Blood of Victory (3 page)

“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 émigré 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 Néréide
—
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
Néréide,
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 émigré 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 André 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.”