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down. He then introduced Goldbark, who rose graciously to speak just as a Turkish porter pounded on the door and hauled in a donation from Mahmoudov’s grocery—a crate of fat, shiny eggplants. Goldbark closed his eyes, took a deep breath—at some point this afternoon the imps of misfortune were going to leave him alone. “Very well, then. Today it is my pleasure to welcome...” Applause. “And now, Lidia Markova, one of our many prize-winning students, will read a selection from the work of our dear guest.”
    She was twelve, Lidia Markova, and very plain, wearing a white blouse starched within an inch of its life and a navy skirt that hung below her knees. She stood with shoes precisely together, adjusted her red-framed eyeglasses, and patted her hair into place. Serebin could only offer a silent prayer—
please God let nothing embarrassing happen to her
. In a tiny voice, she announced the name of the story, then began to read. “‘In Odessa...’”
    “What?”
    “Speak up, child.”
    “Sorry. ‘
In Odessa
...’”
    “That’s better.”
    “Not too fast, now.”
    Goldbark turned pink.
    “‘In Odessa, even the alleys are crooked. They are very narrow, you can touch the walls of the houses by spreading your arms, and they never go east and west. In Odessa, all the alleys run to the sea.’”
    A good choice, he thought. The first story from the collection
Ulskaya Street,
called “The Cats and the Dogs.” Who had, in the alleys of the city, somehow contrived a truce, an
entente,
going about canine and feline business and essentially ignoring each other. Until, one summer day, a Dutch sea captain had rented a small house near the port and introduced a pampered and mean-spirited cocker spaniel into the neighborhood. It was a good story, people said, about tribes and war and peace, gingerly political, a fable to offend nobody, which was pretty much what you could write in Russia that year.
    “‘“Well, the devil take them all, that’s what I say!”’” Lidia Markova did the voice of Futterman the umbrella salesman in a gruff baritone. “‘“They kept me up half the night!”’”
    Oh how she’d worked at this. Serebin felt it in the heart and, when Tamara Petrovna’s tattered old hound wandered through the story, felt it even more. At the end—it turns out the captain’s dog had belonged to his wife, who had died suddenly. “What could I do?” he says, then sails off to Batumi, never to be heard of again—at the end there was enthusiastic applause and somebody said “Bravo.” Serebin was very gracious as he thanked the girl, taking off his glasses as he did it. For a moment, when he’d finished, Goldbark rested a hand on his shoulder. It couldn’t be put in words, but they had in common this army of the lost and forgotten, had somehow become its officers, and led as best they could.
    The crowd flowed around him, compliments and questions, a misspelled word in a long-forgotten article called to his attention, a question about a book someone else had written, a question about the screenplay for the sequel to
Chapayev,
the famous machine gunner in the tower who fought the White army.
    “A telephone call, Ilya Aleksandrovich.”
    As he worked his way over to the desk with the telephone on it, he saw that the cake was gone, some of it no doubt into people’s pockets. He picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?”
    “Can you meet me outside? Right away?”
    “Who is this?”
    “Kubalsky. Very urgent, Ilya.”
    “All right.”
    “See you in one minute.”
    It was cold outside. Serebin shivered in his jacket and tried to stay dry by standing next to the wall of the tannery. The smell of the place was heavy in the wet air, the smell of a century of hides and carcasses and offal. Growing impatient, he looked at his watch.
Politics. Why in God’s name
... He was staring at the front of the building when the windows blew out. A cloud of dirty smoke, glass and wood and pieces of the IRU