Dark Star (56 page)

“And go iron yourself,” Tscherova muttered to her back as she drew the tall door closed.

“What sort of devil?” Szara asked.

“It's from Kostennikov.
The Merchant's Bride.
Act Three.”

Szara raised an eyebrow.

“Come upstairs,” she said.

He followed her through rooms of oiled walnut furniture and towering emerald draperies, then up a curving marble staircase with gilded banisters. “Well you've certainly—”

“Shut up,” she whispered urgently. “They listen.”

“The servants?”

“Yes.”

Sweeping up the stairs in ice-colored silk shirt and pants, voluminous lounging pajamas, she called out, “Last one up is a monkey!”

“Aren't you making it awfully obvious?” he said quietly.

She snorted and danced up the last few steps. Her gold slippers had pompoms on them and the soles slapped against the marble. She paused for a sip of wine, then took his hand and towed him into a bedroom, kicking the door shut behind them. A fire burned in a marble fireplace, the wallpaper was deep blue with white snowdrops, the cover on the huge bed was the same blue and white, and the carpet was thick, pale blue wool.

“Oh, Seryozha,” she said, her voice full of woe. A borzoi crept guiltily off a blue and white settee and slunk over to the fireplace, settling down on his side with the mournful sigh of the dispossessed and a single swish of his feathery tail. Then he yawned, opened his long, graceful jaws to the limit, and snapped them shut with a brief whine.
What settee?

“Won't they suspect I'm your lover?” Szara asked.

“Let them.”

Szara looked confused.

“I can have all the lovers, and generally strange guests, that I want. What I can't have is spies.”

“They know Russian? ”

“Who knows what they know? From my émigré friends they expect Russian, shouting and laughter. Anything political or confidential, keep your voice down or play the Victrola.”

“All this. It's yours?”

“I will tell you everything, my dear, but first things first. Forgive me, but I do not know your name. That's going to become awkward. Would you like me to make something up?”

“André,” he said. “In the French spelling.”

“Good. Now I must ask you, André in the French spelling, if you have any idea what you smell like.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I've been through hard times in Russia: little rooms, long winters, everybody terrified, and no privacy. I'm no shrinking violet, believe me, but …”

She opened a door with a full mirror on it and gestured toward the clawfoot tub within. “I lack nothing. You will find a sponge, bath salts, lavender soap or almond, washcloth, backbrush, shampoo
from Paris. You may give yourself a facial, if you like, or powder yourself like a cruller from the Viennese bakery. Yes? You're not insulted? ”

“A long journey,” he said, walking into the bathroom.

He undressed, horrified at the condition of his clothing. In the scented air of the bathroom his own condition became, by contrast, all too evident. Still, when he looked in the mirror, he could see that he'd survived. A day's growth of beard—was one side of his face still slightly swollen from the dive-bombing?—hair quite long, newly gray here, and here, and here, eyes yellowish with fatigue. Not old. Yet. And very lean and sharp, determined.

He ran the steaming water into the tub and climbed in. The heat woke up various nicks and scrapes and bruises he'd acquired in his travels and he grimaced. It felt as though he had a hundred places that hurt, each in a different way. He watched the water darken, added a handful of crystals from a jar and stirred them about. “That's the spirit!” she called through the open door, smelling the bath salts. She hummed to herself, opened a bottle of wine—he heard the squeak of the cork being drawn—and put a record on the Victrola. Italian opera, sunny and sweet:
on market day, peasants gather in the village square.

“I like this for a bath, don't you?” she said from the bedroom.

“Yes. Just right.”

She sang along for a few bars, her voice, lightly hoarse, hunting shamelessly for the proper notes.

“May I have a cigarette? ”

A moment later her hand snaked around the door with a lit cigarette. He took it gratefully. “Smoking in the bath,” she said. “You are truly Russian.”

The borzoi came padding in and lapped enthusiastically at the bathwater.

“Seryozha!” she said.

With his index finger Szara rubbed the dog between the eyes. The borzoi raised its head and stared at him, soapy water running from its wet muzzle. “Go away, Seryozha,” he said. Surprisingly, the dog actually turned and left.

“Yes, good dog,” he heard her say.

“When I'm done … I don't have anything clean, I'm afraid.”

“I'll get you one of the general's bathrobes. Not the old rag he actually wears. His daughter gave him one for his birthday—it's still in the box. Red satin. You'll look like Cary Grant.”

“Is he your lover?”

“Cary Grant? I thought we'd been discreet.”

He waited.

“No. Not really. Nobody is my lover. When the general and I are together the world thinks otherwise, but we don't fool ourselves or each other. It takes some explaining, but I can't imagine you're going anywhere else tonight, so there's time. But for one thing I can't wait. You really have to tell me why you came here. If you are going to ask me to do all sorts of wretched things, I might as well hear about it and have it done with.” She turned the record over. There was a certain resignation in her voice, he thought, like a woman who dreads a squabble with the butcher but knows it can't be avoided.

“The truth?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“I've … Well, what have I done? I haven't defected. I guess I've run away.”

“Not really. You have?”

“Yes.”

She was silent for a moment, thinking it over. “Run away to Berlin? Is, uh, that where one generally goes?”

“It was a rat's maze. I ran down the open passage.”

“Well, if you say so.” She sounded dubious.

He put his cigarette out in the bathwater, rested the butt on the edge of the tub, then pulled the plug and watched the gray water swirl above the drain. “I'm going to have to fill up the tub again,” he said.

