“Yes. Why not?”
“Salnish was a hero to everyone in Riga Prison.”
“All right.” Karl stopped eating, showed he was listening.
Peter held his voice low but tapped the table to mark each point. “The Salnish who organized Tottenham was the same Salnish who organized that prison raid, too. He broke in and pulled Fritz out, and how many other men? The action had to be done. He led his men in and, no one wounded or lost, got away from there clean.”
“He out-thought them. Out-fought them, too, twenty to one.”
“Didn’t he?”
“But that’s not what you’re talking about.”
Urgency brightened Peter’s fine eyes. “Something besides Salnish’s judgment is different now.”
Karl said, “It was a while ago.”
“Four years, that’s all.”
“Half a decade. Almost.”
“Before our customs house,” Peter reminded him.
At night, four of them against three guards. One night watchman and two police guards. Peter held them against the wall, his gun at their backs, while Karl and the others went for the strongboxes. The night watchman swore up and down he didn’t have the keys.
Karl guessed why Peter had dragged this into the conversation. “You want to what—make some example? Talk about the old man who wet himself…”
“You think he prized his job? Guarding the tsar’s money?”
“He prized saving his skin,” Karl said. “With the barrel of your gun in his mouth.”
A few feet away, in the lightless back room of the customs house, Peter listened to the police guards talking back and forth in half-sentences. The first one wondered what the “gangsters” were going to do with them. It didn’t make a difference, the second one said: either the Lettish bastards were going to shoot them on principle…The first guard finished the thought—or the tsar’s officers were going to arrest them for not resisting and shoot them anyway. So what’s to lose?
“They ran, didn’t they? Not for the door, no, at me. To save the box of money, you think?” Peter answered his own question. “For themselves.”
“And you shot them, Peter. You rescued the action.”
“I want to hear it from you. Karl, tell me the reason you keep going.” Peter stubbed out his cigarette and grasped his friend’s forearm. “To accomplish something, or keep something worse from happening? Or is it just what you do with your time?”
Karl didn’t answer until Peter let go of him and settled again in his chair. “You can’t be emotional about it.”
“What’s wrong with that?” His voice rose louder than he’d meant it to. “We aren’t supermen. I’m not, you’re not. We’re men, that’s all, aren’t we?”
Karl was coolly wary. “Keep emotions out of our plans. That’s all I’m saying.”
“And I’m saying no action has meaning without emotions.” It was a plea, not a philosophy. “We don’t live in history.”
Lightness returned to Karl’s voice, the sound of a man who’d avoided falling into a trap. “Not yet.”
Across the table, Peter offered his hand. Then, smiling— one with sympathy, the other with acceptance—the two friends shook hands.
EVERY ONE OF the demonstrators arrested in Parliament Square on that Friday were released, cases dismissed, at Bow Street Magistrates Court the next day. Of the more than one hundred who were brought before the magistrate, Rivka Bermansfelt alone was remanded in custody to answer charges of obstruction, malicious damage, and assaulting the police. In her patchwork English, she was able to communicate to the desk sergeant at Canon Row her name, age, the address of her lodgings, and the name of her landlord.
“What’s her language? Any of you know it?”
“She might be Polish. Or just a Yid.”
The sergeant cooed to her, “Are you a proper Yid, my dear?”
Rivka’s freckled arms and hands caused a small stir. One of the constables won a round of laughs speculating, “By the looks of ’er could be she’s half-Paddy.”
By now her stomach and chest were racked with pain, and she tried hard to get her jailers to hear her complaints. A nurse swabbed Rivka’s bruises with a cold, soapy sponge; a doctor declared her fit to be questioned. In his attendance notes for the warden, he advised, “The chaps from Special Branch ought to arrive equipped with a Russian-Yiddish interpreter.”
The voices Rivka heard—stone-hard, echoing somewhere outside her cell—sounded Russian. Dimly, as her senses returned, she understood the reality around her: the prison cell, its metal door, damp stone walls, the uniform she wore, rough as burlap, a green serge dress and blue-checked apron, which didn’t hide the broad black arrows printed against the green. Was she in a Russian prison? Her life in London—was that all a memory or a dream? Could it be that she’d never escaped from the Cossacks or from Latvia? That she remained locked in Colonel Orlov’s prison?
