversation. Rheinhardt had come to Istanbul, Marie-Galante explained, in the mid-’30s migration of German intellectuals-doctors, lawyers, artists, and professors, many of whom, like Doktor Rheinhardt, now taught at Istanbul University.

“Serebin, Serebin,” Rheinhardt said. “Have you perhaps written about Odessa?”

“A few years ago, yes.”

“The truth is, I haven’t read your work, but a friend of mine has spoken of you.”

“What subject do you teach?”

“Well, German language, for undergraduates. And some of the early literatures-Old Norse, Old Frisian-when they offer them. But my real work is in Gothic.”

“He is the leading authority,” Marie-Galante said.

“You are too kind. By the way, Monsieur Serebin, did you know that the last time anyone actually heard spoken Gothic it was not far from Odessa?”

“Really?”

“Yes, in 1854, during the Crimean War. A young officer in the British army-a graduate of Cambridge, I believe-led a patrol deep into the countryside. It was late at night, and very deserted. They heard the sound of chanting, and approached a group of men seated around a campfire. The officer, who’d taken his degree in philology, happened to recognize what he’d heard-the war chant of the Goths. It went something like this…”

In a singsong voice, in the deepest bass register he could manage, he intoned what sounded like epic poetry, slicing the air with his hand at the end of each line. A woman with an ivory cigarette holder turned and glanced at him over her shoulder.

“Oh, formidable!” Marie-Galante said.

From Doktor Rheinhardt, a brief, graceful bow.

Serebin finished his drink, went to the bar for another. Where he met Marrano, a courtly Spaniard from Barcelona, and a nameless woman who smiled.

Then there was a man, who was wearing a sash, and a woman in a black feather hat.

Finally, at last and inevitably, he thought, an old friend. The poet Levich, from Moscow, who’d gotten out of Russia just as the Yezhovshchina purge of ’38 was gathering momentum. The two men stared at each other for a moment, then embraced, astonished to discover a lost friend at the Istanbul yacht club.

“You know Babel was taken,” Levich said.

“Yes, I heard that, in Paris.”

“You’re still there?”

“For the moment.”

“We may go to Brazil.”

“You all got out?”

“Thank God.”

“Why Brazil?”

“Who knows. Another place, maybe better than here.”

“You think so?”

“Only one way to find out.”

All around them, people began to say good night. “We have to meet, Ilya Aleksandrovich.” Levich wrote an address on a slip of paper and went off to find his coat. Serebin turned to Marie-Galante and thanked her for inviting him.

“No, no,” she told him, clearly alarmed. “There is dinner to come. Just a few of us. You can’t possibly leave.”

“I’m expected elsewhere,” he lied.

“Have a headache. Please. We are looking forward to it.”

“Well…”

She put a hand on his arm, her eyes were wide. “ Mon ours, don’t leave. Please.”

Eight for dinner. In the small salon. Apricot-colored wallpaper here, a celadon bowl with dried flowers as the centerpiece. There was mullet with olive oil, lamb with yoghurt, braised endive, red wine. “You sit next to me,” Madame Della Corvo said.

Serebin liked her immediately; serious, very stylish and chic, with a short, dramatic haircut, fine features, no makeup. She dressed simply, a loose, cherry red shirt, and wore only a wedding ring for jewelry. “My friends call me Anna,” she told him. Della Corvo sat at the head of the table, flanked by Labonniere and Marie-Galante. Then Marrano and his companion, a Danish woman called Enid, lean and weathered, as though she’d spent her life on sailboats. And, across from Serebin, a man he didn’t remember seeing at the cocktail party.

Introduced as Andre Bastien but, from his accent, not French by birth. He’d probably grown up, Serebin guessed, somewhere in central Europe. He was a large, heavy man with thick, white hair, courtly, reserved, with a certain gravity about him, a cold intelligence, that told in his eyes and in the way he carried himself. You would want to know who he was, but you would not find out-so Serebin put it to himself.

Social conversation, at first. The complex marital situation of the Bebek shoemaker. A woman character in classical Turkish theatre whose name turned out to mean stupefied with desire. Then Marie-Galante mentioned that Serebin had found a long-lost friend and Serebin had to tell Levich stories. How they worked together, in their twenties, for Gudok, Train Whistle, the official organ of the Railway Administration, then for Na Vakhtie — On Watch-Odessa’s maritime journal, where they took letters to the editor, particularly the ones that quivered with righteous indignation, and turned them into short stories, which they ran on the back page. And how, a few years later, Levich was thrown out a second-story window in the House of Writers-he’d been feuding with the Association of Proletarian Authors. “It took three of them to do it,” Serebin said, “and they were big writers.”

“Good God!” and “How dreadful!” and “Was he injured?” Nobody at the table thought it was funny.

“He landed in the snow,” Serebin said.

“Russia is really like that,” Marie-Galante said.

“Even so,” Enid said, “they’ve taught the peasant children to read.”

“That’s true,” Serebin said. “And they have also taught them to inform on their parents.”

“There is a last piece of fish,” Madame Della Corvo said. “Andre, give me your plate.”

“Stalin is a beast,” Marrano said. “And he’s turned the country into a prison. But they are the only counterweight to Hitler.”

“Were, you mean,” Della Corvo said. “Until the pact.”

“That won’t last,” Marrano said. Serebin, watching him in candlelight, thought he looked like a Renaissance assassin. A thin line of beard traced the edge of his jaw from one sideburn to the other, rising to a sharp point at the chin.

“Is that your view, Ilya?” Della Corvo asked.

Serebin shrugged. “Two gangsters, one neighborhood, they fight.”

Anna Della Corvo met his eyes. “The end of Europe, then.”

“And where,” Marrano said, “will you be when it comes to that?”

