“No, no,” she told him, clearly alarmed. “There is dinner to come. Just a few of us. You can’t possibly leave.”
“I’m expected elsewhere,” he lied.
“Have a headache. Please. We are looking forward to it.”
“Well…”
She put a hand on his arm, her eyes were wide. “ Mon ours, don’t leave. Please.”
Eight for dinner. In the small salon. Apricot-colored wallpaper here, a celadon bowl with dried flowers as the centerpiece. There was mullet with olive oil, lamb with yoghurt, braised endive, red wine. “You sit next to me,” Madame Della Corvo said.
Serebin liked her immediately; serious, very stylish and chic, with a short, dramatic haircut, fine features, no makeup. She dressed simply, a loose, cherry red shirt, and wore only a wedding ring for jewelry. “My friends call me Anna,” she told him. Della Corvo sat at the head of the table, flanked by Labonniere and Marie-Galante. Then Marrano and his companion, a Danish woman called Enid, lean and weathered, as though she’d spent her life on sailboats. And, across from Serebin, a man he didn’t remember seeing at the cocktail party.
Introduced as Andre Bastien but, from his accent, not French by birth. He’d probably grown up, Serebin guessed, somewhere in central Europe. He was a large, heavy man with thick, white hair, courtly, reserved, with a certain gravity about him, a cold intelligence, that told in his eyes and in the way he carried himself. You would want to know who he was, but you would not find out-so Serebin put it to himself.
Social conversation, at first. The complex marital situation of the Bebek shoemaker. A woman character in classical Turkish theatre whose name turned out to mean stupefied with desire. Then Marie-Galante mentioned that Serebin had found a long-lost friend and Serebin had to tell Levich stories. How they worked together, in their twenties, for Gudok, Train Whistle, the official organ of the Railway Administration, then for Na Vakhtie — On Watch-Odessa’s maritime journal, where they took letters to the editor, particularly the ones that quivered with righteous indignation, and turned them into short stories, which they ran on the back page. And how, a few years later, Levich was thrown out a second-story window in the House of Writers-he’d been feuding with the Association of Proletarian Authors. “It took three of them to do it,” Serebin said, “and they were big writers.”
“Good God!” and “How dreadful!” and “Was he injured?” Nobody at the table thought it was funny.
“He landed in the snow,” Serebin said.
“Russia is really like that,” Marie-Galante said.
“Even so,” Enid said, “they’ve taught the peasant children to read.”
“That’s true,” Serebin said. “And they have also taught them to inform on their parents.”
“There is a last piece of fish,” Madame Della Corvo said. “Andre, give me your plate.”
“Stalin is a beast,” Marrano said. “And he’s turned the country into a prison. But they are the only counterweight to Hitler.”
“Were, you mean,” Della Corvo said. “Until the pact.”
“That won’t last,” Marrano said. Serebin, watching him in candlelight, thought he looked like a Renaissance assassin. A thin line of beard traced the edge of his jaw from one sideburn to the other, rising to a sharp point at the chin.
“Is that your view, Ilya?” Della Corvo asked.
Serebin shrugged. “Two gangsters, one neighborhood, they fight.”
Anna Della Corvo met his eyes. “The end of Europe, then.”
“And where,” Marrano said, “will you be when it comes to that?”
“Wherever the war isn’t.”
“Oh yes?” Marie-Galante said.
Serebin persisted. “I’ve seen too many people shot.”
“In battle?” Marrano said.
“Afterwards.”
Across from him, the man called Bastien smiled. So have I. So what?
Serebin started to tell him, but Enid said, “There is no place to go, monsieur.” She set a small beaded evening bag on the table and hunted through it until she found a cigarette. Marrano took a lighter from his pocket and lit it for her. She exhaled smoke and said, “Nowhere.”
Della Corvo laughed as he picked up the wine bottle and walked around the table, refilling everyone’s glass, touching each of them, his manner affectionate and teasing. “Oh, have a little more. ‘Live today,’ you know, et cetera, et cetera.”
Anna Della Corvo leaned toward Serebin and said, for him and not for the others, “Please understand, we are all exiles here.”
“Do you know,” Della Corvo said as he returned to his chair, “that I am a great admirer of La Torre Argentea?”
What the hell was that?
“You’re surprised. Not your personal favorite, perhaps.”
Oh Jesus he meant The Silver Tower. Serebin’s first book, which he’d obviously read in the Italian edition. “Well,” Serebin said, pretending that he’d been thinking it over. He then realized that given the pause for speculation, he was obliged to say something meaningful. “I was twenty-eight.”
“Should that matter?” Della Corvo raised an eyebrow as he said it, would, in a minute, have the whole pack of them howling at his heels. In a midnight blizzard, wolves chase the troika.
“It’s only that I might have done those stories better, ten years later.”
“What would be different? You don’t mind my asking, do you?”
“No, no, it’s fine. I suppose, now, I might call it Kovalevsky’s Tower. Silver was how it looked in the heat of summer, but a man named Kovalevsky built it.” He paused a moment, then explained. “A stone tower on a cliff above the Black Sea, near Odessa.”
“Why?”
“Did he build it?”
“Yes.”
“He had no reason. Or, his reason was, I want to build a stone tower. And we used to say, ‘It’s a landmark for people lost at sea.’ Which it was, for sailors, but we meant a little more than that. Maybe. I don’t know.”
Anna Della Corvo laughed. “My love,” she said to her husband, and at that moment she utterly adored him, “people don’t know why they do things.”
“Sometimes in books,” Serebin said, laughing along with her.
Madame Della Corvo rang a crystal bell and a waiter appeared with bowls of fruit on a silver tray. There was another bottle of wine, and another.
Green bottles with no label. “It’s Medoc,” she explained, “from a cru classe estate. We buy it from a ship’s chandler in Sete.”
Were they often in France?
“Oh, now and then. Not recently.”
Obliquity-the base element of life in a police state, learn it or die. Serebin had learned it in the Russian school. “So then, are you going back to Italy?”
“Well, we could.”
Was the Nereide, he wondered, a kind of Flying Dutchman, doomed to wander the seas, from neutral port to neutral port, for a fascist eternity?
Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, more of the same. “I certainly considered resigning,” Labonniere said. “But then, what?”
“A life in opposition,” Enid said. A silence, rather a long one. Then she said, “In London, with de Gaulle.”
It was Marie-Galante who answered, choked-back tears of anger in her voice. “De Gaulle hates him,” she said. “ Hates him.”
Labonniere cleared his throat. “We do what we can.”
“What can any of us do?” Della Corvo defended his friend.
Enid retreated. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I finally heard from my sister, in Copenhagen. It’s the first time since the occupation-just the fact of a postcard getting through felt like a great victory.”
“What did she say?” Madame Della Corvo asked.
