Rivka shuffled from the till to the kitchen and the tables in her bespattered apron, sweat glowing on her forehead, at the end of a late shift, pacing the trail of demands between cook and customers. Yoska watched her take thruppence for a pot of tea from a slouching young man, scan the room for a vacancy, and send him to the table next to Yoska’s. Yoska waved his big, square hand, but Rivka didn’t see him—or perhaps it was the rule there…Yes, that was it: she had to ignore him. No Personal Business Conducted on the Premises. To ignore him so ostentatiously was her coded welcome.
The two men sharing Yoska’s table weren’t talking. They scooped forkfuls of grub from plate to mouth, mechanically, swallowing without chewing or tasting. By the look of the brown muck on their plates, a wise move. Noises from their throats, noses, flapping lips—the kind of people Rivka stooped to serve.
From the end of the room, she finally returned Yoska’s wave with a beleaguered smile. Rivka mimed bringing a cup of tea to her lips. He nodded, held up his penny, but she used the gesture she’d seen Yoska use to stop traffic in Commercial Road to tell him to stay where he sat.
“Only another thirty minutes of this,” she said when she brought his tea over.
He looked at the cloudy brown water in the metal cup. “It’ll take me that long to gargle this down. For my reward, I’ll walk you over to Perelman’s.”
Her face turned away to catch an order from the kitchen, Rivka missed what he said. “Sorry. They boil it to mush,” she said. Then, confidentially, “This morning, first serving, it was stewed too. They brew it in one big pot, Yoska—it’s a witch’s cauldron.”
Yoska sipped, clowned a disgusted face. “No, it’s very good. Good temperature.”
From the kitchen, the manager shouted her name. Rivka sped off in his direction, balancing a heavy tray of dirty plates and mugs. Yoska winced. All right, Beron, we need money for food and a roof, shirts, skirts, and shoes, so we work. But not to serve, Leon, not to serve. Here Rivka served. Here she got bossed from pillar to post, swatted by customer to cook, cook to customer.
The old man sitting next to Yoska finished his eggs, wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve, missed a curd of yolk on his chin. Here they are, the men who order Rivka around. If they look at her at all, do they see a working woman performing a task? No, to them she is nothing but the task. No one looks her in the face, unless it’s to ogle her like they ogle the whores in Spitalfields. They think of Rivka’s soft legs under her skirt, her naked breasts, her arms reaching around their backs, hands squeezing, breath from her mouth huffing against their cheek. Yoska felt disgusted for her. He knew her for the woman she was, the fighter. Those legs stood up to a Russian soldier, those arms brought him down, and here she was, waiting on pigs.
THEY WALKED IN SILENCE from Sclater Street, but at the top of Brick Lane, Yoska turned to her. “You have to get used to the English weather.”
Rivka bunched her shawl’s edge under her chin. “If I stay.”
“If I know anything, I know the Russian police—they won’t forget about you,” he promised her. “You and your dead Cossack.”
“He didn’t die.”
“Worse for you.”
“Worse for me.”
A COLD WIND tattered the dark air. Cold as it was outside, though, conditions were worse in most of the rooms along Brick Lane, as crowded as the cargo hold of a Chinese junk. The street crawled with as much human life at midnight as it did at noon. Gangs of children ran on bare feet up one side street and down another, in and out of places where the gaslights shed their powdery green light. A family huddled in a doorway; the woman used a knife to trim the frayed strips of the rags she wore; her husband’s head lolled on her lap, his trousers caked with gutter mud. Two children unconscious on the step; were they breathing? The dirty pity of the sight burrowed into Rivka.
When a cart stopped short in front of them, Yoska performed a dance step—slide the left foot, drag the right—to avoid colliding with it. “Maybe if we walked on the pavement?” Rivka ventured.
“It’s better to stay in the street. Safer.”
To walk beside Yoska, Rivka thought, was to walk in the sheltering shadow of a folk-tale giant, a limping golem. As if he’d caught that flickering notion, her protector smiled down at her, benignly, baring his black teeth. It was the soot on the walls, the dust on the curb, the grime on her own secondhand clothes. Rivka had left Riga with only the odds and ends Jankel found for her: four crumpled skirts and blouses, one petticoat, and an odd number of stockings. Wearing them made her feel she’d donned a disguise. At least twice a day—climbing out of bed at six in the morning, climbing in again at eleven thirty at night—she wondered, Is it always going to be like this?
