“I am Gamba!”
“Yes, Fritz, that’s it! An iron fist! Showmanship!”
“I am Gam-ba!”
“He’s Gamba, already. He won’t get any better!” The shout bounced in from the side of the hall, another director who was through waiting with his troupe of specialty acts for a fair crack on the boards.
But the director of Girts Wilks was a perfectionist. Ignoring the barracking, he told Fritz to expect more of the same when he was onstage. “You’re good or bad, they’ll yell at you anyway.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because they’re jealous.” He showed no sign of ending the day’s rehearsal. “Now…”
The other director hurried over. “Now what? Now stop. Three o’clock is the Pavilion’s time.”
“Then why don’t you go rehearse in your big theater and stop annoying us?”
“What do you care? We’re paying as much as you are to be in here. And you’re using up the time we paid for.”
Fritz’s director looked over his rival’s shoulder at his assembled troupe and capitulated. “You probably need it more than we do.” He shrugged.
“We’re taking this stage.” He turned and waved over one of his acts, a slim man carrying three Indian clubs and a unicycle.
Wooden sword waving, fist shaking, Fritz jumped in to rally the counterattack. “I am Gamba! Go fuck yourself!”
The director from the Pavilion, who was called Harry, counted Peter Piatkow as a friend. Now he appealed to Peter across the empty space of the hall, beleaguered and desperate. Peter shrugged in reply; in this battle Harry was on his own.
Fritz refused to budge. “Crazy as he ever was,” Peter said. “Big and crazy.”
Luba called to him, and Fritz’s sword and fist dropped to his side, like the arms of a puppet whose strings were cut. “If he told me at noon it was midnight, I’d believe him,” she whispered.
As Fritz walked across to them, Peter recognized the fractured look on his face. My comrade. Mon frère. Maybe it spread like an infection, this shaky discontent, through the ranks to every fighter who sabotaged telephone lines, raided a bank, murdered a policeman, and was jailed, tortured, went on the run only to find himself spurred on to other necessary actions—robberies, burglaries, assaults, shoot-outs—by the shining promise, always closer, of the last revolution this world will ever see. Necessary for whom? Maybe it was a good time to let Fritz hear that someone else felt the same strangeness he did. Peter looked at his friend’s neatly parted and oiled hair, his excited eyes, his soft-featured face, and behind the jaunty mustache saw the hellcat Fritz used to be. No, there was no useful talk Peter could have with him.
“On the same day you took me in the rowing boat,” Luba told Fritz, sprucing up his lapel with her hand, “Peter was in a boat, too. Coming to London.”
“Think of that,” Peter said.
“Don’t want to think anymore,” Fritz said. “Thinking’s a trap.”
Luba said, “I’ll compare your horoscopes.”
Fritz kissed the top of Luba’s head. “An idiot lives inside there.”
She hooked her arm through his and took him out into the dust and traffic of Spitalfields. Back to the odor of rotten things—fruit and vegetables, fresh meat hacked in the kosher butchers’, trickles of blood collected between the pavement stones. The odors of prison.
PETER STAYED ON, finishing his backdrop for Girts Wilks and enjoying a private show of Harry’s acts. For his finale, the unicycling juggler was joined by two dancing girls, who led him offstage. A skinny man in tweed plus-fours impersonated the calls of about a dozen different birds; then two fat comics acted out the hilarious effects of laxative pills accidentally baked into a cake.
The next act, however, got Peter to stop painting. He looked and listened.
“I’m not bloody Marie Lloyd, am I?” The girl’s screechy protest went unanswered at first.
At last Harry had to admit, “No. No, you’re not Marie Lloyd. You’re no star name yet, darling. You’re not established.”
“Am I ’er?”
“No.”
“So I want t’ sing me own song!”
“We haven’t got a song for you, Katie. Max is trying to write one.”
“Fer me signature.”
“That’s right,” he said. “For today let’s just hear the one you’ve been practicing at home.”
“The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery.’”
“Can you sing it without the piano?”
“Well, it’s how I done it home.”
“When you’re ready, then, Katie, all right?”
