A Storm in the Blood

by Jon Stephen Fink

  He communicated all of this to Rivka in the handshake he gave her at the door. “Nina’s going to take you to Hindmann’s. Can you find your way back to your room?”

  “I think so.”

  “Nina can send you in the right direction,” Karl assured her. “Yoska needs to stay with me for a while.”

  THERE WERE RUMORS, always, in the jewelry trade, and, as usual, Yoska Sokoloff had the inside track on two or three at a time. It helped that he was a watchmaker, natural and nimble with intricate mechanisms, which required sharp attention to very small details. But he needed to visit the Houndsditch jewelry shop again, to investigate it as a target, look for possible traps, estimate for himself the size of the treasure inside, base it on observation, not rumors. It was too early to congest Karl’s mind with the ins and outs of a burglary; wasn’t that what he counted on Yoska for, to line up robberies worth the risk?

  A nap on the settee was a daily habit with Karl; now, as Yoska watched, he dropped off to sleep in less than a minute. Noiselessly as he could, the tall man dragged his heavy right foot behind him, shut the door, and directed himself to go out and bring back a prize.

  A Storm in the Blood

  Eight

  WHILE RIVKA POURED COFFEE AND TEA, served plates of fried fish or fried liver and bowls of potatoes at Shinebloom’s, three men, engaged in entirely different business, were setting the stage for her future. Shinebloom’s occupied a good-sized, squarish ground-floor room in Sclater Street. There was no time of day when the restaurant wasn’t congested with diners and assorted fumes. From the kitchen, steam; from the clientele, tobacco smoke and the gases of political argument, grumbling, and mudslinging. To Rivka, it seemed as noisy in there as on the street outside—at all hours, too. The clatter of horses’ hooves, high wheels, and growling motor cars was replaced by the din of scraping knives, forks, spoons, rattling plates, platters, bowls, and mugs, the shouts of “More soup here!” over “Look, girl!” above “Hey, miss!” mainly in Yiddish, Russian, and fractured, practical English. Each of the voices wrestled for her attention—to fetch and carry, to attend to him first. It rose like dust from a busy road, the laughing and squabbling noise.

  First in Shinebloom’s, through luncheon and dinner, then without stop until she’d clocked up four late hours at a scruffier coffeehouse a few doors away, Rivka faced an audience of men. In both dining rooms, the same reminder: as a waitress and as a woman, she was an aside. She lived in their country—men’s—invisible as a breeze circling around their serious business. Or maybe not quite that imperceptible; they did notice her function, which was to bring them food. “More of the same, miss!”

  At home in Sasmacken, Rivka had been a frowning bystander as her fifteen- and sixteen-year-old friends buckled under men the way a frail body succumbs to typhoid. Not Rivka—not to those patriarchs-in-the-making, who from first breath to last salivated at the sight of a woman’s plump breast. No, she refused to be the woman that a man saw with his appetites.

  Rivka offered up a yielding smile to some customers, but she kept its reverse meaning to herself. She served borscht and pierogis, cleared away dirty plates, moved in her dark-blue apron, sweating under her light-blue linen headscarf, from kitchen to table, this corner to that corner, ferrying bread and margarine, bowls of soup, jugs of water, glass pitchers of milk, pots of tea and coffee, to tables of men bent over their plates, snuffling into their meals.

  Somewhere in that thick ruckus, Rivka’s ears caught the ideas of those times. Radical opinions floated on conversations in the smoky, stuffy restaurant whose every inch she trooped hour upon hour, day upon day. Underground groups, official and outlaw, made plans, drafted manifestos, debated fine points. An age of violent collision, in London, an empire city of nothing but possibility—the old order harpooned, hotheaded idealism on the rise. She couldn’t have missed seeing Leon Beron open for business at his regular table. Beron usually held court in the Warsaw from midday to midnight, reliable as an undertaker, on hand to fence the stolen property that funded every revolutionary group he could name. Tonight he graced Shinebloom’s “to avoid an appointment”—with a pickpocket or a policeman, he didn’t say.

