A Storm in the Blood

by Jon Stephen Fink

  Without trying, she became a favorite at Shinebloom’s. One October afternoon, the sky dripping gloom outside, a Cockney grandmother had wandered in and shuffled to the till. Rivka looked at the old blanket she used for a shawl; from under its muddy fringe, a knotted hand poked out, clutching a penny. “Can you let me ’ave somethin’ for this? Anythin’. I’m that faint.” She repeated the plea, this time addressing Rivka as “daughter.” Rivka dropped the penny into the till, then prepared a plate for her—boiled potatoes, a little corned beef, a thick slice of bread and margarine, a mug of sweet tea—and walked her to a chair in a corner of the room where the old woman could eat her meal without embarrassment.

  When Rivka turned around, she saw the manager himself manning the abandoned till. The slant of his head told her he’d witnessed the whole transaction. Before Rivka had a chance to apologize and explain—she had already taken enough from her own change purse to make up the difference—the manager stopped her with an open hand.

  “I don’t want your money,” he said. “You’ll pay a forfeit. Stand here, next to me.” Rivka obeyed. He banged an empty pot with a spoon until every face in the restaurant turned. “Rivka is going to show you she’s sorry for breaking the rules,” he announced.

  After a curtsy, theatrically contrite, she said, in English, “I am most sorry.”

  The manager shook her gently by the arm. “And?”

  Rivka paused a moment. Then she opened her mouth and a song came out. “Nokh eyn tants, beyt ikh itst bay dir…Libster her, ikh bay dir shenk zhe mir nokh eyen tants mir…”

  A rolling wave of applause washed away her misdemeanor.

  Between the two places she worked in Sclater Street—Shinebloom’s and the more English Clark’s—Rivka held Shinebloom’s a notch or two higher in her affections. Before long, she’d forged a straight man-comic working relationship with the manager, who bragged about the nickname she’d given him: the Mayor. The palaver in Shinebloom’s rattled on like the hubbub of a village, especially on Sundays, and the small, wide man who presided there kept up with the wants and needs of staff and clientele alike as though he’d been elected to satisfy them. The Mayor saved his special concern, though, for George Gardstein, the soft-spoken man Rivka knew as Karl. There was always a table available for him and Nina and whatever combination of the Liesma crowd roamed in with them.

  A second salvation, this job at Shinebloom’s. Rivka didn’t need anybody to tell her, though that’s what Charles Perelman did as he’d celebrated her news with a warm hug. Congratulations laced with a few Old Whiskery Uncle words of care: “Be on guard around Gardstein’s gang.” Perelman said he knew them inside and out, the way a smart landlord knows the people he rents to: Fritz Svaars, body too big for his brain, a strongman for Karl once upon a time, gone soft now. Fritz’s woman, Luba, a “dizzy idiot” for her married lover. Fritz’s cousin Jacob Peters, a hothead, a big-mouth. Karl himself, a “raving beauty” with a sledgehammer behind his back. Nina, with a little anvil where her heart should be. And Yoska Sokoloff—in Perelman’s opinion, a jellyfish who “finagles this so he can finagle that.” Keep your distance, he advised Rivka, and see what you see.

  Whether alone or together, they didn’t look like gang members, criminals, idiots, hotheads, or jellyfish—at least not to Rivka. They were people like herself, washed on oily waves to Tilbury and straight from the docks into Shinebloom’s, glad to find their lemon tea and lockshen pudding waiting for them. And a woman with an accent from home to serve their food. When she looked, she saw their differences—different manners and moods, which ones looked at her when she took their order and which ones did not, which of them could see in her eyes the splinter of absence she saw in theirs—and all this kept her looking.

  This Sunday noon, six of them occupied two tables at the front of the room. Seeing them together, close as a bunch of grapes, on the street or in Shinebloom’s, you might conclude that the main activity of revolutionaries in London was kibb-itzing. Debating and condemning, falling in and out with each other while they filled and emptied their plates. Beyond those activities, as far as Rivka could tell, what occupied Nina, Karl, and the rest was the same business of day-to-day survival that busied her.

