by Alan Furst
Back in Nadia’s sanctuary, they settled on the carpet close to the dying fire while Seryozha rested on crossed forepaws and waited alertly for his share of the kill. Szara watched her tear into the sandwich, a serious Russian eater, her hair falling around her face as she leaned over the plate. He simply could not stop looking at her. She apparently ignored it, was perhaps used to it-after all, the job of an actress was to be looked at-still, he did not want to seem a goggling, teenage dolt and tried to be subtle, but that was a hopeless tactic and he knew it. This is God’s work, he thought: drifting hair the color of an almond shell and the fragile blue of her eyes, the lines and planes and light in her. There weren’t words, he realized. Only the feeling inside him and the impulse to make sure, again and again, that he saw what he saw. Suddenly, she looked up and stared back at him, blank-eyed, jaw muscles working away as she chewed, until he sensed that she’d composed her expression into a reasonable imitation of his own. He turned away. “Yes?” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s nothing.”
She poured wine into his glass.
“Do we expect the general home at any moment? ” he asked. “Do I hide in a closet? “
“The general is in Poland,” she said. “And if he were here you would not have to hide. Krafic comes to see me with his boyfriends. Lara Brozina and her brother. You know them, in what we’ll call a different setting. Others also. A little Russian colony, you see: emigre intellectuals, free thinkers, batty painters, and what-have-you. The general refers to us as ‘an antidote to Frau Lumplich.’ “
“Who is she?”
“A character he made up. ‘Madame Lump,’ one would say in Russian.”
“An enlightened general. An enlightened German general.”
“They exist,” she said. She brushed crumbs from her hands and held a bite of sandwich out to Seryozha, who arched his neck forward and took it daintily between his small front teeth for a moment, then inhaled it. She rose and brought over a framed photograph from the night table next to her bed. “General Walter Boden,” she said.
A man in his late sixties, Szara thought. Fleshless, ascetic face below a bald head, deep care lines, mouth a single brief line. Yet the look in his eyes told a slightly different story. At some point, in a life that left his face like stone, something had amused him. Permanently.
“Extraordinary,” Szara said.
“It pleases me you see that,” she said with feeling.
“When I put this picture together with what you’ve told me, I would have to guess that this is not a man well loved by the Nazis.”
“No. They know how he feels about them; in the general’s world, the notion of beneath contempt is taken quite literally. He is rich, however. Very, very rich. They do respect that. And his position with the General Staff is not unimportant, though he speaks of it as ‘the maid’s room in the lion’s den.’ His friends include the old aristocracy, the Metternichs and Bismarcks, princes and counts, the Prussian landholders. Hitler hates them, foams at the mouth because he can’t get at them; they occupy two powerful fortresses in Germany, the army and the foreign ministry.”
“Fortresses. Will they hold under siege?”
“We shall see.”
You don’t, Szara reminded himself, have to think about such things anymore. “Is there another log for the fire?” he asked. The embers were dark red.
“No. Not until the morning. One is a prisoner of servants, in some ways.”
“A long way from Rosenhain Passage, though, and that awful theater.”
She nodded that it was. He stared at her, forced himself to look away. She yawned, took a foot out of her slipper, and propped it inside her opposite knee. “How did you meet? ” Szara said.
