else.”
“It’s not forever,” he said.
“Mean and dreary, and it rains.”
“But”-he paused-“you have to stay.”
She yawned and stretched, pulled the blankets around them. “Don’t tempt me, ours. Really, don’t.” He had the BBC on the radio, tuned low for caution-it was against occupation law to listen to it-and a tiny symphony played away on the night table. “I’ve convinced myself that it matters, what I do there.” She didn’t sound convinced. “Salon intelligence, so-called. Poor Madame X, how she pines for her friend, the Minister of Y, off in frigid Moscow for a week. Labonniere’s pretty good at it.”
“You’re careful, of course.”
“Oh yes, very. But…”
She didn’t like talking about it, didn’t want it in bed with them. She traced a finger down his back, began, lazily, to make love to him.
“Maybe better, in the spring.”
She put a finger to his lips.
“Sorry.”
She rolled delicately over on top of him so that her mouth was close to his ear and said, in a voice so quiet he could only just hear her, “We will survive this, ours, and then we will go away together.”
Only when morning came and they were dressed could he bring himself to tell her what happened at the cafe. “Strange,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I don’t like saying this, but, if they’d really wanted to do something, they could have done it.”
“I know.”
“Maybe they were just trying to frighten you. A warning.”
“Maybe. Still, whatever it was, Polanyi should hear about it.”
“I can manage that,” she said, “when I get back.” She put on her coat, they were going out for coffee. “By now, you know, Polanyi and the people he works for, and the people they work for, have all got themselves committed to this.”
For a moment, they were silent.
“So,” she said, “it’s too late to stop.”
Very unwise to be seen together at the Gare de Lyon but he wouldn’t let her leave him at the hotel. They looked for a taxi, but there was none to be found, so they leaned against each other on the Metro, then got off a stop before the station, found a cafe, held hands across the table, and said good-bye.
20 March. The parks still brown and dead, branches bare and dripping, rain cold, light gone in late afternoon, and hours and hours until the dawn. Yes, the last days of winter, the calendar didn’t lie, but up here it died hard and took a long time doing it. On the Pont Royal, the emigre writer I. A. Serebin leaned on a balustrade and stared pensively down into the Seine.
Writing lines on a reluctant spring? Lines for a lover in a distant city? The river was flat, and low in its banks, it barely moved. Or was it, perhaps, just beginning to swell, just beginning to grow, from thawed fields and hillsides in the south? He couldn’t tell, didn’t know, was ignorant of water. All those years of idle staring at the stuff, the very essence of everything, and he knew nothing about it. Nonetheless, he studied the river and tried to read it because, if the spring tide had started to run here, it was running also at another river, south and east of here, at the Stenka ridge, at kilometer 1030. Certain individuals, in Istanbul and London, had to be gazing at their own rivers, he suspected. So then, where were they?
He needn’t have worried.
When he left the bridge he walked over to the IRU office, then, eventually, back to the Winchester, and then, as was his custom, to a small restaurant in the quarter, where his ration coupons allowed him a bowl of thin stew, turnips and onions and a few shreds of meat, and a piece of mealy gray bread. Which he ate while reading a newspaper, folded by his bowl, to keep him company. He moved quickly past the political news-Hitler had issued an ultimatum to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia-to “The Inquiring Reporter.” Yesterday, our question was for men with long beards: Sir, do you sleep with your beard on top of the blanket, or beneath it?
“Monsieur?”
Serebin looked up to see a woman in a black kerchief and coat. A plain soul, small and compact, unremarkable.
“All the tables are taken, would you mind terribly if I joined you?”
Why no, he didn’t mind. All the tables were not taken, but why fret over details. She ordered a small flask of wine and the stew-there was nothing else on the blackboard-handing over her own coupons. And, when the waiter left, said, “I believe we have a friend in common, in Istanbul.”
In the valley between winter and spring, old friends often reappeared. Maybe chance, or the stars, or ancient human something, but, whatever the reason, it was especially so that year. Helmut Bach, for instance, had left two messages at the IRU, the first week in March, and two more at Serebin’s hotel, the second a brief note. Where was Serebin? Bach very much wanted to see him, they had some things to talk over. So, please get in touch. At this number, or at this one-the protocol office of the German administration-he was sure to get the message.
Des choses a discuter. A German writing in French to a Russian-what couldn’t go wrong! But friends-even “friends,” a cloaked term for a cloaked relationship-did not have “things to talk over.” That was a threat. A warm little threat, maybe, but a threat nonetheless. Bach had invested time and concentration on him, now it had to pay off. The moment had come, was, likely, past due, for Serebin to give the occupation authority what it wanted-“a talk,” or appearance at a cultural event, whatever might imply approval of the new German Europe.
That was to look on the bright side.
Because it did occur to Serebin that these affections from his German pal might have been provoked by the same source that had sent Jean Marc to buy him drinks. Not a direct denunciation to the Gestapo, merely a word with a diplomat or an urbane, sympathetic Abwehr officer. Because this wasn’t force majeure, this was its close cousin, pressure. Which meant, to Serebin, that the unseen hand-mailed fist in a velvet glove-was, for some complex reason, working cautiously.
He thought.
Polanyi’s courier had left him a perfect set of documents for departure from Paris on 25 March. A new name-a Russian name, and a new job: director of the Paris office of a Roumanian company, Enterprise Marasz-Gulian, who was approved for travel to Belgrade, on business, via first-class wagon-lit. This meant two things: Serebin did not have to apply for permission to leave the occupied city-it crossed his mind that they might well be waiting for him, at that office-and, with his train leaving in four days, he could probably avoid responding to Helmut Bach.
Four days. And premonitions. He found himself taking inventory of his life at the Winchester, his life in Paris. Poking through notes and sketches for unwritten work, addresses and telephone numbers, books, letters. He’d known, when the Germans had marched into Paris nine months earlier, that he might not stay there forever. So he’d been rather Parisian about the occupation; try a day of it, see if you survive, then try another. Sooner or later, the French told each other, they’ll go away, because they always did. And he’d imagined that, if it happened that he was the one who had to leave, he would be able to make a civilized exit.
But now he had a bad feeling. Clearly, Bach, which meant the Third Reich, was not going to leave him in peace, they were going to make him pay to live in their city. So, as the French put it, fini. That was that. He found himself anxious to see, one last time, certain places; streets he liked, gardens, alleys, a few secret corners of the city where its medieval heart still beat. It would be a long time before he saw them again.
Two sad days. The photograph of Annette, Mai ’38 scrawled on the back, taken in the garden of a house by the sea. A print dress, a pained smile- why must you take my picture? A letter from Warsaw, dated August of ’39, mailed just before the invasion by a Polish friend from Odessa. A photograph of his father as a young man, hair like brushed wheat, standing stiffly beside an older, unknown, woman. The only picture of him that survived. Put it all in a box and find a place to hide it. He almost did that-he found a good box, from a stationery store, but he was too late.
When he entered the lobby of the Winchester, just after seven, box in hand, the clerk beckoned to him. This was the same clerk, an old man with white hair, who had watched as he’d led Kubalsky upstairs. Now, when Serebin reached the desk, he said, “Ah monsieur, some good news for you.”