  As he waited patiently for Rivka to walk over and take his lunch order, Beron appeared to her the very portrait of respectable English prosperity. The winged collar and tie, expensive woolen coat garnished with astrakhan, the £5 gold coin that adorned his watch chain, each detail naturally arranged and easily worn. Something of a pasha, she thought, as he swiveled his dark head in the restaurant’s stew of ferocious arguments and passionate agreements over racehorses and police activity (subjects that interested Beron) and over Russia and socialist revolution (subjects that did not).

  Rivka recognized the wide back, the heavy arms and sprawled legs, of the man who shared Beron’s table. It was Yoska. He didn’t see her; rather, he leaned away, absorbed in discussion, negotiating. “I’m telling you, Leon, I felt the heat go from that brooch right through my clothes. Soon as it was safe in my pocket.”

  “Twelve pounds, four shillings and sixpence, the lot.” Beron’s appraisal came unclouded by any interest in Yoska’s mystical experience of housebreaking and burglary. Down here with the anarchists or up there with the plutocrats, Beron knew, a piece of jewelery sparked the identical desire—to command wealth. Loot was loot; there was no mystery on a dealer’s side about brute beauty. “The chains are eighteen carat. The watches, eighteen. The necklace, the brooch…My estimate—I’d say the silver will be worth something. These stones: no.”

  “No?”

  “Definitely no.”

  “But it’s just your estimate.”

  “Tonight you can have my final figure.”

  “Twelve pounds isn’t final,” Yoska said flatly, shoulders drooped under Beron’s oppression. “It might be twelve? Ten? You can’t be more exact?”

  “Yoska, no, come back tonight. I’ll talk to Ruby Michaels. If you want to push me for it, at the moment all I’m in a position to say is that your items to me are worth something less than the amount I can get from Ruby.”

  Sensing a lull in their conversation, Rivka broke in. “Can I bring you something, gentlemen?”

  “I’m a gentleman now!” Yoska said, touching Rivka’s elbow, affectionate, familiar. “This is Rivka,” he said to Beron. “She’s very good-looking, isn’t she?”

  She smiled at Yoska. “The brisket is good today.”

  “Rivka, here you have Leon Beron. An ugly crook.”

  Beron ignored Rivka, glancing away from the menu to return a small beaded sewing kit to Yoska. “What made you take this?” he asked.

  Yoska said nothing, covering the item with his big hand and sweeping it into his coat pocket. Beron got down to the business of ordering. Smiling, acknowledging each of his instructions with a sharp nod, Rivka memorized the long list—yes to the brisket, gravy to be served in a gravy boat, boiled potatoes not overcooked, brought to the table hot, and bread without margarine on a separate plate, and to drink…As she contemplated the list of food Beron wanted and how he wanted it cooked and served to him, Rivka tried to picture Mrs. Beron. What kind of woman would be the mate of this sturdy black-market trader? Round and motherly, silvering hair piled up, only out of her apron to put on her dressing gown, provider of a secure and comfortable home. Mrs. Beron’s skin would be doughy, her thighs heavy, her waist thick. Her husband was her horizon. She cooked for him, warmed his bed, lied to the police for him. She knew what he did, where it came from, every penny of the trading, the buying and selling, honest profit from his bent clientele, never mind, the money supported hearth, home, and brood, it was all for them.

  “No brisket for me,” Yoska was saying. “No borscht. Gravy and potatoes.”

  Rivka stopped short of recommending the meat. Maybe Yoska couldn’t afford the brisket. Didn’t he have a wife or lover who’d force him to eat better food? She’d have to be a tolerant woman, Rivka guessed. To kiss his mouth and comfort his eager eyes. To make hi
m wash, or not to notice Yoska’s odors of sweat, stale skin, rotten teeth, exertion, need.

  “Thank you, gentlemen.” As she squeezed around the next table, stopping to clear the plates, Rivka heard a voice behind her.

  A Storm in the Blood

  Nine

  “YOU CAN BE MORE generous with him,” the voice was saying.

  Rivka glanced over her shoulder. The young man sitting behind Yoska hadn’t read her mind; he was addressing Leon Beron. His steady, slightly Mongol eyes and hedgy brows hinted at a Jewish intensity; his tumultuous hair, haphazardly parted, was a storm cloud above the intellectual force concentrated below. A sharp scent of the disciplinarian hung around him too. On his broad face, his flattened nose was on show, a blunt caution to anyone thinking of excluding him from any conversation. A big game trophy might decorate a wall with the same expression on its face.

