Blood of Victory (21 page)

Serebin attended the Monday feast whenever he could. He had, since childhood, a passion for second-day delicacies. They got better overnight, and tasted better yet when eaten in the kitchen instead of the dining room.

“Here, you,” Zubotnik said from his white beard. “Take some of this.”

Serebin carefully sawed a slice off half a beef Wellington, the crust still flaky after a night in the refrigerator. He put a teaspoon of Zubotnik’s brutal mustard beside it, and considered a second until Zubotnik growled, “Don’t murder it, Serebin. And give Anya some mousse.”

“Thank you but no, Ivan Ivanovich,” Anya said.

“Just do what I tell you,” Zubotnik said to Serebin.

“Only a little,” Serebin said, commiserating. The salmon mousse had been chilled in a fish-shaped mold and Serebin gave her one of the tail fins.

“While you’re up,” Ulzhen said, extending his plate.

They sat at the long wooden table in the kitchen. Serebin, Boris Ulzhen, the poet Anya Zak, the taxi driver Klimov and Claudette, his Franco-Russian girlfriend, and Solovy the robber.

Serebin poured himself a glass of red wine from the large flask. There were various
appellations
and vintages in the flask, blended by chance from bottles unfinished by Sunday night’s patrons. Zubotnik and his friends could eat whatever they wanted at the Monday lunch but Papa Heininger would clutch his heart in an alarming way when Zubotnik visited the cellars so the chef, realizing that life would go better if the
propriétaire
remained aboveground, had forsworn the bins.

“To the Zubotnik ’41,” Klimov said, raising his glass.

“Na zdorov’ye!”

“Na zdorov’ye!”

“Ilya Aleksandrovich,” Anya Zak said, “please to continue your story.” She waited attentively, her bright, nearsighted eyes peering at him through old-fashioned spectacles. Solovy began to roll a cigarette, taking long strands of tobacco from a cloth pouch.

“So,” Serebin said, “we came to Bryansk at dawn. We’d heard that Makhno’s people had occupied the city, but we didn’t hear anything. They were always loud, those people, fighting or not, women’s screams and pistol shots and great shouts of laughter. But it was very quiet in the city. A little smoke from the burnt-out houses, not much else. ‘Take a squad,’ the captain said, ‘and go see what’s what.’ So off we went, using whatever cover we could find, just waiting for the snipers, but nothing happened. You could see the looters had been there, stuff they didn’t want dropped in the street. Clothes and toys and pans, half a painting. Then I saw the goat, it came walking toward us, casually enough, staring at me with those strange eyes, just going about its business until somebody came and put a rope around its neck. Something funny about this goat, I thought. I looked closer, and saw a long shred of yellow paper hanging out of its mouth, with the printed words
Genius and Dissipation.
My sergeant saw it at the same time I did and we both started to laugh, almost couldn’t stop. We’d been fighting for a day and a half and we were a little crazy, the way you get. He had to sit down in the street, there were tears running down his cheeks. All this made the goat self-conscious and it began to finish the paper,
Genius and Dissipation
rolling up into its mouth as it chewed.

“One of the men called out from a doorway, ‘The hell’s gotten into you?’ but we couldn’t answer. I mean, go try and explain something like that. And we really couldn’t figure it out, just then, not for about thirty minutes. Then we got into the center of the city and saw the posters. Stuck up on the wall of a theatre with flour glue, which goats like. The posters announced the appearance of the actor Orlenev, coming to Bryansk to play the role of the English tragedian Edmund Kean in the play called
Kean, or Genius and Dissipation.
”

Solovy snorted with laughter, but he was the only one.

“Bryansk was the worst,” Ulzhen said.

“Berdichev,” Zubotnik said. He cut a piece of
baguette,
put smoked salmon on it, then a drizzle of oil, and handed it to Claudette.

“Still,” she said to Serebin, “you miss it, your terrible Russia.”

“Sometimes.”

“They all came through Berdichev,” Klimov said. “Taken and retaken twenty-seven times. Makhno’s band, Petlyura’s band, Tutnik’s partisans. ‘And,’ they used to say, ‘Nobody’s Ninth Regiment.’”

“You remember everything,” Solovy said.

“I remember,” Klimov said. “Jewish prayer shawls used as saddlecloths.”

Claudette ate her salmon with a knife and fork. Serebin poured wine for Ulzhen and Anya Zak. “Oh, thank you,” she said.