  Karl sat back from the table to give Rivka room to serve his whitefish and potatoes. “Did you talk to the new neighbors?” Rivka heard him ask Nina.

  “Who?” Nina glanced up, distracted by Rivka as she set a quarter-loaf of black bread next to the water jug.

  “The new people on top of us. Did you talk to them?”

  “Not very much.”

  “How many times?”

  A sideways wave of her hand swished the irrelevant question out of Nina’s way. “You eat too fast. That’s why you get pains.”

  “What pains?”

  “You don’t taste your food.”

  “Because everything’s white. Fish, potatoes, cauliflower.”

  “I need money for the laundry. And your shoes, they’re still at Bondarchuk’s.”

  “They’re ready?”

  “Since Friday.”

  “Why didn’t you get them then?”

  “I need two shillings.”

  “You didn’t ask me for it on Friday.”

  “When I thought of it, you and Peter were busy talking,” Nina reminded Karl. “On Friday Bondarchuk closes early.”

  “Remind me to find some money for you later. Back at the flat.”

  Digging up two shillings for shoe repairs seemed a long way from toppling the tsar, the kaiser, and the king of England. But who knew for sure what kind of secret activity Karl and Nina hosted behind their drawn curtains? No one outside their circle could say with confidence, and stories about them trailed around in their wake:

  Rosie Trassjonsky, small, hunchbacked, follows Karl everywhere, pathetically in love with him…

  Nina takes advantage of Rosie’s weakness, keeps the crippled girl under her thumb…

  George Gardstein was once a circus acrobat; he used his skills to escape over the wall of Riga Central Prison…He lets his friends call him Karl because it was his father’s name…

  Nina is the truest socialist of the group because she practices free love with every one of the Liesma men…

  Karl openly approves of her behavior, but underneath he harbors agonizing jealousy…

  Judging from the glimpses she had at Shinebloom’s, Rivka found each of these rumors as believable as the next. Revolutionists, “Liesma,” her rescuers—who were they? Here in Shinebloom’s, Rivka was getting to recognize the faces of Karl and Nina’s circle. Behind the locked doors and curtained windows, they could be moon men, for all she knew.

  “Hey, Fritz! Lend me some money!” Jacob Peters hailed a fair-haired man two tables away. He gave a broad, jokey wave to the young woman with Fritz, who wore a winter coat despite the restaurant’s oppressive heat. “Luba! Give him some money so he can lend it to me!” Luba’s overburdened, donkeyish face drooped another inch, and Fritz scooted his chair around so that his back was facing Jacob. Then, huddled over, he asked Luba, “What about it?”

  “He embarrasses you in public,” Luba tutted.

  “It’s your fault.”

  “Mine? How?”

  “You don’t give me enough money. It makes me look bad.”

  “With you there is no enough.”

  “You see me buying fancy clothes? I eat. I buy coal. I always come home to you.”

  “Yes, for more money.”

  “Maybe tonight I won’t come home.”

  “Then I won’t be there either.”

  Fritz growled, stood up, and almost knocked the tray of food out of Rivka’s arms. Luba reached up, touched Fritz’s broad hand, tugged him back into his chair. “Are those our pierogis?” he asked Rivka, savoring the smell rising from the plate.

  At the end of the table closest to the door, Jacob tossed his shaggy head, agreeing wildly with something whispered to him by a man Rivka had never seen before. He paid Rivka for his me
al and Jacob’s, thanked her in Yiddish without meeting her eye. As he looked away from her, she noticed his fine brown hair, brushed back off his brow to reveal a complexion any woman would have prized, a feature that made his beard and mustache even more memorable.

  “Peter, tell me how you’re enjoying life with Fritz and Luba,” Jacob said, loud enough for Fritz and his young mistress to hear two tables away. Luba tucked herself against his cousin’s chest like a menaced animal sheltering under a boulder.

  Peter lit a cigarette, drew in the smoke, and exhaled before he answered. “They gave me the front room,” he said.

  “Mine.”

  “Luba cleaned it for me. It took her a whole day,” he kidded Jacob, horribly serious. “She did a good job.”

