baklava. Or chicken Kiev, or Sachertorte. Maybe he was just the manager. I have a right to do this. Somebody spoke a few words, snide, mocking. Whatever the line meant it sparked a ripple of laughter. Was it “she’s not here”? Something like that, Serebin guessed. The chief of the rajah’s guard hurried through the lanes of a bazaar.
Serebin looked at his watch. The maid tried to refuse the vial of poison, but the rajah’s guard insisted. The princess, wiping away a tear, wrote a letter with a quill pen. Serebin decided that Kubalsky was waiting for him outside, where, at the end of the film, the crowd would come streaming out a single exit. Despite himself, he tried to imagine what Kubalsky might want, what he’d done, what he knew about. Twenty-three years of exile, adrift in the shadows of Europe, what arrangements had he been forced to make? The Tiger and the princess met secretly, in a moonlit rose garden, eyes alive with longing, throbbing sitar and tabla suggesting the embrace that the director could not show.
But the lovers were not alone. The scene darkened, a spy crouched behind a hedge, and someone in the audience took advantage of this darkness to make a spontaneous exit. Serebin never quite saw him. He heard a few pounding footsteps, then turned in time to see a running shadow disappear through a side door into a black square of night. Two men followed. Amid shouts of irritation they forced their way to the aisle, threw open the door, and vanished. Just stay where you are. Outside, the flat popping noise made by a small-calibre pistol. Three or four shots, then silence. Serebin leapt to his feet and ran around the back of the theatre, arriving at the door with several men from the nearby seats. One of them tried the door, which opened an inch or two, then was slammed shut by somebody on the other side. The man was offended, tried again, harder this time, but whoever was out there was very strong and the door wouldn’t open. Serebin heard voices, indistinct, muffled, then footsteps. The lights came on in the theatre and a man who seemed to be in authority came striding down the aisle, the others made way for him. He grasped the knob firmly and opened the door.
Serebin and the others stepped out into a long alley, lit by a streetlamp at the far end. There was a high wall three feet in front of them, the noise of the streets, nothing else. In the faint light, Serebin could see a stain on the cobblestones. Old? New? Somebody laughed. The theatre manager shrugged, then opened the door and waved his customers back inside. What oddities in this grand city, who could know, from one minute to the next, what people might do. Serebin changed seats, moving along the far aisle to a row toward the front of the theatre. There was a belted raincoat folded carefully on one of the empty seats. He waited until the end of the movie, the crowd shuffled out, but nobody claimed the raincoat.
He stopped at a lokanta on the way back to the Beyoglu, he wanted to drink something, maybe eat, and bought a French newspaper to keep him company at the table. A woeful dinner companion, it did nothing but talk about the war, in varying shades of the Vichy point of view, Churchill called “that Shakespearian drunkard” and all the rest of it. The Italian divisions in the Pindus mountains of Greece failing nobly, poor boys, and the Italian fleet attacked-in fact destroyed, Serebin and everybody else knew that-at Taranto by Royal Navy Swordfish torpedo planes. However-an implicit however, the deftly made sneer a felicity of French diction-the industrial city of Coventry had been successfully assaulted by the Luftwaffe. Set ablaze by thirty thousand incendiary bombs. Serebin recalled the look on Major Iskandar’s face when he spoke of wooden Istanbul.
The newspaper’s correspondent in Bucharest reported on damage to the Roumanian oil fields caused by the recent earthquake. Then, following Hungary on the 22nd of November, Roumania had signed the Tripartite Pact with the fascist powers, though Bulgaria had refused. Civil war continued in Roumania, sixty-four officials of the former King Carol government had been executed by the Iron Guard, who were also fighting units of the Antonescu regime in the city and some of the towns.
Bon appetit, monsieur.
But the paper didn’t lie, not so much that you couldn’t read the truth if you wanted to. Endgame in southern Europe. Mopping up in the Balkans to create a harmonious German continent. No, they hadn’t gotten across the Channel to finish off the nation of shopkeepers, but the shopkeepers weren’t going to cross either. So, they bombed each other and fired caustic epithets over the airwaves. Churchill noble and stoic, Goebbels sarcastic and sly. A stalemate, clearly enough, that could easily enough wind down over time to a brutal peace, punctuated by the oppression of the Jews and the unending political warfare that flowed from Moscow.
Poor Kubalsky. Poor Kubalsky-maybe. And wasn’t that what they excelled at, the Bolsheviks. Not sure, don’t know, too bad, life goes on. “Molotov in Berlin for Important Talks,” said the newspaper. A fine alliance, teaching the world, if nothing else, what the term realpolitik actually meant.
Serebin’s long day wasn’t over. At the desk of the Beyoglu, a note for effendi. A sentence, painfully carved onto a sheet of paper with a blunt pencil, every letter wavering and hesitant. From one of the Ukrainian sisters: “Please, sir, we beg you with all respect not to leave the city without saying good-bye to Tamara Petrovna.”
He was there an hour later. Not quite midnight yet, but close to it.
She was in bed, wearing two sweaters and a wool cap, eating licorice drops and reading Bulgakov’s White Guard.
“Ilya! What’s wrong?”
“Why should anything be wrong?” He sat on the edge of the bed.
She shrugged, used a scrap of paper to mark her place in the book. “It’s late.” She stared at him for a moment, face flushed and pink. “Are you all right?”
“I was supposed to meet Kubalsky, earlier, but something happened.”
“What?”
“He didn’t appear, that’s the short version. What about you?”
“A little fever. It comes and goes.”
“And of course you don’t tell the doctors.”
“I do! There was one here this morning.”
“What did he say?”
“Humpf, harumpf.”
“Just that?”
“Drink liquids.”
“Do you?”
“What else to do with them? You can have a cigarette if you like, clearly you want one.”
“In a while. I’ll go outside.”
“No, have one here and now. And give me one.”
“Oh sure.”
“I’m serious.”
“Tamara, behave.”
“Tired of behaving. And, anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Now give me a cigarette or I’ll send my ladies out to get them the minute you leave.”
“Who says I’m leaving?”
“Don’t torment me, Ilya. Please.”
“You are impossible.” He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. She inhaled cautiously, suppressed a cough, lips tight together, then closed her eyes and blew the smoke out, a blissful smile on her face.
“Very well, you’ve had your way, now give it back.”
Slowly, she shook her head. She was, he knew, afraid of infecting him.
“So,” he said, “it’s only you who gets to say the hell with everything.”
“Only me.” She tapped the Sobranie on the edge of an empty glass on her bedside table. “Why did God make us love so much what we mustn’t do?”
He didn’t know.
She sighed. “Do you leave soon?”
“In a while. The police don’t really want me here.”
“They told you?”
“Yes.”
She inhaled once more, then put the cigarette out in the glass. “Did they mean it?”
“A suggestion, for the moment.”
“So you could stay, if you wanted to.”
“Maybe, yes. It would take, some work, but I probably could.”
“You can’t do what you’re doing now, Ilya.”