From the mouth of an alleyway, a man staggered into Rivka, drunk or wounded. In a flare of violence that seized him for one hot instant, Yoska gripped the man’s lapels and shoved him away. Rivka’s assailant fell backward on the pavement and rolled unconscious into the gutter.
“Did he hurt you anywhere? Touch you?” Yoska’s voice was loud, furious.
Rivka shook her head. “It’s worse in the restaurant at lunchtime.”
This tripped a laugh out of him. “Wait,” he said. He dragged his foot and the clodhopping rest of him to an archway in the middle of the block, where a pocket of quiet sank away from Brick Lane’s noise. He was still puffing when he stopped; Rivka thought he wanted to stop and catch his breath.
“This is for you,” he said, pressing a package into her hand.
“What’s this?” Rivka said.
“Open it and you’ll see.”
She untied the string, undid the paper. The beaded case sparkled under the gaslight. The beads were as tiny as barley grains, worked into a decoration of flowers, dog roses, pink blossoms twined by green leaves.
Yoska nudged her again to open it. “The best quality. You see there? Scissors, needles…”
No more favors, Rivka was thinking. No more debt. “What’s it for?” she said.
“For sewing. See? One of the thimbles, there, that one…” He flicked it with his fingertip. “That one’s gold. I think so.”
“Sewing and what else?”
In innocence, Yoska missed the point. “Just sewing.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” she had to tell him, and tried with a gentle frown to refuse it.
He ignored the frown. “Did you look at the beadwork? It’s fancy French.”
A shake of her head. “It’s too rich for me.”
“No, but that’s…London is so…” The right word wasn’t in his head, one word for the degrading desperation, the unrewarded sweat, the freedom you could mistake for punishment. “Dirty. So,” Yoska said, “I want it for you.”
If he hadn’t said that, she might have gone home with the wee satin case out of kindness. The note in his voice hovered between a plea and a boast, delivering Yoska’s real message: I want Good Things for you, the Best of Things, a Better Life. That was less than the whole story. This was the rest: I want you to want this From Me.
“No,” she said. “No, Yoska.”
“You don’t care for it?” Maybe its fineness was the problem; maybe this Cossack-killer was more communist than he was. “It belonged to the wife of a bank manager. It was liberated during a Liesma exe last night. Karl was happy enough with the pot,” he lied. “Instead of putting this in with the rest I kept it back. For you.”
“I’m sorry if you did that.”
To quiet any doubt, Yoska showed off the scissors’ sharp blades by snipping bits from the end of the string. Rivka took the sterling silver tool from him, as Yoska thought, to get a feel of the quality. She slipped the scissors inside, closed the lid, buttoned the mother-of-pearl button in its loop of satin thread, then pressed the sewing case into his hand, wrapping and all. “You should save this for someone special.”
“Who’s more special than you?” Gambling everything, he bent down to kiss Rivka’s mouth.
Her arms hung at her sides.
She twisted her head away. “You have to stop now.”
“Is it something about me?”
“No.”
“You have another man?”
Here was a quick way out and Rivka took it. “His name’s Benjamin.”
“Benjamin.”
“He’s in Riga. He plays concert violin. Yiddish songs sometimes, too. In his own band.”
Yoska nodded, conceding. “Benjamin’s the leader. He’s coming to be with you?”
“No. He wants peace and quiet so he can play his violin. Anyway, being with me right now is dangerous. Benjamin’s waiting for when I can come back.”
“Benjamin’s an unusual type. Sounds like he is, to me.”
His heart stormy and rocking in his chest, Yoska limped away from Rivka’s refusal, wrapping the satin box again in its clean brown paper.
Yoska, you unfaithful dog! Let a pretty face tangle your emotions and humiliation is what you’ll get every time!
