Blood of Victory (6 page)

Yes, one lied to them. Always. “Today a man talks freely only with his wife”—Babel had said that, the last time Serebin ever saw him—“at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”

He stopped at a Karagoz show, puppets made of camel hide, and stood at the edge of the crowd. Serebin was a man who truly hated puppets—hated the way they leaped and skittered about, the way they shrieked—but he was also a man who could no more pass by theatre in the street than he could fly. The Karagoz companies (Karagoz was Punch) wrote contemporary characters into their skits, so Serebin, in past trips to the city, had seen Mickey Mouse, Tarzan of the Apes, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo.
Greta Garbo? I’ll write you a puppet play about Greta Garbo—a love story. “Ow! Oh! Don’t punish me so, madame, I’m only the script girl!”

He saw a bar he liked and sat at an outdoor table. They didn’t have vodka, so he drank instead some kind of delicious brandy. Made of apricots, probably, the waiter drew one on a napkin for him. Then, walking again, he came to a boulevard with a fragrant breeze. A certain scent he recognized: rotting seaweed, salt, coal smoke. His heart rose. A harbor. A view of the sea. Down this hill? He would go and see.

7:20. A warm night for the season, cloudy and soft. No stars, when Serebin looked for them,
maybe later
. He always took émigré officials out for a good dinner, something most of them never got, so he scouted General de Kossevoy’s neighborhood on his way to the old man’s room and found a place with a basket of cucumbers in the window. When he peered inside he saw that it was crowded and noisy, steamy and smoky, the way he liked it, with harassed waiters on the run.

But, wrong again. “If it’s all the same to you,” de Kossevoy said, “I’ve been meaning to look in at The Samovar, do you know it? The owner was one of my officers in the Urals and he’s always asking me to drop by.”

Sodden kasha pierogi with suspiciously sour sour cream was the result of that, but de Kossevoy had smiled beatifically as they entered, his iron foot ringing out on the tile floor of the restaurant. The general’s foot had been blown off by a mortar round in Smolensk and, when the wound healed, a local blacksmith had forged a substitute. De Kossevoy seemed to get along with it all right. He walked with a stick, and you had to watch out for him at parties—Serebin recalled a bearded luminary at an official reception, his eyes squeezed shut with agony as de Kossevoy trod on his toes, while a supernatural effort at courtesy kept him from crying out.

“Your excellency!” A humble shuffle and bow from the owner, hurrying past his empty tables.

“Champagne,” Serebin said.

“An attractive place.” That was the general’s verdict.

Red velvet, red linen, tired from the years. “Oh yes,” Serebin said. “I think he does rather well.”

“Later at night, probably.”

“Mmm.”

Serebin ordered everything.
Zakuski
of smoked fish with toasts, sorrel soup, veal patties, and the kasha pierogi. “You can fight a war on these,” the general said, a twinkle in his eye.

“Stalin was always recommending rusks.”

“Rusks!”

“Tukhachevsky told me that.”

“Your commander?”

“Twice. Outside Moscow in the revolution, then in Poland in ’21.”

“And, for his trouble, shot.”

“Yes. You were with the Whites?”

“Damn my soul. Under Yudenich.”

“Not the worst.”

“Pretty close. I was sixty-two years old when they dragged me back into it, believed in order, in Christ our Lord, in life being as life had always been. I feared the rabble. I feared that, once the yoke came off, they would burn and murder. And then, in 1917, the yoke came off, and they burned and murdered. I was wrong on the
scale
of the thing, much grander than I ever imagined, but that’s an old man’s error.”

“Let me fill that up for you.”

“Thank you.”

“So, what do we do now?”

“With the Union?”

“Yes.”

“Damned if I know. I expected that Kubalsky would be in touch with me, but, not a word. Heard from him?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, Konev is in the hospital. Lost the sight in one eye, I’m told, but he’s got another. I expect he’ll take command, I’ll do what I can, we’ll survive, somehow, we always do. Will you stay on?”

“I’ll probably go back to Paris.”

The general hesitated, didn’t say what came to mind, then nodded slowly. “Of course,” he said. “I understand. You have to do what’s best for you.”