She stood for a moment in quiet thought, a beautiful girl, beautiful the way an English girl can be. Apple beauty. Every curve and soft color brought to life in the English summer, burnished by the English autumn. That’s what this pink-fleshed and blond-ringleted dollop of honey urged a man to romanticize— even a man like Peter, infected and ailing with every strain of doubt.
And she sang:
I’m a young girl, and have just come over,
Over from the country where they do things big,
And amongst the boys I’ve got a lover,
And since I’ve got a lover,
Why I don’t care a fig…
The awfulness of her voice outraged Peter’s ears. The girl didn’t sing, she yowled: she belted out a tin-eared bray that washed over everybody in the rehearsal hall like the stink from an open sewer. Harry gave Peter another one of his trademark surrenders: Look at her. What am I supposed to do? But Harry couldn’t look at her. Peter, on the other hand, couldn’t stop looking at her, a brassy collision of heaven and hell. As the final jagged notes of her song tore free from her throat, Harry mimed playing a trombone—The orchestra can drown her out!—and Peter went back to his painting.
The landscape he created for Girts Wilks was a road in the countryside. Peter had improvised the details—a milestone in the foreground, an old manor house in the distance—and when he stood back to survey his workmanship and be disappointed by it, he realized with a swell of tenderness in his chest that he’d added the homely features of the Talsen road.
A Storm in the Blood
Fourteen
WHERE WAS THE BEST PLACE to approach Shinebloom’s singing waitress? And could he say (and be believed) that the beautiful English hiccoughing donkey in the rehearsal hall last night laid him low by polluting every note of music she breathed—while Rivka’s singing, bumpkin accent and all, held out a realistic hope of purity in the roaring world?
Peter was no strategist, he was an improviser. For good or ill, he left strategic thinking to men gifted with more organized minds than his, for instance Lenin and Karl. Against a challenge, Peter trusted his instincts, even when they were vague, as they had been lately. The most obvious answer was Shinebloom’s, where she worked. Possible complications? Difficult for them to talk over the noise; also, she’d take any attempt to get her alone to hear out his proposition as a masher’s cheap ploy.
He would deal with these obstacles and any others that might come up there and then, Peter decided, as he stepped inside Shinebloom’s from the already darkening November afternoon. For an hour he sat at a table by the door, drinking tea with lemon, slowly eating his barley soup, saying little more to Rivka than, “Can you bring me the salt, please?” He studied the situation. There was a glossy cheapness to it on the surface: How would you like to audition as a singer? My friend hires acts at the Pavilion Theatre and when I heard you sing the other day…Try as he might, he couldn’t make the words sound like anything except bait in a scheme to get her alone.
The slap and clutch of a large hand on his shoulder broke Peter’s concentration. A reflex tightened his muscles, twisted him half out of his chair. “Karl’s worried about you,” Yoska said. He used his grasp on Peter to pivot around the end of the table, supporting his bad leg, and dropped heavily into the vacant chair.
“Why?”
“He didn’t say,” Yoska said, then b
riskly moved on to a more important piece of business. “Look here.” From two pockets he clawed out his haul—more than nine pounds in cash and a gold watch and chain. “Feel it,” he said, holding out the timepiece. “It’s still warm. Lifted it on the way over.” Peter admired it with a nod. “I thought Leon could be in here since he’s gone from the Warsaw. Have you seen him? Beron?”
“No.”
Rivka was serving a few tables away. Yoska caught her attention with a fond salute, and she returned the greeting with a tilt of her head toward her armful of plates, an apology for having to keep her mind strictly on her work. He turned back to notice Peter also looking Rivka’s way with a particular intention. “You’re wasting your time with her,” counseled Yoska.
“What do you know about it?”
“Rivka’s got a man. Not here. At home.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me.”
“Why did she do that?” Peter asked lightly.
“She’s pretty, all right?” Yoska fumbled with his silverware. “So I tried—why shouldn’t I?”
“To lift her.”
“That’s right!” He took the joke and wasn’t insulted. Far from it. “She’s some Benjamin’s prize.”
“Benjamin who?”
“Rivka’s man. Aren’t you listening? Home in Sasmacken.”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Peter said. “What else do you know about her?”
