catch anybody at anything.
10:20-time to go. He made sure to take his briefcase-emblem of office-though there was hardly anything in it. No matter, they were sure to give him paper enough to fill it up. He only then realized, too late, that he had no paper to give them. He went downstairs to the lobby, started toward the main entrance, then changed his mind and left by the back door. Hurried down a side street and out onto the avenue, then put ten minutes of distance between himself and the Beyoglu. Forgive me, my friend, I do not mean to cause you difficulties. Truly, he didn’t know why he’d evaded the driver. Nameless instinct, he told himself, let it go at that, stepped into the street and hailed a taxi.
In heavy traffic, they crept across the Golden Horn on the Galata Bridge to the old Jewish district of Haskoy. This was only the most recent address of the IRU office. It had moved here and there since its founding, in 1931, as had the offices in Belgrade, Berlin, and Prague, finding its way to Rasim street a year earlier, across from the loading yard of a tannery.
They were now in two comfortably large rooms on the second floor, at one time the office of the emigre Goldbark, who’d become rich as an exporter of tobacco and hazelnuts and was now one of the directors, and chief financial supporter, of the International Russian Union: Istanbul chapter. The building itself was ancient and swelled alarmingly as it rose, leaning out over a cobblestone lane.
At the top of the staircase, a sign on the door in Cyrillic, and one in Roman letters. Inside, magnificent chaos, Russian chaos. A steamy room with a radio playing and two women seated at clacketing typewriters. Two old men with long white beards were working at a bridge table, addressing envelopes with nib pens and inkwells. On one wall, drawings from the Russian kindergarten, mostly trains. Flanked by Pushkin in profile, and Chekhov in a wicker chair in the yard of a country house. A dense oil painting of the Grand Bazaar, in vibrant colors. A brown and black daguerreotype of a steppe.
On the adjacent wall, a mimeographed schedule for the month of November, which Serebin, for the moment left alone, felt he might as well read. A lecture about wool, a meeting of the stamp club, Turkish lessons, English lessons, meeting for new members-please sign up, memorial service for Shulsky, and a film, Surprising Ottawa, to be shown in the basement of the Saint Stanislaus church. Tacked up beside the schedule, underlined clippings, news of the Russian community cut from the IRU Istanbul’s weekly newspaper.
“Serebin!” Kubalsky, the office manager, hugged him and laughed. “Don’t tell anybody you’re here!”
Kubalsky took him around the office, introduced him to a bewildering assortment of people, sat him down at a table, pushed aside stacks of newspapers and files, and poured him a glass of tea from an ornate copper samovar.
“Life’s being good to you?” Serebin said, offering Kubalsky a Sobranie.
“Not too bad.” Kubalsky had a long, narrow face and deep-set eyes that glittered like black diamonds. Twice, in Berlin, he’d been beaten up as a Jew, which made him laugh, through split lips, because his grandfather had been a Russian Orthodox priest.
Serebin blew on his tea. Kubalsky, prepared for the worst, drummed his fingers on the table. “So, what brings you to Istanbul?”
“Truth?”
“Why not?”
“I had to get away from Paris.”
“Oh. Claustrophobia.”
Serebin nodded.
“Have you seen Goldbark?”
“Not yet. How is he?”
“Crazy as a bedbug. Says he lies awake all night, worrying about money.”
“Him?”
“‘I make a fortune,’ he says. ‘Where is it? Where is it?’”
“Where is it?”
Kubalsky shrugged. “Thank God for the wife, otherwise he’d make us all crazy.” He tapped cigarette ash into a cracked cup used as an ashtray. “The real problem here, of course, is the politics.”
Serebin agreed.
“It’s a zoo. The city’s crawling with spies-Nazis, Hungarians, Zionists, Greeks. The German ambassador, von Papen, is in the papers every day, but so are the British. The Turks are scared. Hitler went through the Balkans like shit through an eel. Now he’s got Bulgaria-maybe he stops there, maybe he doesn’t. The Turks are neutral, officially, but, so far, they’re neutral on our side. Still it’s difficult to navigate. That old business about the Middle East-to walk across a square you have to make three moves.”