“Wherever the war isn’t.”

“Oh yes?” Marie-Galante said.

Serebin persisted. “I’ve seen too many people shot.”

“In battle?” Marrano said.

“Afterwards.”

Across from him, the man called Bastien smiled. So have I. So what?

Serebin started to tell him, but Enid said, “There is no place to go, monsieur.” She set a small beaded evening bag on the table and hunted through it until she found a cigarette. Marrano took a lighter from his pocket and lit it for her. She exhaled smoke and said, “Nowhere.”

Della Corvo laughed as he picked up the wine bottle and walked around the table, refilling everyone’s glass, touching each of them, his manner affectionate and teasing. “Oh, have a little more. ‘Live today,’ you know, et cetera, et cetera.”

Anna Della Corvo leaned toward Serebin and said, for him and not for the others, “Please understand, we are all exiles here.”

“Do you know,” Della Corvo said as he returned to his chair, “that I am a great admirer of La Torre Argentea?”

What the hell was that?

“You’re surprised. Not your personal favorite, perhaps.”

Oh Jesus he meant The Silver Tower. Serebin’s first book, which he’d obviously read in the Italian edition. “Well,” Serebin said, pretending that he’d been thinking it over. He then realized that given the pause for speculation, he was obliged to say something meaningful. “I was twenty-eight.”

“Should that matter?” Della Corvo raised an eyebrow as he said it, would, in a minute, have the whole pack of them howling at his heels. In a midnight blizzard, wolves chase the troika.

“It’s only that I might have done those stories better, ten years later.”

“What would be different? You don’t mind my asking, do you?”

“No, no, it’s fine. I suppose, now, I might call it Kovalevsky’s Tower. Silver was how it looked in the heat of summer, but a man named Kovalevsky built it.” He paused a moment, then explained. “A stone tower on a cliff above the Black Sea, near Odessa.”

“Why?”

“Did he build it?”

“Yes.”

“He had no reason. Or, his reason was, I want to build a stone tower. And we used to say, ‘It’s a landmark for people lost at sea.’ Which it was, for sailors, but we meant a little more than that. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Anna Della Corvo laughed. “My love,” she said to her husband, and at that moment she utterly adored him, “people don’t know why they do things.”

“Sometimes in books,” Serebin said, laughing along with her.

Madame Della Corvo rang a crystal bell and a waiter appeared with bowls of fruit on a silver tray. There was another bottle of wine, and another.

Green bottles with no label. “It’s Medoc,” she explained, “from a cru classe estate. We buy it from a ship’s chandler in Sete.”

Were they often in France?

“Oh, now and then. Not recently.”

Obliquity-the base element of life in a police state, learn it or die. Serebin had learned it in the Russian school. “So then, are you going back to Italy?”

“Well, we could.”

Was the Nereide, he wondered, a kind of Flying Dutchman, doomed to wander the seas, from neutral port to neutral port, for a fascist eternity?

Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, more of the same. “I certainly considered resigning,” Labonniere said. “But then, what?”

“A life in opposition,” Enid said. A silence, rather a long one. Then she said, “In London, with de Gaulle.”

It was Marie-Galante who answered, choked-back tears of anger in her voice. “De Gaulle hates him,” she said. “ Hates him.”

Labonniere cleared his throat. “We do what we can.”

“What can any of us do?” Della Corvo defended his friend.

Enid retreated. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I finally heard from my sister, in Copenhagen. It’s the first time since the occupation-just the fact of a postcard getting through felt like a great victory.”

“What did she say?” Madame Della Corvo asked.

“On the card, she wrote that I need not worry about her, the Danes are treated with respect by their German allies. Between the lines she’s miserable, but Denmark will never die.”

“Between the lines?”

“Yes. Someone told me to check, and there it was. Invisible writing.”

“Secret ink?” Della Corvo asked. At least three people at the table glanced at Bastien.

Enid hesitated, then answered. “Weewee.”

Hilarity. “How did you…?”

“Well, with a hot iron, there was a certain, oh, you know.”

Marrano didn’t think it was funny. “You could use plain water,” he said.

Marie-Galante started to laugh. “Oh but really, why would you?”

Two in the morning. Serebin waited on the pier at the foot of the gangway. It was immensely quiet, the water shining like metal in the light of a quarter moon. Serebin had mentioned going back on a ferry, but Anna Della Corvo wouldn’t hear of it. “You mustn’t. Andre came in a motor launch, he’ll have you dropped off at a dock near your hotel.”

Serebin heard the rumble of an engine, the launch appeared a moment later. He sat in the stern next to Bastien. A million stars above, the air cool and damp, to be out in the night the only cure for a dinner party.

Bastien lit a cigar. “Will you stay in Istanbul?”

“Forever, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“No, I’ll go back.”

“And stay out of trouble?”

“So far, the French do nothing.”

“It will come.”

“Perhaps.”

“Difficult, that sort of decision.”

“For you also, no?”

“Oh yes, like everybody else.”

They were silent, after that. Sometime later the launch slowed, and pulled in to a dock in the Beyoglu district. Bastien took a card from his wallet. Serebin read it in the moonlight, a trading company, with offices in Istanbul, then put it in his pocket.

“When you’re ready,” Bastien said.

In Haskoy, 3:20 on a rainy afternoon. Serebin watched the drops run down the grimy windows of the IRU office, a glass of pink lemonade in his hand. The larger of the two rooms was set up like a theatre-desks shoved against the wall, chairs side by side. On stage: Goldbark, General de Kossevoy, and the guest of honor, I. A. Serebin.