Yoska rubbed his face with both wide hands to stimulate his memory and passed on to Peter the story of Rivka Bermansfelt, which everybody in Liesma knew by now: how she and her father had ambushed a detachment of Russian cavalrymen on the road between Talsen and Sasmacken; how her father was captured but Rivka went on the run; how a cousin of hers in Talsen, Jankel Somebody, forged her papers and slipped her out of the country; how Karl had brought her to London, even fixed her up with the job at Shinebloom’s. “After that—” Yoska brushed his palms together and held up Karl’s clean hands.
“You know better ways to help her?” Peter said in Karl’s defense.
“I asked him—no, I said…” Yoska stammered. “What I asked him is, why can’t he use her, for something, you know?”
“You mean, for an action?”
“Why not? A face the police don’t know here.”
“What did Karl say?”
Yoska shook his head. “My opinion, it’s Nina talking.”
Peter sipped another spoonful of barley soup. “Doing anything besides stealing gold watches?”
“Cooking.”
“Cooking? Something for Karl?”
“You don’t want me to talk about an action here.” He leaned close. The pits in Yoska’s cheeks, his clotted complexion, loomed toward Peter like a flank of the moon. He went on: “I can’t give you any details. It’s a big job, a rich one. After we send Salnish his percentage we’ll still have enough left over to keep us alive for half a year. Talk to Karl if you want to help.”
In the few weeks Peter had been in London, one problem or another had gotten in the way of a satisfactory talk with Karl. Peter could wait a little longer, take advantage of the next opportunity to catch Karl on his own, away from Nina. Meanwhile, he could occupy himself with Rivka. “Introduce me to her,” he finally asked Yoska.
“You’re fearless, Peter. Right now?”
Peter glanced over and noticed an elderly Orthodox Jew rise from his table to help his wife with her coat. “Wait till she clears the table behind you.”
“What name should I tell her?”
He weighed the question for a second. Then, firmly, he said, “Peter.”
When the time came, Peter tucked his hand into the small of his back, a nod to formality without the stiff neck, and courteously stood to speak Rivka’s name. She spoke his in polite reply. They traded half-sentences of small talk, then left each other’s company, with no promise to meet again.
BETWEEN THEN and the late hour when Peter saw Rivka (from a doorway across the street) finish work and start homeward, he mulled over the single question he’d returned to ask her. He phrased it every way he could imagine: dryly, as a business opportunity. Casually, as a suggestion that just happened to spring to mind. Stirringly, as a rare chance to make a great change in her life. Benevolently, as a favor he might do for a friend, not to mention for his friend Harry at the Pavilion Theatre. Yet, no matter how Peter formulated his side of the offer, his motive remained slippery to his own touch.
So Peter’s thoughts went on troubling his stomach as he shadowed Rivka at a careful distance along Brick Lane. Her footsteps clicked across pavement that was slimy with refuse, and she appeared ahead of Peter in a ring of lamplight, then disappeared into the next pool of darkness. She walked in short, confident strides around and through the nighttime business of those streets, where market stalls now wheeled off their pitches were replaced by fistfights, shouting matches, the pigeon-cooing of prostitutes and the grunts of their alleyway customers.
Peter followed Rivka close enough to hear a man brag or lament, “…wiv a few shillins in me trouseys!” before the drunkard toppled into her and slurred, “Beg pardon.” His fingers curled around Rivka’s upper arm. “Pardon me, darlin’.”
Rivka’s smile was sweet-natured, but not even a drunk could mistake her meaning. She twisted out of Trouseys’ grip and wagged her finger in his face. Behind him, his friends raised cheers and insults. No revolution in England, Peter thought as he waded through them—not for this numb underclass—and then the sight of Rivka in the lamplight at the turning into Whitechapel Road shook politics out of his head.
