Just as remarkable to her was Peter’s ease among it all. His tweed suit, his confident bearing, not blasé but unawed, made him indistinguishable—to Rivka, anyway—from an Englishman. When he told her where their long ride from Stepney was taking them, she half expected a lantern lecture from him to caption the passing scenery, some commentary or revolutionist’s critique of the immoral wealth on parade, the manifesto of his Liesma brotherhood. But she got very little conversation out of Peter.
He watched for their stop. “And you know where it is—how to get there?”
“Oh. I thought…No—yes, I can find out.”
“I can’t be there,” Peter said. “I have to see Karl.”
“I’ll find it all right.”
“If Harry likes you enough, maybe he’ll let you sing in one of his Yiddish operas.”
“Good.”
Peter cocked his head. “You don’t know what an opera is, do you?”
“It’s singing. With a dance to it.”
“No. With a story. It’s a play, and everybody in it sings. Usually while they suffer and die.”
“In Yiddish this is no surprise to me.”
“Harry also puts on Gilbert and Sullivan in Yiddish.” He waited for a glint of recognition from her. “Gilbert and Sullivan?” The omnibus stopped at the curb and spared Rivka another embarrassing display of her backwoods greenness. Peter nodded for her to get up. “We’ll walk from here.”
From the bus stop at Green Park, Peter forged their way across Piccadilly, one step ahead of Rivka for safety’s sake, keeping clear of the motor and carriage traffic. Once they reached the chic side street, he hung back to walk beside her, but didn’t take her arm. His mind was on higher things, or at least things that waited ahead, and whatever they were, the closer Peter got to them, the more excitement they kindled. His mouth tightened; his skin, smoothly opaque as a bar of soap, bloomed with a pinkish blush in his cheeks and throat.
At the entrance to the Grafton Galleries, his crisp manners weren’t forgotten by any rush to get inside. As he held the door open to usher Rivka in, she thought she heard him say something in a low whisper, edged with reverence, perhaps not even meant for her to hear: “This is the real revolution.” Then they stood in the first room. “Look,” Peter invited her, as if the painting in front of them were his own.
The painting emerged from the full wall it occupied with the insistence of a living presence. Almost eye to eye in front of her, when onlookers strayed off to view the other artworks, Rivka had clear sight of a red-haired woman of about her own age serving at an elegant marble bar. It wasn’t pierogis and borscht she was serving, either, but champagne, oranges, cognac. Reflected in the huge mirror behind her, the roomful of chandelier-lit gaiety whirled in the far distance—regardless of the girl, it seemed—and the dulled absence in her face, her inhibited silence, reflected back the same distance and disregard.
Peter translated its title for Rivka. “A schenk bei Folies-Bergère, it’s called.”
“Why didn’t he, didn’t the painter—”
“Manet. Edouard.”
“Why didn’t he call it by her name, that girl’s?”
“He did.”
Rivka looked again, at the serving girl’s dark velvet dress, nipped waist, her rose-white flesh, then at the bottles displayed on the bar, their bodies a green that was almost black, their necks wrapped in pale pink foil. “He made her look like a bottle of champagne.”
“She is the Folies-Bergère. You see it?”
“I feel that way sometimes,” Rivka said. “Not usually at Shinebloom’s. At Clark’s. I stop looking at their faces. I pretend I’m someplace else.”
“Where?”
She glanced upward to catch the memory. “Back in Shinebloom’s.”
Other rooms stored more treasures. Peter plunged into the Cézanne landscapes, still lifes and portraits, canvases by Matisse, Signac, van Gogh, and Picasso, even some African pottery, and Rivka worked to stay with him. With half a sentence trailing behind him, more than once he disappeared through the tight spaces between the well-dressed men and women who crowded the rooms. Whenever she got the chance, she asked him questions. About the colors and subjects. Were these painters the most famous in France? Did they live on what they sold? She asked about the places in the landscapes, the patchwork of shades in this one, the wildly blurred shapes in that one.