So far, nothing had gone right. Goldbark, hair standing out from the sides of his head, ran around like a harassed waiter. Kubalsky had not returned from wherever he’d gone, nobody could find the Welcome! banner, there was a commotion out on Rasim street that began with a beaten donkey and ended with shouted insults, and poor old Madame Ivanova dropped a tray of glasses and had to be consoled.

“My God”-Goldbark shook his head in slow anguish-“why are we like this?”

“Just enjoy it,” Serebin said. “It’s a party.”

True enough: frosted cake, lemonade, loud talk, laughter, two or three arguments, a hot, smoky room, a sad autumn day. “Like home, Chaim Davidovich. What can be so bad?”

General de Kossevoy clapped his hands, pleaded for their kind attention, and eventually got everybody to shut up and sit down. He then introduced Goldbark, who rose graciously to speak just as a Turkish porter pounded on the door and hauled in a donation from Mahmoudov’s grocery-a crate of fat, shiny eggplants. Goldbark closed his eyes, took a deep breath-at some point this afternoon the imps of misfortune were going to leave him alone. “Very well, then. Today it is my pleasure to welcome…” Applause. “And now, Lidia Markova, one of our many prize-winning students, will read a selection from the work of our dear guest.”

She was twelve, Lidia Markova, and very plain, wearing a white blouse starched within an inch of its life and a navy skirt that hung below her knees. She stood with shoes precisely together, adjusted her red-framed eyeglasses, and patted her hair into place. Serebin could only offer a silent prayer- please God let nothing embarrassing happen to her. In a tiny voice, she announced the name of the story, then began to read. “‘In Odessa…’”

“What?”

“Speak up, child.”

“Sorry. ‘ In Odessa…’”

“That’s better.”

“Not too fast, now.”

Goldbark turned pink.

“‘In Odessa, even the alleys are crooked. They are very narrow, you can touch the walls of the houses by spreading your arms, and they never go east and west. In Odessa, all the alleys run to the sea.’”

A good choice, he thought. The first story from the collection Ulskaya Street, called “The Cats and the Dogs.” Who had, in the alleys of the city, somehow contrived a truce, an entente, going about canine and feline business and essentially ignoring each other. Until, one summer day, a Dutch sea captain had rented a small house near the port and introduced a pampered and mean-spirited cocker spaniel into the neighborhood. It was a good story, people said, about tribes and war and peace, gingerly political, a fable to offend nobody, which was pretty much what you could write in Russia that year.

“‘“Well, the devil take them all, that’s what I say!”’” Lidia Markova did the voice of Futterman the umbrella salesman in a gruff baritone. “‘“They kept me up half the night!”’”

Oh how she’d worked at this. Serebin felt it in the heart and, when Tamara Petrovna’s tattered old hound wandered through the story, felt it even more. At the end-it turns out the captain’s dog had belonged to his wife, who had died suddenly. “What could I do?” he says, then sails off to Batumi, never to be heard of again-at the end there was enthusiastic applause and somebody said “Bravo.” Serebin was very gracious as he thanked the girl, taking off his glasses as he did it. For a moment, when he’d finished, Goldbark rested a hand on his shoulder. It couldn’t be put in words, but they had in common this army of the lost and forgotten, had somehow become its officers, and led as best they could.

The crowd flowed around him, compliments and questions, a misspelled word in a long-forgotten article called to his attention, a question about a book someone else had written, a question about the screenplay for the sequel to Chapayev, the famous machine gunner in the tower who fought the White army.

“A telephone call, Ilya Aleksandrovich.”

As he worked his way over to the desk with the telephone on it, he saw that the cake was gone, some of it no doubt into people’s pockets. He picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?”

“Can you meet me outside? Right away?”

“Who is this?”

“Kubalsky. Very urgent, Ilya.”

“All right.”

“See you in one minute.”

It was cold outside. Serebin shivered in his jacket and tried to stay dry by standing next to the wall of the tannery. The smell of the place was heavy in the wet air, the smell of a century of hides and carcasses and offal. Growing impatient, he looked at his watch. Politics. Why in God’s name… He was staring at the front of the building when the windows blew out. A cloud of dirty smoke, glass and wood and pieces of the IRU office, the sound of it hitting the street lost in the echoes of the explosion which rolled away into silence as the screams began.

There were two Serebins at that moment. One sat down. The other, the real one, ran as far as the foot of the stairs, where he was forced back by the crowd. He saw the girl, she had blood on her and her eyes were vacant, but she was there, stumbling down the stairs between a man and a woman. The woman had one hand pressed over her eyes while the other gripped the shoulder of the girl’s blouse. She was either pulling the girl away from what had happened in the office or holding on to her because she couldn’t see. Or, perhaps, both. To Serebin, it wasn’t clear.

He waited, it seemed to take a long time, people were coughing, their faces stained with black soot. Eventually, the stairway cleared and Serebin climbed up to the office. The air was thick with smoke and dust-it was dark as night and hard to breathe-but the building wasn’t on fire. He didn’t think it was. There were three or four people walking around in what had been the office, one of them knelt by a shape beneath a table. Serebin stepped on a shoe, heard a siren in the distance. Goldbark always wore a silver tie, and so did what he saw on the floor by a cast-iron radiator, now bent in a vee aimed at the ceiling.

“She’s alive, I think.” A voice in the darkness.

“Don’t move her.”

“What did she say?”

“I couldn’t hear.”

He went up to Besiktas, to the yellow house on the Bosphorus. Tamara wore a heavy coat and a sweater, and, knotted under her chin, one of those head scarves that all Ukrainian women had, red roses on a black background. She’d bundled up so they could sit on the terrace, where the wind made the lantern flicker on the garden table, because she knew he was one of those people who don’t like to be indoors.

“It’s too cold for you,” he said.

“No. I’ll be fine.”

“I’m going in.”

