Blood of Victory Read Online Free PDF Page A

cigarette holder turned and glanced at him over her shoulder.
    “Oh,
formidable
!” Marie-Galante said.
    From Doktor Rheinhardt, a brief, graceful bow.
    Serebin finished his drink, went to the bar for another. Where he met Marrano, a courtly Spaniard from Barcelona, and a nameless woman who smiled.
    Then there was a man, who was wearing a sash,
    and a woman in a black feather hat.
    Finally, at last and inevitably, he thought, an old friend. The poet Levich, from Moscow, who’d gotten out of Russia just as the
Yezhovshchina
purge of ’38 was gathering momentum. The two men stared at each other for a moment, then embraced, astonished to discover a lost friend at the Istanbul yacht club.
    “You know Babel was taken,” Levich said.
    “Yes, I heard that, in Paris.”
    “You’re still there?”
    “For the moment.”
    “We may go to Brazil.”
    “You all got out?”
    “Thank God.”
    “Why Brazil?”
    “Who knows. Another place, maybe better than here.”
    “You think so?”
    “Only one way to find out.”
    All around them, people began to say good night. “We have to meet, Ilya Aleksandrovich.” Levich wrote an address on a slip of paper and went off to find his coat. Serebin turned to Marie-Galante and thanked her for inviting him.
    “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 André 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