Alan Furst - Dark Star

Her face was flushed; she drank the last of the wine in her glass. When she met his eyes he saw anger and sorrow, and all the courage and defiance she could possibly summon. Not that it was overwhelming, it wasn’t, but for her it was everything she possessed. “And God damn you if you’ve come here to make me work again. No matter what you’ve said. For I won’t. Won’t betray this man in the way you want. I’ll go where even your power does not reach. And we both know where that is.”

Szara took a deep breath and let the air between them cool a little. Then he said, “I’ve told only the truth”-he looked at his watch-“since ten-thirty last night. Almost six hours. The way things are for me lately, I have a right to be proud of even that.”

She lowered her eyes. He stood, the carpet soft beneath his bare feet, and walked to a mirrored cabinet with glasses and a silver ice bucket on it. He opened the door and found a bottle of Saint-Estephe, took a corkscrew and worked it open, then filled both their glasses. She had meanwhile found a newspaper, was bunching up wads of it and feeding it to the fire. “It looks warm, anyhow,” she said.

“I was wondering,” he said, “what had become of the people in Paris in all this. Because if you’d let them know about an intimacy with a senior staff officer they would have been-inquisitive. To say the least.”

“And something terrible would have happened. Because even if I’d tried to conceal everything, I don’t trust my little friends in Berlin. They’ve had to improvise their lives for too long-not all humans are made stronger by that.”

“Very few.”

“Well, for me there is only one escape, and I was prepared to take it. I’d made my peace with the idea. In the beginning, when I stole away from Russia and came to live in Berlin, these people approached me. Threatened me. But I gave them very little, only bits of gossip and what they could read in the newspapers if they wanted. Then they played a second card. Your brother Sascha is in a camp, they said, where he deserves to be. But he’s as comfortable as he can be under the circumstances; he works as a clerk in a heated room. If you want his situation to continue, you must be productive. It’s up to you.”

“And you did what you had to do.”

“Yes. I did. In exile, I cared very little what I made of my life because I discovered I wasn’t touched by it. Perhaps Russia has something to do with that-to be sensitive yet not at all delicate, a curious strength, or weakness, or whatever you want to call it. But then I met this man, and suddenly it was as though I’d woken from a long sleep. Every small thing now mattered-the weather, the way a vase stood on a table, meeting someone and wanting them to like me. I had built walls-now they crumbled. And this I knew I could not survive. Not for long. I could no longer do what I’d done for the people who came around with money, and once they began to press I knew there would be only one way out. So I hadn’t, as I saw it then, very long to live. Yet each day was vivid, and I trembled with life. They say it is the only gift, and now I came to understand that with all my heart. I never cried so hard, and never laughed so much, as I did in those weeks. Perhaps it was a form of prayer, because what came next was a miracle, I know of no other word to describe it.

“It was in early August. A man came to see me. Not here. At the theater, in the same way you did. Clearly he knew nothing of the general. A dreadful man, this one. Fair, wavy hair, thick glasses, a vile little chunk of a thing with no mercy anywhere in him. None. And what he mostly wanted to talk about was you. Something had gone wrong, something extremely serious, for nothing has happened since. No money, no demands, no couriers, nothing.”

She twisted the glass about in her hands, watching the light of the burning newspaper reflected in the red surface of the wine. “I’ve no idea what happened,” she said. “I only know it saved my life. And that you seemed to be the cause of it.”

He woke up in a kind of heaven. He had no idea how he’d happened to wind up on her bed but there he was, his face against the soft coverlet, his side a little sore from sleeping on the knot in the twisted belt of the bathrobe. He was in heaven, he decided, because it smelled exactly the way heaven, or his heaven at any rate, ought to smell: the perfume she wore-which reminded him of cinnamon-and scented soap, as well as wine, cigarette smoke, the ashes of a dead fire, and the sweetish odor of a well-washed borzoi. He could, he thought, detect Nadia herself, sweet in a different, a human way. For a time he simply lay there, suspended in a perfect darkness, and inhaled. When he felt himself slipping back into unconsciousness, he forced his eyes open. A knitted comforter was tossed carelessly on the settee-so that’s where she’d slept. His suit-apparently the maids had cleaned it-hung from a hanger on the knob of the bathroom door, and the rest of his clothing was piled neatly on a dresser. Miraculously clean and dry.

He struggled to sit up. Returning from the dead, it felt like. All those nights in Poland, lying on the ground on a blanket; followed by restless hours on a thin mattress in the Kovno apartment, people around him awake, coughing, talking in low voices. Now he hurt for every minute of it. He unhooked the white shutter that covered the lower half of the window and pushed it aside. An autumn garden. Surrounded by high walls. Dead leaves had drifted across the paths and mounded at the foot of a hedge. Nadia sat at a weathered iron table-she was reading, he could not see her face-one hand dangling above the wolfhound stretched out at her side. Am I in Russia? Wrapped in a long black coat and a red wool scarf she was lost in her book. The wind lifted her fall-colored hair, leaves spun down from the trees and rattled along the garden paths; the sky was at war, broken towers of gray cloud, blown and battered, swept past a pale sun. Certainly it would rain. His heart ached for her.

Later he sat in a garden chair across from her and saw that she was reading Babel’s Red Cavalry. The wind was cool and damp and he pulled his jacket tightly about him.

For a long time they did not say anything.

And she did not look away, did not deny him her eyes: if this is what you wish, she seemed to say, I will pose for you. She touched nothing, changed nothing, and did not defend herself. The wind blew her hair across her face, Seryozha sighed, the light shifted as the clouds crossed the sun, she never moved. Then he began to understand that he’d misread her. This stillness was not simply poise-what he saw in her eyes was precisely what was in his own. Could she be that deluded? To want somebody so lost and useless? Was she blind?

No.

From the moment he’d walked through the door of the dressing room he had been in love with her. That it might be the same for her had never occurred to him, simply had not crossed his mind. But maybe it worked that way-women always knew, men never did. Or maybe not, maybe it all worked some other way. He didn’t really care. Now he understood that everything had changed. And now he understood what, just exactly what, he had been offered.

Sad, he thought, that he couldn’t take it. They were castaways, both of them, marooned together on an exotic island-as it happened, the garden of a Florentine villa on the Schillerstrasse. But somewhere beyond the high walls a military band was playing a march and, he thought, the general will soon return from the wars. Only for a moment did he imagine a love affair in flight: the unspeakable hotel rooms, the secret police, the predators. No. She belonged in his imagination, not in his life. A memory. Met in the wrong way, in the wrong place, in the wrong year, in times when love wasn’t possible. One remembers, and that’s all. Something else that didn’t happen in those days.