A Storm in the Blood.
by Jon Stephen Fink.
PART I
NHUMAN CRIMINALS.
One
IN THEIR VILLAGE, the Bermansfelt family had a reputation. Mordechai"s branch of the Bermansfelt line was crazy in its own way, but everyone agreed that the whole squabbling lot of them, going back generations, was crazy in the blood. And so it was that no neighbor in Sasmacken over the age of seven was surprised, one autumn midnight on the Talsen road, when events turned Mordechai Bermansfelt from a clockmaker into a condemned man and his teenage daughter Rivka into a fugitive.In a locality that took a hard att.i.tude toward Jews, the Bermansfelt family"s reputation for unpredictable behavior had one advantage: it shielded them by obscuring their motives beneath a fuzz of gossip. Once, a young Russian army private approached the Bermansfelts" youngest daughter in the street. "Miss, please," he said, a few steps in front of her, bashful in a way that hinted that things might turn nasty if shyness didn"t get him what he was after. That night, a lifetime ago, he was after fifteen-year-old Rivka. "Miss? My friends-they"re laughing at me. They say I"m a coward if I don"t talk to you. Will you stop for a minute?"Rivka smiled, offered him a trace of her own shyness, and kept her pretty mouth closed. She didn"t look down. She didn"t look side to side for help. This encouraged the trooper. "Please, miss, tell me your name," he begged soulfully. From a nearby doorway, his uniformed pals egged him on with catcalls, gestures, insults to his manhood. Rivka stepped backward into the street, holding her smile. When the Russian private made a move to follow her, Rivka flashed him the flat of her hand at the end of her stiff arm. And then she started to sing.Her eyes playful and ferocious above a disconnected smile, she sang: "Nokh eyn tants, beyt ikh itst bay dir...Libster her, ikh bay dir shenk zhe mir nokh eyn tants mir...Ikh hob dik gezukht mayn gants lebn lang...Ists farlir ikh dikh tut mir azoy bang...Bist ge-k.u.mmen tsu shpeyt in meyn glik...Iz shoyn oys, libster her..."
One dance more, I beg of you,Dearest sir, I beg you grant meOne dance more...I searched for you all my life,Now I"m losing you and I"m so sad.My joy lasted only an hour.You came too late,It"s over, dearest sir...
Balodis the grocer, who did regular business with the garrison, kept an eye on things from the doorway of his store. Now he stepped in to salvage the teenage soldier"s dignity. "Don"t get your hands dirty for nothing," Balodis advised him in Russian. "She"s crazier than the limp p.r.i.c.k who dribbled her out."There were times when prejudice worked in the family"s favor.
ANOTHER MEMORY of village life would survive in Rivka like an ancient catfish in murky river water: the face of Sasmacken"s local garrison commander, Colonel Y. M. Orlov, a minor aristocrat who showed genuine creativity when it came to malice and abuse. In this, he followed the proud example of Peter the Great, who had kicked the Swedes out of Latvia a hundred years before and flooded the country with Russian colonists. Where they couldn"t outbreed the natives, the Russians stripped them of their language, laws, and social freedoms. When the Letts objected, they were killed in their thousands, cut down in the streets, chased into freezing rivers, slung into prisons, exiled. Latvian Jews received all this, with the added benefit of not having to leave their houses.Normally, it was beneath the dignity of a Russian officer to pay Jews on time or the agreed price for their work. Or at all. It was a principle of authority, and Orlov was a tower of principle. Unless you could dodge his summons with an attack of hysterical blindness, the smart choice was to accept the offer that glowed like a hot coal inside it.Too fl.u.s.tered to fake blindness, Rivka"s father accepted Colonel Orlov"s commission to build him a mantel clock, in the Louis Quatorze style, as a decoration for his master bedroom. For five months, Mordechai dedicated himself to the job night and day. The finished clock married use to beauty in a stately ceremony of gla.s.s, enamel, bra.s.s, and wood. He delivered it himself, trudging miles out to the manor house for the satisfaction-the physical proof-that he had, thank G.o.d, made it to the end in one piece. His payment? That night Orlov burst in on the Bermansfelts" dinner, swinging the clock in a burlap bag, like a litter of kittens he was going to beat to death. On the floor in front of them, he took his rifle b.u.t.t to the gilded wood and the enamel face and smashed Mordechai"s work to splinters, shouting, "This pile of junk ticks so loud it even keeps the maid awake!"Helpless, ashamed, unhinged, Mordechai retreated to the woodshed after Orlov thundered away on his horse. He stayed there for the rest of the night and late into the next day. After enduring the Russian"s a.s.sault, he needed solitude to remember who he was, to give him strength for the next onslaught. When he finally came inside, his wife, Rebekah, set a cup of tea on the table for him. He sipped some through a sugar cube and asked for a piece of dry toast. After another cup of tea, his family keenly silent around him at the table, Mordechai spoke. The words, like solid things, had formed in his mouth overnight. Out they tumbled: "I know what to do."That was all, and Rebekah let the remark go. She was delighted that her husband wasn"t lying dead in the street or in a jail cell in Riga with his back flayed to raw strips. Her suspicious daughter, though, tried every trick she knew to get him to tell her more-to tell her what he was going to do. Mordechai answered Rivka the same way each time, by touching his finger to his lips, with a little tilt of his head and a sour frown that said, What you see-that"s what I"m doing.Then, one dinnertime, Mordechai wasn"t in his chair at the table. He wasn"t contemplating the cobwebs in the woodshed, either.The minute they knew he was gone, a cry went up and the Bermansfelts fanned out across Sasmacken. The five sons scoured the streets; Rebekah and Sara knocked on neighbors" doors. Rivka searched farther afield, outside the town limits. She looked up into the clear cold sky, its distance and darkness threaded into the world with shadows of tree branches. Some ghostly hand must have touched her shoulder, guiding her along the dark road. It could have been Mordechai"s spirit hand reaching out to her from his hiding place.Rivka bunched her skirts in her determined fist and ran down the Talsen road. Half a mile from Orlov"s manor house, out of breath, she found her father hunkered by the roadside. "Papa?"He ducked behind the nettles and slipped down into a pool of shadows. "Ssh!""If I can see you hiding there, anybody can.""Shush! Watch your voice! What can you see if you"re on a horse? I could be a wild animal in here," Mordechai whispered. He levered himself up again over the lip of the ditch. "You can help me," he told her. "Good." Should a father, turned by Russian barbarity from a master craftsman to a puny slave, expect anything else from blood of his blood?Mordechai crossed to the other side of the road, crouched behind the whitewashed nub of the Talsen milestone. The way she might calm the nerves of a crazy man on a high ledge, Rivka said, "Whatever you"re doing, Papa, it doesn"t look like a good idea.""How do you know?""It scares me.""They don"t expect us to complain. Not in their own language."As she sat and watched, her father looped a coil of thick rope around the stone and anch.o.r.ed it. Then, shuffling sideways, he stepped around her, letting the rope"s length sag and flatten on the road. He kicked earth over it as he crabbed backward, toward a nearby ditch."If you don"t want to help me, do you mind going home? Stay out of the way.""Papa, one minute you were with us in the kitchen, and the