“Go ahead. I’ll be right here.”

Stubborn. Like all of them. The word Ukraine meant borderland.

One of the sisters appeared with a pot of steaming tea-Tamara had asked for that because she thought it might settle him-and a bottle of vodka, which would.

When he told her the story she was silent for a long time, then shook her head slowly. She’d seen such things, been told such things, too often. Finally she said, “Was it Russians, Ilya? Special services?”

“Maybe.”

“Why would they do this?”

He shrugged. “Espionage, of some sort, maybe somebody running a network out of the IRU office. It’s a convenient setting, if you think about it. And nothing new-every spy service in the world tries to recruit emigres, and every counterintelligence office tries to stop it. So, what happens next, is the local people see something they don’t like, and then…”

“But they spared you.”

Serebin nodded.

“That didn’t just, happen.”

“No.”

She poured two cups of tea, took one for herself, held the vodka bottle over the other. “You want?”

“A little.”

He moved his chair back from the table and lit a cigarette.

“You have family in it, no?”

“My mother’s sister.” She had never been an aunt.

Tamara thought it over for a moment, then said, “Ah, the Mikhelson girls.” She smiled-it was strange to remember a time when the world just went along, one day to the next.

A well-known story in Odessa, the life and courtship of the Mikhelson girls. Frieda and Malya. Zaftig, smart, they smoked cigarettes, wore black, read French novels, went to Polish spas. Frieda got Serebin’s father, a son of the nobility-the real thing: handsome, brilliant, certainly a little crazy but who cared. So, now Frieda had a husband, Malya had to have one too, but it didn’t last a year. She wore him out, going off to screw her lovers whenever the mood took her. A dancer, a baron, a colonel. The husband shot himself in the front parlor and they couldn’t find the cat for days. And it was Serebin’s grandfather who wept, poor soul. He’d worked his heart out, selling agricultural machinery, for his darling girls, who gave him nothing but grief. In 1917, Malya joined her friends in the Cheka-the most stylish job in town that winter. “God forgive me,” Serebin’s grandfather whispered to him just before he died, “I should’ve gone to America with everybody else.”

Serebin walked to the edge of the terrace and stared out at the lights on the Asian shore of the city. A ferry, then a train across the Anatolian steppe to Persia — he knew what was waiting for him in the lobby of his hotel. When he returned to the table Tamara said, “Hard to believe that your aunt is still alive, after the purges. Most of them disappeared.”

“They did, but she climbed.”

“Took part in it, probably.”

“Probably.”

“ Had to.”

“I would think.”

The sea mist was clouding Serebin’s glasses. He took them off, pulled a handful of shirt out of his belt, and began to clean the lenses. “Of course, all that who and why business is a bubbemeisah.” A story made up for children. “Nobody knows what happened except the people who did it, and if they’re a halfway professional organization, nobody ever will.” He finished his tea, and poured some vodka into the cup.

“Before you go, Ilya, I want you to see something.”

The interior of the house had grown in complicated ways over time. Tamara led him to the back, then opened a door to reveal a stairway so narrow he had to turn his shoulders as he climbed. At the top, another door, and a room beneath the eaves, the ceiling slanting sharply down to a single, small window. A secret room. At first, Serebin thought he’d never seen it before, then realized it had been worked on. The piles of dusty shutters with broken slats were gone, replaced by a cot covered with a blanket. A battered table and chair had been set below the window, and every board, ceiling, walls, and floor, had been freshly whitewashed. All it lacked, he thought, was the tablet of writing paper and sharpened pencils on the table.

“Of course you understand,” she said.

“Yes. Thank you.” It had gotten to him.

“Perhaps it’s not to be, right away, but who knows, Ilya, the day may come.”

He couldn’t really answer her. That somebody should want to do this for him, that in itself was refuge. And what more, in this life, could anyone offer?

He started to speak, but she pounded him gently on the shoulder with the side of her fist. Oh shut up.

When Serebin was fourteen, he would swim with his friends off a jetty north of the Odessa docks. The whole crowd, naked and skinny, from the Nicholas I Commercial School of Odessa. Joined, one sweltering August afternoon, by Tamara Petrovna and her friend Rivka. Fearless, they stripped down and dove in and swam way out. Later, lazing on the rocks, Tamara caught Serebin staring at her backside. She picked up a clamshell and heaved it at him-a lucky shot on the nose-Serebin’s eyes ran tears and he got red in the face. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he shouted, hand pressed to his nose. “I’m not even wearing my glasses.”

The taxi was slow, returning to Beyoglu, the melancholy driver sighed and dawdled in the back streets, lost in a world of his own. Meanwhile, in Serebin’s imagination, the Emniyet agents sitting in the lobby grew angrier and angrier when he didn’t show up, but there was nothing he could do about that.

In the event, they weren’t there. He reached the hotel after midnight, to find that a note had been slipped under his door. A Russian note, typed on a Cyrillic typewriter, asking if he would be good enough to drop by the office-an address in Osmanli street-in the morning and see Major Iskandar in Room 412. So, for a long night, he was to have the pleasure of thinking about it.

The desk of Major Iskandar. Born as conqueror’s furniture in the days of the Ottoman Empire, a vast mahogany affair with legs like Corinthian columns and ball feet. But time passed, empires drifted into ruin, coffee cups made rings, neglected cigarettes left burn scars, stacks of dossiers appeared and established a small colony, then grew higher and higher as a hostile world hammered on the national door. Or picked the lock.

Major Iskandar, not very military in a rumpled uniform, had spectacles and a black mustache, with hair and patience thinning as he moved through his forties. He was chinless, with something waxy and unhealthy in his complexion, and reminded Serebin of an Armenian poet he’d once known, a great sensualist who died of drinking valerian drops in a sailors’ brothel in Rotterdam.