At the Seurat, he ran out of answers for her. A drizzle of dabs that was wind in the high trees at the same time it was sunlight across a tiled roof at the same time it was fields in summer at the same time it was the shadow of a wall, it gripped him there in silence. Here it was again, the world as it really existed, the world-haze. They dissolve everything out of the fixed, concrete and fated, these seers who look at people, their trappings and belongings, and see constant motion…Around him the blind babblers hammered spikes into Peter’s ears. “Are these Frenchies at large?” “In some asylum, I shouldn’t wonder.” “Not worth my while, or my wife’s, neither.” “Get the police! There’s been a horrible accident—with paint!” Each one aimed a shot to outdo the other’s droll superiority. What a sickening thought it was: the threads of that same world-haze connected him to this pool of know-nothings, and them to him. Brittle tinkling laughter and smug ridicule reached Peter wherever he stood in the gallery.
“Childish dribbles!” “Indecent!” “Pornographic!” “Raw anarchism!”—Rivka heard the women’s voices, flinging slogans over her head at the Gauguins, loud enough to make sure their husbands knew what they thought. But when she looked at the same picture, she didn’t see the lewdness, only a young Tahitian family at peace in the evening beside their canoe.
“What do you see?” Peter asked her, politely eager to hear. She told him: the husband was at rest, home from his day’s work, shorn of his work clothes. In the bowl he drank from was something sweet made by his wife. She was the woman relaxing on the far side of the canoe, combing her hair, unworried. Their little boy, naked like his father, played by the canoe. He wasn’t old enough yet to go out and help his father catch fish. They looked like the first family on earth, loved by God as much as they loved each other.
Peter listened, thoughtfully, then said, “Why do you bring God into it?”
“The way they love each other,” she said. Then, because Peter showed he was still listening, Rivka found more to say. “That’s God talking to people.”
“No it isn’t.”
“What is it to you, Peter?”
“Father, mother, son, everyone’s lost in their own business. But together.”
He pushed through the burgomasters and lazy bohemians with glances over his shoulder to make sure Rivka was still following him—out of the gallery now. But in the middle of the room Peter stopped. For a parting look, she thought, at a Cézanne portrait, the one of his wife, Hortense, seated in a big red armchair. (Earlier, he’d asked Rivka what she thought of it. “Hortense doesn’t love him in that one,” she said. Yet in its blood-reds, jewel-blues and-yellows, the scene was aglow with the fragile heat of one human being’s memory: this woman in her Sunday skirt and blouse, her prim coiffeur and unquiet obedience, the armchair, wallpaper, and sunlight fused in her husband’s eye.) Rivka felt a coldness sift through her when she realized it wasn’t the picture he’d stopped to look at but the man bent double in front of it, in a spasm of laughter, having a hard time catching his breath.
“She’s a farmer’s wife! No beauty is she!” Another man patted the cackler’s back in support, or to help his breathing. “An artist ought to make the ugly ones look pretty, shouldn’t he?” Oh, he was too smart to let any French bugger play a joke like that on him and get away with it. “Whole game’s a damn swindle,” he coughed.
For a second or two, Peter was nervous—until he realized that the rumble inside him was really revulsion, a poison mash in his belly he had to disgorge or it would choke him. He stood at the cackler’s elbow and asked the man, in English, “You get a shock from this? G
ood. I say good, you can have a shock!”
Assaulted by the Frenchy art—and now assaulted by a French madman! “What’s this now?”
Peter waved his arm at the Cézanne, at the whole gallery. “His painting of her, Paul Cézanne’s picture. Not yours—not yours!”
“He’s raving, coming in here! Raving at me!” The cackler looked to friends for help. “Some jumped-up Frenchy!”
One of the cackler’s friends made a grab at Peter’s arm and threatened to hold him till a policeman could be brought. “You can’t go ’round disturbing the peace any time you want to! What do you think of that?”
Peter’s outburst shook Rivka. It broke like a flash flood or lightning storm, with the force of some natural disaster. She felt a sudden fear for him, because the silence that dammed him up for twenty minutes afterward, under the blush that heated his face, told her that he couldn’t help himself. For the length of their walk to Piccadilly Circus, nothing she tried to tell him, no touch on his arm, penetrated deep enough to draw a response. Finally, as they searched the traffic in half a dozen directions for the right omnibus to take them home, Peter said, “A bomb blows up.”