next minute-pssht, gone. For all we knew they dropped you down a hole.""That"s the thing we"re facing," he said."Come back with me, will you, Papa?""As usual, I"m the only one with a calm brain. Riveleh, if you"re not going home you have to hide in the ditch. Or go behind those trees.""So you"ll ambush the Russian army," Rivka said, getting the picture. "Yes, all right. Then what?""Not all of them. One or two." Mordechai picked up a rock the size of an orange and dropped it into his coat pocket."One or two?""If I"m lucky.""Then what?""G.o.d knows.""I"ll tell you "then what," Papa. We"ll have to look for you all over again." Then a dose of reality: "I"ll find you, too-in prison or the morgue.""Quiet, please, darling. Here they come."Her freckled fingers sc.r.a.ped back the edge of her shawl. She held still and listened for vibrations in the air. A rhythm of hoof-beats carried down the road. She knew that quick, potent, earth- m.u.f.fled rhythm. It was how the cavalry rode. Her father leaned up to see the single horse and rider cantering toward him from the town.Now the argument turned into a wrenching tug-of-war. Rivka sank her heels into the spongy earth of the ditch bank and leaned back, using her weight to pull the rope out of her father"s hands. Mordechai, caught and struggling, a fish on a line, hissed at her to let go and move out of the way. If her hands could work as quickly as her brain, she still had precious seconds to get her father away from there with no one the wiser. Rivka ran to the milestone and pulled at the knotted rope knuckled around it. She scrabbled at the granite for a handhold. Her fingernails tore; the rope might as well have been carved into the rock. Still seconds, still...Rivka stepped into the road before the thought to do it formed in her head, waving her shawl as a warning. She walked forward, in front of the rope, away from her father"s hideout.Maybe the rider was drunk, or maybe he took the figure waving at him in the road for the shadow of windblown branches as he galloped past. In the same moment that Rivka jumped to safety, Mordechai sprang his trap. The rope snapped up from the ground and caught the animal knee-high, snagged its forelegs, and tipped him over, headfirst.The big chestnut Don rolled to its feet; the Russian officer did not. He lay on his stomach, blood trickling out of a gash in his forehead. Rivka and Mordechai stood over him. "Don"t let him see you, Papa. Go home!" She daubed the wound with the sleeve of her dress."Did I kill him?""Thank G.o.d, no. He"s waking up. Will you go?"Mordechai paced in a small circle, momentarily off-course in a wilderness of his own. The Russian had enough strength in him to raise the upper part of his body. He sat splay-legged in the middle of the road. A faint sign of relief flickered across his face, scratched and bruised as it was, when he realized he wasn"t there alone. "What a tumble I took. Is Kolya hurt very bad?""Your horse?" Rivka asked, one eye on her father, purging the shakiness from her voice."Kolya," he nodded. "His hoof needs a shoe.""Kolya"s fine. He"s by the tree, behind you. See him?" She brushed more of the sweat, dirt, and blood out of his eyes."He"s grazing?" Rivka supported his shoulders as the Russian arched his neck to look. "Kolya"s like me. Eating, always eating."But the Russian couldn"t focus very well on his horse or the tree. And he didn"t see the rock that flashed white-gray when Mordechai pitched it at his head. That spasm of violence shook a yelp out of Rivka and a groan from the Russian, who collapsed sideways on the ground. "What...?" he said to no one, to himself, smearing wet blood out of his eyes with his tunic sleeve. "What happened to me?" He unholstered his revolver, but his aim was wild. The first shot went up into the trees. His second bullet hit the ground an inch from Mordechai"s shoes, splashing chips of rock into the air.Rivka was sure the noise of gunfire could travel on the night air all the way to Sasmacken. "Run," she begged her father, pulling at his arm, dragging him backward away from there.The rest of the Russian"s troop must have been only two minutes behind on the Talsen road. In a blink, they were there: four riders, five, Rivka couldn"t count how many, circling them, shouting questions-and answers too. "What are you doing out here?" "What"s your name?" "Your name, c.u.n.t!" "You"re a terrorist." "Is that what you are?" "Who"s the s.l.u.t?" "Where do you live?" "I know him. That"s the Jew clockmaker..." "Didn"t Colonel Orlov finish with you?" "...from Sasmacken."At the center of a carousel of hooves and boots, flanks and faces, whipping tails, jangling reins, Mordechai snapped out of his trance. He grabbed Rivka"s shoulders and hugged her close to him. His whisper had desperation in it, and sudden strength. "Get away from here.""Not by myself.""Do what I"m telling you. Don"t go home-you have to get to Talsen. It"ll be all right. Go to Jankel. He"ll know what to do for you." Then, to the riders, his arms waving above his head, Mordechai announced, "Yes, yes! I"m Bermansfelt! You and your monkey colonel can go c.r.a.p in your hats!"Rivka felt a shove in her back, and she stumbled through a gap that curtained shut behind her as the whole gang of them fell upon her father. Then she ran. Into the ditch and along it, across the corner of a field, to the pine woods beyond. Two soldiers on horseback chased her, shouting to each other, maddened, laughing, firing their guns up, down, sideways. Wild shots smashed the branches and tree trunks on every side. Charging through the tangled shadows, they couldn"t see what they were shooting at.In the forest, hours later, only a mile from home, Rivka ducked down and tucked in, then slept in the dirt, more lost than hidden.
Two
FOR MOST OF THE NEXT DAY Rivka tore through the forest, slipping on pine needles, dodging from tree to tree at the sound of circling Cossack horse hooves. And when she could think, she thought? Here"s the inescapable reality: Men shatter the world and women run for cover. By oratory and legislation, by custom and impulse, by inborn nature, men lay out choices in the raw for women-just as Rivka"s father did for her on that terrifying night early in October 1910.Clothes torn, running in circles, she made it out of the woods with cuts on her face and arms, a mangled knee, a sprained wrist. At the first farmhouse, Rivka struck lucky. Jews lived there. She was allowed to shelter in a chicken coop for one night. But this was just the first step of ten thousand, and worse luck was on its way.Bad luck sat eating potatoes cooked in pig fat in the squalor of the ramshackle hut she happened across on her second day of hiding. It occupied a corner of a beet field that belonged to two bachelor brothers, farm laborers, Letts, who fed her a bowl of soup and listened, sad-faced, nodding, to her story. "Terrible, terrible," one brother said. The other agreed. "Terrible. You"re a little girl. You tried to stop him. Maybe by now the police know everything and it"s not so bad." He paused. "There"s one sure sign: if they put up a reward to catch you." Brother Number Two barely disguised what he was thinking. "One of us can go find out," he said.Rivka knew that no Yiddish song would work any magic on those boys, and she knew that two against one wasn"t the best odds if she were to try fighting her way to the door. So she went at it another way. "Oh, thank you," she cooed. "Can you go soon? Now?" She wrung a fold of her skirt in her twitching hands, offering them her frailty and fear, which she didn"t need to work very hard to muster. As soon as Brother Number Two left for town, Rivka sneaked out the window. She didn"t stop until she reached Talsen, where her cousin Jankel had a print shop. When he opened the door, she fainted into his thick arms.