  Jacob lowered his voice a little. “God gave cows more self-respect. Fritz talks to her about his wife—he tells Luba everything. Even how they’re emigrating to Australia in January. I don’t care. They can go to hell.” Volume raised again, half- facing Fritz: “With the rest of the anarchists, who believe in nothing.”

  As Rivka cleared away their plates, Karl leaned toward Peter to offer him the last piece of black bread. His friend took it, slipped it into his coat pocket, then dipped his head closer for privacy, and, through the threads and blur of Peter’s cigarette smoke, Karl gave him his exclusive attention.

  Behind them, trouble loafed in through the front door. They’d been hanging around outside for a quarter of an hour, the Cockney lads, joshing each other, whistling through their teeth at the Jewish girls who walked by. They were regulars at Clark’s; if she’d been looking through the window and not ferrying plates back to the kitchen, Rivka would have recognized the one who tried to charm Fanny Perelman with a cheeky wink as a troublemaker called Arthur.

  The boy was sympathetic to other outsiders who scrabbled to make a living under the cosh of marauding police, and that sympathy made him cocky in the company of Jews. He singled out Fanny because of her slender neck and her father’s Spanish eyes, but also because he knew she spoke English. “I went into the Sugar Loaf and I learned a lesson,” he teased her. “Want to know what?”

  Fanny’s eyes snapped away from him, looking to Nina to give her a lead. Nina stared directly into his Cockney face, a look of dry disbelief and challenge. “We know what you learn in a boozer.”

  He laughed with his mates at Nina’s pronunciation. “I use the Hanbury m’self. That’s a Englishman’s boosa. Thing I seen fer true in comparison is—the English, they drink, and the Jews talk.”

  Fanny said, “We don’t want to talk to you, please.”

  “Yer talkin’, though, aren’t you?” He crabbed toward her between the ledge of the windowsill and the back of Nina’s chair, and bent shallowly over the table. “A little bird told me your real name’s Fenia.” As he spoke, his elbow jutted out carelessly in front of Karl’s face. It was shoved away. “Excuse me,” the boy puffed in sarcastic courtesy. “Do you want to say somethin’ to me?”

  By this time Fritz was standing at the door with Luba, and the stir at Karl’s table stopped him in place. Fritz’s heavy shoulders were hunched forward in weariness; his pale gray eyes anticipated nothing; what was in front of him to do, he did. Now he gently shunted Luba outside; then, with the same big-knuckled hand, he touched the lad’s shoulder. “Go away,” he said. “Nothing for you in here.”

  And the lad landed a roundhouse punch on the side of Fritz’s head.

  The surprise of it threw Fritz off balance. He stumbled backward into an empty table, sent a chair skittering, and dropped to the floor. Rivka looked over to see Jacob spring out of his seat and shove his pistol into the lad’s armpit.

  “Not in here,” Karl said to Jacob.

  Half a dozen plates slipped from Rivka’s grip. The noise of their crash and shattering pulled the Mayor out of the kitchen; the first thing he saw was Rivka standing amid hundreds of white china fragments. He missed seeing Arthur’s terrified surrender and hearing George Gardstein say, “Put your hands down, you idiot.” He didn’t see what Rivka saw: Jacob pocketing his gun before he vanished out the door.

  The Mayor clapped his hands for attention. “Rivka has something to tell you,” he announced.

  “I broke five plates,” she confessed.

  Up on his toes to accentuate the point, the Mayor corrected her. “I count six.”

  “Six!” Rivka shouted out her shame with a plucky smile, triggering a round of high-spirited applause.

  Rivka nodded, accepting her fate, and, in a few seconds, quiet, if not calm, spread through the whole restaurant. She sang, “Dayne oygn shvarts un groys, Makh itst tsu bay mir in shoys, Shmeykhist, heylst mayn vund…Papa dayner vogelt um, Tog un nakht keyn brekl ru, Alts far undz mayn kind…”

  Close your big black eyes

  As you curl up in my lap,

  Your smile heals my wound.

  Papa is wandering

  Day and night without rest

  All for us, my child…

  Peter sat as still as the rest of Rivka’s audience. Her singing voice, pure and persuasive, dug channels into them as they listened, transported and helpless. To Peter’s ears, it was the melody of this girl’s struggling pride. And for him alone, the flat, drawled vowels of her Talsi accent, tenderly familiar, carried more force than Jacob’s gun.

