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cat for days. And it was Serebin’s grandfather who wept,
poor soul
. He’d worked his heart out, selling agricultural machinery, for his darling girls, who gave him nothing but grief. In 1917, Malya joined her friends in the Cheka—the most stylish job in town that winter. “God forgive me,” Serebin’s grandfather whispered to him just before he died, “I should’ve gone to America with everybody else.”
    Serebin walked to the edge of the terrace and stared out at the lights on the Asian shore of the city.
A ferry, then a train across the Anatolian steppe to Persia
—he knew what was waiting for him in the lobby of his hotel. When he returned to the table Tamara said, “Hard to believe that your aunt is still alive, after the purges. Most of them disappeared.”
    “They did, but she climbed.”
    “Took part in it, probably.”
    “Probably.”
    “
Had
to.”
    “I would think.”
    The sea mist was clouding Serebin’s glasses. He took them off, pulled a handful of shirt out of his belt, and began to clean the lenses. “Of course, all that who and why business is a
bubbemeisah
.” A story made up for children. “Nobody knows what happened except the people who did it, and if they’re a halfway professional organization, nobody ever will.” He finished his tea, and poured some vodka into the cup.
    “Before you go, Ilya, I want you to see something.”
    The interior of the house had grown in complicated ways over time. Tamara led him to the back, then opened a door to reveal a stairway so narrow he had to turn his shoulders as he climbed. At the top, another door, and a room beneath the eaves, the ceiling slanting sharply down to a single, small window.
A secret room.
At first, Serebin thought he’d never seen it before, then realized it had been worked on. The piles of dusty shutters with broken slats were gone, replaced by a cot covered with a blanket. A battered table and chair had been set below the window, and every board, ceiling, walls, and floor, had been freshly whitewashed. All it lacked, he thought, was the tablet of writing paper and sharpened pencils on the table.
    “Of course you understand,” she said.
    “Yes. Thank you.” It had gotten to him.
    “Perhaps it’s not to be, right away, but who knows, Ilya, the day may come.”
    He couldn’t really answer her. That somebody should want to do this for him, that in itself was refuge. And what more, in this life, could anyone offer?
    He started to speak, but she pounded him gently on the shoulder with the side of her fist.
Oh shut up.
    When Serebin was fourteen, he would swim with his friends off a jetty north of the Odessa docks. The whole crowd, naked and skinny, from the Nicholas I Commercial School of Odessa. Joined, one sweltering August afternoon, by Tamara Petrovna and her friend Rivka. Fearless, they stripped down and dove in and swam way out. Later, lazing on the rocks, Tamara caught Serebin staring at her backside. She picked up a clamshell and heaved it at him—a lucky shot on the nose—Serebin’s eyes ran tears and he got red in the face. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he shouted, hand pressed to his nose. “I’m not even wearing my glasses.”
    The taxi was slow, returning to Beyoglu, the melancholy driver sighed and dawdled in the back streets, lost in a world of his own. Meanwhile, in Serebin’s imagination, the Emniyet agents sitting in the lobby grew angrier and angrier when he didn’t show up, but there was nothing he could do about that.
    In the event, they weren’t there. He reached the hotel after midnight, to find that a note had been slipped under his door. A Russian note, typed on a Cyrillic typewriter, asking if he would be good enough to drop by the office—an address in Osmanli street—in the morning and see Major Iskandar in Room 412. So, for a long night, he was to have the pleasure of thinking about it.
    The desk of Major Iskandar.
Born as conqueror’s furniture in the days of the Ottoman