FOR A FEW OBLIVIOUS HOURS, she was free. Then she woke up in bed and remembered where she was and why. She sobbed so heavily that Jankel expected to find her tears on his shirtfront pink from blood. And, with that, the storm was over.Now, just as she had faced down the Russian soldier in the street, as she had faced her demented father on the Talsen road, Rivka faced her situation. She told Jankel the news of Mordechai"s one-man uprising against the tsar of Russia. Jankel knew the story already, but he wanted to hear Rivka tell it."I don"t know if he"s alive or dead," she said, her voice losing its steadiness."Somebody will know," said Jankel.Her first question, the only one she asked him, was, "How soon can I go home?""Sleep now. Stay inside. I"ll visit Rebekah."Jankel returned from Sasmacken with hard information. Mordechai was, yes, in prison, and Rivka-his Accomplice in the Attempted Murder of a Russian Cavalry Officer-was sought by the police for questioning. All it had taken was a quarter of an hour one night, a single misbegotten act, to transform her into an enemy of the state.Plain as he could, Jankel told her, "You have to get out of the country."
TRAVEL VOUCHERS, PERMISSION to travel, pa.s.sport, steamship ticket: Jankel forged them all for Rivka. He was a master at it. His underground connections, his network of political friends, spread from the northern borders of Courland down to Riga and beyond. Many of them were members of Liesma, The Flame, a revolutionary gang dedicated, consecrated, to acts of political terror, mainly armed robberies, "exes"-or expropriations, from banks, businesses, private and public wealth. There were Latvians among them, nationalists, communists, some Jews, it was true, but they spoke a language foreign in every other way to young, uprooted Rivka.The underground moved her from village to village, safe house to safe house. She traveled by foot and horse cart. Sometimes she had help avoiding the patrols of Russian gendarmerie and Cossacks; other times she was left to make her way to Riga alone. To comfort herself, she thought of her mother"s eyes, cherishing Rivka across the kitchen or from the bedroom doorway. They were a spiritual blue, and they looked out on the suffering world the same way Rivka"s did. Particles of the deep and clear, unreachable, high atmosphere were embedded in her face.In three days, those eyes were looking out, for the first time, on England.The seventy souls who traveled with Rivka in the hold of the Comet dissolved into the crowd on the quay. People moved in no direction, in all directions, a jumbled ma.s.s with no center. Rivka was shoved along in a dirty, sluggish flow of the dest.i.tute, all struggling with baggage, bundles, children, thirst, hunger, fatigue. In front of her, calling out surnames behind waving hands and scavenging eyes, washing through and past the streams of newcomers in a counter-tide were the Londoners. For a minute, Rivka let the jostling panorama pour in through her steady blue eyes.Jankel had guaranteed that an escort would be there to meet her, but she suddenly doubted that the yellow tablecloth she carried, the bright bundle of donated skirts, blouses, and food put into her hands by her last contact in Riga, would be enough of a marker to single her out.She stood scanning the dockside for her escort"s unfamiliar face. Quick as a squirrel, a young boy, shoeless, dipped out of the horde and made a grab for the bundle at her feet. His fingers hooked the rope that secured it; he avoided her glance, his bead on the kill. He spoke to Rivka in Yiddish. "I"ll take you to Whitechapel, miss. Free lodging. Cheap food, miss."Then, out of the same bulge in the crowd, a man"s hand flew down and slapped at him so hard that the boy"s flat cap jumped from his head. The man spoke to her. "You need to watch out for lads like that one. Even Jews rob Jews. His father, I know him. Birnbaum. He"s a crook, the worst kind. If you give him an inch he"ll steal everything you own, then push you out in the street. Please. My name is Marks." He pointed at the badge on his lapel, which Rivka couldn"t read. "Hebrew Ladies" Protective Society. You arrived alone? On her own, a woman...""Someone is meeting me here," she said."Is he?" Marks looked around, friendly and skeptical. He"d seen women abandoned by husbands, brothers, even fathers on this disorderly dock. Marks gave a nod toward the danger prowling around her, the men lounging at the door of the gin shop. He raised an eyebrow at the shouts slashing across the wharf: "Move that load of s.h.i.t." "s.h.i.t-a.r.s.ed Russos." "Landin" fee. Landin" fee, get me? No money, you row your a.r.s.es back to the boat!""What can happen you don"t want to imagine," he told her. "We have to look out for each other twenty-five hours a day."Rivka was aware of a tall man standing nearby, listening closely, making Marks"s point for him. "If you need a place to sleep I"ll take you to the Temporary Shelter in Leman Street," Marks went on, reaching to take her luggage. "I took some others from Latvia last night. Which boat brought you out?" he asked, carefully polite and cheerful under pressure, offering small talk as part of the service. "You have everything? This way.""Crimp." A curse, in English. Behind it, the tall man stepped clumsily into Marks"s way, blocking him with his body and brute intention. "Give me the bag.""So you can steal it? No!" Marks answered with a sharp look up. He came up to the tall man"s chest. "This lady is under my protection. The safety...She"s under the safety of the Hebrew Ladies" Protective Society.""I can get twenty badges from the same place you got yours." The insult lit red fires in the patches of skin above Marks"s beard. The tall ruffian kept at it, looked Rivka in the face and said, "Stay away from this shundiknik. He"ll knock you on the head and sell you to men for two shillings a time.""You see? This is what I"m telling you," Marks cried out, runty arms flung up, indignant, exasperated. "They swarm in, men like him. Prowlers. To rob you. They steal from other Jews. It"s repulsive. I know the Chief Rabbi," he shouted to keep his attacker off. "I"m an official." But when Marks bent over to pick up Rivka"s luggage, a savage kick in the ribs spilled him onto the ground."He didn"t deserve that, did he?" Rivka demanded an answer."He must have," said the man, meaning, Yes, of course he did-it was what happened to him. His eyes were mild when he spoke to her, and possessive. His message was simple: Rivka"s business, from here on, was his business. "Look for the yellow," he told her as he stooped to grab ahold of the eye-catching bundle. Then he turned to Marks with a warning: "She has friends here." He delivered a vicious slap to Marks"s face. "Liesma. You understand?"