Iskandar hunted through his dossiers until he found what he was after. “Well,” he said, “we’d planned to have a, a chat, with you when we saw the shipping manifest.” Suddenly annoyed, he snapped his fingers twice at the doorway to an outer office. That produced, a moment later, an orderly carrying two cups of black, sandy coffee. “But then, yesterday’s bombing on Rasim street…” He opened a dossier and turned pages. “Any theories? Who? Why?”

“No, not really.”

“Was Goldbark a friend of yours?”

“An associate. I knew him as one of the directors of the IRU office.”

“Been to his house?”

“No.”

“Met his wife?”

“Maybe once. At some kind of event.”

“The crate of eggplants was sent to him, specifically. Three other people died, there are five or six in various hospitals.” He offered Serebin a pack of cigarettes, then lit one for himself. “You got out, it would seem, just at the right moment.”

“A telephone call.”

“A warning?”

“No.” Serebin’s voice was very cold.

“Then what?”

“‘Please meet me outside. It’s urgent.’”

“And who was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Really don’t?”

“No.”

“An unknown stranger calls, and you go charging off in the middle of a party held in your honor.”

“‘An old friend’ is what he called himself. I thought that was possible, and the tone of the voice was serious, so I thought I’d better go.”

The major tilted his head to one side, like a listening dog. What do I hear? Then decided that, for the moment, it didn’t matter. He leaned back in his chair and said, “This comes at a bad time for us, do you understand? There is a war going on in Europe, and we are under pressure from both sides. And in this country, and particularly in this office, we feel it. The more so because we know the thing is heading south. I could drive you up into Thrace, to the Bulgarian frontier, and there, in the border villages, you would see a new sort of tourism. Vacationing Germans, all men, in overcoats and alpine hats, with cameras or binoculars around their necks. It must be the birds, don’t you think? That makes them so passionate to be in the Bulgarian countryside in November?

“And these days, where such tourists go, tanks follow. It isn’t far from here, maybe six hours. And much faster by aeroplane. It’s sad to see a city like London being bombed, night after night, terrible, a nice brick city like that. But here, of course, it wouldn’t be night after night. Because one night would be enough. A few hours’ work for the bomber pilots, and the whole thing would just, burn.”

Serebin knew. Dense neighborhoods of old, dry, wooden houses.

“So, we stay neutral, and treat every act of political violence as a potential provocation. A shooting, a stabbing, a bombing-what does it mean? Is it an incident? What comes next? Well, maybe nothing, in this case. It’s England and Germany we worry about these days. Russia maybe not so much-we’ve spent three hundred years worrying about them, so we’re used to it. Still, we have to be concerned, an attack of this sort, and our concern is, ah, concentrated by the fact that Goldbark was no virgin. There is at least some possibility that he asked for it.”

Serebin said “Oh?” He meant fuck you.

But Iskandar was ready for him. Slid a photograph from the dossier and laid it on the desk, like a playing card. A clandestine photograph, a gray man on a gray street on a gray afternoon. Hands thrust deep in overcoat pockets, brooding as he walked. Perhaps a Slav, grave lines in the face, the corners of the mouth pulled down, a sensitive man who had long ago chosen the wrong life, one where the Emniyet took his photograph.

“Know him?”

Serebin shook his head.

“This woman?”

She was buying oranges from a market stall.

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Goldbark knew them.”

Did he?

Iskandar laid down a photograph of Goldbark and the woman, leaning side by side on the railing of a ferry.

“Who are these people?” Serebin asked.

“Professionals-from the way they behave. Was Goldbark a Zionist?”

“I have no idea.”

“Communist?”

“Unlikely. He left the country, after all.”

“All kinds of people leave all kinds of countries. How much pressure would it have taken to force him to work for Germany?”

Serebin stared.

“It is not unheard of. I am sorry, but it is not.”

“He was too strong for that,” Serebin said. What remained of Goldbark was the memory of him.

Major Iskandar raised an eyebrow. He drank down the last of his coffee and snapped his fingers. Perhaps a comment on Serebin’s answer, or maybe he just wanted more coffee.

“Do you plan to remain in Istanbul?”

Serebin thought it over. “For a week or two, maybe.”

The major paged through an appointment book. “That would make it the twelfth. Of December.” He made a note by the date.

They drank a second cup of coffee. The major said that it often rained, this time of year. Still, they hardly ever had snow. Spring, on the other hand, was pleasant, with wildflowers in the countryside. When Serebin left, a man he recalled, vaguely, from the IRU party, was sitting in the outer office. Their eyes met, for a moment, then the man looked away.

My God, who is she? She was radiant, strange, had the face of an uncomfortably beautiful child. Twenty minutes from Major Iskandar’s office, in a tiny square with a fish market, Serebin sat at a table outside a lokanta, a neighborhood restaurant, and she came and sat on the edge of the other chair. When she pushed the hair back from her eyes he could see that her hand was shaking. She wet her lips, then spoke a few words-memorized, he thought-in guttural French: his friend, Monsieur Serge, wanted very much to see him. Then she waited, unsure of the language, to see if he’d understood her. She is Kubalsky’s lover, he thought.

He nodded, tried to look encouraging. “In Tatavla,” she said.

The Greek district.

“At Luxe cinema, tomorrow night.”

Her hands clutched the top of a purse, tight enough so that her knuckles were white and sharp. He said he understood and thanked her for the message, which earned him a sudden, luminous smile, on and off, then she stood and walked away, striding around the corner and out of sight.