“The winter
Harvest
was a great success,” Ulzhen said to Serebin. “I’ve been wanting to tell you that but you haven’t been around.”

“Yes, very good,” Solovy said.

“The Babel, of course,” Ulzhen said. “Everybody talked about it. That, and Kacherin’s poem to his mother.”

“No,” Serebin said. “You’re joking.”

“Not at all.”

“It had feeling,” Zubotnik said. “
Real
feeling, sincerity, what’s wrong with that? Didn’t you have a mother?”

“So now,” Ulzhen said, “you have only to worry about spring.”

“Anya Zak will be in that one,” Serebin said. He knew better. Zak published only in the best quarterlies, she would never,
never,
submit to a magazine like
The Harvest.

“Will she?” Zubotnik said. He gave money to the IRU.

Her glance at Serebin was covert, and not amused,
how could you?
“I wish I had something,” she lamented. “I’ve been working on a long piece, for weeks, the whole winter, but, we shall see, maybe, if I can finish...”

“We would, of course, be honored,” Ulzhen said, lingering on the
would.

“You should try the salmon, Tolya,” Claudette said to Klimov.

“Mm,” Zubotnik said. He cut some bread and salmon and passed it across the table.

Ulzhen set his napkin down. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said. As he stood up, he met Serebin’s eyes,
come with me.

Serebin followed him from the kitchen out to the bar that bordered the darkened restaurant, then into the men’s room. Ulzhen looked for a light switch on the wall but he couldn’t find it.

“I’ll hold the door for you,” Serebin said.

“Doesn’t matter.”

Serebin held the door ajar while Ulzhen used the urinal. “Ilya Aleksandrovich,” he said, his voice echoing faintly off the tiled wall, “we need your help.” He finished, began to button his fly.

“All right,” Serebin said.

“A committee,” Ulzhen said. He went to the sink and turned the water on. “Only four of us.” He mentioned two people that Serebin barely knew—the widow of a German industrialist, very rich, who had come to live in Paris years earlier, and a thin, serious, older man who hardly said a word to anybody. To Serebin, this made no sense at all.

“Committee?”

“She has the money,” Ulzhen said. “And he was an officer in the military intelligence.”

“To do what?”

“For our Jews, Ilya.” He washed his hands, then began to dry them with a towel from the stack on the attendant’s table. “Eighty-nine of our members, as far as we can determine. And their families, that number we don’t know. But we’ve decided to get them out, if they want to go. First into the Unoccupied Zone, the Vichy zone, in the south, then to Nice. There are still boats that will take passengers, we’ll provide documents and whatever money we can manage. We know we can get them to Spain, at least that far, then, maybe, South America. So, it’s a very quiet committee.”

“Secret.”

“Yes.”

Serebin felt ill. He had to go to Marseilles in two days, then God only knew where after that. He heard laughter from the kitchen.

“Why me?” That loathsome phrase, out of his mouth before he could stop it.

“Why you?” Ulzhen had heard it loud and clear. “Because you don’t flinch, Ilya. Because the fact that you can take care of yourself means that you can take care of people who can’t, and, most of all, because I want you there with me.”

“Boris,” he said.

To tell? Not to tell? Excuses poured through his mind like water, this lie or that, one worse than the next.

“Yes? What?” Ulzhen dropped the towel in a basket by the table.

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

Now he couldn’t say anything.

“What is it, some business you’re doing with Ivan Kostyka? Is that it? You want money, all of a sudden?”

Serebin didn’t answer.

“Look, this has everything to do with Poland, I don’t need to tell you the stories, and it’s coming here. Nothing wrong with chess tournaments and magazines, Ilya, but we’re responsible
for these people. They’re coming to me, they’re asking for help. What am I to tell them? You’re busy?”

“Boris, I have to do something else. I
am
doing something else. For God’s sake don’t make me tell you more than that.”

“You are?” He was going back and forth—truth or cowardice?

“Yes.”

“Swear it to me.”

“I swear. On anything you like. Please understand, as long as I’m in Paris, I’ll do whatever you want. But I cannot promise to be in such and such a place at such and such a time, and, in what you’re talking about, that’s everything.”

Ulzhen took a deep breath and let it out. It meant concession—to disappointment, betrayal. That betrayal came for some noble reason, ghostly, beyond explanation, did not matter.

“How did this happen?” Ulzhen said, defeat in his voice.

“I got involved,” Serebin said.