Three
BEHIND HIS BACK, friends and strangers alike called her escort the Limper. Joseph Sokoloff, nicknamed Yoska. The crippled right thigh, the pits and sores on his skin, the black and broken teeth, the thick waist and legs, the extra weight he himself called his "cow belly"-whatever his body did to attract his attention, Yoska ignored it. Or else, too conscious of his impression on strangers (especially attractive strangers like Rivka), he hemorrhaged conversation to take the spotlight off of his flaws.Rivka"s guide through Cable Street kept ahead of her, even with his wide-gaited limp. His torso swiveled with each step he took, left foot planted, right foot dragging behind, so that he seemed to be forcing himself permanently uphill. To make up for it, he set a quicker pace, swerving through the buyers and sellers, cornering around the stalls, through the Yiddish and c.o.c.k ney hurly-burly of market voices. The first time Rivka heard the English language, it reached her ears as a cascade of exotic confusion.Wot"s yer game, eh?...no bloomin" good."No bloomy good,"" Rivka mimicked. "What does it mean?""Very bad." Yoska gave the bundle a shake, craned it out at the end of his long arm, and tested the weight. "You didn"t leave with much, did you?""Not even my own clothes," she said. "My father is in prison. Did Jankel tell you that?"Sympathy and concentration pursed Yoska"s lips. "I don"t know any Jankel." His smile turned that lie into an intimate joke. "Did he tell you about me? My name?""My cousin told me the name of the boat. That"s the only thing he told me.""I"m Yoska," he said without looking at her. "I can fix you up with anything here. Anything you want.""How soon can I go home?" she asked him."I"m like you. Always I"m thinking about the future."She was here and her father was there; everybody she knew was there; those were the facts. So Rivka gave in to a more useful worry. "What can I do? I have to work.""What did you do at home? For money, straight pay.""Bakery.""We know a good place. A restaurant. All of us go there.""I can carry plates."The first broad street Yoska navigated, Rivka in tow, could have been lifted from a town in Latvia and set down across the North Sea. Shops announced their existence and purpose with black-and-white signs in English and Hebrew letters. A fried-fish shop, a rag-and-bone yard, a cabinet maker"s, a coffeehouse, and more than one hole-in-the-wall restaurant, each with its own advertising scent hovering around the door. Hot oil, mildew, sawdust, frying onions, crusty toast, smoked herring. They walked past spreads of fruits and vegetables that topped the wooden market stalls with color and ap.r.o.ned the sooty brick of the buildings. Among them, too, white chickens dangled by their feet, pink meat leaked blood, gutters clogged with slops and dribbled with ooze that spread to the street, where it clung to pa.s.sing boots and shoes.Down those close dogleg turns, Rivka had the feeling of descending into Whitechapel. The streets felt close with human noise. Shouts for food, shouts of buying and selling goods and labor, shouts to the wild children from women who sat in chairs on the street, the sharp rattle of high wheels on the cobblestones when carriages and carts hauled by, all of it stole her attention. Occasionally, Yoska would break off from something he was saying to point out a landmark important for finding your way around the crooked turnings and hive of courtyards. The blind sprawl groped in a hundred different directions, with no guiding hand except necessity.Whitechapel"s buildings rose out of the pavement, darkly. A rind of soot held them together. In places, they grew out of each other, the way ancient trees throw down branches that somehow take root. Bridges connected floors across alleys, built with junk, zigzagging sideways, upward, into a tower of corners. Filth, two feet thick, caked into a sediment on the slanted tin roofs. Garbage slopped from upper windows, from the upper storeys, piled up in layers of fish and meat bones, rags, old boots, broken plates, G.o.d knows what. She looked up, through the shambles. Above her, Rivka could only see squares of anemic cloud. Any brightness that wasn"t stopped by the rooftops thinned to nothing at ground level, where the bone-colored light was soaked up by shadows that webbed every entrance and exit. Her new world.Sensing Rivka"s mood, Yoska said, "Keep your eyes open. Plenty of opportunities here." It was good advice; her comrade was eager to help her because her exploit commanded respect. A Cossack killer! She was a friend from the first minute. Yoska stole glimpses of her walnut-brown hair, her freckled hands and throat, the slow, soft contours of her face. And to top it off-Yoska believed Jankel on this score-she was a sc.r.a.pper, a fugitive, ambusher of Russians. Over here, he would be the protector, she the protected. Who"d say it was bragging to rea.s.sure Rivka that she was in the care of a seasoned revolutionary?"It"s been quiet in London," he said. "I like it better that way. What I do, I use my brains.""You can write down the address of the restaurant?""Sure, of course. We call it Shinebloom"s. I"ll introduce you to the manager tomorrow morning."Their hour-long walk from Tilbury brought them to a wall at Commercial Road. The onrush of motor traffic stopped them as hard as if they"d come to the bank of a wild river. Held off by an unbroken, unbreakable stir of hansom cabs, coaches, motor-omnibuses, and motor cars, they watched for a chance to cross. A block away, the flow thickened and pooled. Pedestrians colonized the pavement, pa.s.sengers climbed down from the omnibuses and out of the flapping square doors of coaches and automobiles, their heads and hats bobbing in the crush. From where Rivka stood, it all resembled a stretch of bubbling black water disturbed by the wind.This was not the stunned scramble of refugees who landed with Rivka at Tilbury Docks; here the crush moved with the purpose of the city. Perched on the curb she watched Englishmen parade along Commercial Road-tight-mouthed pa.s.sengers behind the upright windows of broughams, distantly distracted pedestrians, frock-coated gents whose habits maintained the nation. Look how the English move. Steady steps. No fear in their faces, and, less than a mile from where their steamships arrive and depart, is the underworld.Yoska took her hand and stepped out into traffic. In his dusty brown overcoat, he stretched his arm and flipped his free hand upward, broad and pale, a.s.sertive. The drooping green snout of a motor-taxi dipped as the driver braked and gave them time to cross.At least here I"ll see no Cossacks, Rivka reminded herself. No Russian officers. She was living in this place now; her feet stood planted in Great Britain. A momentum just starting to build had conveyed her here. Look behind, Rivka thought, and see the life this driving pulse had outrun. Latvia was expunged. Sasmacken. Riga. Zalenieku. Druza. Tirzas. Libau. The curbstones beneath her feet were London curbstones. The overcast sky, English sky.
Four
UNDER A Ca.n.a.lSIDE STRETCH of the Parisian sky, shadowed by the same pale gray weather that comforted Rivka on her walk across the East End, Peter Piatkow sat on a borrowed cafe chair with his half-eaten lunch, a bowl of potato soup, going cold in his lap. A rocky motion, a watery b.u.mp and shove in his organs, told Peter he was drifting into a crisis.He focused his eyes on the ca.n.a.l with keen purpose, even as he fought to forget what the purpose was. His mind quieted. In disturbed patches, the dull green water was flecked, fish-scaled, with daylight. Just then the thought occurred to him: this is how an animal or insect sees it, liberated from ideas, a liberation you don"t need violence to win for yourself. In fact, in that slipping s.p.a.ce of time, Peter won it with the opposite of violence.A moment at rest. Beside this water with its chaotic reflec tions, he felt himself floating free of morality, accomplishment, history, comradeship, the good fight, every one of civilization"s hall-of-mirrors illusions, with nothing required of him anymore except to be present. For this blank ecstasy. Now here"s a revolutionary hope, such democratic purity: any pair of eyes can watch the glimmering water in the Ca.n.a.l St. Martin at lunchtime on an overcast day and partake of the same single truth about the world. Start again from there.Our substance is all particles and vibrations; that"s how the world is, always was, its changeless natural shape. Who lays it bare and tells us, dares us, to open our eyes and look? Who is the epoch"s authentic genius of material existence, the visionary who sees through the confusion of human interference down to the heart of things?Peter settled the matter in a whisper to himself. "Brother Claude." Monet before them all, he decided, silently completing the argument. Where Monet is, movement comes to rest.A memory of one of the artist"s Waterloo Bridge paintings swirled through Peter"s thoughts. Blue factories in the distance huffing out blue and brown smoke, haze everywhere you look, the unifying world-haze, people and the things they make embedded in it. The haze connects everybody