Another warm room waited for Yoska half a mile away. On his way there, his shiver of embarrassment disappeared beneath a shiver of cold. As he walked, he rehearsed what he’d say to the woman who waited for him there, as he put the paper-wrapped gift in her hand. “Here’s the start of a better time for us, Betsy.”
Betsy Gershon appreciated his ways. She knew the ropes, shared the same spirit. Take what’s here to take, have what you can have now. Five years ago, hadn’t her husband packed up and left her, to plant himself in the Crimea? A flock of pigeons or English weather you can count on better than people.
Here’s the start of a better time for us, Betsy. Every word of it the truth, too, there and then. Three weeks since he lay down in her arms. Tonight she’ll bring him upstairs, lead him by his hand through the door, where the first thing he’ll see is her green-painted iron bed, the heavy blankets opened like the peel of a piece of fruit. Betsy will undress him, button by button. She’ll want him to kiss her face and throat, her mouth, her brown nipples. Down in his trousers, Yoska felt her effect on him as he thumped the soft edge of his fist on Betsy’s door, shuffling on the cold pavement outside 100 Sidney Street.
A Storm in the Blood
Eleven
PETER’S UNCLE, a colonel in Tsar Nicholas’s army, had made a promise to the twenty-six-year-old jailbird two years before, in ’08. “Money doesn’t have to be one of your problems,” he said. “You can have all you need from me.”
“If…”
“Is that a question?” The older man sipped his coffee and tilted back his head to be drenched by the Marseilles sun.
“It’s a hundred questions. If I go back home? If I ‘settle down’? If I’m a good little boy and stop hating the Russians…”
“You don’t have to like them, just stop shooting at them.”
“Yes, and…?”
“And see different friends. Those ragtags you go around with, Peter. They’re troublemakers. It’s simple: they’re nobodies, lowlifes, just people who don’t want to knuckle under.”
“Revolutionaries,” Peter replied. “Why should people hold still while the Russian Empire rapes them?”
The sloganeering—or the idea that he was hearing it from his nephew’s mouth—jerked a sharp laugh out of the colonel. “That bunch couldn’t overthrow a grocery store. They got caught and dragged you into court and prison with them.”
“That’s not how it happened.”
“I don’t care. You want more of the same? Should I mention the wreck it made of your mother?”
“You don’t have to worry about her.”
“Oh, you’re going to? With your father in the ground? Well, you don’t have to worry what he thinks anymore, either, do you?”
“No.” Peter looked away.
His uncle’s voice, and intention, softened. “I apologize, Peter.” With his uniformed arm, he clasped his misguided nephew’s shoulder; his sympathy belonged with his kin, even if he must make accommodation with the forces of order. “Listen to my offer.”
“If.”
Uncle-colonel refused to take the bait. “I’ll give you an allowance, a good one, every month, so you can attend classes at the university in Paris. Study anything you want. Any subject except politics.”
“Politics is the only subject there is.”
“You mean it’s the only one you’re interested in.”
“Everything interests me,” Peter said honestly.
“Good.” Perhaps they were finally making progress. “What about economics? A baccalaureate in such a serious field and you’ve got a civil service job for life. And after you have your degree, well”—a generous puff of his cheeks—“stay in Paris if you don’t want a career in Riga.”
“Economics is politics,” Peter said flatly.
“Geography, then. What about studying maps and terrains, that kind of thing? You like to draw, don’t you? Learning about the Hottentots?”
He counted on his fingers as if they were the undeniable realities themselves: “Colonies, countries, borders, populations, resources—what’s geography if it isn’t politics?”
“You’ll say engineering is politics, too.”
“Yes! I design a bridge, so some foundry owner can hire workers to manufacture the iron for it, so he can sell it to the city, so the city can hire laborers to build it so people can walk across it to their jobs to earn their rotten wages. So tell me please, how can I study anything that isn’t politics?”
