Russia and installed her in the house in Besiktas.
“You see the doctors,” he said.
“Oh yes. Spending money like water.”
“I have money, Tamara.”
“Well, I spend it. I rest till I can’t stand it anymore, eat cream like a cat-your ladies don’t leave me alone for a minute.” He had found two sisters, Ukrainian emigres, to live in the house and care for her. “Are you happy in Paris?” she said. “Very adored, I suspect.”
He laughed. “Tolerated, anyhow.”
“Oh yes. Tolerated every night-I know you, Ilya.”
“Well, it’s different now. And Paris isn’t the same.”
“The Germans leave you alone?”
“So far. I am their ally, according to the present arrangements, the Hitler-Stalin treaty, and a literary celebrity, in a small way. For the moment, they don’t bother me.”
“You know them?”
“Two or three. Officers, simply military men assigned to a foreign posting, that’s how they see it. We have the city in common, and they are very cultured. So, we can have conversation. Always careful, of course, correct, no politics.”
She pretended to shiver. “You won’t stay.”
He nodded, she was probably right.
“But then, perhaps you are in love.”
“With you.”
Her face lit up, even though she knew it wasn’t true. Or, maybe, only a little true. “Forgive him, God, he tells lies.”
Fifteen years old, in empty apartments, on deserted beaches, they had fucked and fucked and slept tangled up together. Long summer evenings in Odessa, warm and humid, dry lightning over the sea.
“And do you walk?” he said.
She sighed. “Yes, yes, I do what I must. Every day for an hour.”
“To the museum? To see our friend?”
She laughed at that, a loud, raucous caw. When she’d first come to Istanbul they had visited the neighborhood attraction, a naval museum. Exquisitely boring, but home to a twenty-three-ton cannon built for an Ottoman sultan called Selim the Grim. A painting of him hung above the monster gun. His name, and the way he looked in the painting, had tickled her wildly, though the laughing fit had produced a bright fleck of blood on her lip.
One of the Ukrainian ladies stood at the door to the terrace and cleared her throat. “It is five-thirty, Tamara Petrovna.”
Serebin rose and greeted her formally-he knew both sisters’ names but wasn’t sure which was which. She responded to the greeting, calling him gospodin, sir, the genteel form of address that had preceded comrade, and set a tray down on the table, two bowls and a pair of soup spoons. Then she lit an oil lamp.
The bowls were heaped with trembling rice pudding, a magnificent treat for Serebin when he was a child. But not now. Tamara ate hers dutifully and slowly, and so did Serebin. Out on the Bosphorus, an oil tanker flying the swastika flag worked its way north, smoke rising from its funnel.
When they finished the pudding, she showed him where the roof tiles had cracked and come loose, though he could barely see them in the failing light. “That’s why I wrote to you,” she said. “They must be repaired, or water will come in the house. So we asked in the market, and a man came and climbed up there. He will fix it, but he says the whole roof must be replaced. The tiles are very old.”
Is that why you wrote? But he didn’t say it. Instead, standing at the dark corner of the house, waves breaking at the foot of the bluff, he asked her why she’d said one last time.
“I wanted to see you again,” she said. “That day I feared, I don’t know what. Something. Maybe I would die. Or you.”
He put a hand on her shoulder and, just for a moment, she leaned against him. “Well,” he said. “As we seem to be alive, today anyhow, we might as well replace the roof.”
“Perhaps it is the salt in the air.” Her voice was soft.
“Yes. Bad for the tile.”
“It’s getting cold, maybe we should go inside.”
They talked for an hour, then he left. The taxi was waiting in front of the house, as Serebin knew it would be, and on the way back to the hotel he had the driver wait while he bought a bottle of Turkish vodka at a cafe.
A practical man, the driver, who had contrived to learn a few crucial words for his foreign passengers. When Serebin returned from the cafe he said, “Bordello, effendi?”
Serebin shook his head. The man had watched him, in the rearview mirror, as he’d rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. Well, the driver thought, I know the cure for that.
No, no cure. She had that damn photograph on her dresser, cut from a newspaper and framed, amid sepia portraits of her mother and grandmother, and snapshots of her Polish lieutenant, who’d disappeared in ’39, and her dog Blunka, descendant of every hound that roamed the alleys of Odessa. She showed Serebin the small room where she slept, and there was the famous photograph.
Taken at a railway station captured from Denikin’s cossacks on a grainy April morning. A gray photograph; the station building pocked with gunfire, one side of the roof reduced to blackened timbers. The young officer Serebin, looking very concentrated, with two days’ growth of beard, wears a leather jacket and a uniform cap, the open jacket revealing a Nagant revolver in a shoulder holster. One hand holds a submachine gun, its leather sling hanging down, the other, bandaged with a rag, points as he deploys his company. Bolshevik intellectual at war. You could smell the cordite. The photograph had been taken by the renowned Kalkevich, who’d chronicled young dancers, backstage at the Bolshoi, for Life magazine. So it was very good, “Bryansk Railway Station: 1920.” Was reproduced in French and British newspapers, appeared in Kalkevich’s New York retrospective.
“We remember your photograph, Ilya Aleksandrovich.” Stalin said that, in the summer of 1938, when Serebin, certain that he was headed to the Lubyanka, was picked up by two chekists in a black Zil and whisked off to the Kremlin at midnight.
To be praised, it turned out, for the publication of Ulskaya Street, and to eat salted herring and drink Armenian champagne. He could barely get it down, could still taste it, warm and sweet. Beria was in the room, and, worse, General Poskrebyshev, the chief of Stalin’s secretariat, who had the eyes of a reptile. The movie that night- he’d heard they watched one every night-was Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland. Stalin laughed so hard that tears ran down his face. As the torch-bearing hobgoblins marched, singing, out of Bo-Peep’s shoe.
Serebin went home at dawn, and left Russia a month later.
And when the writer Babel was taken away, in May of ’39, knew in his heart that his name had been on the same list. Knew it because, at a certain point in the evening, Poskrebyshev looked at him.
Back at the hotel, the night clerk handed him an envelope. He took it up to his room, had a taste of the vodka, then another, before he opened it. On cream-colored paper, a note. A scented note, he discovered. And not only did he recognize the scent, he even knew its name, Shalimar. He knew this because he’d asked, the night before, and he’d asked because, everywhere he went, there it was, waiting for him. “Mon ours,” she wrote. Friends for drinks, at the yacht club, slip twenty-one, seven-thirty. She would be so pleased, so delighted, if he could join them.
A cloudy morning in Istanbul. From Serebin’s window, the Bosphorus was gray as the sky. The room service waiter was long departed, and Serebin had become aware that Turkish coffee was only a partial ameliorant for Turkish vodka-a minor lapse in the national chemistry-and had to be supplemented with German aspirin. The fat slice of pink watermelon was an affront and he ignored it.
In Constanta, waiting eight days for the Bulgarian steamship to make port, he’d wired the IRU office in Istanbul and let them know he was coming. Life as an executive secretary had its particular demands; Serebin had learned this the hard way, which was pretty much the way he learned everything. As a writer, he’d been a free spirit, showed up where and when he liked, or didn’t show up at all. A visit from the muse — or so people wanted to believe, a permanent excuse. But, as an administrator, you had to announce yourself, because a surprise visit implied inspection, you were trying to catch them at it, whatever it was. The last thing Serebin ever wanted, to