and everything. There they are, crossing the bridge in daily migration, the caravanserai of human traffic reflected on the surface of the Thames, while the river, its dumb nature and substance, sloughs underneath. Monet framed it on his canvas, the hidden fact of London-or Paris or Riga or Moscow-movement you can"t boil down to a political slogan. If I stood on the embankment of the Thames, Peter went on thinking, wherever Brother Claude had set up his easel, I"d see exactly what he saw.Peter"s mental freedom was a fast-fading sensation; to take stock of his trouble, he had to clear his head and think, think, think. Was that, after all, the reason he quit Ma.r.s.eilles and came back to Paris? For a holiday from agitation? From informers? Maybe there was nothing he could do about it; his calmness attracted agitators from every direction. Even so, at times here, when he was blandly employed, Peter missed the activity, or noticed its sharp absence...One thought one minute, contradicted by the next in the next! Never troubled by doubt before, now he felt it every morning when he woke up, a plunge of ice water in his stomach. And after he slumped out of bed to get dressed, the fit of his clothes was wrong, the trim of his beard, the name he went by. Today he forgot he disliked potato soup; it usually reminded him of the paste he used to hang wallpaper.Along with everything else in the world-haze, somewhere, something had to be solid and certain. In London, just a couple of years ago, it was in Jubilee Street, in the smoky air of the Anarchist Club. To the police, it was a heathen temple, rat"s nest, alien outpost, turbulent mosque. Peter"s crowd. But he had dodged the thundering proclamations, kept out of the debate. Those spiel-ers with the lung power and lack of inhibition who promised to deliver a new world minus the imperialism...which meant minus the imperialists, their friends, allies, and beneficiaries...which meant the ruling cla.s.s, merchant cla.s.s, and counterrevolutionaries among the working cla.s.s on every continent, anywhere those sickening bedbugs could be flushed from cover, denounced, eradicated!Oh, yes?What about booting the Russians out of his homeland? If it took revolution in Russia to free Latvia, then Peter swam with the revolutionaries, his heart swollen with joy. Many times a special guest at the Anarchist Club, he had just as clear a purpose: to paint backdrops for the occasional skits and plays they put on and, while he was there, to demonstrate how to manufacture, plant, and detonate a nitroglycerin bomb. Anarchist entertainments.Among the comrades, those sc.r.a.ppers, one man recognized who Peter was, separate from what he"d done. A friend. He was still in London, calling himself Gardstein now, George Gardstein. "Karl," Peter said out loud."Monsieur?" Looking at him slouched there by the ca.n.a.l, M. Bra.s.saud, the patron of the corner cafe and rightful owner of the chair underneath Peter, softened his voice but not his irritation. What satisfaction would arm-swirling rage get him from this slumped heap of surrender? Besides which, the gloss of sweat on Peter"s forehead in the cool air made the patron wonder if the man was ill. "Monsieur, the chair. Give it back to me."Peter hauled himself to his feet and picked up his tool bag. It rattled with his collection of brushes and tins of turpentine.Behind him, Peter heard Bra.s.saud grab up the chair and grumble, "Next time maybe you"ll order an aperitif so I can retire."Only half a block away, in rue des Vinaigrieres, waited the afternoon"s job, repainting the door of a dress shop. The owner hired Peter on recommendation-not as a survivor of torture or escapee of Russian jails, not in honor of a veteran in the revolutionary underground; the dressmaker was no sympathizer. She hired him on a Frenchman"s good word. Peter"s last employer, a tailor in Montparna.s.se, had high praise for his talents with brush and paint, especially Peter"s skill at outlining street numbers in a second color. "Oh, he"s intelligent," the tailor said of him, "but he"s a good worker."
ON THE MONEY he was earning, Peter could afford to maintain just one address, so he made it a habit to eat in different bistros in different quarters of the city. He always waited for an aisle seat close to the door. If, pa.s.sing the bread, anyone haphazardly asked personal questions, or came at him snuffling like a pig after truffles, in each place Peter gave them a different story. His tablemates believed they were enjoying the company of Alois or Paul, a plasterer from Alsace-Lorraine or, vaguely, "the South," not a foreign radical in the crosshairs of the secret police. With the limbs of a runner and a laborer"s muscles, he could still run fast if he had to, though lately a thickening at his belly and hips had become noticeable, and not only to Peter. At twenty-seven, could he already be a middle-aged man?Peter kept his table talk brief and common in these neighborhood restaurants. He spoke a smooth French, barely accented, solid Russian, convincing German and Yiddish, clear English. In Le Barricou d"Or he was known as a native of Ma.r.s.eilles, and in Chez l"Ami he was Tomas Peter, a Swiss-German chemistry teacher. Around the Marais, where shopkeepers and waiters knew him as Paul Pavloff or Peter Schtern, he pa.s.sed as a Jew.And it was to the Marais that Peter strolled for his dinner after he finished work in rue des Vinaigrieres. Stepping from the street into La Roulante des Rosiers, he always imagined entering the hold of a barge. Eight or ten tables with their pairs of benches crammed the narrow room, as if leaving s.p.a.ce for full-grown customers were an afterthought. By early evening, La Roulante"s ancient tile floor wore a layer of tobacco ash, glued to it here and there by precious sloppings of soup or wine.You"d think, by looking at the couple dozen men and women eating and drinking there, that they"d come there together for some celebration, singing at the table on the right, loud conversation on the left. Across the narrow gangway, two old men growled through a folk song about English knights-Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, goutons voir si le vin est bon...An old woman with a bandaged foot dragged herself from friend to acquaintance to stranger, begging a loan of twenty-five centimes to get her coat out of hock...a red-headed Italian girl leaked tears as she finished reciting a poem about suicide...at the end of Peter"s table, a quarrel broke out between a bricklayer and a carpenter over whose work is harder on a man"s health. And at Peter"s elbow, a pair of prost.i.tutes resigned themselves to their luck, advising each other not to expect any trade within ten streets of des Rosiers, it being the start of the workweek; all the men with money to throw at pleasure were in better neighborhoods, where anyway the compet.i.tion between streetwalkers was cutthroat...Tumult all around, communication with the kitchen reduced to gestures and glances, intricately understood by everyone-Another pitcher here! Plate of chops! The pool of human noise ringed Peter like a moat and he sat placidly in the middle of it. These things, he thought, the human body"s burdens and pleasures, aren"t touched by revolution...Meals at La Roulante had another advantage: his vegetarian diet didn"t rouse any real curiosity. The waiters a.s.sumed that Peter avoided meat on account of his nearly empty pockets; when he found work, the five francs a day had to stretch to cover rent, food, clothes (and his laundry, postage, and sometimes travel), common costs to workers like him. One difference between him and the others was that they bought the minimum of food to save their money for the maximum of drink.The truth was, his plate of cooked carrots and parsnips, beet soup, bread, and cheese satisfied Peter in a way not much else did these days. He ate, head down, not entirely in self-defense, every now and then glancing slowly at the people around him. One glance, the seat opposite was vacant; the next it was filled by a young man in cheap but laundered clothes and a black peaked cap slouched a la mode on one side of his blond head. Peter had noticed him earlier, hovering at the door with an eager appet.i.te. Now, between bites, Peter made the mistake of looking Black Cap in the face, which gave the-what was he? a student?