by Alan Furst
Hawker Harts, and Furies, Bristol Bulldogs-with their wings on struts above and below the pilot cockpit, armed with a single machine gun, they were the aircraft of the early 1930s but they looked like they belonged to an earlier time-descendants of the Spads and De Havillands of the 1914 war-and Serebin doubted they could stay long in the air with German Messerschmitts.
“You have others?” Serebin said.
“No. This is what the British sold us, but they’re faster than you think.”
He sent a mechanic off to get Serebin a flying jacket and goggles-he would fly in the cockpit, for gunner or bombardier, behind the pilot.
“You have to fight with what you have,” Draza said. “Anyhow, the same Englishman that sold us the planes helped us with the coup. So, I leave the judgments to others, but that’s the way the world is, right?”
Serebin put on his flying gear and climbed up into the gunner cockpit behind Draza, who turned and handed him a road map of Yugoslavia and Macedonia. “Change of plan,” he said, “you’re going to Thassos.”
“In Greece?”
“Sort of. An island, smugglers’ paradise. The Adriatic’s no good now-too much fighting; Luftwaffe, RAF, Italian navy. It’s crowded.”
The mechanic pulled the blocks from the wheels, then spun the single propeller, which produced coughs and smoke and backfires and, eventually, ignition. The Hawker bumped across the rutted field, lifted with a roar, flew over the Srbski Kralj and waggled its wings, then, bouncing up through the thermals, climbed to five thousand feet and turned south. In a bright blue sky, above fields and forests, sometimes a village. Captain Draza turned halfway around in his seat, shouted “Mobilization,” and pointed off to the east. Extraordinary, to see it from above. At least a thousand carts, drawn by plodding teams of oxen, long columns of infantry, field guns on caissons. Draza turned round again, and, with a broad grin, made the victory sign.
3 April. London. It was a long ride by tube to Drake’s club, on Grosvenor Square, so Josef the waiter always left home early to make sure he wasn’t late to work. Now and then, when his line had been hit the night before, he had to walk, and sometimes, going home after work, he had to make his way through the blackout, or wait in an air raid shelter until the all clear sounded.
Still, he didn’t mind. A cheerful soul, with a game leg and merry eyes, who’d lost his hair in his twenties-“from worrying,” he liked to say-he’d snuck out of Prague in April of ’39, after the Germans marched into the city, and, with wife and baby, somehow made his way to London. The young men who’d worked at the Drake had gone to war, so new service staff had to be hired, but the management was more than pleased with Josef.
Josef with a hard J, to the spruce types who stopped at their club for drinks or dinner. He worked hard at being a good waiter-he’d been a good teacher of mathematics-doing his best meant something to Josef and the club stewards knew it. Now that his wife was pregnant again they let him do all the work he wanted, and often sent him home with a little something extra in a napkin. Life wasn’t easy, with rationing, for a family man.
So they let him work private dinners, which got him home after midnight, but every little bit helped. The private dinner on that April night was given in honor of Sir Ivan Kostyka, and went pretty much like they all did. A dozen gentlemen, and rather elegant, even for Drake’s-Lord this and Colonel that, another known as Pebbles. Josef overheard what was said without really listening to it. Two or three speeches, one of them in a distinctly foreign accent, with words like “appreciation” and “gratitude.” For? Well, Josef didn’t know-the speakers didn’t precisely say, and his English wasn’t all that good anyhow.
He did, however, notice that, like the man with the foreign accent, some of the men were not native to Britain; one with a white goatee, another with a vast stomach and a rumbling laugh. Foreigners like him. Well, not much like him.
Josef had cleared the dessert, and was preparing to serve the port, when Sir Ivan stood and thanked the men at the table for honoring him. He was sincere in this, Josef could see, even moved. One of the men said “Hear, hear,” then they all rose, as if to propose a toast. Josef waited patiently, but it wasn’t exactly a toast. What happened next was unusual, but, he thought, well done, as the spruce types had said more than once during the dinner. Well done because it was from the heart, and they all had the sort of self-confidence that allows men to sing without fussing overmuch about carrying a tune. It was, anyhow, an easy tune to carry:
For he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fell-ow, which nobody can deny.