“At a reception. We went to dinner a few times. Talked into the night-he speaks passable Russian, you yourself know what that feels like, especially when you have no country to go home to. A strange romance. I waited for the inevitable offer, a relaxing weekend in the country, but it never came. One night at a restaurant he simply said ‘Nadia, my girl, generals and actresses are nothing new in Berlin. A cliche of the nightclubs. But come along to my house, even so, and see how you like it.’ I did. And in this room I asked, ‘Whose bedroom is this?’ for I’d already seen his, and everything was obviously new. ‘I believe it is yours, if you like,’ he said. I had expected anything but this, and I was speechless. That strip of Persian carpet, the one by your hand? He’d meant it for Seryozha. Suddenly I started to cry-inside, I didn’t want him to see. And that was the end of the discussion. I came to live here and it was a kind of salvation; I stopped doing all those other things, seeing those vile people. Now this is my life. When he wants to see me, I’m here. I sit across from him at dinner, we converse, my job is to be exactly who I am. Any affectation, to become what I imagine he might want, would break his heart. We have a life together, we go-what is the phrase? — we go out in society. To his friends. Sometimes to the country, to grand estates. In Germany, civilized life continues in such places, much as it does in the basements of Moscow. But no matter where we go, I am always at his shoulder. I take his arm. Now I could-and of course I would, nothing would be easier- make the world believe that he was a sublime lover. A few small signals and the tongues begin to wag. If he desired that, it would be little enough to ask. But he does not. He does not care what people think of him. I’m not here for his vanity, for his reputation. I’m here because it gives him pleasure to have me here.”
Her face was flushed; she drank the last of the wine in her glass. When she met his eyes he saw anger and sorrow, and all the courage and defiance she could possibly summon. Not that it was overwhelming, it wasn’t, but for her it was everything she possessed. “And God damn you if you’ve come here to make me work again. No matter what you’ve said. For I won’t. Won’t betray this man in the way you want. I’ll go where even your power does not reach. And we both know where that is.”
Szara took a deep breath and let the air between them cool a little. Then he said, “I’ve told only the truth”-he looked at his watch-“since ten-thirty last night. Almost six hours. The way things are for me lately, I have a right to be proud of even that.”
She lowered her eyes. He stood, the carpet soft beneath his bare feet, and walked to a mirrored cabinet with glasses and a silver ice bucket on it. He opened the door and found a bottle of Saint-Estephe, took a corkscrew and worked it open, then filled both their glasses. She had meanwhile found a newspaper, was bunching up wads of it and feeding it to the fire. “It looks warm, anyhow,” she said.
“I was wondering,” he said, “what had become of the people in Paris in all this. Because if you’d let them know about an intimacy with a senior staff officer they would have been-inquisitive. To say the least.”
“And something terrible would have happened. Because even if I’d tried to conceal everything, I don’t trust my little friends in Berlin. They’ve had to improvise their lives for too long-not all humans are made stronger by that.”
“Very few.”
“Well, for me there is only one escape, and I was prepared to take it. I’d made my peace with the idea. In the beginning, when I stole away from Russia and came to live in Berlin, these people approached me. Threatened me. But I gave them very little, only bits of gossip and what they could read in the newspapers if they wanted. Then they played a second card. Your brother Sascha is in a camp, they said, where he deserves to be. But he’s as comfortable as he can be under the circumstances; he works as a clerk in a heated room. If you want his situation to continue, you must be productive. It’s up to you.”
“And you did what you had to do.”
“Yes. I did. In exile, I cared very little what I made of my life because I discovered I wasn’t touched by it. Perhaps Russia has something to do with that-to be sensitive yet not at all delicate, a curious strength, or weakness, or whatever you want to call it. But then I met this man, and suddenly it was as though I’d woken from a long sleep. E
very small thing now mattered-the weather, the way a vase stood on a table, meeting someone and wanting them to like me. I had built walls-now they crumbled. And this I knew I could not survive. Not for long. I could no longer do what I’d done for the people who came around with money, and once they began to press I knew there would be only one way out. So I hadn’t, as I saw it then, very long to live. Yet each day was vivid, and I trembled with life. They say it is the only gift, and now I came to understand that with all my heart. I never cried so hard, and never laughed so much, as I did in those weeks. Perhaps it was a form of prayer, because what came next was a miracle, I know of no other word to describe it.
“It was in early August. A man came to see me. Not here. At the theater, in the same way you did. Clearly he knew nothing of the general. A dreadful man, this one. Fair, wavy hair, thick glasses, a vile little chunk of a thing with no mercy anywhere in him. None. And what he mostly wanted to talk about was you. Something had gone wrong, something extremely serious, for nothing has happened since. No money, no demands, no couriers, nothing.”