-an opening to ask if there was anything on the menu that the cook didn"t ruin."The beet soup is good," Peter said."It looks good. You recommend it?""If you like the taste of beets," Peter said, leaning over his bowl.Black Cap went on. "Looks like more of a vegetable stew," he said, to no reply. He tried again. "What about the chops? Are they lamb or pork?""Haven"t tried them."Black Cap rose halfway out of his seat to get madame"s attention. "They"re probably horse." He signaled his order to her, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "She serves everything burned, looks like. Your soup and, what have you got there-carrots? That"s smart."Peter threw a glance toward the door. "Meat"s no good for my stomach.""No? You don"t eat it?""No.""Only vegetables, that"s interesting. And fruit?""That"s right.""Vegetables and fruit. Clean food, good for the stomach. You can trust her not to burn the carrots, anyway.""They"re boiled.""Does she fish them out in time?" He ignored Peter"s silence and plunged ahead. "You"re right, meat"s heavy on your insides. I should have ordered the beet soup.""It"s the best thing she makes," Peter said."You can look forward to healthy years on that kind of food." The room noise swamped him, so Black Cap repeated the point."Yes.""Good food, good life. Bad food...Maybe it"s better not to be born at all." He abandoned the thought behind an apologetic wave. "Sorry. No politics in here.""That"s not politics. It"s philosophy." Peter reached down the table for the loaf of bread and accidentally knocked the arm of the working girl sitting next to him. "Pardon me."She returned his smile, with genuine sweetness. "I"m no peach. A little tap won"t bruise me."As his plate of chops was pa.s.sed along to him, Black Cap picked up his conversation with Peter again. "No, I"ll order the soup and carrots next time, if it"s as good as you say. Does she ever make it with cabbage and sour cream, a la russe?"Maybe the boy was lonely. His accent wasn"t Parisian. His stab at sociability struck Peter as forced and clumsy. Maybe Black Cap was slumming. Or was he a police informer? Callow, open, curious, harmless, the kind of personality that"s attractive to the Surete, not to mention the okhrana; Russian secret policemen, even more than French ones, fall head over heels for appealing characters like him, and they pay better...that is, when they can"t blackmail or threaten the family at home. Either way, the okhrana can turn callow boys into poisonous rats overnight. Peter offered him a smile, lifting his gla.s.s, taking a last sip of wine. Is this Black Cap trawling for radicals, he wondered, or is he sitting here because I"m here?Peter leaned close to the working girl, whispered to her, "Can you come with me?" Then he abandoned his spoon in the half-empty soup bowl and got up to pay."What," said Black Cap, "can"t trust the cooking after all?""You have it."The cashier was madame"s baby-faced, gray-skinned older sister, who also kept a droll eye on the regulars. "They get what they want here, don"t they?" he observed.She shrugged. "Everybody comes back.""You"re lucky. You hear the voice of the people."She agreed. "One franc, twenty centimes."Outside, in the street, the girl told Peter her name was Claudette."Is it?" Peter said."If you want to ask for me next time."She took his hand and started to lead him around the corner. He told her his name was Paul, offering his arm to lead her back the other way. "No," she said, digging in her heels. "My room is over here.""I want to get out of the Marais." Camouflaged with you on my arm, he could have told her, as a strolling couple in the boulevard crowd.Under her reddish curls, the girl gave him a sly look. "How long will you take?""You should come home with me," Peter bargained. "I want you for the whole night.""I"m your extravagance, is that it?""If you"ve got the money it"s no extravagance. Come home with me.""Where?""Montparna.s.se.""Too far, too long. No. I work here. It"s near my room and I don"t have to pay for the Metro.""I"ll buy your ticket. And one for the return.""But my hotel"s so close.""Your pimp, too, I"ll bet.""I work for myself," she lied."You can decide, then. How much would you earn on a Monday?""If I go somewhere else tonight how will I know?""Whatever it is, you can make just as much, more even, in Montmartre, around there, Montparna.s.se. My neighborhood.""I don"t think so. Why?""You"re much, much prettier than the girls I see walking the Marche every day. You know who I mean, the ones at the fountain. Something shines out of your face, believe me. You could be an artist"s model."She stood back from him and gave Peter the kind of look she got from men a hundred times a day. His workman"s clothes (hectically stained), his clunking tool bag, his fingers flecked, dirtied with white, green, black, and guessed Peter"s angle. "You want me to work for you!""No!""Are you Arab," she kidded him, "or Corsican?" Peter jerked his face away from her hand. He shook his head, a signal for her to read: he"d stop talking until she stopped clowning. "You can take those lightning bolts out of your eyes," she said."I"m not angry at anybody.""Good." She slipped her hand back into the crook of his arm. "You"ve got artists for friends, then?""Yes.""Famous ones?""Notorious.""Who? Who"d pay me? How much?""Two or three francs for a couple of hours. I think that"s the going rate. With food and drink thrown in. Drink, for sure.""I can make the same here," she said. The slight wobble in her voice made Peter doubt that was true."Can you keep it? Some? Any? How much?" He made his proposal with earnest charm. "What you might earn tonight in the Marais, gamble it against what you might make tomorrow in Montparna.s.se, for work that won"t make you an old woman before you"re thirty.""I won"t be an old woman.""A face in a painting doesn"t age," Peter suggested gently. Then he replaced pretty persuasion with ironclad facts. "Anyway, it won"t stop you from making money however you want.""Are you an artist, Paul? You talk like one.""Yes. I paint."
Five
WITH THE PAVEMENT of Montparna.s.se under his boots, Peter"s tension drained out of him. It trickled down from his neck, through his arms, and from his hands. Up the steps of the Metro, Peter"s walk slowed with a looseness in his limbs. He didn"t say a word to the girl for the whole ride from Saint-Paul to Pigalle, but not because the judder and rattle of the carriage would have forced him to shout; at each stop, Peter silently watched the ones who got onboard, where they sat or stood. Between stations, he kept his head down.Once they had turned the corner of rue Danville, he livened up. He was this woman"s escort and scout, pointing out local characters by the nicknames he"d given them: Treasure Trove, an old woman who trawled the gutters for lost jewelry...The Flies, a trio of young women, gaily drunk, usually singing, none of them ever spotted on her own...The Monument, an ex-army officer in his frayed uniform, medals on display, who planted himself outside the cemetery in the morning and in the Cafe Sebastopol at night, delivering patriotic speeches and entertaining the clientele with his own lewd verses of the national anthem...They were all out on the street tonight: The Pygmy, Didier"s Egg, Madame Aubergine..."No sign of The Amorous Pinhead," Peter said, turning his key in the door. "Maybe we"ll see him at breakfast."Even with the light from the landing, she couldn"t see very far into his small room, and disobeyed him when he told her to wait outside until he switched on the bedside lamp. Her foot made contact with something that collapsed when she kicked it. A splash of electric lamplight showed her she"d knocked over a stack of unframed watercolors. Stepping over them, she said, not exactly surprised, "You didn"t lie to me."Except for the brushes soaking in jars and a collection of tins and little boxes, Peter kept his place tidy. Her eyes slid onto a panel of freshly hung wallpaper next to the bed, the same brown floral pattern that covered the other walls."It was shabby. If I can fix something, I don"t stand on ceremony," Peter said. "I"m working my way around the room." He picked up one of his paintings to show her, a small still life of flowers in a blue-and-white vase. Daisies, b.u.t.tercups, scarlet poppies, the air of summer.Peter"s girl admired it with a musical hum. Each one he handed to her won the same reply-his street scenes, landscapes, one of a pond and water lilies, which he told her outright was his amateur copy. "Don"t ask me." She shrugged. "Art should be pretty. Your paintings are pretty, so they"re good.""You think so, Claudette? They"re "pretty"?"In the teeth of a lecture on the beaux arts, she unb.u.t.toned her short jacket and then her blouse. Her bare shoulders had gentle power in them; the curve of her thighs, the youth of her skin, the rude tufts of hair in her armpits acted on Peter. He caught the sharp scent of her when she raised her arms to untie her hair.A roughhouse shove tipped Peter backward across the bed. The girl bent to untie his shoes, slipped them off his feet, then lay next to him. Before he could frame a correct thought about fair wages for streetwalkers, modeling for artists, or anything else, her mouth was on his, his hands on her hips. The moment sank into its physical purity, the same stuff as the shimmer of light on the ca.n.a.l, slipping past him as fast as Peter could grope for a hold on it. From the taste of her mouth, his attention slid to the sight of her wide shoulders and small b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the soft angles of her face, until his pleasure took solid form as she arched her back and pushed herself against him and stayed there awhile, long enough to grind the spinning wheel of his senses into a fixed memory.As if a shade had rolled down on daylight and raised on night, after a sleep that could only have lasted ten minutes, Peter opened his eyes on the settled state of things. Paris went on without any need for him to be there. The girl stood near the bed, pulling