“What if they sign on with Germany?”
“We run. Again.”
Serge Kubalsky knew all about that. In 1917, he’d been a successful “boulevard journalist” for one of the St. Petersburg newspapers that lived on gossip and innuendo. Then came revolution, and the husband of the woman he was sleeping with that week rose, overnight, from clerk to commissar. Kubalsky got away with eighty roubles and a canary. Settled in Berlin but couldn’t tolerate the Nazis, so he went to Madrid in 1933. The Republican secret service booted him out in ’36, he went to Lisbon, was hounded by Salazar’s thugs and left in ’37. Tried Switzerland- sorry, no residence card. Sofia the following autumn, wrote the wrong thing about the king, so off to Amsterdam, sneaking in the back door just about the time the Wehrmacht was breaking down the front. “I no longer,” he once told Serebin, “speak any language whatsoever.”
An old woman with a cane came over to the table, kissed Kubalsky on both cheeks, then disappeared into the other room. Kubalsky finished his cigarette and stood up. “Well,” he said, “you’d better take a look at the finances.” He went to a file cabinet and returned carrying a ledger filled with spidery bookkeeping.
Serebin ran his finger down the expense column. Ah, Sanskrit. But he worked at it, found the stamps, the ink and paper and envelopes, the lifeblood, then came upon an entry for rent. “What’s this?” he said.
“Rental of office space.”
“I thought Goldbark gave us this place.”
“He does. But we pay the rent and he donates the money. It helps him with his taxes, he says. Turks are old-fashioned about taxes. The strangling cord may be out of style, but the point of view hasn’t changed.”
The following pages were given over to loans and gifts, it went on and on, small amounts, the names not only Russian but Ukrainian and Jewish, Greek and Tatar, many others, a history of migration, a history of flight.
“So many,” Serebin said, subdued.
“People wounded in the war. Sick. Drunk. Or just broken. We come from a brutal place, Ilya. The list would double, if we had the money.”
Serebin knew. In Paris, he gave more than he could afford.
“What we try to do,” Kubalsky said, “is to help the Russian community as a whole. The Turks are basically fair-minded people, cosmopolitan. Hospitality to strangers is a religion with them. That’s what Kemal was all about. He outlawed the fez, changed the alphabet, kept Islam out of government. Everybody had to have a last name-they had lists of suggestions nailed up in the public squares. Still, foreigners are foreigners, and Russia and Turkey have always fought wars. So, the community is suspected of harboring Stalinist agents, the NKVD is active here, and every time some plot blows up and hits the newspapers, we all get blamed. Old story, right?”
Kubalsky sighed. Why did life have to go like this? “Christ,” he said, “you have to live somewhere.”
The yacht club was in the village of Bebek, just north of the city, where Istanbul’s wealthiest citizens had summer homes. Serebin, with Marie-Galante’s note in his pocket, visited a bar by the ferry dock in Eminonu, thought about not going, then decided he might as well. It had been a long, long day in the world of the International Russian Union. He had left Kubalsky to have lunch with Goldbark, followed by a visit to the eighty-five-year-old General de Kossevoy, in a tiny room so hot it made him sweat, and by the end of the afternoon he’d had all the emigre business he could bear. He stood at the rail of the crowded ferry, watching the caiques and the feluccas sliding through the water, the oil lamps on their sterns like fireflies in the darkness.
He found the yacht at slip twenty-one. Sixty feet of teak and polished brass. La Nereide — Tangier was painted in gold script on the bow and two crewmen, in green uniforms with the yacht’s name on the bands of their sailor hats, waited at the gangplank. He wondered about the nationality of the Nereide, sea nymph, but Tangier, in the Vichy French colony of Morocco, could have meant anything, and he knew, from talk on the docks of Odessa,