The metal door swung back and a wardress came in, carrying a tray.
“Eat some food, will you, Fourteen Eighteen?”
A crustless cube of bread smeared with margarine sat on the tray; beside it were a pint of cocoa and a bowl of thin soup. Rivka raised her head in time to see the door swing closed. A narrow horizontal slot in it framed the matron’s eyes and eyebrows for a moment, then only the dim corridor light. Rivka turned her back to it and sipped at the soup. She swallowed a mouthful and felt it trickle into her stomach. It didn’t make her feel worse; her mother might have given her the same remedy. Eat, ketzel. Some barley soup. A little more, try. Rivka attempted a bite of bread. The margarine didn’t take away the dryness; it only added a dose of oil to the pasty mixture coating her tongue and teeth. She swallowed some of it, then retched air and watery spit. Rivka’s arms were barely strong enough to hold her face off the floor. The vomit rushed out of her three times, choking streams that splashed her bed and the walls with milky brown water and bread, thin soup, juices of her body, Rivka’s saliva, mucus, bile, blood.
Two wardresses, each holding one of Rivka’s arms, ushered her along a corridor between cells that somewhere became a corridor between ordinary rooms. Plunked into a stiff-backed chair in one of these comfortless rooms, behind a locked door, she waited alone for half an hour. There was no other furniture in there except a small metal trolley. Where the white enamel was cracked and flakes of it missing, blooms of rust dirtied it. A single electric bulb shed waxy light from the ceiling. Soon Rivka wasn’t alone in there. The prison matron unlocked the door and stood aside to make room for two nurses, a doctor, the warden and two other men, one middle-aged and fair-haired, the other younger and dark.
They took up places around her—at distances decided by their importance, Rivka guessed. The warden stood closest to her. “Hunger strikes won’t be tolerated at Holloway,” he said, “no matter what you’ve heard from other women.”
It seemed to Rivka he was calling on her to defend herself. In English, she said, “I have in my stomach ill. Sick, sir.”
“You refuse to eat.” He made a gesture toward his open mouth, his fingers clutched together, as if feeding himself a morsel.
“It’s mean, mm, she doesn’t see—”
“Miss Simms, you mean?” pointing toward the matron. “She didn’t see what?”
“She doesn’t see, mm, ill in my…here.”
The fair-haired man spoke to Rivka without moving from where he leaned against the wall to her side. He spoke in English. Immediately, the younger man spoke for him in Yiddish. “You struck a policeman with a belt. It’s a very terrible crime.”
“No,” she replied in English. “He stand behind of me. To hit me down.”
Again, the question in English first, then in Yiddish. “Where are you from? What country?”
A subtle signal from the young man, the swirl of a finger, advised Rivka to answer in Yiddish. She followed him in this, but spoke to the fair-haired man, saying she used to live in Sasmacken, in East Courland, in Latvia.
“Wh
at’s a Lett doing at a WSPU demonstration? Are you a member of the WSPU?”
Above and beyond translating Yiddish to English and vice versa, the young man made a note of Rivka’s answers in the kind of pocketbook she’d seen policemen use. She told her story of the journey to the Strand that took her so far off course. She didn’t know what the people around Big Ben were doing there. She never heard of suffragettes before, she didn’t know what the initials WSPU meant, and when its meaning was spelled out for her, Rivka shook her head.
“The Strand’s quite a distance from Parliament Square.”
She knew that now.
“Do you believe women should have the vote?”
If the men said so.
To the young man, his superior said, “Write ‘no response.’” He took a step closer, showed Rivka his face, his stance. “You believe women have advanced? The educated native also tells us that he’s advancing, pulling up level with the white man.” For a second time, he instructed the interpreter to enter “no response” as Rivka’s reply. “Tell me where you live.”
They had this information already. The young man urged her to repeat it. Wellesley Street, she told them. A room.
“What’s your landlord’s name? Who takes your rent money?”
Charles Perelman, she told him.