Kubalsky’s messenger had not mentioned a time, only “tomorrow night,” so the idea was simply to be there, Kubalsky would do the rest. Serebin took a taxi to the docks, then another—Major Iskandar very much in his thoughts—to the edge of the Tatavla district, and wandered through the autumn twilight. He asked, now and then, for the Luxe cinema, which produced long bursts of Turkish, sometimes Greek, a variety of emphatic gestures—
down there, around to the left, big something, you can’t miss it
—and an even greater variety of encouraging nods and smiles. Going to the cinema? Yes! Good! A fine thing to do tonight!

A poor neighborhood, crowded, with narrow, winding streets that sometimes ended suddenly, washing strung on lines above his head, small groups of men in workers’ clothing and peaked caps, talking and gesturing, silent as he went past. Then, around a corner, next to an Orthodox church, the Luxe. Serebin watched the street for a few minutes before he went in but it wasn’t much of a precaution. Perhaps he was followed, perhaps not, people everywhere, anybody could be anybody.

Serebin paid and went inside. The theatre was half full, almost all men, maybe twenty rows of wooden seats with an aisle down each wall. The projector whirred, cigarette smoke drifted slowly through the beam. On screen, along with a few excited moths, was Krishna Lal,
The Tiger of Rajahstan
. A champion, Serebin guessed, of his sorely oppressed people, somewhere in vast India. Pursued by the rajah’s guards, in steel helmets and red silk pantaloons, the Tiger ran through a bazaar, angering merchants as he tipped over stalls of fruits and cooking pots. Cornered at last, he looked desperately for escape.

A pretty Tiger, with dark, liquid eyes and a sulky mouth, he slew a pair of guards with his curved dagger, climbed to a balcony, leapt to another, held a finger to his lips to quiet an old woman slicing onions into a bowl. Serebin lit a Sobranie, searched the pale faces in the audience for a sign of Kubalsky, found no likely candidates. The music changed, a single sitar now, giggling maids attending a princess in her milky bath. Poor Tiger—maybe, just maybe, lurking outside the window where a suggestive curtain stirred in the wind. The princess leaned forward to let a maid wash her back, then dismissed the girl with a flick of her hand and straightened up. Up, up—were they going to see something? A certain silence in the audience but no, not quite. She stared at the window, alerted by a noise, then gave an order and the maids appeared with a sort of royal towel, holding it stretched wide between a hundred Turkish men and the rising silhouette of a wet actress.

Kubalsky, where are you?

Somebody was snoring. A very fat man came down the aisle, footsteps heavy on the wooden floor. He peered down Serebin’s row, looking for—a seat? A friend? Kubalsky? Serebin? Moved away slowly, one row at a time, gave up, and walked back up the aisle. On screen, the rajah, with the drooping black mustache that always meant villainy, scolded the leader of his hapless guard.
Fool! Jackass! Bring me the head of the Tiger!
Reached inside his silver-embossed black vest and brought forth a vial of amber liquid. From somewhere in back, a whispered exclamation.

Now, coming down the far aisle,
encore le
fat man. But here, Serebin corrected a writer’s error. He wasn’t a very fat man, he was a very heavy man. With a big face, the chin still square across the bottom despite years of baklava.
Or chicken Kiev, or Sachertorte.
Maybe he was just the manager.
I have a right to do this.
Somebody spoke a few words, snide, mocking. Whatever the line meant it sparked a ripple of laughter. Was it “she’s not here”? Something like that, Serebin guessed. The chief of the rajah’s guard hurried through the lanes of a bazaar.

Serebin looked at his watch. The maid tried to refuse the vial of poison, but the rajah’s guard insisted. The princess, wiping away a tear, wrote a letter with a quill pen. Serebin decided that Kubalsky was waiting for him outside, where, at the end of the film, the crowd would come streaming out a single exit. Despite himself, he tried to imagine what Kubalsky might want, what he’d done, what he knew about. Twenty-three years of exile, adrift in the shadows of Europe, what arrangements had he been forced to make? The Tiger and the princess met secretly, in a moonlit rose garden, eyes alive with longing, throbbing sitar and tabla suggesting the embrace that the director could not show.