her blouse on but leaving it unb.u.t.toned. She grabbed a rag off the floor, one Peter used for his watercolor brushes, and asked if she could use it to wash herself."There"s a cleaner one somewhere. On the other table, the round one, right side of the door."But she"d already poured water from the jug into the bowl on the wash stand and dropped the rag in. She wrung it out and squatted to rinse between her legs."I have to ask you for money, cheri."Peter switched on the light. Her face looked rougher than it did half an hour before. Drained, lined. He wondered how he"d paint her if he had the talent for portraits. If anything, his paintings were a record of his limitations. "On the dresser there"s a porcelain dish."He heard her fingers tickle through the coins. "You don"t have enough here," she said over her shoulder."Try the drawer." A foraging animal rummaged through his things. She picked over the useless bits and pieces, his keys, pocket knife, cuff links, collar b.u.t.tons, a scatter of centimes. "Come back to bed," he said. His hope was that she"d hear it as a cozy invitation, not a plea. His hope quickly guttered."I can"t tonight, mon cheri, no," still digging for loose change. "You said you"d give me my fare, too."For the Metro home to the Marais. Peter turned over in bed, his back to her. "Take whatever you want." Then he turned around again to say, "You can take all the money you can find."She told him straight, "I"m not staying.""Who knows who you could meet tomorrow? Delaunay has his studio a few streets from here."She spelled out what should have been obvious to Peter all along. "I don"t want to be a model. I can"t sit still. See?" And she was up again, doing up her b.u.t.tons and hunting Peter"s room like a child on a scavenger hunt."Please yourself." He shrugged, retreating.If it was a game, the girl concentrated on it with a seriousness that narrowed her eyes. She riffled his coat and trouser pockets, clutched a few more coins. A single uncomplicated idea guided her from one likely cache to the next. He wanted her to leave.Her haul couldn"t have added up to more than a few francs. After she"d counted it, she said, "I lied. There"s a man. His name is Jojo. He"ll hurt me if I stay away." It was a practical worry, not a moral one. She gave him the information without complaint or appeal in her voice.Peter didn"t say another word to her. He rolled onto his side, kept his back to her, and switched off the light. When he heard her footsteps tap their way down the stairs, he got up and locked his door.A few weeks later, he saw the girl on the corner near La Roulante. By the look of her friend standing with her, the way he gripped her wrist, Peter figured he wasn"t a customer. Jojo, her protector. Across the street, she recognized Peter but gave him no friendly sign. Instead she pointed him out to Jojo as Peter headed for, then avoided, the restaurant.He told himself he had nothing to repent. He hadn"t lied to her that night. No, he would have done his best to find a Montmartre artist for the lady to charm. Even so, he thought, I"m a hypocrite, a dolt, for trying to tantalize her. Shiny blandishments. Isn"t that their tactic, the favorite argument of the comrades he hated? A beautiful future is waiting for us if we survive a little hardship, some mutilation maybe, or the occasional unspeakable atrocity. It turned out, a street wh.o.r.e"s realism was stronger than his.Peter roasted himself under his breath. "You child." And he thought back to himself as a boy, adventuring up and down the Talsen meadows, watching patrols of Russian soldiers march by. In childhood, he was as innocent of the persecution, kidnappings, public hangings, and routine savagery as he was of the armed resistance he"d lead against them. His robberies, murders, and jailbreaks hovered in the future along with Russian reprisals-pliers taken to his fingernails, the freezing cell, starvation, beatings, the shattering echo of firing squads, endured for the rumor of a golden tomorrow scheduled to dawn on the first day of revolution in Russia.So there it was, the cloudy turbulence Peter felt inside his skull: firm ideas crumbling to powder. To find a solid foothold, start again from the fundamentals, like a child, begin with childish questions.When does the future start? Where does the sky?
Six
WITH THE ELAN of a stage magician, Charles Perelman swirled his black sombrero and matching cloak onto the coatrack, singing a sweet air of apology to Rivka. He"d meant to be at the docks to meet her, he would have been out and home again in five minutes, never mind, it could wait, G.o.d"s truth, nothing was more of a pleasure than being there to welcome Yoska"s friend himself the minute she arrived. Yoska wasn"t with her? "Good, good." He wanted her to himself, Rivka supposed, sniffing a rivalry there."Mrs. Perelman made me a cup of tea.""As she should." Charles Perelman"s healthy brown hair defied age; his wide-set Spanish-looking eyes, black as a doe"s, defeated suspicion. Even when he said the most innocent things with a conspiratorial wink, like a man who expected his words to convey double or triple meanings.In the tiny entryway of his Wellesley Street terraced house, Perelman squeezed around the heap of coats and shoes and formally presented himself to Rivka, bestowing kisses on her cheek, left, right, left again. For a few seconds, a trace of eau de cologne hung like a velvet drape around them."Deborah!" Perelman shouted up the stairs. "Deborah! Come down and visit!" But his wife remained an irritated answering voice in some distant part of the house. His children, though, roamed down the stairs and out of other rooms in ones and twos. A tribe of six, evenly divided between boys and girls. In the middle of directing the brewing of more tea, slicing of bread, ordering pots of jam and honey, Perelman conducted her along the hallway.Rivka felt a touch on her shoulder and Perelman lowered his voice. Its sound was as warm as a cello thrumming directly into her ear. "You came to us from Russia?""My family, they"re in Sasmacken.""Courland. I know Libau." He nodded, registered Rivka"s answer, carried on. "Where you bagged your Cossack.""Is that what I did? All I did was run away."Perelman studied Rivka"s face. "Yoska"s friends, you"ve met them?""Not yet. You will. The Guardsteins have a lot of friends from Courland. Wonderful people, the best." He paused. He spoke. "Rivka, I work in my own way. Special Branch know me. Sometimes they post men in the street outside. If they want to, they can pack me in a crate and ship me to Russia. Back there, they"ll hang me for "crimes"-can you believe it?-socialist crimes."Delusion, bravado, half-truth, justified fear, a mixture- whatever the deeper reality, Perelman took pains to display himself as a man in the thick of antigovernment struggle."You don"t have to tell me your business.""Be aware of things while you"re living with us. That"s all I"m saying. A small piece of information in the wrong ear, it"s not so healthy." A piece of gentle advice that came wrapped around (was she hearing clearly?) a not-so-gentle threat. Followed by a smile, followed by a friendly squeeze of Rivka"s shoulder, followed by a bow delivered with a maitre d"s sincerity.Perelman showed Rivka to the room he rented out at the rear of his ground floor. It was a stuffy place, narrow as a rowboat, windowless and cramped by wooden packing crates. Under Perelman"s energetic direction, Rivka slid them against the walls and cleared enough floor s.p.a.ce for him to lay down a single horsehair mattress. With eyes closed, how much s.p.a.ce does a body need?"Do you enjoy looking at art?" Whether she did or didn"t wasn"t going to make a difference. Her landlord slid a canvas out of the s.p.a.ce behind the table that occupied most of the room. "What do you think?" He held the work of art at chest height for Rivka to appreciate.The painting, his visionary work, was hideous. A collision of ferocious colors and slabs of h.e.l.lish night. Three dozen terrified Jews running wildly from houses, all at the mercy of Cossack marauders. Splintered furniture, heaved out of windows, lay piled in the streets. Another dozen Jewish victims hanging by their necks from lampposts."Does it have a t.i.tle?" Rivka"s eyes moved from lynching to bonfire, Cossack devil to wind-splayed trees, while she stretched her mind to imagine what artistic name you"d give to an orgiastic eruption of inhumanity.Perelman announced it to her, and to posterity: "Pogrom in Minsk. You see how the colors-""The red and yellow. They"re very expressive.""Exactly, exactly," he said and lowered his broad behind onto the bottom corner of the mattress. "A touch of Turner. Painting"s a holiday from my photography." He waved at the gla.s.s bottles, the source of the chemical odors hanging in the air. "I wouldn"t give those "portraits." They"re just records I make of people"s faces."Perelman crossed his legs and steadied the painting between his knees. "The Rothschilds bought one of mine, exactly the same." For another hour he kept her awake with his account of the Rothschild family"s personal crusade to rescue him from the tsarist torture cells. Then he kindly left her to sleep.