“Did anybody arrange the accommodation? Did somebody find the room at Perelman’s for you?”
She said, “He inwited me live dere.”
The three men spoke together, the warden included in the whispered conference. Then Rivka was asked, “How do you get your money? Seamstress?”
She worked in a restaurant, she told them. Two restaurants.
“Which ones? Where?”
Shinebloom’s and Clark’s. Both in Sclater Street.
“Are you friendly with any particular customers at Shinebloom’s? Men, say? Other Letts? Jews?”
She tried to be friendly with everyone she served.
“How did you come to London?”
By steamer.
“Under your own steam?” As the mild laughter drained out of the room, he asked, “By yourself, I mean. No one helped you—with money, papers, that sort of thing.”
I’m a refugee. Cossacks attacked my family. I came here to be safe.
“Why did they do that, I wonder, those filthy Cossacks?” The young man didn’t interpret that remark. “Are you an anarchist?”
Before Rivka could think how to answer, the warden cut in. “Obviously she’s a radical.”
She caught the change of tone, threatening enough for her to use English, directed at them all. “Everything what I say…no bloomy good.”
“Are you an anarchist? Do you have anarchist friends?”
“No! Friends of me. Helping. Only! Only!”
“I don’t believe you.” He clutched Rivka’s mouth.
“I am singer. Please, sir…” Crying now, shaking her head free. “You hurt me dere. Den I am not sing.”
“Can’t. You mean you can’t sing.”
“No, please. I am singer only! No troublemaker!”
Rivka told the young man, and asked him to write in his notebook that it wasn’t possible for her to be an anarchist; she didn’t know what an anarchist did.
The chap from Special Branch repeated his round of questions twice more. Rivka could only give him the same answers in the same words. She was a match for his patience, but not his stamina. Without fanfare, the fair-haired man and his interpreter put their hats back on, signaling to Rivka and the warden that they’d finished with her. She had no idea what finally satisfied them that they’d got enough, or all they were likely to get, from her. As the warden opened the door to let them out, Rivka heard him call the older man Mr. Whitfield and the younger one Mr. Wagner.
Rivka waited for the wardresses to take her back to her cell. But they didn’t lift her from her chair; instead, they began to tie her to it, wrapping cloth straps around her ankles and pulling her ankles to the chair legs. As a wardress on each side of her pinioned her arms, the warden leaned close to Rivka and said, “You think we’ve never seen that trick before? You pretend you’re eating the good food that staff provide, then force yourself to expel it in a sickening mess on the floor.”
“I want go…to home.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said, not unkindly. “Should’ve thought of that before you hurt that policeman.”
He nodded to the doctor, a short, thin man, ungentle and expressionless, who ordered Rivka to open her mouth. She shook her head, clamped her jaws. “Usually,” said the doctor, “this is done where other prisoners can watch. Do you want us to do that? Take you out to the reception room?”
The nurse’s hands caught Rivka’s head in a strong grip—one at her forehead, the other at her chin—pressing down with her whole weight to force open the lower jaw. Rivka twisted away and felt a crisp slap on her cheek. She let out a breath—of anger, outrage, animal ferocity—and when she did, the doctor pushed a metal wedge between her teeth, preventing her from closing her mouth. Bracing a bony knee on her thigh, the doctor fed a length of rubber tube into her throat. On its way down, the flexing rubber scraped raw flesh; another taste of metal, the flavor of her blood as she choked it up.
“Hold her—keep her steady!”
“Yes, Doctor. I’m trying to.”
Another pair of hands pinned Rivka’s shoulders against the back of the chair. She fought for air, a single breath to keep her body alive, resisting, every gasp plugged by the fattening rubber tube gorged with the mash of bread and milk now being sloshed into the funnel above Rivka’s head. Quick as it slopped into her stomach it churned there, rushed back up her throat, and splashed sour froth from her slack mouth.