Uncle-colonel struggled to muffle his neck-reddening fury and embarrassment as the head waiter stopped to refill Peter’s wineglass…
That was two years ago and the event still rattled around in Peter’s head. “Money won’t be your problem,” he reminded himself out loud. He drew the edge of his straight razor downward along a brown stalk in the center of the wallpaper panel he’d hung the week he moved into the flat. A puff of plaster dust floated in the lamplight when he pried the slit edges apart. Then, with his forefinger, Peter nudged a sealed envelope out of its hiding place. Apart from that clutch of banknotes and forged identity papers, the only thing he took from rue Danville was his painting of the lily pond, unstapled from its stretchers and rolled in his suit jacket pocket.
Ten hours later, he stood on the deck of a mail boat, lightly flicking cigarette ash into the English Channel.
It was the right time to travel to London, and the right reason. Ever since he’d quit Marseilles in the dead month of January, prickly questions and pricklier answers had had him running in circles. Peter had to talk with somebody besides himself. There was no one in Paris, no one in Marseilles. In London, at least, there was Karl. He and Peter had survived the same years together; side by side they had done the same violence and suffered the same wicked reprisals.
A year ago, Peter had read reports in English newspapers about the outrage in Tottenham—the last masterwork of Christian Salnish. A bungled robbery, a running gunfight in the streets, a cowering little boy slaughtered by a bullet through the mouth, a policeman killed outright, a sick old man shot in the throat, both of Salnish’s men hunted down and shot dead, all in bright daylight. Brutality and havoc with nothing to show for it, except five corpses and a backlash of loud encouragement for the Russian vendetta against political thugs who terrorize and torment the innocent.
As far as Peter knew, Karl had no plans to launch any such armed assault on London. He wondered if the reason for a year’s quiet in London was that Karl, too, had been slowed by dizzying doubts.
France drifted somewhere in the murk behind him with no sight yet of England over the boat’s ploughing bow. Around him, Peter saw only gray water and blanched air, not even another ship. Salt mist hung low overhead; he felt he was afloat in it.
“Not afraid of catching cold out here?” someone said.
Peter smelled the cigar smoke before he turned to see who was smoking it: a middle-aged Englishman pacing toward him, a man of about Peter’s height, bulkier, with a heavy mustache balancing chubby red cheeks, under a bowler hat and a long coat wi
th a broad astrakhan collar, only the lower button done up. One hand in his pocket, he approached Peter with the confidence of a banker or a detective.
“Are you heading home or getting away?” he asked.
Peter made a helpless gesture of apology, fluffing the air with open hands, and muttered in a German accent, “Not English speak, mister.”
The man’s face tightened. “You better bloody learn English. It happens to be what we speak in England.”
Good and proper warning delivered, he marched back toward the cabin, leaving Peter alone to stare into the fog that soon enfolded the boat, billows of the world-haze that connected him to London, to his comrade Karl, in the swirling vastness Peter’s only living friend.
A Storm in the Blood
Twelve
RIVKA COULDN’T AFFORD to be tugged off-balance, pulled backward by memories of her family. So, for sixteen hours a day, six days a week, she was grateful for something besides the £1.4s.6d she earned at the two restaurants. The Bermansfelts were out of reach in Sasmacken; that was the hard fact. Her life was in London, beginning with the geography of the district: the synagogues, schools, and social clubs, strangers’ faces and local street life, prices in the market, opening and closing times of the shops, where Yiddish ended and the city’s native language took over.
Rivka was an eager learner, especially of spoken English. Her best teachers were the girls who worked alongside her at Clark’s coffeehouse. As a mimic, she was practically clairvoyant. A scrap of local slang might drift above the din into Rivka’s ear, and right away she’d parrot it, Cockney accent and all, usually without un derstanding a syllable. When she could, she buttonholed the other waitresses for a translation.
Rivka swooned over the lyric beauty of the language. “Bewitch a pot of boiling water with some tea,” she heard. Clear water bewitched into a beverage the color of tree bark! What poetry! Could you say sugar bewitched it sweet? And this sassiness tickled her: “I know one thing and that ain’t two!” Meaning: here’s something I know without a doubt. Rivka laughed out loud at the brassy comedy of it; she went around repeating the phrase all day. That night, when she trudged in the door close to midnight, her landlord asked if she was too tired to sit up for a while and talk to him. Eyelids closing under their own weight, Rivka disappointed him: “I know one thing and that ain’t two…”
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