THE NOISE OF Perelman"s children playing and squabbling leaked in through the walls, as Perelman"s voice and heavy footsteps retreated upstairs."Deborah? Deborah! I"m going out at six o"clock," Perelman said.Deborah replied, "To photograph?""Yes. No. Yes. Why?""Because are you eating?""How can I eat with this noise?""You can"t live without eating.""Why do you think I"m going out?"Shut in her rented room, in exile from the happy racket of home life, Rivka listened to the children"s voices, a dozen feet scuffing the floor, dishes, pots, pans clattering, taps running, doors slamming. The same noises she left in Sasmacken. A picture formed in her mind: her sisters and brothers collected around the table, her mother ladling soup and dumplings into seven bowls, not the usual nine. Minus hers and minus Mordechai"s.Another picture crowded in: her father in his prison cell, where he squatted on wet straw, sleepless, beyond avail, ripped from the heart of his family. The daughter ached the father"s ache. He must be suffering over the misfortune he"d delivered her into; he must sit awake, tortured by the thought of his brave Riveleh curled under a thin blanket in a filthy room somewhere out of reach, out of his sight, all because of the trouble he stirred up. She longed to comfort him as much as he must long to reach across the North Sea to find her and comfort her, slumped against the wall of his cell, the world shrunken to the worry of whether his next stop was going to be the hangman or the firing squad.Beside the bare mattress, Rivka shimmied down through four layers of skirts to relieve herself into the chamber pot Perelman"s boy had bashfully ferried to her from another part of the house. No one told her where to go to empty it. As she stared down at the clear, warm, human-smelling soup, Perelman"s son Carlusha bustled in through the door, his father"s miniature and emissary as master of the house. He balanced a pitcher of warm water in a cracked china bowl and told Rivka she could use them for washing. On the cane chair, he dropped a folded cloth and the remains of a bar of soap. Either Carlusha didn"t hear her ask about the sanitation arrangements or he was too shy to answer the question; in the next second, eyes averted, he was gone.By yellow gaslight, Rivka scrubbed her face, brushed her hair. She would make herself attractive in London the same way she did at home.
Seven
TRUE TO HIS WORD, Yoska collected Rivka at Perelman"s house next morning. "We"ll stop before Shinebloom"s restaurant. Five minutes, that"s all."Together they must have been a sight: the Limper, six foot four inches of him, with five-foot-two Rivka in tow, strolling across Whitechapel to Karl"s flat in Gold Street."Nina will feed you, don"t worry," Yoska prepared her. "Then she"ll tell you to wipe your mouth. Real fussy, I"m telling you. A good socialist into the bargain. Karl loves her from here to the moon." Yoska shrugged and chuckled, waved a wise finger. "But he hasn"t married her."Nina Vasilyeva spoke not a word, not h.e.l.lo, not come in out of the cold, not a syllable of welcome. She ushered Rivka and Yoska indoors with a limp gesture from a closed hand."They"re coming in," Nina announced, in Russian, to a figure standing in front of the dead fireplace. To his landlord, he was P. Morin. Closer to the truth, Mourrewitz. Or Mourremitz. Murontzeff, or Mouremtzoff. In London, George Gastin, H. A. Gartner. Sometimes Grunberg. More often George Gardstein. To his London circle, Karl. He traveled on pa.s.sports bearing the names Schafsh and Khan and Yanis Karlowich Stenzel. Shrewd, refined, persuasive, just twenty-four years old, he"d stepped into the leadership after the Liesma gang"s most catastrophic year.Karl was the type of young man who kept all the tumult screened off behind a soft voice. He uttered every confidential sentence in the tones of a drawing-room intellectual, an impression bolstered by stacks of books and pamphlets on his floor, desk, table, and sideboard, not to mention the labeled bottles of chemicals and odd pieces of laboratory equipment installed around the single bed tucked into a corner of the front room.Karl"s smooth features gave away two intimate facts: he was at ease with the kind of attention physical beauty brought him, and he could use his handsome looks or mask them in shyness any time he wanted. In one of the formal photos of him, his neat, dark hair, straight and fine, thickly brushed back at the sides, sloped up into a gentle wave away from his forehead. The hair of his mustache was spa.r.s.e, a soft fringe that dipped around the corners of his mouth, and worked against the a.s.sertion of masculine maturity that rested firmly in the center of him. His flowing tie (usually burgundy or plum) and his genteel suit came close to a theatrical flair, and on its own gave him the natty air of an actor-manager. His athletic physique was on display, even covered by his woolen jacket and waistcoat; Karl carried it with the absolute right to ask questions on any subject, to any depth.His fingertips strayed over a rack of test tubes. "You can bring me another distilling tube, can"t you, Yoska? One with a bra.s.s frame." Karl"s wide-set eyes held none of Yoska"s mildness; to Rivka they seemed not unfriendly, but they had the watchfulness, the formal and glancing suspicion, of a border guard.Karl ignored Yoska, finished with him for the moment. Eyes lowered, he rearranged bottles of chemicals in a drawer, handling them like chess pieces. Then he picked up a copy of Mutual Aid and penciled a note in the margin in his minute, scientific handwriting, a spontaneous objection or agreement in his silent tutorial with Kropotkin.Then he turned to Rivka. "I wanted to meet you," he said. He nodded at Nina. "She didn"t.""Thank you, Mr. Gardstein," Rivka replied. "For getting me out of Riga. My cousin Jankel didn"t tell me if-""Call me Karl.""There"s a grocer two streets away who lets you buy on credit," Nina said to Rivka.