Someone had neatly replaced the Bible, prayer book, hymn book, and two pamphlets—Fresh Air and Cleanliness and The Narrow Way—on Rivka’s bed. The vomit from hours before lay uncleaned and freshly slicked with more; patches of it glistened on the cell floor under the electric light. Rivka’s thoughts sailed to her father, carried skyward on her weak, sympathetic breath. Poor Mordechai, a Lettish man degraded by the Russians, a Lettish Jew made their special toy, his tolerance and caution broken. “I’m your daughter here,” Rivka whispered to the air. “I’m your good daughter.” She rolled onto her side and sang to the wall, “Nokh eyn tants, beyt ikh itst bay dir…”
FOR A THIRD time, Karl woke to Saturday’s dim, overcast morning, ticked into its last hour now. The bedsheets’ warmth kept him drowsy and submissive to sleep. Awake, dressed, busy, Nina had already been out on homely errands and returned with fresh rolls, a jar of English jam, even, somehow, a scuttle full of coal. The room swelled with heat from the fireplace. From his bed, Karl could see tea steaming in the blue china pot on the table. He crooked one arm behind his head.
Nina said, “You’re ready to eat?”
He nodded. “Yes, Nina. Please.”
“You’ll be glad to hear that Perelman apologized to Fenia for hitting her.” Nina ladled a small mound of jam onto a plate, sliced the roll in half, poured a cup of tea, sugared and stirred it.
“He wouldn’t have. You had to shame him into it.”
“That’s him.” Nina shrugged one shoulder, all the effort Perelman deserved. “Some men don’t bend to shame. He does. He cares what we think of him.”
Karl held a spoonful of jam on his tongue and slowly breathed out. He sniffed summer air. “English strawberries.”
“Fanny didn’t accept so quick. She’s making him suffer a little.”
“Yes? How?”
“A new hat. Not only. He’s a bully, Perelman, you know why? Because his wife goes with those men.”
“What men?”
“Other men. Younger men. He flattered himself with Deborah. Is he twenty years older than she is? More?”
“Thirty. He was bragging, for sure.”
“What does he expect from someone who has to put up with his crazy running around…”
At that moment, Karl felt l
ulled into a cloud of sensual pleasure: the sweet fruit of the jam, the sound of Nina’s voice. He listened to her report of her mission to the Perelmans—of the treaty she negotiated between father and daughter, of Nina’s successful mothering, her acid observations of home life chez Perelman—but his attention flickered and faded. He huddled into himself. Whispery half-thoughts tugged him back to the unsettling conversation he’d had with Peter the night before, and further still…
Lemon juice is invisible ink, Karl reminisced. Chemistry is change made visible. Alter one fact, you make an experiment with history. If this, then that. If he gave up the leadership of Liesma, then someone else—Jacob Peters, for instance—would step in. All right. Let Lenin’s quartermasters get along without my help. Let the great revolution arrive or not arrive in my absence. Take Russia out of my life’s arrangements and what’s left? Mornings like this, with Nina.
Karl’s contemplation ran in this direction: A man needs a livelihood—that’s enough of a reason to act. What career would I have? Where? Not in England. Not Latvia or Russia, I’ve put those places behind me. France, Germany, Poland, where I’m a wanted man? Australia? America? Karl had never visited America. Fritz had, the year before. “Karl, it’s a green country,” he said when he returned. Naïve, he meant. The job there would be to make himself over with an American name: Jack Martin. Fritz told him about Pennsylvania. Penn-sylvan-ia. Sylvan, wooded. Penn’s woods. He imagined living in a house outside the city near the woods—from P. Morin of Gold Street, London, to J. Martin of Pennsylvania, USA—finding a situation as a chemical engineer. Eating his breakfast there, not here.
Early sunlight washes into the kitchen from windows on two sides. Even on autumn days, the room is warm and airy. Their Pennsylvania house has four other rooms, two downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs, with a bathroom between them. Stands of plane trees, chestnut, oak, and maple line the low hills. This time of year, the middle of November, their leaves are still scar let, orange, yellow, waiting for the cold nights to prune them. Nina hasn’t made tea for her Jack. Americans drink coffee in the morning. After his second cup, he leaves Nina, who cooks at the stove—pork chops, fried potatoes, and celery for his lunch. Outside, from the road, a man calls Karl’s name. “Jack! It’s Albert and Bill!”
A Storm in the Blood Page 11