She twisted the glass about in her hands, watching the light of the burning newspaper reflected in the red surface of the wine. “I’ve no idea what happened,” she said. “I only know it saved my life. And that you seemed to be the cause of it.”
He woke up in a kind of heaven. He had no idea how he’d happened to wind up on her bed but there he was, his face against the soft coverlet, his side a little sore from sleeping on the knot in the twisted belt of the bathrobe. He was in heaven, he decided, because it smelled exactly the way heaven, or his heaven at any rate, ought to smell: the perfume she wore-which reminded him of cinnamon-and scented soap, as well as wine, cigarette smoke, the ashes of a dead fire, and the sweetish odor of a well-washed borzoi. He could, he thought, detect Nadia herself, sweet in a different, a human way. For a time he simply lay there, suspended in a perfect darkness, and inhaled. When he felt himself slipping back into unconsciousness, he forced his eyes open. A knitted comforter was tossed carelessly on the settee-so that’s where she’d slept. His suit-apparently the maids had cleaned it-hung from a hanger on the knob of the bathroom door, and the rest of his clothing was piled neatly on a dresser. Miraculously clean and dry.
He struggled to sit up. Returning from the dead, it felt like. All those nights in Poland, lying on the ground on a blanket; followed by restless hours on a thin mattress in the Kovno apartment, people around him awake, coughing, talking in low voices. Now he hurt for every minute of it. He unhooked the white shutter that covered the lower half of the window and pushed it aside. An autumn garden. Surrounded by high walls. Dead leaves had drifted across the paths and mounded at the foot of a hedge. Nadia sat at a weathered iron table-she was reading, he could not see her face-one hand dangling above the wolfhound stretched out at her side. Am I in Russia? Wrapped in a long black coat and a red wool scarf she was lost in her book. The wind lifted her fall-colored hair, leaves spun down from the trees and rattled along the garden paths; the sky was at war, broken towers of gray cloud, blown and battered, swept past a pale sun. Certainly it would rain. His heart ached for her.
Later he sat in a garden chair across from her and saw that she was reading Babel’s Red Cavalry. The wind was cool and damp and he pulled his jacket tightly about him.
For a long time they did not say anything.
And she did not look away, did not deny him her eyes: if this is what you wish, she seemed to say, I will pose for you. She touched nothing, changed nothing, and did not defend herself. The wind blew her hair across her face, Seryozha sighed, the light shifted as the clouds crossed the sun, she never moved. Then he began to understand that he’d misread her. This stillness was not simply poise-what he saw in her eyes was precisely what was in his own. Could she be that deluded? To want somebody so lost and useless? Was she blind?
No.
From the moment he’d walked through the door of the dressing room he had been in love with her. That it might be the same for her had never occurred to him, simply had not crossed his mind. But maybe it worked that way-women always knew, men never did. Or maybe not, maybe it all worked some other way. He didn’t really care. Now he understood that everything had changed. And now he understood what, just exactly what, he had been offered.
Sad, he thought, that he couldn’t take it. They were castaways, both of them, marooned together on an exotic island-as it happened, the garden of a Florentine villa on the Schillerstrasse. But somewhere beyond the high walls a military band was playing a march and, he thought, the general will soon return from the wars. Only for a moment did he imagine a love affair in flight: the unspeakable hotel rooms, the secret police, the predators. No. She belonged in his imagination, not in his life. A memory. Met in the wrong way, in the wrong place, in the wrong year, in times when love wasn’t possible. One remembers, and that’s all. Something else that didn’t happen in those days.
“When will you leave?” she said. “Today?”
“Tomorrow.”
Just for an instant he was clairvoyant: he could watch the question as it took shape in her mind. She leaned across the table until she was very close, he could see that her lips were dry from the wind, a red mark on the line of her jaw-suddenly she was out of perspective, too near to be beautiful. And when she spoke it was a voice he didn’t know, so soft he could barely hear what she said. “Why did this happen?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded a little. She agreed. There was no answer.