Ulzhen wanted to argue, then thought better of it. “Well, you have to do what you think is right,” he said.

“I know.” Serebin looked for words, to somehow bridge the space that had opened between them, but all he could say was, “I’m sorry, Boris.”

Ulzhen shrugged. So life went.

It was almost five when they left. Klimov and Claudette, Anya Zak and Serebin walking together for a time, then parting at the rue de Turenne, where Anya Zak headed off into the Eleventh and Serebin went with her. To a street that reminded Serebin of the tenement districts of Russian cities, old and poor and silent, where Anya Zak had a room above a tailor shop. “It isn’t much,” she said, “but you can come up if you want.” He did. He was very lonely, and he couldn’t face going back to the Winchester just to be by himself.

A small room, cluttered and warmed with things she liked. A fish bowl filled with mussel shells on an upturned crate, Bal Musette posters and Victorian silhouettes tacked to the wall. Books everywhere, a glass of dried weeds, a copper lion.

They talked idly for a while, then she read him a poem. “No title yet,” she said. “For me, that is always difficult.” She settled herself into the corner of an easy chair, drew her feet up beneath her bulky skirt, and read from a paper in one hand while the other held a Sobranie, its blue smoke curling straight up in the airless room. The poem was intricate, about a lover, more or less, the lines simple, declarative, and opaque. She’d been, sometime, somewhere, easy prey. Was still? Didn’t care? “But the heart was blind that summer,” she recited, inhaled the cigarette, spoke the next line in puffs of smoke. Loss in a crowded room, in a storm, a dream, a shop. She had long dark hair, with a few silver strands, that hung down around her face, and, as she read, she would tuck one side of it behind her ear but it didn’t stay. She looked up at him when she finished and said, “Awful, isn’t it.”

“No, not at all.”

“A little awful, admit it. One’s intimate self is, you know.”

She was narrow-shouldered and lean on top, broad below the waist, heavy-legged. On the windowsill by the bed, half a burned candle, its wax congealed in a saucer. “You are looking at me,” she said.

“True.” He smiled at her.

“Tell me, are you working?”

“I wish I could, but life takes sharp corners, lately, so all I do is watch the road. A line sometimes, now and then, but who knows where it belongs.”

She understood. “They are killing us,” she said. “One way and another.”

“What will become of you, Anya?”

“Such a question!”

“Forgive me, I didn’t mean...”

“No, it’s all right,” she said. “I know what you mean. In fact, I think I’ve been offered a way out, if things go wrong here. About a year ago I met this couple. Nice enough,
haute bourgeois
types, but sweet. They were rich and social, before the occupation. Likely still are, now that I think about it. Anyhow, they somewhat adopted me, the saintly poetess, poor as a mouse, you know how it is. Sunday afternoons, they would have me up to their apartment, in Passy, all kinds of sexy nonsense in the air though nothing
said,
of course. Then, about a month ago, they told me that they had a little house in a village, in Normandy somewhere, at the end of a road, and if life went bad in Paris, I was invited to go up there and hide out for as long as I needed to.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Serebin said. “Still...”

“What about you?” she said.

“I don’t think I’ll have to run,” he said. “Of course, you can never be certain.”

“No you can’t. Not about anything, ever. You and I know all about that.” She took her spectacles off, blinked at a fuzzy world, folded them up, and put them on the table beside her.

More would come off, he imagined. Everything. By the light of the candle on the windowsill. And, as time went by, she would wear the very same smile she wore at the moment, opening, as her eyes closed, to a shape he dearly loved to see. Stripped, languid, appetitious, a true partner in crime, no saintly poetess at all and very pointed about it. Oh, his heart might be a little somewhere else, but that he couldn’t help and there was no way on earth she could know about it.

“Well,” she said.

As he stood up, she leaned her head back against the top of the chair. “Getting late,” she said. “Would you like to come and kiss me good night?”

As he walked toward the hotel, a long way away, it occurred to him that maybe she did know. Sensed it, understood him better than he thought possible. But, whether she did or she didn’t, it had been a long kiss good night, warm and elaborate, and a lot happened while it was going on. Was it possible they’d had a love affair? A thirty-second love affair? Well, why not. He stopped at the far end of the Pont Marie.
I’ll do anything you like.
She hadn’t said it out loud but even so she’d told him that. He wasn’t wrong. He could turn around, go back, she’d be waiting for him. No, he thought, that’s crazy. Don’t think about it, go home to bed.