He passed by shops with notices in Hebrew covering the windows, Hebrew scrawlings chalked on the brick walls, Hebrew advertisements. In the busy road, mixed in with the Yiddish laughter, Russian arguments, German and Polish deal-making, were the English, too, muttering: “’Tisn’t always six ounces. ’Tisn’t, no. An’ often you can’t hardly eat it. An’ they cheat you out of yer fair money.” Rivka pushed through, face front. No one knows her around here, Peter thought and watched her cross the boulevard. He looked at Rivka and saw a foreign pedestrian like him, dodging high carriage wheels and swampy heaps of horse manure.
Where Sidney Street met Stepney Way, a policeman touched the brim of his helmet when Rivka walked by. “Gutn-ovnt. A sheyn ponem!” She returned the constable’s compliment with the same calm smile she used to warn off the drunk on Brick Lane. Now they have police trying out their Yiddish on innocent citizens! Doll’s face or not, it’s a matter of privacy and none of the constabulary’s business.
The PC said nothing to Peter as he went on pacing his beat, and Peter nonchalantly glanced away. Gatekeepers, that was Salnish’s name for the police. This constable let Peter and Rivka deeper into Little Jerusalem. To cross over from the upper world. Jewish workers slogged home, Jewish bums slept in muddy yards, Jewish rag-pickers sorted their hauls, Jewish thieves fled like smoke into the brick tenements, fur-hatted rabbis patrolled their congregations, Jewish gamblers rolled dice and dealt cards, Jewish babies cried for food and warmth. The same as everywhere else in the East End, curbstones dissolved, it seemed, under mounds of wet filth, grinding man-made roadworks back into soil, but unlike in most English streets, in the rows of windows above you could see Sabbath candles, just smears of light, minuscule flames of unremarkable devotion.
In Wellesley Street, without slowing, Rivka’s walk relaxed. She had a “gutn-ovnt” for a few people on her way—neighbors, Peter supposed. One of these, a man of about his age, greeted him, too. “Gut-yontev,” he said. Peter replied, “Gutn-shabes.” Peter as an immigrant Jew: out of his half-dozen, this false identity felt most natural. A Jew in London. Hidden and conspicuous at the same time. Their language is a blanket pulled over their heads, outside the English but lodged in England, accepted without belonging. This gives a man secret freedom.
He felt a surge of that freedom as he ambled closer to Rivka. He would have to speak to her now, before she reached her front door. “Riv
ka?” He stood in the lamplight on purpose, to keep from frightening her.
“Hello?”
“My name is Peter.” He took a step closer. “Yoska’s friend.”
“Peter. I remember you.”
“Yes. Good.”
Their voices brought Charles Perelman to the front door. He opened it a crack to see who Rivka’s companion was, then quietly squeezed the door shut again. From the front window, shielded behind an edge of the curtain, he could get a better view. Later on, he’d ask Rivka how she met the man and whether she had any inkling of what Peter the Painter was doing in London. By his watch, he observed them in conversation together for seventeen minutes. If Perelman had been able to eavesdrop or if he’d been a lip reader, he would have jotted down but not made out the meaning of this exchange:
Rivka Bermansfelt: “I only sing when I’m in trouble.”
Peter Piatkow: “Can you sing if somebody pays you for it?”
A Storm in the Blood
Fifteen
UP ON THE BALLS OF HIS FEET, the Mayor shook both his fists at her—pure vaudeville tantrum—before generously allowing Rivka two half-days off work: Thursday for her first excursion into the West End, Friday for her audition at the Pavilion Theatre.
“Harry wants you there tomorrow afternoon at one o’clock. Did I tell you that?”
“You told me,” Rivka said.
On the omnibus’s upper deck, as it rounded Piccadilly Circus and the boulevard rolled open in front of them, Rivka almost swooned from the rush of light and space. Prosperity’s steady work carved out the rosy brick and polished granite buildings that stretched ahead, majestic as a canyon, and prosperity’s English children moved through the street below, human affairs like a deep river. Men with ivory-topped walking sticks, fine hats and broad-collared overcoats, the women’s black or chocolate-brown dresses, trimmed with burgundy, bottle-green, plum silk, flashes of color under coats and wraps that could make a woman look like she was being molested by a bear. Civilization shined out of Piccadilly’s windows, from dress shops, wine shops, food shops, nameless marble-clad buildings Rivka thought could as easily be banks as hotels.
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