Which nobody can deny, which nobody can deny, for he’s a jolly good fell-ell-ow… which nobody can deny!
29 July.
Serebin woke up long after midnight, tried to go back to sleep, then gave up and climbed out of bed. No point tossing and turning-especially on a hot summer night. Summer nights were famously hot in Istanbul but it was more than that. It wasn’t the heat that woke him, he thought, it was a cricket on the terrace, the soft air, the sense of a summer night of life going by.
The floorboards creaked as he walked down the hall to the white room. Plenty of paper and pencils there. He’d never told Marie-Galante that Tamara had meant the room as a writer’s cell, but it had taken her about ten minutes to figure it out. “We’ll put you in here,” she’d said. So, mornings, there he was. It was hard, with war everywhere, to figure out what he ought to say, or who might want to hear it. Still, he kept at it, because he always had.
As for her, she’d done exactly what she said she would, and so they ran away together. Not far, only to Besiktas and the little house above the sea, but, nothing wrong with that. She’d bought new towels and sheets and tablecloths, marshaled the Ukrainian sisters in a magnificent French campaign of waxing and polishing, so that now everything smelled like honey and glowed like gold.
Out on the Bosphorus, a dark ship with a long, white wake, headed up toward the Black Sea. Maybe to Bulgaria or Roumania, he thought, but not much farther, unless it was a supply ship-German, Italian, or neutral. One place it wasn’t going was Odessa. They were fighting there now, the city besieged by Roumanian armies, the defenders wildly outnumbered, but holding on, refusing to surrender. Stories of heroism every day in the newspapers, which they clipped, at the IRU office, and pinned to the bulletin board. Serebin went in from time to time, offering to help out, to do whatever he could. So, a new Harvest, but the emigre writers here weren’t as good as the ones in Paris. Patriotic now-it was Russia fighting, not the USSR, Stalin had said that and everybody believed him. On the Danube, the oil barges moved upriver to Germany, day and night.
They followed the war, Serebin and Marie-Galante, in the newspapers with their morning coffee, on the radio when they had afternoon drinks, and with people they sometimes saw in the evenings. Marie-Galante could not be in the world without invitations. The precise nature of the social chemistry eluded him, but somehow people knew she was there and invited her places, and sometimes she accepted, and so they went.
They had one that evening-he thought it was that evening, he’d have to make sure. Some kind of dinner at the yacht club, a beautiful invitation, on thick, cream-colored stock with an elaborate crest on top. Given by people he’d never heard of, for, apparently, some couple connected with the Norwegian royal family, now in exile in London. What were they doing in Istanbul? Well, what was anybody doing. Waiting, mostly.
In the same post there’d been a note from Polanyi. He hoped they were well, perhaps he would see them at the royal dinner. “Someone I want you to meet,” he’d said. Marie-Galante had stood the invitation on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, which was what she did when something appealed to her, so, clearly, they were going. It was-something to do. Not that they were bored, or anything like that.
He opened the drawer of the table, found a Sobranie and lit it. Turn the light on? Work for a while? No, he wanted only to watch this summer night as it went by. The ship was a
lmost out of sight now, so he stared at the dark water, finished his cigarette, and walked back to the bedroom.
Too warm for a sheet or a blanket. He watched her for a moment as she slept, then lay down carefully on the bed. Wouldn’t want to wake her up. But she slid back against him, her skin silky and cool, even on a hot summer night.
“Where were you?” she said, not really awake.
“Just walking around.”
“Oh ours, mon ours, ” she sighed. “What is to become of us.”
Silence, only the beat of waves at the foot of the cliff.
“No, no,” she said. “ Beside that.”
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