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 unbuttoned. 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 buttons, 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 Métro 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 buttons 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 whore’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?
A Storm in the Blood
Six
WITH THE ÉLAN 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, God’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 maître 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 space for him to lay down a single horsehair mattress. With eyes closed, how much space 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 space 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 hellish 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 title?” 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 glass 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.
A Storm in the Blood
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 hello, 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 passports 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 sparse, a soft fringe that dipped around the corners of his mouth, and worked against the assertion 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 brass 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.
“Near here? I don’t remember the street where I’m staying, but the landlord’s name is Perelman.”
“We know where you’re staying. We used to rent from Perelman. You can trust him, he runs with us.” Nina was a small woman, exactly Rivka’s height, her waist slightly thicker, shoulders slightly plumper. She handled Rivka with some caginess. “The grocer is Hindmann; he’s in Cable Street. Max Hindmann.”
“Where Yoska took me. From the boat.”
“Maybe you walked by his shop.”
�
��But he doesn’t know me. He’d give me credit?”
“He knows us. He’ll do it.” A boast of blunt influence. And that concluded Nina’s business with Rivka. The scrolled lips, the businesslike frown—Rivka had seen expressions like Nina’s before, privately public messages on the faces of clerks and minor officials whose job it was to handle her. Russians, usually. Nina was Russian, with Slavic seriousness brooding in her eye sockets, giving her bark-brown eyes their depth and darkness. Swirling slowly in that depth was alertness too, Rivka could tell. Intelligence and a pledge to strive. A passerby looking in through the window might even have suspected a family resemblance between Nina and Rivka, might have mistaken them for sisters. Both had the same dense hair, carried the same way, piled up on the wide, round head. But where Rivka’s face seemed to search you out, every angle of Nina’s face focused ahead, past you—her straight nose mounted over her flat, jokeless mouth, her chin so intense that all by itself it warded off any casual or friendly approach.
It was only by rocking his hips to the edge of the settee that Yoska could haul his large, unstable body to its feet. He asked Karl, “Are you going?”
“For a few weeks.”
“Then I can stay here.”
“Yes, why not.” Karl brushed crumbs from the blanket, fluffed and turned the pillow, took off his jacket, and lay down on the bed. “One of us has to come home with a prize.” Put that way, this was a direct question, drenched with tired distraction. “I’m going to visit my family. They’re in Courland, like yours.” Karl answered the question Rivka didn’t ask. “We’re scattered everywhere.” She understood the message here: Karl was inviting her into his confidence. He understood homesickness and exile, injury and recovery, the singing nerves of life on the run.
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