Blood of Victory Read Free

share,” she said firmly.
    He pretended to hunt for one that especially appealed to him, found it, and took a bite. “Also this,” he said. A bag of dry cookies with almonds. “And these.” Two bracelets of ribbon gold, from a jewelry store near the hotel. She put them on and turned her wrist one way, then the other, so that the gold caught the light.
    “You like them? Do they fit?”
    “Yes, of course, they’re beautiful.” She smiled and shook her head in feigned exasperation—
what is to be done with you?
    They sat together on a bench and looked out over the water. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I must ask you how you are.”
    “Better.”
    “All better.”
    “Much better. Good, really. But, you know, the
chahotka
.” Wasting away, it meant, the Russian word for tuberculosis.
    In 1919, during the fighting between Bolshevik and Czarist forces, she had served as a nurse in a Red Army medical unit and treated the sick and dying villagers in the shtetls of Byelorussia. She had not been ordered to do this, she had done it on her own. There was no medicine for the illness, all she had was a pail of heated water and a cloth. But, cold and wet, exhausted from advancing, retreating, working day and night, she persisted, did what others feared to do, and the
chahotka
came for her. She spent eight months in bed, thought the illness was gone, and went on with her life. But in the bad winter of 1938, it returned, and Serebin had arranged her departure from 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 émigrés, 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