The Star of Istanbul

15

The city’s white row houses, lit by gas light and torches, were stitched into the side of the abrupt-rising hills by cobbled streets. The fishing boat put in at the Cunard wharf and the forty or so of us hobbled onto land. We all ached terribly after the exertion of having saved our lives in the sea and then having huddled for some hours cramped on that tiny boat deck.

We found ourselves on a cut-stone wharf that was crowded with the swaddled dead. Selene, still wearing the boat captain’s bright yellow slicker and sou’wester and smelling of mackerel, clung to me as we picked our way through, noticing the small bundles, which were the children, noticing the ones with faces framed in the open folds, noticing one bundle in particular: two faces bound in one blanket, jaundiced by the lamplight, mother and child, pressed together as if for a photographic portrait but having waited so long for the flash, they’d fallen into a deep sleep. Selene gasped and clung harder to me, and we angled our faces to each other, focused once again only on the two of us, until we entered the large open hall of the customshouse.

The place was dim, unprepared for night landings, and it was crowded with living bodies — hundreds of us now — and some of us were bumping about near the door in the first confusion of arrival. The familiar tones and cadences of the voices of low-level officialdom were directing us, as if we’d just left a steamship and were going off to retrieve our luggage and queue up for the customs boys to search for the booze and the tobacco and the silver plate and the books and the sheet music. And, to be honest, the faintly patronizing, coolly efficient voices were reassuring now, turning the horror into the routine, as much as that was possible with the background of moaning and coughing and whispering and with the quaking and the trembling and with the travelers being damp and bareheaded and with many of them clad only in their wetly clinging underwear and some showing flesh, too much flesh. We looked at these exposed bodies only out of the corners of our eyes, even as dry, dark-uniformed bodies emerged in the dim light to throw blankets over the nakedness.

And Selene and I leaned into each other.

The official voices propelled us into roped-off lines, the wounded who needed immediate help being sent to triage at the far end of the hall, the rest of us guided to the long, alphabetically sectioned wall where our luggage would have been placed but which now led to tables where they gave us coffee and then passed us on to queue and wait for a Cunard official sitting behind a large ledger book. We all waited to approach the book one at a time, Selene waiting before me, clutching hard at my arm, keeping me close. I thought this was because she still needed to rely on me.

Then the man at the table was looking our way.

“Next,” he said.

Selene let go of my arm and turned her face to me and I was surprised at what was there: a hard mouth, pressed thin, but eyes gone wide and gentle, and her head tilted a little. She was about to reenter the world as Selene Bourgani. She’d twice already tried to end our connection to each other. Now it was as if all that we’d done together these past hours — searching the sinking ship for escape and then entering the sea and clinging to life there amidst the dead and dying and then rising together into safety and landing once more on the shore — as if all that was just one more night of lovemaking and this thing between us could not last.

She’d been clutching my arm, keeping me close, because she knew it was time for me to go.

Realizing all this, I also realized I’d missed an opportunity. I’d tried not to intrude upon the silence we kept with each other since we’d been lifted from the sea. Perhaps if I’d pressed her to speak of Brauer, to speak of what it was she was intending to do, she would have told me what it was my job to learn.

But it had never occurred to me. The silence had been inside me as well.

And now she said, “Thank you.”

And I knew she would break away from me.

All I could do was nod.

She turned and moved to the desk.

I could not hear, but the man in the Cunard uniform sitting behind the ledger spoke, and then Selene spoke, and the man jumped up and gave a little bow.

A film fan, no doubt.

She said more to him, and he bowed again. He would grant her a special favor. He motioned to the ledger.

She drew her forefinger down the right-hand, half-filled page. Then she did the same to the left-hand page. Then she turned to the previous two-page spread.

I knew the name she sought.

Halfway down on the right, her hand stopped. She lifted it away and she straightened up.

She nodded to the official, and he sat back down.

She signed her name.

They spoke a few words more.

I was right about her. When she was finished, she did not look back to me but moved off at once, searching the crowd.

I approached the desk, the ledger, the Selene Bourgani fan in the Cunard uniform.

And after I’d signed my name and nationality — my pen-stroke going suddenly heavy, assertive, from a complex surge of feeling at writing United States of America—after then taking an abrupt, retained, chest-lifted breath at being an American upon this day, I turned and she was gone.

Before I could take a step away, the Cunard man, craning his neck to confirm his upside-down reading, said, “Mr. Cobb is it?”

I turned back. “Yes?”

“Would you be so kind as to wait behind my table? Someone has come to collect you.”

“Miss Bourgani was with me, as you saw.”

“Yes.”

“I was supposed to meet her. . Did they assign her a place to sleep?”

“Most of the first-class passengers are going to the Queen’s Hotel.”

“I’ll be back in a few moments,” I said.

The Cunard man stiffened; he was responsible for me waiting. Before he could protest, I said, “I won’t be long,” and I moved off.

I watched for her yellow slicker to flash in the crowd, but my goal was the streetside doors. I did not see her among the bandages and slings and blankets — the half-naked bodies were disappearing into blankets — and now the doors were in sight and I saw the yellow there amidst a dark brace of Cunard ducks and I swung wide in my approach to them, ready to let her go.

I saw her from behind. She was speaking to a guy with a clipboard, and then she moved off through the doors.

I followed, brushing aside the Cunards’ importunings. She’d pushed through already, and I stopped and looked through the glass. She turned her face to the far left and then swept her gaze slowly toward the harbor street, where the merchants on the far side — milliner and ironmonger, draper and men’s clothier, sellers of fish and poultry and cakes — all were lit up inside, as the whole town had awakened to the rescue; and then her face kept moving right, across a square and to another long row of wider buildings — the Queen’s Hotel included — and above them, up the hill, an arch-supported roadway climbing to a Gothic-spired cathedral. I thought that Selene’s eyes would come to rest upon her hotel. But she did not pause, she scanned on, and then she abruptly stopped. Her face drew very slightly forward. She was checking her perception.

And from that direction a figure was moving now, coming out of the shadows, wrapped and hooded in a blanket. Selene straightened and waited, and the figure stopped before her, and she was speaking, and the blanket came down off the head. It was Walter Brauer.