  “Should I?” Beron replied, without giving the heckler the courtesy of a glance. “Maybe I should turn my business into a charity.”

  “Why not?” Another heckle.

  Yoska said, “After an exe, Leon, you know what this fellow does? He sends his share to Russia.” Yoska tilted his head, gave a brotherly nod in the direction of the heckler, whose name was Jacob Peters. “Nobody knows how he feeds himself.”

  Until the noise near the kitchen drowned it out, Jacob’s voice streaked across the room. It was there again, cranked up to full volume, when Rivka returned with Yoska’s gravy and potatoes, Beron’s meat and borscht.

  “…or which Social-Revolutionaries you could trust, which ones were probably okhrana agents, which Social Democrats were weak Marxists.” Jacob watched Rivka serve the food, rearrange the plates and glassware; he rode out the distraction until Beron made the mistake of assuming Jacob would show some manners and let him eat in peace. “Class slavery! The Zionist future! Legitimate targets of political mass terror, Lettish nationalism versus socialist solidarity, our party, their party, the whole Anarchist Club circus—it’s entertainment, that’s all. Nothing gets done in London.”

  “Big ideas, confusing everybody,” Beron noted, then belched.

  “I’ll tell you what confuses everybody,” Jacob started to say.

  “Please don’t,” said Beron, heartfelt, heartburned.

  A voice from the other end of the restaurant chimed in. “Moscow is on a knife edge! London is rubber, everything bounces off the English…”

  From another diner: “Mishigas! Mishigas!”

  A giant toy balloon could have bounced from table to table the same way, but no matter where the subject landed, it was always swatted back to Jacob. “Crazy? The king of England is crazy. Revolution is an act of sanity.”

  “I’m eating my lunch in hell,” Beron moaned to nobody.

  Rivka sympathized. “Try to concentrate on your borscht.”

  To enlighten her or include her—either way, Rivka felt a mild jolt when Jacob spoke to her directly. “Scientific Illegalists over there, Marxists and Social Democrats there. That one’s a Russian anarchist. There’s a German communist. Those there, those three are Polish anarcho-communists. Christian Socialists there, Individualists over there, Social-Revolutionaries in the corner, pooling their money to buy one pot of coffee.”

  With the flammable exception of Jacob, none of the little commissars she served at Shinebloom’s was as considerable a personality as Karl. They yapped about revolt and freedom in the same agitated voice they ordered her to bring borscht and pierogis. Oh, but when Karl addressed her, he paid Rivka Bermansfelt the compliment of understanding that her freedom had one concrete meaning—her own money from her own work. He was clear: he saw what to do, then he arranged things. It staggered her to open her mind to a feeling that trembled in her legs for days, and warmed her stomach: he existed, he wasn’t imaginary at all. Karl was a man she could love with a wife’s devotion.

  Yet Karl was with Nina, that was the situation, so Nina must be who he wanted. In a fair competition, Rivka told herself, he might have chosen me. At nineteen, she was years younger than Nina, as much as five or six. In looks, size, form, nearly identical. In spirit, calmer; in movement, more graceful; in public, more amiable; in private (a sudden flash told her), more passionate. Yet Nina Vasilyeva stood in front of her like a full-length mirror and revealed Rivka as the green immigrant, a country girl, clumsy and ignorant among the English. Back and forth she went, measuring Nina’s qualities against hers. Attractive was not how Rivka felt carrying food from the kitchen to Leon Beron’s table.

  With one sweep, she delivered another bowl of potatoes; the next sweep cleared away the empty plates and the gravy boat. “Leon sits at the same table every time he comes here,” Rivka heard Jacob complain. “To his ears it’s one big meaningless argument.”

  Beron appealed to Yoska scornfully. “Believe me, I try not to listen.”

  “Now I’m going to tell you what you don’t want to hear.” Up went Jacob’s scarred finger to separate right from wrong.

  Yoska sniggered. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. A slick of spit and small pieces of potato, garbage dropped from the stern of a boat, spread from wrist to knuckles. “What do you think, Rivka, who’s going to win?”