“What are you talking about?”
His breath smelled sharp to her, metallic. He seemed to concentrate on each word, as if he were working out the ideas as he spoke them. “People oppose you.”
“What are you talking about, Peter—a bomb?”
“The bomb, or the gun—that isn’t the terrifying thing. Why was that idiot laughing? I’ll tell you: he’s protecting himself.” He paused a moment, looking for words. “The paintings don’t scare him. He’s scared about what they’ll make him think after he looks at them. A bomb blows up a tram car, or a policeman’s brains get splashed on the ground, or a friend’s blood. Then you know something for sure—there are people alive who want to break you into pieces. Your suffering is their reward. They are unreasonable men. Nothing you can do will ever make them stop. They won’t stop until you’re gone. Someday in the future. When they are up and you are down.”
“Are you one of those men?” Rivka asked, fearing his honest answer.
Peter glanced across to Shaftsbury Avenue and thought, These were the old arguments. He was speaking them out loud again to test their strength, on Rivka and on himself.
“That one’s ours, on the other side,” he said, pointing to a nearby bus. “If we miss it I don’t know how long we’ll be waiting here. Let’s go.”
A Storm in the Blood
Sixteen
WITHOUT LOOKING UP from his newspaper, the assistant stage manager directed her to the wings, stage left, where she should wait to hear her name called.
Remarkable. On the other side of the world from Sasmacken, in the Pavilion Theatre, she felt at home. More here than she did as a waitress in Shinebloom’s, or as a lodger with the Perelmans, or as a Jew shopping for a loaf of pumpernickel in Whitechapel Road. She rested her hand on the dull, cooling edge of the curtain’s lead counterweights, then gripped the tendon of the rope they swung from, romantic as a hawser of a tall ship, and the tarry wooden floor muffled her footsteps over to a rack of costumes stowed behind the safety curtain. The fineness of the dressmaking, striped silk skirts, a rabbit-fur stole, and the tailoring of men’s clothes—Orthodox hats and black coats among them—seemed to hint at the treasures this life had stored up for Rivka, this theater life.
Unimaginable.
No, the shuddering didn’t seize Rivka’s stomach until later, after she’d finished singing for Harry and she returned to the sheltering dark backstage. Her bones vibrated like piano strings, a hummingbird fluttered in her chest, her head floated in a ring of cloud. How much could she earn from one performance? So much? First performance, one song, tomorrow night. A part in an opera? Maybe yes, maybe no, but her name would be on the Pavilion’s next playbill: Rivka Bermansfelt’s debut as a singer of Yiddish songs.
And what about her name? It was all right for the East End, but not up West. “Can you sing English songs?” On the first time through, with piano accompaniment, she learned the melody; by the third time, tutored from the third row by Harry, she was singing “The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery” with the stretched vowels and brassy hard consonants of your actual Cockney miss. “Think of an English name for yourself,” he instructed her. “I’m going to tell my friend at the Tivoli all about you, hm? How would you like to sing in a music hall in the Strand?” And support herself on her singing, and buy a dress that came decorated with burgundy ribbons.
EITHER THE BUS conductor misheard Rivka’s Cockney-Yiddish pronunciation of Tivoli and Strand, or the bell-ringing and engine noise garbled it entirely—or else in Mile End she’d climbed onto the wrong bus altogether. Instead of being set down in front of a first peek of her music-hall future, Rivka stood lost on a corner of Parliament Square. From a painted tea tray in Clark’s, she recog nized the House of Commons, which she thought was called Big Ben, and pointed it out to a nearby police constable.
“Walk or ride?” he quickly asked her.
“Please?”
“Sorry, I can’t help you,” he muttered impatiently and hurried to join other policemen crossing the street toward the Commons gates.