After that, he walked and walked. Writing sometimes, staring at faces, adrift in unknown streets, far away on his own private planet. The world gnawed at you, he thought, better to be, now and then, elsewhere — it would all still be there when you got back. He would send flowers to the hospitals, would call on Goldbark’s wife. Later, when Iskandar was done talking with her. She would lie to them, of course, as he had. One did.

For the moment, he studied a handsome chestnut tree, spidery winter branches trimmed back to the pollard shape, circled by an iron fence. A pair of girls in school uniforms, kohl darkening their eyes-after-school femmes fatales. A sidewalk vendor, tending skewers of lamb and onions that sizzled and dripped onto hot coals. This made him violently hungry, but he couldn’t bear to stop walking. The neighborhood changed. To rows of elaborate stone buildings, five stories high, with brass plaques announcing important companies and banks. Standing restlessly in front, scowling doormen, Turkish wrestlers with brass buttons on their uniforms. Deutsche Orientbank. Banque de la Seine. At the end of the street: Societe Ottoman des Docks et Ateliers du Haut Bosphore. Title! “On a certain cloudy morning in springtime, the bookkeeper Drazunov folded his newspaper under his arm and stepped off the Number Six trolley…”

Yes, one lied to them. Always. “Today a man talks freely only with his wife”-Babel had said that, the last time Serebin ever saw him-“at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”

He stopped at a Karagoz show, puppets made of camel hide, and stood at the edge of the crowd. Serebin was a man who truly hated puppets-hated the way they leaped and skittered about, the way they shrieked-but he was also a man who could no more pass by theatre in the street than he could fly. The Karagoz companies (Karagoz was Punch) wrote contemporary characters into their skits, so Serebin, in past trips to the city, had seen Mickey Mouse, Tarzan of the Apes, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo. Greta Garbo? I’ll write you a puppet play about Greta Garbo-a love story. “Ow! Oh! Don’t punish me so, madame, I’m only the script girl!”

He saw a bar he liked and sat at an outdoor table. They didn’t have vodka, so he drank instead some kind of delicious brandy. Made of apricots, probably, the waiter drew one on a napkin for him. Then, walking again, he came to a boulevard with a fragrant breeze. A certain scent he recognized: rotting seaweed, salt, coal smoke. His heart rose. A harbor. A view of the sea. Down this hill? He would go and see.

7:20. A warm night for the season, cloudy and soft. No stars, when Serebin looked for them, maybe later. He always took emigre officials out for a good dinner, something most of them never got, so he scouted General de Kossevoy’s neighborhood on his way to the old man’s room and found a place with a basket of cucumbers in the window. When he peered inside he saw that it was crowded and noisy, steamy and smoky, the way he liked it, with harassed waiters on the run.

But, wrong again. “If it’s all the same to you,” de Kossevoy said, “I’ve been meaning to look in at The Samovar, do you know it? The owner was one of my officers in the Urals and he’s always asking me to drop by.”

Sodden kasha pierogi with suspiciously sour sour cream was the result of that, but de Kossevoy had smiled beatifically as they entered, his iron foot ringing out on the tile floor of the restaurant. The general’s foot had been blown off by a mortar round in Smolensk and, when the wound healed, a local blacksmith had forged a substitute. De Kossevoy seemed to get along with it all right. He walked with a stick, and you had to watch out for him at parties-Serebin recalled a bearded luminary at an official reception, his eyes squeezed shut with agony as de Kossevoy trod on his toes, while a supernatural effort at courtesy kept him from crying out.

“Your excellency!” A humble shuffle and bow from the owner, hurrying past his empty tables.

“Champagne,” Serebin said.

“An attractive place.” That was the general’s verdict.

Red velvet, red linen, tired from the years. “Oh yes,” Serebin said. “I think he does rather well.”

“Later at night, probably.”

“Mmm.”

Serebin ordered everything. Zakuski of smoked fish with toasts, sorrel soup, veal patties, and the kasha pierogi. “You can fight a war on these,” the general said, a twinkle in his eye.

“Stalin was always recommending rusks.”

“Rusks!”

“Tukhachevsky told me that.”

“Your commander?”

“Twice. Outside Moscow in the revolution, then in Poland in ’21.”

“And, for his trouble, shot.”

“Yes. You were with the Whites?”

“Damn my soul. Under Yudenich.”

“Not the worst.”

“Pretty close. I was sixty-two years old when they dragged me back into it, believed in order, in Christ our Lord, in life being as life had always been. I feared the rabble. I feared that, once the yoke came off, they would burn and murder. And then, in 1917, the yoke came off, and they burned and murdered. I was wrong on the scale of the thing, much grander than I ever imagined, but that’s an old man’s error.”

“Let me fill that up for you.”

“Thank you.”

“So, what do we do now?”

“With the Union?”

“Yes.”

“Damned if I know. I expected that Kubalsky would be in touch with me, but, not a word. Heard from him?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, Konev is in the hospital. Lost the sight in one eye, I’m told, but he’s got another. I expect he’ll take command, I’ll do what I can, we’ll survive, somehow, we always do. Will you stay on?”

“I’ll probably go back to Paris.”

The general hesitated, didn’t say what came to mind, then nodded slowly. “Of course,” he said. “I understand. You have to do what’s best for you.”

Kubalsky’s messenger had not mentioned a time, only “tomorrow night,” so the idea was simply to be there, Kubalsky would do the rest. Serebin took a taxi to the docks, then another-Major Iskandar very much in his thoughts-to the edge of the Tatavla district, and wandered through the autumn twilight. He asked, now and then, for the Luxe cinema, which produced long bursts of Turkish, sometimes Greek, a variety of emphatic gestures- down there, around to the left, big something, you can’t miss it — and an even greater variety of encouraging nods and smiles. Going to the cinema? Yes! Good! A fine thing to do tonight!

