hoarse, and even in two words he could hear contempt.

“Different? “

“They usually send me a sort of boar. With bristles.” She was tall and slight, had turned up the cuffs of a thick sweater to reveal delicate wrists. Her eyes were enormous, a blue so pale and fragile it reminded him of blindness, and her hair, worn long and loose, was the color of an almond shell. It was very fine hair, the kind that stirred with the slightest motion. Also she had been drinking; he could smell wine. “Sit down,” she said softly, changing moods.

He sat in a thronelike armchair, clearly a stage prop. “Are you in the play?” She was wearing slacks and strapped shoes with low heels, the outfit didn’t go with the old-fashioned bluster he could hear from the stage.

“Done for the night.” Her voice easily suggested quotation marks when she added, “Beatrice, a maid.” She shrugged, a dismissive Russian gesture. “It’s my rotten German. Sometimes I play a foreigner, but mostly it’s maids. In little maid costumes. Everybody likes little maid costumes. When I bend over you can almost see my ass. But not quite.”

“What play is it?”

“What? You don’t know The Captain’s Dilemma? I thought everybody did.”

“No. Sorry.”

“Mutchler suits the current taste-that is, Goebbels’s taste. He’s said to consider it quite excellent. The captain returns to his home ten years after a shipwreck; he finds his wife living beyond her means, a slave to foolish fashion, beset by sycophants and usurers. He, on the other hand, is a typical Volk: sturdy, forthright, honest, a simple man from Rostock with the pleasures of a simple man. Simple pleasures, you see-we play him as a turnip. So now we have conflict, and a kind of drawing room comedy, with all sorts of amusing character parts: hypocrites, fops, oily Jews.”

“And the dilemma? “

“The dilemma is why the playwright wasn’t strangled at birth.”

Szara laughed.

“What are you? A writer? I mean beside the other thing.”

“How do you know I’m the other thing? “

“Cruel times for Nadia if you’re not.”

“And why a writer? “

“Oh, I know writers. I have them in my family, or used to. Do you want some wine? Be careful-it’s a test.”

“Just a little.”

“You fail.” She reached behind a screen, poured wine into a water glass, and handed it to him, then retrieved her own glass, hidden behind a leg of the chaise longue. “Nazhdrov’ya.”

“Nazhdrov’ya.”

“Phooey.” She wrinkled her nose at the glass. “Your pretty little niece, who is no doubt dying to be an actress-tell her it all rests on a tolerance for atrocious white wine.”

“You are from Moscow?” he asked.

“No, Piter, St. Petersburg. So sorry, I mean Leningrad. An old, old family. Tscherova is my married name.”

“And Tscherov? He’s in Berlin?”

“Pfft,” she said, casting her eyes up at the ceiling and springing four fingers from beneath her thumb, flicking Tscherov’s soul up to heaven. “November 1917.”

“Difficult times,” he said in sympathy.

“A Menshevik, a nice man. Married me when I was sixteen and didn’t I give him a hellish time of it. The last eight months of his life, too. Poor Tscherov.” Her eyes shone for a moment and she looked away.

“At least you survived.”

“We all did. Aristocrats and artists in my family, all crazy as bats; revolution was the very thing for us. I have a brother in your business. Or I should say had. He seems to have vanished. Sascha.” She laughed at his memory, a harsh cackle, then put her fingers to her mouth, as though it were a drunken sound and embarrassed her. “Sorry. Colonel Alexander Vonets-did you know him?”

“No.”

“Too bad. Charming bastard. Ah, the elegant Vonets family- but see what they’ve come to now. Miserable stukachi, dealing in filthy Nazi gossip. ‘Oh, but my dear General, how absolutely fasss- cinating!’ ” She snickered at her own performance, then leaned toward him. “You know what they say in Paris, that a woman attending a soiree needs only two words of French to be thought an elegant conversationalist? formidable and fantastique. Well, it’s the same here. You look up at them-you sit down if they’re squatty little things; the eyes simply must look up at them-and they talk and talk, and you say-in German of course-formidable! after one sentence and fantastique! after the next. ‘Brilliant woman!’ they say later.”

“So it’s all nothing more than conversation.”

She studied him for a moment. “You are very rude,” she said.

“Forgive me. It’s just curiosity. I don’t care what you do.”

“Well, as I’m certain you know, this wasn’t my idea.”

“No?”

“Hardly. When they discovered I’d snuck out of Russia and was in Berlin, they sent some people, not like you, around.” She shrugged, remembering the moment. “Offered a choice between death and money, I chose money.”

Szara nodded in sympathy.

“We go to … parties, my little troupe and I. Parties of a sort, you know. We’re considered a terrific amount of fun. People drink. Lose their inhibitions. Shall you hear it all?”

“Of course not.”

She smiled. “It isn’t so bad as you think. I avoid the worst of it, but my associates, well. Not that I’m innocent, you understand. I’ve known a couple of them better than I should have.” She paused. Looked at him critically, closed one eye. “You must be a writer-so serious. Everything means something, but we … In the theater, you know, we’re like naughty children, like brothers and sisters playing behind the shed. So these things don’t mean so much, it’s a way to forget yourself, that’s all. One night you’re this person and the next night you’re that person, so that sometimes you’re no person at all. This profession … it deforms the heart. Perhaps. I don’t know.”

She was lost for a moment, sitting on the edge of the chaise, weight borne by elbows on knees, glass held in both hands. “As for the Nazis, well, they’re really more like pigs than humans, if you think about it. The men-and the women-just like pigs, they even squeal like pigs. It’s no insult to say this, it’s literal. It isn’t their ‘Schweine!’ that I’m talking about but real pigs: pink, overweight, quite intelligent if you know anything about them, certainly smarter than dogs, but very appetitious, there the common wisdom has it just right. They do want what they want, and lots of it, and right away, and then, when they get it, they’re happy. Blissful.”

“I thought you said the man who came to see you was like a boar.”

“I did say that, didn’t I. I’m sure there’s a difference, though. You just have to be much smarter than me to see it.”

From the stage Szara could hear the ringing tones of a soliloquy, a kind of triumphant anger shot through with blistering rectitude. Then a pause, then desultory applause, then the creak of an unoiled mechanism closing the curtain. This was followed by a heavy tread in the hallway, a man’s gruff voice, “Scheiss!” and the emphatic slam of a door.

“There,” said Tscherova, switching into German, “that’s the captain now. A simple Volk.”

Szara reached into his pockets and withdrew the thick wads of reichsmarks. She nodded, took them from him, stood, and stuffed the pockets of a long wool coat hanging on a peg.

Szara now assumed their conversation to be perfectly audible to the “captain” next door. “You’ll take care of your, ah, health. I really hope you will.”

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