“Not so bad.”
“It’s good.”
“Who is it?”
“Vasilov.”
“Vasilov the taxi driver?”
“No,” Serebin said. “He works at Renault.”
“‘The penal colony!’” The emigre name for the huge Billancourt plant.
“May he burn in hell,” one of the women said, meaning Louis Renault. “My poor brother-in-law died out there, worked to death.”
“How old?”
“Thirty-eight. After six years of it, travail a la chaine. ” Work on the assembly line. “Like prison, he said.”
“He was right, rest in peace.” The man who’d read the poem made the sign of the cross. “I tried it. You’re photographed and fingerprinted, the timekeepers watch every move you make and, when they can’t see you, they have spies in the cloakrooms, spies in the lavatory.” He spat into the gutter.
They were silent for a time, in memory. At the rue Blanche they had to wait, a German military policeman had halted traffic while a convoy of trucks rumbled past. After a minute or so he held up a white-gloved hand, the trucks stopped, and he waved the porter and his helpers across. “Allons, mes enfants.” Go ahead, my children. The porter jerked the handles of the cart and the Russians followed him across the street into the rue Ballu.
The man with The Harvest looked through the issue, now and again reversing the journal when the pages were upside down. “‘Italian Influence on Three Paintings by Watteau.’”
“Don’t bother.”
“You’re getting it wet, you know.”
“Oh, it doesn’t care. How about…rhymed quatrains from Romashev?”
“No!”
“Very well, the parliament votes no. All right, then…Babel!”
“What? He gave you a story?”
“He’s dead.”
Ulzhen stared at Serebin. “Babel?”
“It’s never been published,” Serebin said. “An Odessa story. Somebody was handed a manuscript copy, he smuggled it out when he emigrated and gave it to me for safekeeping. I thought, well, nobody’s read it, so, let it be in The Harvest for the New Year. Babel is in heaven. Believe me, if he’s looking down he won’t mind.”
“‘Froim Grach.’” They clustered around the man and slowed down. The porter looked over his shoulder, shrugged, and kept pace with them.
In 1919 Benya Krik’s men ambushed the rear guard of the White Army, killed all the officers, and captured some of the supplies. As a reward for this, they demanded three days of “Peaceful Insurrection,” but permission was not forthcoming, so they looted the goods in all the shops on Alexandrovski Avenue. After that they turned their attention to the Mutual Credit Society. Letting the customers enter ahead of them, they went into the bank and requested that the clerks put bales of money and valuables into a car waiting on the street. A whole month went by before the new authorities started shooting them. Then people began to say that Aron Peskin, who ran a sort of workshop, had something to do with the arrests. Nobody quite knew what went on in this workshop. In Peskin’s apartment there was a large machine with a bent bar made of lead and the floor was strewn with shavings and cardboard for binding books.
The procession crossed into the elegant 8th Arrondissement, although for a time it was like the 9th, everything grimy and poor, with Gypsy fortune-tellers and private detectives and shops that sold cheap clothing and pots and pans. The porter stopped for a rest by the Gare St.-Lazare Metro and they gave him a cigarette and a drink of marc from a tin flask. Gathered around the cart, it was easier to listen to the story.
Peskin is murdered, then chekists come down from Moscow and shoot the killers, except for one who flees to the house of the bandit called Froim Grach.
Froim Grach was alone in his yard. He was sitting there without moving, staring into space with his one eye. Mules captured from the White Army munched hay in the stable and overfed mares with their foals were grazing in the paddock. Coachmen played cards in the shade of a chestnut tree, sipping wine out of broken cups. Hot gusts of wind swept the limestone walls, and the sunlight, blue and relentless, poured down over the yard.
Then, Froim Grach goes to the Cheka and asks them to stop shooting his men. The Moscow chekist is very excited, and rounds up all the interrogators and commissars to tell them who has come to see them, who is inside the building at that very moment.
Borovoi told them it was the one-eyed Froim not Benya Krik who was the real boss of Odessa’s 40,000 thieves. He kept very much in the background but it was the old man who had masterminded everything-the looting of the factories and the municipal treasury in Odessa, the attacks on the White and Allied troops. Borovoi waited for the old man to come out so they could have a talk with him, but there was no sign of him. He went through the whole building and finally out into the yard at the back. Froim Grach was lying there sprawled under a tarpaulin by an ivy-covered wall. Two Red Army men had rolled themselves cigarettes and were standing smoking over his body.
The story ended soon after that, with a hint of regret, the twenty-two-year-old chekist from Moscow forced to admit that the old man was “worthless to the society of the future.” The porter finished the cigarette and took up the handles of his cart and they moved off again, walking slowly in the rain toward the office near the cathedral on the rue Daru.
Serebin was wet and tired when he returned to the Winchester late that afternoon. There had been an impromptu party to celebrate the publication of The Harvest. Several bottles of cheap wine were bought, the journal was toasted many times, and people stopped by to get a copy and stayed to talk and laugh and drink wine.
On the top floor, Serebin found the door of his room unlocked, the light was on, a small valise stood by the window, and Marie-Galante was lying on the bed reading a fashion magazine. She looked up from the magazine and, after a moment, said, “Hello, ours. ” It was tender, the way she said it, he could tell that she knew about Tamara. “You don’t mind, do you? The manager let me in.”
No, he didn’t mind. Heartsore as he was, it was good to have her there, propped on an elbow on his pillow, a little worried, and caring for him. For whatever reason, dark or sweet, caring for him.
He took off his wet overcoat and hung it in the armoire to dry. Then leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. The magazine was open to a photo of three models in tall, outlandish hats, the Paris chic answer to occupation.
“I was in Stockholm,” she said. “So I’ve been on the trains for- days. Felt like it, anyhow.”
“A wagon-lit?”
“Coach, ours. Second class. And crowded, people everywhere-it’s a busy war.”
“Well, consider yourself at home.”
She relaxed. “You’re gracious,” she said. “You don’t have a bathtub, do you.”
“There’s a salle de bains for the rooms on the floor below, but it’s, it’s better to use it on Mondays, after the maid cleans. Otherwise, there’s a basin under the sink, you’re welcome to that.”
“Maybe later, I need to do something.”
“You have an apartment here, no?”
“Yes,” she said. “Out in Neuilly.”
“I thought you did.”
She paused, then said, “Can’t go there right now.”
“Oh.” Of course. He understood. Say no more.
“No, no.” She laughed at him. “It’s not that, such things do not keep Marie-Galante from her tub. It’s little men with mustaches, you know? Waiting on the corner? All day? Mostly one ignores them, but not right now. Right now it’s better not to be in two places at once, so, I’m not in Paris. I’m in-Polanyi-land.”
Oh.
“Where you are in high regard. The gentleman was pleased, as much as he ever is, with your approach to the terrible Kostyka, so I come bearing, among other things, his gratitude.” She swung her legs off the bed, stood up, and stretched. “All right,” she said. “Whore’s bath.”
She went into the bathroom, undressed, started to wash. Serebin took off his tie and jacket and lay down on
