by Alan Furst
“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.”
“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 la
st,” 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.