“I'll bring you a glass of wine if you like. And you can tell me about your travels. If it's allowed, that is.”

“Anything's allowed now,” he said. He burst out laughing.

“What?”

“Really nothing.” He laughed again. It was as though a genie had escaped.

•

It was well past midnight when they tiptoed down the stairs to the kitchen, a narrow room with a lofty ceiling and porcelain worn dark on its curves by years of scrubbing. They made absurdly tall sandwiches of cheese and pickles and butter and stole back across the Baluchi carpets like thieves. Szara caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror: shaved, hair combed, wearing a red satin bathrobe with a shawl collar, a giant sandwich teetering on a plate—it was as though in headlong flight he'd stumbled through a secret door and landed in heaven.

Back in Nadia's sanctuary, they settled on the carpet close to the dying fire while Seryozha rested on crossed forepaws and waited alertly for his share of the kill. Szara watched her tear into the sandwich, a serious Russian eater, her hair falling around her face as she leaned over the plate. He simply could not stop looking at her. She apparently ignored it, was perhaps used to it—after all, the job of an actress was to be looked at—still, he did not want to seem a goggling, teenage dolt and tried to be subtle, but that was a hopeless tactic and he knew it.
This is God's work,
he thought: drifting hair the color of an almond shell and the fragile blue of her eyes, the lines and planes and light in her. There weren't words, he realized. Only the feeling inside him and the impulse to make sure, again and again, that he saw what he saw. Suddenly, she looked up and stared back at him, blank-eyed, jaw muscles working away as she chewed, until he sensed that she'd composed her expression into a reasonable imitation of his own. He turned away. “Yes?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“It's nothing.”

She poured wine into his glass.

“Do we expect the general home at any moment? ” he asked. “Do I hide in a closet? ”

“The general is in Poland,” she said. “And if he were here you would not have to hide. Krafic comes to see me with his boyfriends. Lara Brozina and her brother. You know them, in what we'll call a different setting. Others also. A little Russian colony, you see: émigré
intellectuals, free thinkers, batty painters, and what-have-you. The general refers to us as ‘an antidote to Frau Lumplich.' ”

“Who is she?”

“A character he made up. ‘Madame Lump,' one would say in Russian.”

“An enlightened general. An enlightened German general.”

“They exist,” she said. She brushed crumbs from her hands and held a bite of sandwich out to Seryozha, who arched his neck forward and took it daintily between his small front teeth for a moment, then inhaled it. She rose and brought over a framed photograph from the night table next to her bed. “General Walter Boden,” she said.

A man in his late sixties, Szara thought. Fleshless, ascetic face below a bald head, deep care lines, mouth a single brief line. Yet the look in his eyes told a slightly different story. At some point, in a life that left his face like stone, something had amused him. Permanently.

“Extraordinary,” Szara said.

“It pleases me you see that,” she said with feeling.

“When I put this picture together with what you've told me, I would have to guess that this is not a man well loved by the Nazis.”

“No. They know how he feels about them; in the general's world, the notion of
beneath contempt
is taken quite literally. He is rich, however. Very, very rich. They do respect that. And his position with the General Staff is not unimportant, though he speaks of it as ‘the maid's room in the lion's den.' His friends include the old aristocracy, the Metternichs and Bismarcks, princes and counts, the Prussian landholders. Hitler hates them, foams at the mouth because he can't get at them; they occupy two powerful fortresses in Germany, the army and the foreign ministry.”

“Fortresses. Will they hold under siege?”

“We shall see.”

You don't,
Szara reminded himself,
have to think about such things anymore.
“Is there another log for the fire?” he asked. The embers were dark red.

“No. Not until the morning. One is a prisoner of servants, in some ways.”

“A long way from Rosenhain Passage, though, and that awful theater.”

She nodded that it was. He stared at her, forced himself to look away. She yawned, took a foot out of her slipper, and propped it inside her opposite knee. “How did you meet? ” Szara said.

“At a reception. We went to dinner a few times. Talked into the night—he speaks passable Russian, you yourself know what that feels like, especially when you have no country to go home to. A strange romance. I waited for the inevitable offer,
a relaxing weekend in the country,
but it never came. One night at a restaurant he simply said ‘Nadia, my girl, generals and actresses are nothing new in Berlin. A cliché of the nightclubs. But come along to my house, even so, and see how you like it.' I did. And in this room I asked, ‘Whose bedroom is this?' for I'd already seen his, and everything was obviously new. ‘I believe it is yours, if you like,' he said. I had expected anything but this, and I was speechless. That strip of Persian carpet, the one by your hand? He'd meant it for Seryozha. Suddenly I started to cry—inside, I didn't want him to see. And that was the end of the discussion. I came to live here and it was a kind of salvation; I stopped doing all those other things, seeing those vile people. Now this is my life. When he wants to see me, I'm here. I sit across from him at dinner, we converse, my job is to be exactly who I am. Any affectation, to become what I imagine he might want, would break his heart. We have a life together, we go—what is the phrase?—we go out in society. To his friends. Sometimes to the country, to grand estates. In Germany, civilized life continues in such places, much as it does in the basements of Moscow. But no matter where we go, I am always at his shoulder. I take his arm. Now I could—and of course I would, nothing would be easier— make the world believe that he was a sublime lover. A few small signals and the tongues begin to wag. If he desired that, it would be little enough to ask. But he does not. He does not care what people think of him. I'm not here for his vanity, for his reputation. I'm here because it gives him pleasure to have me here.”

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-Estèphe, 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.”