With a better grasp of the English language, Rivka would have been able to read the messages on the placards brandished by small bunches of women who were pooling in the square in pairs and sixes and dozens: DEEDS NOT WORDS, VOTES FOR WOMEN, OUR CAUSE IS NOBLE, JUSTICE. As the women walked by, men on the surrounding sidewalk snarled curses at them for their own entertainment; laughing and ugly, the bullies kicked out at passing ankles and feinted blows with their fists. As gravely imposing as the Palace of Westminster’s stone walls, the policemen stood their ground and watched for mischief. Tall, strong men in long blue coats, gold stripes of rank on their sleeves, they overshadowed the bully boys just by talking to them. English police, Rivka thought. Serious and honorable. Look how many they sent to protect these women.
THE FRONT ROOM in Gold Street was a box of cold air. Two days ago, when the coalman drove by in his cart, Karl wasn’t home; Nina was, but she forgot to flag him down. Against the chill, they boiled pots of Russian tea on the stove. Peter surrounded the heavy mug with his fingers and palms. As he raised it to his lips, he heard Nina say, “Do you want me to bring a piece of fish?”
Karl looked up, but not at her. “From?”
“By Perelman’s. I have to go comfort Fenia. Her father hit her again. In the face.” Nina tucked herself into her coat, tugged its seams neat, and walked back to the table where Peter sat. She filled the half-empty mug that sat in front of him with fresh tea. “He choked her, too, that dog. I saw the marks on Fenia’s neck.”
“She can’t stay here,” Karl said. “I don’t want it.”
“Do you want fish or not?” Nina said, from the door.
“For lunch or dinner?”
“Dinner.”
He exchanged a quick glance across the table with Peter. “No. We’ll eat at the Warsaw.”
Karl airily described his ménage as “the London arrangement.” He had shared his days and nights with Nina Vasilyeva for more than a year; their sitting room had the atmosphere of a burrow they’d dug for themselves with freely given confidences. What would this man and woman be to each other away from the political turbulence constantly pounding at their door? Any visitor to Gold Street would see what Peter saw: a beautiful young couple, a man of persuasive charm and a woman of sure-footed moral determination, both of them intelligent and capable, fond partners in the struggle for money, safety, and a place where they could belong.
Nina’s footsteps trickled down the outer hallway, pursuing Fanny Perelman’s domestic drama. Karl waited until he heard the street door shut before he relaxed back into his conversation with Peter. “Charles Perelman should watch out. There’s a force in her. Nina gets it from her father.”
“Does she?”
“Indrik Gristis.”
Peter shook his head; th
e name meant nothing to him.
“Indrik Gristis?” Karl repeated. “No?”
“Gristis? No. That’s his only name?”
The hero of Nina’s life, Karl explained. One of the early converts from servitude to rebellion. Indrik was a chef in one of the tsar’s palaces; then, when the ’05 revolution came, Brother Gristis commanded a squad of riflemen. “Gristis and thirteen other men on horseback against an artillery battery that was bombarding a village near Kiev. The Russians had a Gatling gun. Indrik led them in. He was the only one who survived.”
“Unlucky. For the thirteen, I mean.”
“We don’t live in a magic world,” Karl observed. “Anyway, they killed those bastard gunners first and Indrik took their gun.”
“No, I never heard that story.”
“Nina told it to me.” Karl gave a sympathetic smile. “She’s her father’s daughter.”
“And what did you get from your father?” Peter asked him.
Karl paused a moment. “My hair.”
“It’s beautiful hair.” The two men laughed together, Karl easily and warmly.
“There’s nobody to talk to here,” Karl said.
“Paris, either. Not counting police informers.”
“Somebody after you?”
“Of course!” Peter said lightly, with honesty. “It’s been quiet in London—since that craziness last year.”
“Yes, I was going to come find you. I tried.”
“Did you? When?”
“Summer. July,” he said. “I thought of you. Were you in France?”
“Yes.”
“Paris?”
“No. You came to Paris?”
“No. I tried, though. To sniff you out.” Karl sipped at his tea. “If anybody could find you…”
“You’d’ve been a welcome sight,” Peter said. It was flattery, but poured from his heart. “I wanted to talk with you, too. You thought of me?”
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