Blood of Victory (4 page)

“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. “André, 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 Argèntea
?”

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 Médoc,” she explained, “from a
cru classé
estate. We buy it from a ship’s chandler in Sète.”

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
Néréide,
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. André 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.”