  A Storm in the Blood

  Thirteen

  LUBA KEPT HER GAZE ON FRITZ, who stood on the improvised stage at the other end of the rehearsal hall. Head lowered, shoulders slumped, he concentrated on new instructions from the director. As he took in the critique of his performance, Fritz wore the look of a scolded schoolboy. “Fritz has been back here ten months,” she said to Peter. “Since January. Karl said he wasn’t so shaky before.”

  Peter looked up from the scenery he was painting. “Before when?”

  “That Russian prison.” Luba watched the director arrange Fritz in a pose: right arm curved over his head, brandishing a wooden sword; left arm crooked, thrust out, triumphant fist to the fore. He threw his whole being into his role in the play, a socialist drama called Girts Wilks. It was a part nobody else wanted, in the story of a young revolutionary on the run. Our hero per suades a farmboy to hide him, but a prowling rat of an informer bribes the boy with a stolen watch and chain, and, tragically, the rebel is betrayed. Disgusted by his son’s low morals, the farmer shoots the boy dead.

  Luba said, “Karl says since he’s back he looks smaller.”

  Abandoned, thought Peter. Not reliable. Now Fritz controls what he can control: this controllable girl Luba Milstein, who abides. She abides him denying her a key to his flat in Grove Street, abides his sulks and then his wild bouts of heels-in-the-air elation, abides his treatment of her—speaking Lettish with his friends to keep her from eavesdropping, the same thing as Fritz shutting a door in her face. He did that too. Where’s my dinner? Come to bed. Or sometimes Peter heard him tell her, “Go to bed,” as if nineteen-year-old Luba were an irritating child. Keep me company. Go away. Come back.

  Peter glanced up from his work, painting a backdrop for the play. “I’d say he’s heavier in the face.”

  “Fritz looks all right by me,” Luba said. “He’s starting again. We should be quiet.”

  Peter saw the borders of Luba’s life marked there, in her choice to stop talking and fasten her eyes on Fritz. He watched her, slyly, as he added green brushstrokes to a tree that looked like a tree, and once again he felt the failure of his talent to paint faces. What made that knowledge harder to take was his power to see beyond a face to its character, and the cold fact that his hands wouldn’t move with the talent to make its portrait. Luba’s face turned three-quarters in the dirty light of the rehearsal hall, the dull glow of her skin—yes, Peter had no difficulty imagining how an artist of, say, Cezanne’s skill and vision would capture these minutes in Luba’s life, and her life in these minutes…

  Nothing hidden in her expression, no rage there for her to bury…A narrow face with no insistence i
n it recedes behind a nose that belongs on a Middle Eastern face…She watches her lover and thinks she’s lucky to be protected by a man like him…Her womanliness gathers in her heavy-lidded, credulous blue eyes, full, high breasts, and a mouth that depending on her mood can look either comically large or voluptuous…The black silk that neatly decorates the rim of her straw hat she sewed there herself, a remnant she brought home from her work finishing skirts at her brother’s sweatshop in Whitechapel…Small people become either fearsome or fearful, and this Luba is the kind who scrambles for safety…

  Luba’s round of applause greeted Fritz’s bow. For her, he encored his dramatic line: “I am Gamba and you are a traitor!”

  “Doesn’t he mind playing a policeman?” Peter asked Luba.

  She shook her head. “The story has a happy ending.”

  “I’m Gamba and you are under arrest!”

  “Good, good!” the director cheered Fritz on. “Now show him.”

  Fritz struck the statuesque pose he’d rehearsed, sword arm up, fist thrust out. Close observation of Russian police attitudes toward socialist heroes gave his interpretation a fanatical authenticity. Not just Russian, either: Fritz was wanted by the authorities in five countries. The Russians had merely been the last ones to get hold of him. For eleven days in Riga, the okhrana hardmen had pummeled his face and head so brutally, and with such relentless glee, that he lay unconscious in his cell for three days. They beat his bones and crushed his spirit for good. That’s one change a man can’t disguise.