A poor neighborhood, crowded, with narrow, winding streets that sometimes ended suddenly, washing strung on lines above his head, small groups of men in workers’ clothing and peaked caps, talking and gesturing, silent as he went past. Then, around a corner, next to an Orthodox church, the Luxe. Serebin watched the street for a few minutes before he went in but it wasn’t much of a precaution. Perhaps he was followed, perhaps not, people everywhere, anybody could be anybody.

Serebin paid and went inside. The theatre was half full, almost all men, maybe twenty rows of wooden seats with an aisle down each wall. The projector whirred, cigarette smoke drifted slowly through the beam. On screen, along with a few excited moths, was Krishna Lal, The Tiger of Rajahstan. A champion, Serebin guessed, of his sorely oppressed people, somewhere in vast India. Pursued by the rajah’s guards, in steel helmets and red silk pantaloons, the Tiger ran through a bazaar, angering merchants as he tipped over stalls of fruits and cooking pots. Cornered at last, he looked desperately for escape.

A pretty Tiger, with dark, liquid eyes and a sulky mouth, he slew a pair of guards with his curved dagger, climbed to a balcony, leapt to another, held a finger to his lips to quiet an old woman slicing onions into a bowl. Serebin lit a Sobranie, searched the pale faces in the audience for a sign of Kubalsky, found no likely candidates. The music changed, a single sitar now, giggling maids attending a princess in her milky bath. Poor Tiger-maybe, just maybe, lurking outside the window where a suggestive curtain stirred in the wind. The princess leaned forward to let a maid wash her back, then dismissed the girl with a flick of her hand and straightened up. Up, up-were they going to see something? A certain silence in the audience but no, not quite. She stared at the window, alerted by a noise, then gave an order and the maids appeared with a sort of royal towel, holding it stretched wide between a hundred Turkish men and the rising silhouette of a wet actress.

Kubalsky, where are you?

Somebody was snoring. A very fat man came down the aisle, footsteps heavy on the wooden floor. He peered down Serebin’s row, looking for-a seat? A friend? Kubalsky? Serebin? Moved away slowly, one row at a time, gave up, and walked back up the aisle. On screen, the rajah, with the drooping black mustache that always meant villainy, scolded the leader of his hapless guard. Fool! Jackass! Bring me the head of the Tiger! Reached inside his silver-embossed black vest and brought forth a vial of amber liquid. From somewhere in back, a whispered exclamation.

Now, coming down the far aisle, encore le fat man. But here, Serebin corrected a writer’s error. He wasn’t a very fat man, he was a very heavy man. With a big face, the chin still square across the bottom despite years of baklava. Or chicken Kiev, or Sachertorte. Maybe he was just the manager. I have a right to do this. Somebody spoke a few words, snide, mocking. Whatever the line meant it sparked a ripple of laughter. Was it “she’s not here”? Something like that, Serebin guessed. The chief of the rajah’s guard hurried through the lanes of a bazaar.

Serebin looked at his watch. The maid tried to refuse the vial of poison, but the rajah’s guard insisted. The princess, wiping away a tear, wrote a letter with a quill pen. Serebin decided that Kubalsky was waiting for him outside, where, at the end of the film, the crowd would come streaming out a single exit. Despite himself, he tried to imagine what Kubalsky might want, what he’d done, what he knew about. Twenty-three years of exile, adrift in the shadows of Europe, what arrangements had he been forced to make? The Tiger and the princess met secretly, in a moonlit rose garden, eyes alive with longing, throbbing sitar and tabla suggesting the embrace that the director could not show.

But the lovers were not alone. The scene darkened, a spy crouched behind a hedge, and someone in the audience took advantage of this darkness to make a spontaneous exit. Serebin never quite saw him. He heard a few pounding footsteps, then turned in time to see a running shadow disappear through a side door into a black square of night. Two men followed. Amid shouts of irritation they forced their way to the aisle, threw open the door, and vanished. Just stay where you are. Outside, the flat popping noise made by a small-calibre pistol. Three or four shots, then silence. Serebin leapt to his feet and ran around the back of the theatre, arriving at the door with several men from the nearby seats. One of them tried the door, which opened an inch or two, then was slammed shut by somebody on the other side. The man was offended, tried again, harder this time, but whoever was out there was very strong and the door wouldn’t open. Serebin heard voices, indistinct, muffled, then footsteps. The lights came on in the theatre and a man who seemed to be in authority came striding down the aisle, the others made way for him. He grasped the knob firmly and opened the door.

Serebin and the others stepped out into a long alley, lit by a streetlamp at the far end. There was a high wall three feet in front of them, the noise of the streets, nothing else. In the faint light, Serebin could see a stain on the cobblestones. Old? New? Somebody laughed. The theatre manager shrugged, then opened the door and waved his customers back inside. What oddities in this grand city, who could know, from one minute to the next, what people might do. Serebin changed seats, moving along the far aisle to a row toward the front of the theatre. There was a belted raincoat folded carefully on one of the empty seats. He waited until the end of the movie, the crowd shuffled out, but nobody claimed the raincoat.

He stopped at a lokanta on the way back to the Beyoglu, he wanted to drink something, maybe eat, and bought a French newspaper to keep him company at the table. A woeful dinner companion, it did nothing but talk about the war, in varying shades of the Vichy point of view, Churchill called “that Shakespearian drunkard” and all the rest of it. The Italian divisions in the Pindus mountains of Greece failing nobly, poor boys, and the Italian fleet attacked-in fact destroyed, Serebin and everybody else knew that-at Taranto by Royal Navy Swordfish torpedo planes. However-an implicit however, the deftly made sneer a felicity of French diction-the industrial city of Coventry had been successfully assaulted by the Luftwaffe. Set ablaze by thirty thousand incendiary bombs. Serebin recalled the look on Major Iskandar’s face when he spoke of wooden Istanbul.

