front, scowling doormen, Turkish wrestlers with brass buttons on their uniforms. Deutsche Orientbank. Banque de la Seine. At the end of the street: Societe Ottoman des Docks et Ateliers du Haut Bosphore. Title! “On a certain cloudy morning in springtime, the bookkeeper Drazunov folded his newspaper under his arm and stepped off the Number Six trolley…”
Yes, one lied to them. Always. “Today a man talks freely only with his wife”-Babel had said that, the last time Serebin ever saw him-“at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”
He stopped at a Karagoz show, puppets made of camel hide, and stood at the edge of the crowd. Serebin was a man who truly hated puppets-hated the way they leaped and skittered about, the way they shrieked-but he was also a man who could no more pass by theatre in the street than he could fly. The Karagoz companies (Karagoz was Punch) wrote contemporary characters into their skits, so Serebin, in past trips to the city, had seen Mickey Mouse, Tarzan of the Apes, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo. Greta Garbo? I’ll write you a puppet play about Greta Garbo-a love story. “Ow! Oh! Don’t punish me so, madame, I’m only the script girl!”
He saw a bar he liked and sat at an outdoor table. They didn’t have vodka, so he drank instead some kind of delicious brandy. Made of apricots, probably, the waiter drew one on a napkin for him. Then, walking again, he came to a boulevard with a fragrant breeze. A certain scent he recognized: rotting seaweed, salt, coal smoke. His heart rose. A harbor. A view of the sea. Down this hill? He would go and see.
7:20. A warm night for the season, cloudy and soft. No stars, when Serebin looked for them, maybe later. He always took emigre officials out for a good dinner, something most of them never got, so he scouted General de Kossevoy’s neighborhood on his way to the old man’s room and found a place with a basket of cucumbers in the window. When he peered inside he saw that it was crowded and noisy, steamy and smoky, the way he liked it, with harassed waiters on the run.
But, wrong again. “If it’s all the same to you,” de Kossevoy said, “I’ve been meaning to look in at The Samovar, do you know it? The owner was one of my officers in the Urals and he’s always asking me to drop by.”
Sodden kasha pierogi with suspiciously sour sour cream was the result of that, but de Kossevoy had smiled beatifically as they entered, his iron foot ringing out on the tile floor of the restaurant. The general’s foot had been blown off by a mortar round in Smolensk and, when the wound healed, a local blacksmith had forged a substitute. De Kossevoy seemed to get along with it all right. He walked with a stick, and you had to watch out for him at parties-Serebin recalled a bearded luminary at an official reception, his eyes squeezed shut with agony as de Kossevoy trod on his toes, while a supernatural effort at courtesy kept him from crying out.
“Your excellency!” A humble shuffle and bow from the owner, hurrying past his empty tables.
“Champagne,” Serebin said.
“An attractive place.” That was the general’s verdict.
Red velvet, red linen, tired from the years. “Oh yes,” Serebin said. “I think he does rather well.”
“Later at night, probably.”
“Mmm.”
Serebin ordered everything. Zakuski of smoked fish with toasts, sorrel soup, veal patties, and the kasha pierogi. “You can fight a war on these,” the general said, a twinkle in his eye.
“Stalin was always recommending rusks.”
“Rusks!”
“Tukhachevsky told me that.”
“Your commander?”
“Twice. Outside Moscow in the revolution, then in Poland in ’21.”
“And, for his trouble, shot.”
“Yes. You were with the Whites?”
“Damn my soul. Under Yudenich.”
“Not the worst.”
“Pretty close. I was sixty-two years old when they dragged me back into it, believed in order, in Christ our Lord, in life being as life had always been. I feared the rabble. I feared that, once the yoke came off, they would burn and murder. And then, in 1917, the yoke came off, and they burned and murdered. I was wrong on the scale of the thing, much grander than I ever imagined, but that’s an old man’s error.”
“Let me fill that up for you.”
“Thank you.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“With the Union?”
“Yes.”
“Damned if I know. I expected that Kubalsky would be in touch with me, but, not a word. Heard from him?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, Konev is in the hospital. Lost the sight in one eye, I’m told, but he’s got another. I expect he’ll take command, I’ll do what I can, we’ll survive, somehow, we always do. Will you stay on?”
“I’ll probably go back to Paris.”
The general hesitated, didn’t say what came to mind, then nodded slowly. “Of course,” he said. “I understand. You have to do what’s best for you.”
Kubalsky’s messenger had not mentioned a time, only “tomorrow night,” so the idea was simply to be there, Kubalsky would do the rest. Serebin took a taxi to the docks, then another-Major Iskandar very much in his thoughts-to the edge of the Tatavla district, and wandered through the autumn twilight. He asked, now and then, for the Luxe cinema, which produced long bursts of Turkish, sometimes Greek, a variety of emphatic gestures- down there, around to the left, big something, you can’t miss it — and an even greater variety of encouraging nods and smiles. Going to the cinema? Yes! Good! A fine thing to do tonight!
A poor neighborhood, crowded, with narrow, winding streets that sometimes ended suddenly, washing strung on lines above his head, small groups of men in workers’ clothing and peaked caps, talking and gesturing, silent as he went past. Then, around a corner, next to an Orthodox church, the Luxe. Serebin watched the street for a few minutes before he went in but it wasn’t much of a precaution. Perhaps he was followed, perhaps not, people everywhere, anybody could be anybody.
Serebin paid and went inside. The theatre was half full, almost all men, maybe twenty rows of wooden seats with an aisle down each wall. The projector whirred, cigarette smoke drifted slowly through the beam. On screen, along with a few excited moths, was Krishna Lal, The Tiger of Rajahstan. A champion, Serebin guessed, of his sorely oppressed people, somewhere in vast India. Pursued by the rajah’s guards, in steel helmets and red silk pantaloons, the Tiger ran through a bazaar, angering merchants as he tipped over stalls of fruits and cooking pots. Cornered at last, he looked desperately for escape.
A pretty Tiger, with dark, liquid eyes and a sulky mouth, he slew a pair of guards with his curved dagger, climbed to a balcony, leapt to another, held a finger to his lips to quiet an old woman slicing onions into a bowl. Serebin lit a Sobranie, searched the pale faces in the audience for a sign of Kubalsky, found no likely candidates. The music changed, a single sitar now, giggling maids attending a princess in her milky bath. Poor Tiger-maybe, just maybe, lurking outside the window where a suggestive curtain stirred in the wind. The princess leaned forward to let a maid wash her back, then dismissed the girl with a flick of her hand and straightened up. Up, up-were they going to see something? A certain silence in the audience but no, not quite. She stared at the window, alerted by a noise, then gave an order and the maids appeared with a sort of royal towel, holding it stretched wide between a hundred Turkish men and the rising silhouette of a wet actress.
Kubalsky, where are you?
Somebody was snoring. A very fat man came down the aisle, footsteps heavy on the wooden floor. He peered down Serebin’s row, looking for-a seat? A friend? Kubalsky? Serebin? Moved away slowly, one row at a time, gave up, and walked back up the aisle. On screen, the rajah, with the drooping black mustache that always meant villainy, scolded the leader of his hapless guard. Fool! Jackass! Bring me the head of the Tiger! Reached inside his silver-embossed black vest and brought forth a vial of amber liquid. From somewhere in back, a whispered exclamation.
Now, coming down the far aisle, encore le fat man. But here, Serebin corrected a writer’s error. He wasn’t a very fat man, he was a very heavy man. With a big face, the chin still square across the bottom despite years of
