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.
A Storm in the Blood
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, passport, 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 mass with no center. Rivka was shoved along in a dirty, sluggish flow of the destitute, 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 shit.” “Shit-arsed Russos.” “Landin’ fee. Landin’ fee, get me? No money, you row your arses 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 fl
ung 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?”
A Storm in the Blood
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 Cock 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 aproned 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 passing 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, God 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 scrapper, a fugitive, ambusher of Russians. Over here, he would be the protector, she the protected. Who’d say it was bragging to reassure 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, passengers 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 passengers 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, assertive. 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.
A Storm in the Blood
Four
UNDER A CANALSIDE STRETCH of the Parisian sky, shadowed by the same pale gray weather that comforted Rivka on her walk across the East End, Peter Piatko
w sat on a borrowed café chair with his half-eaten lunch, a bowl of potato soup, going cold in his lap. A rocky motion, a watery bump and shove in his organs, told Peter he was drifting into a crisis.
He focused his eyes on the canal 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 space 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 Canal 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 Storm in the Blood Page 2