“While you’re up,” Ulzhen said, extending his plate.
They sat at the long wooden table in the kitchen. Serebin, Boris Ulzhen, the poet Anya Zak, the taxi driver Klimov and Claudette, his Franco-Russian girlfriend, and Solovy the robber.
Serebin poured himself a glass of red wine from the large flask. There were various appellations and vintages in the flask, blended by chance from bottles unfinished by Sunday night’s patrons. Zubotnik and his friends could eat whatever they wanted at the Monday lunch but Papa Heininger would clutch his heart in an alarming way when Zubotnik visited the cellars so the chef, realizing that life would go better if the proprietaire remained aboveground, had forsworn the bins.
“To the Zubotnik ’41,” Klimov said, raising his glass.
“Na zdorov’ye!”
“Na zdorov’ye!”
“Ilya Aleksandrovich,” Anya Zak said, “please to continue your story.” She waited attentively, her bright, nearsighted eyes peering at him through old-fashioned spectacles. Solovy began to roll a cigarette, taking long strands of tobacco from a cloth pouch.
“So,” Serebin said, “we came to Bryansk at dawn. We’d heard that Makhno’s people had occupied the city, but we didn’t hear anything. They were always loud, those people, fighting or not, women’s screams and pistol shots and great shouts of laughter. But it was very quiet in the city. A little smoke from the burnt-out houses, not much else. ‘Take a squad,’ the captain said, ‘and go see what’s what.’ So off we went, using whatever cover we could find, just waiting for the snipers, but nothing happened. You could see the looters had been there, stuff they didn’t want dropped in the street. Clothes and toys and pans, half a painting. Then I saw the goat, it came walking toward us, casually enough, staring at me with those strange eyes, just going about its business until somebody came and put a rope around its neck. Something funny about this goat, I thought. I looked closer, and saw a long shred of yellow paper hanging out of its mouth, with the printed words Genius and Dissipation. My sergeant saw it at the same time I did and we both started to laugh, almost couldn’t stop. We’d been fighting for a day and a half and we were a little crazy, the way you get. He had to sit down in the street, there were tears running down his cheeks. All this made the goat self-conscious and it began to finish the paper, Genius and Dissipation rolling up into its mouth as it chewed.
“One of the men called out from a doorway, ‘The hell’s gotten into you?’ but we couldn’t answer. I mean, go try and explain something like that. And we really couldn’t figure it out, just then, not for about thirty minutes. Then we got into the center of the city and saw the posters. Stuck up on the wall of a theatre with flour glue, which goats like. The posters announced the appearance of the actor Orlenev, coming to Bryansk to play the role of the English tragedian Edmund Kean in the play called Kean, or Genius and Dissipation. ”
Solovy snorted with laughter, but he was the only one.
“Bryansk was the worst,” Ulzhen said.
“Berdichev,” Zubotnik said. He cut a piece of baguette, put smoked salmon on it, then a drizzle of oil, and handed it to Claudette.
“Still,” she said to Serebin, “you miss it, your terrible Russia.”
“Sometimes.”
“They all came through Berdichev,” Klimov said. “Taken and retaken twenty-seven times. Makhno’s band, Petlyura’s band, Tutnik’s partisans. ‘And,’ they used to say, ‘Nobody’s Ninth Regiment.’”
“You remember everything,” Solovy said.
“I remember,” Klimov said. “Jewish prayer shawls used as saddlecloths.”
Claudette ate her salmon with a knife and fork. Serebin poured wine for Ulzhen and Anya Zak. “Oh, thank you,” she said.
“The winter Harvest was a great success,” Ulzhen said to Serebin. “I’ve been wanting to tell you that but you haven’t been around.”
“Yes, very good,” Solovy said.
“The Babel, of course,” Ulzhen said. “Everybody talked about it. That, and Kacherin’s poem to his mother.”
“No,” Serebin said. “You’re joking.”
“Not at all.”
“It had feeling,” Zubotnik said. “ Real feeling, sincerity, what’s wrong with that? Didn’t you have a mother?”
“So now,” Ulzhen said, “you have only to worry about spring.”
“Anya Zak will be in that one,” Serebin said. He knew better. Zak published only in the best quarterlies, she would never, never, submit to a magazine like The Harvest.
“Will she?” Zubotnik said. He gave money to the IRU.
Her glance at Serebin was covert, and not amused, how could you? “I wish I had something,” she lamented. “I’ve been working on a long piece, for weeks, the whole winter, but, we shall see, maybe, if I can finish…”
“We would, of course, be honored,” Ulzhen said, lingering on the would.
“You should try the salmon, Tolya,” Claudette said to Klimov.
“Mm,” Zubotnik said. He cut some bread and salmon and passed it across the table.
Ulzhen set his napkin down. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said. As he stood up, he met Serebin’s eyes, come with me.
Serebin followed him from the kitchen out to the bar that bordered the darkened restaurant, then into the men’s room. Ulzhen looked for a light switch on the wall but he couldn’t find it.
“I’ll hold the door for you,” Serebin said.
“Doesn’t matter.”
Serebin held the door ajar while Ulzhen used the urinal. “Ilya Aleksandrovich,” he said, his voice echoing faintly off the tiled wall, “we need your help.” He finished, began to button his fly.
“All right,” Serebin said.
“A committee,” Ulzhen said. He went to the sink and turned the water on. “Only four of us.” He mentioned two people that Serebin barely knew-the widow of a German industrialist, very rich, who had come to live in Paris years earlier, and a thin, serious, older man who hardly said a word to anybody. To Serebin, this made no sense at all.
“Committee?”
“She has the money,” Ulzhen said. “And he was an officer in the military intelligence.”
“To do what?”
“For our Jews, Ilya.” He washed his hands, then began to dry them with a towel from the stack on the attendant’s table. “Eighty-nine of our members, as far as we can determine. And their families, that number we don’t know. But we’ve decided to get them out, if they want to go. First into the Unoccupied Zone, the Vichy zone, in the south, then to Nice. There are still boats that will take passengers, we’ll provide documents and whatever money we can manage. We know we can get them to Spain, at least that far, then, maybe, South America. So, it’s a very quiet committee.”
“Secret.”
“Yes.”
Serebin felt ill. He had to go to Marseilles in two days, then God only knew where after that. He heard laughter from the kitchen.
“Why me?” That loathsome phrase, out of his mouth before he could stop it.
“Why you?” Ulzhen had heard it loud and clear. “Because you don’t flinch, Ilya. Because the fact that you can take care of yourself means that you can take care of people who can’t, and, most of all, because I want you there with me.”
“Boris,” he said.
To tell? Not to tell? Excuses poured through his mind like water, this lie or that, one worse than the next.
“Yes? What?” Ulzhen dropped the towel in a basket by the table.
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
Now he couldn’t say anything.