The newspaper’s correspondent in Bucharest reported on damage to the Roumanian oil fields caused by the recent earthquake. Then, following Hungary on the 22nd of November, Roumania had signed the Tripartite Pact with the fascist powers, though Bulgaria had refused. Civil war continued in Roumania, sixty-four officials of the former King Carol government had been executed by the Iron Guard, who were also fighting units of the Antonescu regime in the city and some of the towns.

Bon appetit, monsieur.

But the paper didn’t lie, not so much that you couldn’t read the truth if you wanted to. Endgame in southern Europe. Mopping up in the Balkans to create a harmonious German continent. No, they hadn’t gotten across the Channel to finish off the nation of shopkeepers, but the shopkeepers weren’t going to cross either. So, they bombed each other and fired caustic epithets over the airwaves. Churchill noble and stoic, Goebbels sarcastic and sly. A stalemate, clearly enough, that could easily enough wind down over time to a brutal peace, punctuated by the oppression of the Jews and the unending political warfare that flowed from Moscow.

Poor Kubalsky. Poor Kubalsky-maybe. And wasn’t that what they excelled at, the Bolsheviks. Not sure, don’t know, too bad, life goes on. “Molotov in Berlin for Important Talks,” said the newspaper. A fine alliance, teaching the world, if nothing else, what the term realpolitik actually meant.

Serebin’s long day wasn’t over. At the desk of the Beyoglu, a note for effendi. A sentence, painfully carved onto a sheet of paper with a blunt pencil, every letter wavering and hesitant. From one of the Ukrainian sisters: “Please, sir, we beg you with all respect not to leave the city without saying good-bye to Tamara Petrovna.”

He was there an hour later. Not quite midnight yet, but close to it.

She was in bed, wearing two sweaters and a wool cap, eating licorice drops and reading Bulgakov’s White Guard.

“Ilya! What’s wrong?”

“Why should anything be wrong?” He sat on the edge of the bed.

She shrugged, used a scrap of paper to mark her place in the book. “It’s late.” She stared at him for a moment, face flushed and pink. “Are you all right?”

“I was supposed to meet Kubalsky, earlier, but something happened.”

“What?”

“He didn’t appear, that’s the short version. What about you?”

“A little fever. It comes and goes.”

“And of course you don’t tell the doctors.”

“I do! There was one here this morning.”

“What did he say?”

“Humpf, harumpf.”

“Just that?”

“Drink liquids.”

“Do you?”

“What else to do with them? You can have a cigarette if you like, clearly you want one.”

“In a while. I’ll go outside.”

“No, have one here and now. And give me one.”

“Oh sure.”

“I’m serious.”

“Tamara, behave.”

“Tired of behaving. And, anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Now give me a cigarette or I’ll send my ladies out to get them the minute you leave.”

“Who says I’m leaving?”

“Don’t torment me, Ilya. Please.”

“You are impossible.” He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. She inhaled cautiously, suppressed a cough, lips tight together, then closed her eyes and blew the smoke out, a blissful smile on her face.

“Very well, you’ve had your way, now give it back.”

Slowly, she shook her head. She was, he knew, afraid of infecting him.

“So,” he said, “it’s only you who gets to say the hell with everything.”

“Only me.” She tapped the Sobranie on the edge of an empty glass on her bedside table. “Why did God make us love so much what we mustn’t do?”

He didn’t know.

She sighed. “Do you leave soon?”

“In a while. The police don’t really want me here.”

“They told you?”

“Yes.”

She inhaled once more, then put the cigarette out in the glass. “Did they mean it?”

“A suggestion, for the moment.”

“So you could stay, if you wanted to.”

“Maybe, yes. It would take, some work, but I probably could.”

“You can’t do what you’re doing now, Ilya.”

“I can’t?”

“No.”

He was tempted to ask her what she meant by that but he knew what she meant.

“It’s, there, ” she said, “this terrible war. It will come for you.”

After a moment he nodded-he didn’t like it, but she wasn’t wrong.

“So,” she said.

They were silent for a time, the wind rattling the windows, the sea in the distance. “When France fell,” he said, “that day, that day I was Parisian, more than I’d ever been. We all were. Exiles or born in the 5th Arrondissement it didn’t matter. Everyone said merde — it was bad luck, bad weather, we would just have to learn to live with it. But we would all stay the same, so we told each other, because, if we changed, then the fascists would win. Maybe I knew better, in my heart, but I wanted to believe that that was enough: hold fast to life as it should be, the daily ritual, work, love, and then it will be.”

“That is sweet, Ilya. Charming, almost.”

He laughed. “Such a hard soul, my love.”

“Oh? Well, please to remember who we are and where we’ve been. First you say you’ll pretend to do what they want, then you do what they want, then you’re one of them. Oldest story in the world: if you don’t stand up to evil it eats you first and kills you later, but not soon enough.”

“Yes, I know.”

“So now, tomorrow, next day, you’ll find a way to fight.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No, never. I fear for you.”

He stood up and walked to the window. Tamara yawned, covered her mouth with her hand. “We weren’t meant to live long lives, Ilya.”

“I guess not.”

“I don’t care so much. And, as for you, you will die inside if you try to hide from it.”

“It?”

She gave him a look. “You’re the writer, go find a name.” She was silent for a time, he came back to her and sat on the end of the bed, she turned on her side and rested her head on her arm. “Do you know what matters, these days?”

He spread his hands.

“You did love me, Ilya. I wasn’t wrong about that, was I?”

“With all my heart.”

She smiled and closed her eyes. “Women like to hear those things. Always, I think. It always makes them happy, God only knows why.”