But the lovers were not alone. The scene darkened, a spy crouched behind a hedge, and someone in the audience took advantage of this darkness to make a spontaneous exit. Serebin never quite saw him. He heard a few pounding footsteps, then turned in time to see a running shadow disappear through a side door into a black square of night. Two men followed. Amid shouts of irritation they forced their way to the aisle, threw open the door, and vanished.
Just stay where you are.
Outside, the flat popping noise made by a small-calibre pistol. Three or four shots, then silence. Serebin leapt to his feet and ran around the back of the theatre, arriving at the door with several men from the nearby seats. One of them tried the door, which opened an inch or two, then was slammed shut by somebody on the other side. The man was offended, tried again, harder this time, but whoever was out there was very strong and the door wouldn’t open. Serebin heard voices, indistinct, muffled, then footsteps. The lights came on in the theatre and a man who seemed to be in authority came striding down the aisle, the others made way for him. He grasped the knob firmly and opened the door.

Serebin and the others stepped out into a long alley, lit by a streetlamp at the far end. There was a high wall three feet in front of them, the noise of the streets, nothing else. In the faint light, Serebin could see a stain on the cobblestones. Old? New? Somebody laughed. The theatre manager shrugged, then opened the door and waved his customers back inside. What oddities in this grand city, who could know, from one minute to the next, what people might do. Serebin changed seats, moving along the far aisle to a row toward the front of the theatre. There was a belted raincoat folded carefully on one of the empty seats. He waited until the end of the movie, the crowd shuffled out, but nobody claimed the raincoat.

He stopped at a lokanta on the way back to the Beyoglu, he wanted to drink something, maybe eat, and bought a French newspaper to keep him company at the table. A woeful dinner companion, it did nothing but talk about the war, in varying shades of the Vichy point of view, Churchill called “that Shakespearian drunkard” and all the rest of it. The Italian divisions in the Pindus mountains of Greece failing nobly, poor boys, and the Italian fleet attacked—in fact destroyed, Serebin and everybody else knew that—at Taranto by Royal Navy Swordfish torpedo planes. However—an implicit
however,
the deftly made sneer a felicity of French diction—the industrial city of Coventry had been successfully assaulted by the Luftwaffe. Set ablaze by thirty thousand incendiary bombs. Serebin recalled the look on Major Iskandar’s face when he spoke of wooden Istanbul.

The newspaper’s correspondent in Bucharest reported on damage to the Roumanian oil fields caused by the recent earthquake. Then, following Hungary on the 22nd of November, Roumania had signed the Tripartite Pact with the fascist powers, though Bulgaria had refused. Civil war continued in Roumania, sixty-four officials of the former King Carol government had been executed by the Iron Guard, who were also fighting units of the Antonescu regime in the city and some of the towns.

Bon appétit, monsieur.

But the paper didn’t lie, not so much that you couldn’t read the truth if you wanted to. Endgame in southern Europe. Mopping up in the Balkans to create a harmonious German continent. No, they hadn’t gotten across the Channel to finish off the nation of shopkeepers, but the shopkeepers weren’t going to cross either. So, they bombed each other and fired caustic epithets over the airwaves. Churchill noble and stoic, Goebbels sarcastic and sly. A stalemate, clearly enough, that could easily enough wind down over time to a brutal peace, punctuated by the oppression of the Jews and the unending political warfare that flowed from Moscow.

Poor Kubalsky. Poor Kubalsky—maybe. And wasn’t
that
what they excelled at, the Bolsheviks. Not sure, don’t know, too bad, life goes on. “Molotov in Berlin for Important Talks,” said the newspaper. A fine alliance, teaching the world, if nothing else, what the term
realpolitik
actually meant.

Serebin’s long day wasn’t over. At the desk of the Beyoglu, a note for effendi. A sentence, painfully carved onto a sheet of paper with a blunt pencil, every letter wavering and hesitant. From one of the Ukrainian sisters: “Please, sir, we beg you with all respect not to leave the city without saying good-bye to Tamara Petrovna.”

He was there an hour later. Not quite midnight yet, but close to it.

She was in bed, wearing two sweaters and a wool cap, eating licorice drops and reading Bulgakov’s
White Guard
.

“Ilya! What’s wrong?”

“Why should anything be wrong?” He sat on the edge of the bed.

She shrugged, used a scrap of paper to mark her place in the book. “It’s late.” She stared at him for a moment, face flushed and pink. “Are you all right?”

“I was supposed to meet Kubalsky, earlier, but something happened.”

“What?”

“He didn’t appear, that’s the short version. What about you?”

“A little fever. It comes and goes.”

“And of course you don’t tell the doctors.”

“I do! There was one here this morning.”

“What did he say?”