“There isn’t anything we have to do, you know,” he said.
Her face changed, gracefully but completely, until he was confronted by the single great inquisitive look of his life. “No?”
He had never in his life been the lover he was with her.
They waited for nightfall-only the first in a series of common consents that flowed to meet the occasion. Szara could not safely go out in the street, and Nadia knew it, so there was no point in raising the issue. They simply passed a rather nineteenth-century sort of day; they read, they talked, they cut clusters of fall berries from a shrub to make a table decoration, avoided the servants, played with the dog, touched only accidentally and only now and then, and neither of them let on how it affected them. If living in the days of war demanded a love affair measured in hours and not in months, they discovered that a love affair was something that could be compressed in just that way.
They could have looked, from any of the windows in the front of the three-story villa, out on the Tiergarten and observed that day’s life in Berlin: strollers and idlers, officers and couples, old men reading newspapers on a park bench. But they declined to do so. The private world suited them. They did not, however, build sand castles, did not pretend the present was anything other than what it was, and they tried to talk about the future. Difficult, though. Szara’s plans focused vaguely on Denmark; from there he would extemporize. He had no idea how he might be able to earn a living; his writing languages, Russian and Polish, would not serve him very well anywhere he could think of. Emigre intellectuals lived in penury-sometimes the little journal paid, sometimes it didn’t. The former aristocrats gave parties, everyone ate as much as they could. But even that tenuous existence was denied him-he was a fugitive, and the emigre communities were the first places they would look for him. Of course he could not go back to Paris, much too dangerous. Sad, because to be there with her …
Sad, because even to know him put her in danger. This he did not say, but she knew it anyhow. She’d seen enough of Soviet life to apprehend vulnerability in every one of its known forms. So she understood that one did what one had to do. Such realpolitik was very alchemical stuff. It started with politicians and their intellectuals, all this doing what had to be done, but it had a tendency to migrate, and the next time you looked it was in bed with you.
Still, they agreed, one had to hope. Humans survived the most awful catastrophes: walked away from the inf
erno with singed hair, missed the train that went over the cliff. Both felt they might just be owed a little luck from whatever divine agency kept those books. There were still places on earth where one could get irredeemably lost, it only took finding one. And how exactly did one go about herding sheep? Could it be all that difficult?
In the end, they refused to let the future ruin their day, which made them heroes of a low order but heroes nonetheless. And they had the past to fall back on, realizing almost immediately that the sorts of lives they’d led created, if they did nothing else, long and luxuriant anecdotes. They discovered that they had, on several occasions, been within minutes of meeting each other, in Moscow, in Leningrad. Had been in the same apartments, known some of the same people; their trails through the snowy forest crossed and re-crossed. What would have happened had they met? Everything? Nothing? Certainly something, they decided.
They weren’t very hungry, as the day wore on toward evening, and just after dark they toyed with a light supper. Their conversation was somewhat forced, slightly tense, in the dining room with a ticking grandfather clock that made every silence ring with melodrama. Nadia said, “If it weren’t for the general’s feelings, I’d have poured soup in that monster long ago.”
They retired early. He, for form’s sake, to a guest room, she to her blue and white sanctuary. When the noise in the kitchen subsided and the house grew quiet, Szara climbed the marble staircase.
They lit a fire, turned out the lights, played the Victrola, drank wine.
She surprised him. The way she moved through the daily world, fine boned, on air, made her seem insubstantial-one could hold her only cautiously. But it wasn’t so. With a dancer’s pointed toe she kicked the bottoms of her silk pajamas fully across the room, then melted out of the top and posed for him. She was full and lovely and curved, with smooth, taut skin colored by firelight. For a moment, he simply looked at her. He’d supposed their joined spirits might float to some unimagined romantic height, but now he fell on her like a wolf and she yelped like a teenager.