  Her detached smile, unreadable to Yoska, said, Not you. “Let me take the rest of these plates away.”

  Jacob didn’t stop haranguing poor Leon Beron. “Everybody in this restaurant hates your guts.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Yoska advised. “Rivka, you don’t hate Leon, do you?”

  “No, he’s…” she stumbled into embarrassment.

  Yoska egged her on. “He’s what?”

  “Very fatherly,” Rivka decided.

  Beron laughed off the whole business. “No, no. It doesn’t matter. Nothing Jacob Peters says makes any sense—everybody here knows it.”

  “Conflict, Leon. Permanent conflict—between what’s now and what’s coming next!” Jacob rose out of his seat with the intensity of a fist in flight. “Holy God, the prize that’s going to come out of this.” His arm flung out and knocked Rivka’s tray. Plates and glasses crashed to the floor, a percussion orchestra splashing through the restaurant noise.

  “The Pistol!” Yoska, laughing, let Rivka know. “See why we call him the Pistol?”

  The manager hurried over. Red-faced, jaw tensed, totting up the loss shard by shard, the soup bowls, the plates, the glasses. “Second time today,” he said loudly. “Twice in one day!” Theatrically stern, holding his head, moaning, “Oy gevalt,” mostly for show.

  Before Jacob fled the scene, he had a prophecy for them all. “A coup d’etat is starting in this room.” Then he was gone.

  On her knees, head down, Rivka got busy cleaning the mess. She gathered the fragments one by one onto the tray. Yoska’s pity rose sadly above her, a fleshy, cratered moon. He watched her sop up the mess with her apron.

  “Here’s a rag,” the manager said. “Don’t use your apron.” No anger but a cockeyed glimmer of pleasure. “Wait. Stand up. If you had any money, I’d fine you. Since you don’t…”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “What can you do?”

  Rivka stood without complaint, shoulders stiff, staring over the half-turned heads of the men. She sang, “Nokh eyn tants…” Rivka’s singing voice was angelic. Her pure soprano had the charm and strength to quiet every diner, bury every shouted pledge, rupture every political argument. “Beyt ikh itst bay dir, libster her, ikh bay dir shenk zhe mir nokh eye tants mir…” It was the voice some of the men carried home with them through the damp streets, the sweet plea of a young woman unafraid to ask a beau for one more dance. Rivka’s song asked each one of them.

  Yoska led the applause, the first to raise his arms over his head in praise. He slapped his huge square hands together, lips curled above his red gums, grinning, baring his black teeth, a man who couldn’t be prouder if he’d married Rivka five minutes before and she were singing to him at their wedding feast.

  A Storm in the Blo
od

  Ten

  THE CLEAN BROWN PAPER he’d found on the pavement, blown flat as a sign against the wall of a Brick Lane coffee stand—for Yoska, dragging himself along to Rivka’s place of work, it certainly was some kind of omen. Only a narrow fringe of one of the edges was stained by crud and damp. After the deal he’d struck with Leon Beron, to stumble across exactly what he needed—paper attractive enough to wrap Rivka’s gift—was proof that his luck was in. Wasn’t it miraculous that anything as delicate as paper, abandoned in the street for hours, days even, could remain so clean? For a ribbon, Yoska unpicked a strand of twine he stole off the end of a barrow.

  Clark’s coffeehouse at that late hour was as busy with workingmen on their way home as it was early in the morning, with the same hammered faces. A few doors away, at the King’s Arms, they drank themselves stupid, the Exploited Proletariat. Yoska counted himself a member of this class, in good and prominent standing, in spite of one well-known detail: when he worked for straight pay, it was in the polished surroundings of a jewelry store he would end up robbing, not in any salt mine of a sweatshop or factory. At the table just inside the door he found an empty seat. Yoska awkwardly steered his bulk around the two men sitting there. Neither one looked up at the disturbance. Crumbs, sauce stains, grease smears, particles of boiled eggs and fried fish littered the bare wooden tabletop. As if he were crushing ants, he poked at the stray bits with the pad of his thumb, brought his thumb to his lips, and nibbled, absently calming his nerves.