Blood of Victory (2 page)

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 émigrés, 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 café.

A practical man, the driver, who had contrived to learn a few crucial words for his foreign passengers. When Serebin returned from the café 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 émigré 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.