Night Soldiers

Paris in a steady stream, he was but one among them. He worked hard at being Nick the waiter, hid his money behind a loose light fixture in the hallway outside his room, and kept all acquaintance-with the exception of the Omaraeff connection-emphatically casual. He didn’t need much. He had his work, he had the city, and he had a great deal more than that.

In the room, he undressed slowly, then made sure the shutters were firmly closed. The window faced east and the pale light of the winter sunrise would leak in through the slats, creating a shadow light that seemed to him peaceful and timeless.

She was, as usual, pretending to sleep. But, if her eyes were closed, how did she sense the moment he was ready to enter the bed? Because it was, always, this very moment she chose to stretch and twist in such a way that she shaped her body for him in the softened outline of the blanket.

“Aleksandra?” He spoke softly, standing by the bed.

“I am sleeping,” she said, unbothered by this, or any other, contradictory statement.

He slid carefully between the sheets next to her. A moment later, just as sleep began to take him, her hand came visiting.

“You are moving in your sleep,” he whispered.

“I am having a dream.”

“Oh.”

“A terrible dream.”

“What of?”

“That certain things, indescribable things, are to happen to me, just at dawn, it is far too wicked even to describe … my heart beats …”

“Very well. You must go back to sleep.”

“Yes. You are right.”

“Aleksandra?”

“What?”

“It is dawn.”

“Oh no! Say it isn’t!”

Who was she?

He was not entirely sure. Her passport gave her family name as Varin, probably French, possibly Russian, and she claimed it was not the true family name anyhow. What he did know was that she wanted to be a mystery to him, wished him to see her as a creature of the Paris night, a manifestation, without the claustrophobic bonds of family or nationality. It was self-conscious artifice, transparently so, but she refused to leave its shelter.

“Who are you, truly?” he’d asked more than once.

“Ah,” she’d say, triste as a nightclub singer, “if only one knew that sort of thing.”

She spelled her name in the Slavic form, implied exotic connections-emigrant communities in distant corners of Europe, Trieste perhaps-and claimed that her spirit, her psyche, was Russian. In support of such claims, she owned a few rich Russian curses that were occasionally hurled his way. She was small, waiflike, unsmiling, with a thick shag of muted blond hair that whipped her forehead when she shook her head and cool, deep, enormous eyes like a night animal. Her coloring he found strange-dark beneath pale-as though a shadow lived inside her. She had a hot temper, would go to war on the slightest provocation.

But there was also in her a peasant sharpness that he found very familiar, an echo of his part of the world. She could leave the room with a few sous and return with the most extraordinary amount of stuff. She spoke a tough Parisian street French-calling him “mec,” pal, when it suited her, in a hoarse, low voice-and bits and pieces of English she learned at the cinema. Would surprise him with lines memorized from American movies in which men with pencil-thin mustaches dueled over business deals and won the heiress. “Now see here, Trumbull,” she would say, black beret pulled down over her mop head.

She had been born in the countryside, she said, somewhere in the South of France, but of a family, she claimed, from elsewhere. Arrived in Paris at sixteen, alone, without money, and survived. Her father, according to the time of day, had been a gangster, a poet, or a nobleman. She had never met him, she said, and had few memories of her mother-carried off by the influenza epidemic of 1919. She had been raised by an aunt, or rather, a woman who called herself aunt, or, perhaps, a woman who had known her aunt. None of her stories was ever told the same way twice and he finally gave it up-acknowledged inconsistency the only effective defense against a trained interrogator-and consigned her to the present moment, which was where she wanted to be in the first place.

He had met her in a bookstore where she worked, lost in a billowing blue smock. She had fierce little hands, and he could not take his eyes off them as they whisked piles of books into order. She challenged him- What are you looking at? — he met the challenge. She demanded coffee. They went to a cafe. He waited for her after work. Eventually, they returned to his room. The following day, she appeared at his door with a cardboard suitcase. “I have brought a few things,” she’d said.

She had, in her own way, taught him to be her lover. Using for instruction a great range of pouts and swoons and sly looks, attacks and retreats, an entire ragbag of stratagems. She teased him until he growled, then ran away. But not too far. Led him, subtly, to such special silky places as made her sing and showed him how, by example, to play lovers’ games.

She seduced him. Sometimes this way, sometimes that. With rainy-day melancholy or by getting absurdly drunk on two glasses of wine. “Did we do something vile? I swear I don’t remember.” She was clever at being “naughty” and making him “mad.” Sometimes, pretending to immense modesty, she let him have a peek at something he wasn’t supposed to see-quite by accident, of course, a stolen glimpse. She played at being his captive, squeaking for mercy. Or at being his captor, in the voice of a disciplinarian schoolteacher. At times, she was partial to costumes. Not intentional ones, it just happened that he would discover her in garter belt and silk stockings while she was looking for her earrings. Other times, he would get in bed to find her in the chaste cotton shift of a schoolgirl, on which occasion she chose to address him as uncle. She taught him this and she taught him that until at last it dawned on him that the only way a man ever becomes a lover is at the hands of a woman.

Of her former lovers, whoever they might have been, he had no time to be jealous. The world seemed intent on rushing off its cliff, so, like everyone else, he lived for the moment and hung on tight. The lipstick grew crimson, hairdos were twisted about in bizarre shapes, and in some dresses a woman simply could not sit down. Affairs begun on Friday were over by Wednesday. And every woman in the world seemed to want him, sensing, he guessed, what went on in the little room. At Heininger, the screechy English girls pressed apartment keys into his hand, absolutely bent on having it off with the working class, and an evil-looking Slav at that. He smiled wistfully and returned the keys, regret for the lost opportunity showing clearly in his expression, hoping that such chivalry would spare him their anger.

If he was tempted at all, it was the French women who caught his attention, especially the ones a few years older than he. It was the single glance on the street that undid him, gone in the very last instant before it actually meant anything. His eyes would roam hungrily after them as they trailed their wondrous perfume away down the avenue, leaving him to sniff great nosefuls of Parisian air. What was that?

But Aleksandra, who smelled like soap, or lemons, or someone who had just been in the hot sun, was more than enough for him, so he prayed at one church only and, soon enough, woke to discover that love had got him.

In Vidin, the March wind blew in hard off the river, rippling the surface of the water and flattening the reeds that grew by the wooden dock. A few snow patches remained on the dirt street that ran past the waterfront shacks of the fishermen, and the two old people in dark clothing, a man and a woman, moved carefully around them, bodies bent against the wind. The woman wore a black shawl over her head and the man held his cap on with his hand. It was Sunday, and they were going home from mass.

At the path that led through the garden to the house, they stopped. The woman pointed to a small skiff tied to a post among the reeds and said something to her husband. He shook his head, then shrugged. He did not know, he did not care. When they went into the house, there was a stranger sitting at the plank table near the stove. He wore the wool cap and clothing of a river fisherman. He stood up politely as they entered. “Please forgive me,” he