Blood of Victory Read Free Page A

on the table, two bowls and a pair of soup spoons. Then she lit an oil lamp.
    The bowls were heaped with trembling rice pudding, a magnificent treat for Serebin when he was a child. But not now. Tamara ate hers dutifully and slowly, and so did Serebin. Out on the Bosphorus, an oil tanker flying the swastika flag worked its way north, smoke rising from its funnel.
    When they finished the pudding, she showed him where the roof tiles had cracked and come loose, though he could barely see them in the failing light. “That’s why I wrote to you,” she said. “They must be repaired, or water will come in the house. So we asked in the market, and a man came and climbed up there. He will fix it, but he says the whole roof must be replaced. The tiles are very old.”
    Is that why you wrote?
But he didn’t say it. Instead, standing at the dark corner of the house, waves breaking at the foot of the bluff, he asked her why she’d said
one last time
.
    “I wanted to see you again,” she said. “That day I feared, I don’t know what. Something. Maybe I would die. Or you.”
    He put a hand on her shoulder and, just for a moment, she leaned against him. “Well,” he said. “As we seem to be alive, today anyhow, we might as well replace the roof.”
    “Perhaps it is the salt in the air.” Her voice was soft.
    “Yes. Bad for the tile.”
    “It’s getting cold, maybe we should go inside.”
    They talked for an hour, then he left. The taxi was waiting in front of the house, as Serebin knew it would be, and on the way back to the hotel he had the driver wait while he bought a bottle of Turkish vodka at a café.
    A practical man, the driver, who had contrived to learn a few crucial words for his foreign passengers. When Serebin returned from the café he said, “Bordello, effendi?”
    Serebin shook his head. The man had watched him, in the rearview mirror, as he’d rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. Well, the driver thought, I know the cure for that.
    No, no cure.
She had that damn photograph on her dresser, cut from a newspaper and framed, amid sepia portraits of her mother and grandmother, and snapshots of her Polish lieutenant, who’d disappeared in ’39, and her dog Blunka, descendant of every hound that roamed the alleys of Odessa. She showed Serebin the small room where she slept, and there was the famous photograph.
    Taken at a railway station captured from Denikin’s cossacks on a grainy April morning. A gray photograph; the station building pocked with gunfire, one side of the roof reduced to blackened timbers. The young officer Serebin, looking very concentrated, with two days’ growth of beard, wears a leather jacket and a uniform cap, the open jacket revealing a Nagant revolver in a shoulder holster. One hand holds a submachine gun, its leather sling hanging down, the other, bandaged with a rag, points as he deploys his company.
Bolshevik intellectual at war.
You could smell the cordite. The photograph had been taken by the renowned Kalkevich, who’d chronicled young dancers, backstage at the Bolshoi, for
Life
magazine. So it was very good, “Bryansk Railway Station: 1920.” Was reproduced in French and British newspapers, appeared in Kalkevich’s New York retrospective.
    “We remember your photograph, Ilya Aleksandrovich.” Stalin said that, in the summer of 1938, when Serebin, certain that he was headed to the Lubyanka, was picked up by two chekists in a black Zil and whisked off to the Kremlin at midnight.
    To be praised, it turned out, for the publication of
Ulskaya Street,
and to eat salted herring and drink Armenian champagne. He could barely get it down, could still taste it, warm and sweet. Beria was in the room, and, worse, General Poskrebyshev, the chief of Stalin’s secretariat, who had the eyes of a reptile. The movie that night—he’d heard they watched one every night—was Laurel and Hardy in
Babes in Toyland
. Stalin laughed so hard that tears ran down his face. As the