The Star of Istanbul

41

This was the vaunted Berlin-to-Baghdad Express, the great umbilical of Germany’s nascent Asian empire, though it still had big gaps beyond Aleppo and we ourselves would have to leave it in Budapest and head for the Romanian coast and a steamship down the Black Sea to avoid Servia. But immediately before us were twenty hours to Budapest, and Selene and I spent most of it on her narrow bed, even after there was not a drop of anything left in either of us to give or to receive or to exude, and yet we stayed in that bed and we smoked and we slept and, now and then, we tried some more with our bodies, tried to give and to take, and we were fine when that didn’t go much of anywhere, laughing at it even, like an old couple who had sweet intentions and patience with each other because of some good, larger feeling they shared, but we said very little, not like lovers at all in many ways, not like that old couple either, in this respect, though we should have been intensely curious about each other — I should have been about her, professionally at least — but sealed as we were in a room in a coach on a train that surged and slowed and stopped and surged and slowed and surged again, its whistle as distant and as mournfully vowel rich as the cry of a rutting cat, we put away any questions or issues that came from outside this shuttered window, this shuttered door.

We did dress, twice, once to eat another meal in the dining car with the landscape dark outside, and once scrambling into our clothes when the passport officials boarded the train at Teschen, on the Hungarian frontier, and they knocked on our door only to quickly click their heels and bow their way back out again in response to our German documents, two youngish men with immaculate Hungarian officer uniforms and large mustaches. Selene and I both noticed them exchanging a knowing little smile over these two lovers as they slid our door closed, which we laughed about much harder than it warranted, which revived our bodies a bit for one more tumbling and soft pounding before a good six hours of deep sleep wrapped in each other’s arms.

And then we were in Budapest.

And immediately before us were twenty-four hours to the Romanian port city of Constanţa.

We did not have to say more than a dozen words between us for us to decide that I would go to my own cabin now and close the door and we would not see each other again until we arrived on the shore of the Black Sea.

Which was what we did, across the Hungarian plains and over the pine-quilted Carpathian Mountains and all along the wheat and corn fields of Romania, a landscape that could easily have been Illinois except for the water-buffalo-powered plows.

And then we were on the SS Dacia, a 3,200-ton mail steamer of the Romanian State Railways doing the Black Sea run to Istanbul with 120 first-class cabins and two special cabins built to accommodate the women of a Turkish harem.

And we ended up once again in each other’s arms, this time in my cabin. In the first hour we made love, and it felt as if it was the last time Selene and I would ever make love, though that had become a routine feeling for me, an inevitable part of the act: from our almost tender commencing kiss, to her threat on my life if I didn’t keep going, to her final scream, to the cigarette afterward, to a voice in my head going I bet this is the last.

But on the Dacia, upon the Black Sea, there was a new coda to our jazz suite: we segued immediately into a close embrace burrowed deep beneath the sheet and blanket. And Selene wept.

Wept and trembled.

Silently for a while, and then she said, “I’m afraid.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“This is the only time you’ll ever hear me say that,” she said.

“It’s natural.”

“I won’t feel it again either,” she said.

“You can.”

The ship pitched a little and she flinched.

“Is it about the ship?” I said.

“Partly.”

I said, “This is the first ship you and I have been on that’s not threatened by submarines.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m free to be afraid.”

I could understand this. Some of the best soldiers I knew felt their fear after the battle, not during it.

“That comes with being able to loosen your hold on your courage,” I said.

She held me more tightly.

Partly the ship, she’d said. I understood this as well. I myself was starting to feel a rat-toothed gnawing in my chest, in my throat.

Der Wolf was on his way. I was to meet someone at the Pera Palace who expected me to be Walter Brauer and therefore expected me to be an expert on Islam and to speak Turkish, skills Metcalf had failed to include in my leather portfolio. Just for a starter.

The sun had set outside our cabin window. When it rose again we would arrive in Istanbul and the curtain would go up on our final act.