Saturday, yes. His neighbors, father and son, promised to come over to help him finish the long wooden fence he’s building to protect his garden from the passing motor cars. He’d sunk the posts himself; shaving the ends of the rails and laying them in is a job for two men, and with young Bill they’re three. Together they finish the whole thing in a couple of hours and the three men go inside to drink Nina’s coffee and eat slices of her apple strudel.
“See, that’s good lumber you bought, Jack,” Albert says.
“Not so good for my hands,” says his son, showing off the blisters on his fingers.
“I’ll knit you some gloves,” Nina promises Bill.
“It’ll stand up to the weather,” Albert says. He asks Jack, “Made any breakthroughs at the chemical plant?”
Karl leans back in his chair. “Nothing I can talk about.”
“To the peasants,” Albert kids him. “Your free labor!” He scoops another bite of strudel into his mouth.
“Free neighbor,” corrects Jack.
He means this freedom—his. Freedom to choose what he makes his responsibility. A house, a fence, a debt. The historical causes that landed him here are a thousand human generations; his only consequence is the first of the next thousand.
I’ll live another fifty years and die in my Pennsylvania bed when I’m seventy-four. In 1960. Who knows? Perhaps by then the revolution will come meet me in America. History and a man’s history, one in the other. You can leave that to men with the head for it—men like Salnish, Lenin, Jacob Peters.
Karl’s mental experiment unsettled him less than he expected. He might even talk it over with Peter that afternoon, he thought, drifting back from his daydream of a pastoral future. “Let’s go away from London tomorrow,” he said to Nina.
“Where?” she asked, reaching for his empty plate.
“The countryside.”
Nina covered her mouth with her hand and laughed. “Karl, you’re lost anyplace outside the city. When we went to visit Jan Kernow at the seaside, every five minutes you wanted to know what time it was.”
“The seaside’s not the countryside. I’m talking about trees and meadows,” said Karl, “not cold wind in your ears and wet feet. And no Kernow, either.”
“We don’t have train fare.”
“It’s cheaper to live in the countryside.”
“In that case we’d scrape for train fare to get to London.” Nina brushed the crumbs from Karl’s plate into a washbasin. She heard a knock on the street door, two taps, followed by three. It reminded her: “I met Yoska by the Perelmans. Him and Max Smoller. He said he wants to talk to you today.”
“Smoller?”
“Yoska.”
“Not with Smoller.”
“I told him: just you. And not until later, because Karl’s resting.”
“What time is it?”
“Twelve.”
The knock came again. Karl said, “All right. Let him in.”
Yoska’s raw knuckles attacked the door with another gleeful melody of knocks. As an optimist, he felt justified; as a comrade, he felt vindicated. He was one of the few reliable ones—a plain fact Karl was obliged to appreciate.
That security was the secret behind Yoska’s good-dog grin when Nina brought him inside. One look at him and Karl was sure it was the sight of fresh food on the table that kindled the joy heating Yoska’s cheeks.
Karl finished dressing by the fireplace. Nina helped him button his shirt collar. “Have you eaten anything today, Yoska?”
“I can always eat,” he replied. He limped to the nearest chair, lowered his thick body down into it. “What is it? Strawberries?”
“Strawberry.”
“From Reuben,” Nina said. “Same as they sell in the West End.”
Yoska said to Karl, “I have something for you, too.” He retrieved a small square of paper from the inside pocket of his overcoat. Karl and Nina watched him open it out and smooth it on the table. It was a sketch in pencil of the layout of a building. Nothing was labeled. Yoska waited for Karl to speak.
Nina obliged him, frowning. “What is it?”
“A prize,” Yoska answered. His broad index finger stabbed at the bottom end of the T-shaped line drawing. “Houndsditch,” he said. “Number 119.”
He had come to tell Karl about a jeweler’s shop on the premises, called H. S. Harris, doing brisk business for the last six or seven months. Savvy about jewelry trade gossip, Yoska mentioned—but brushed aside—rumors of Romanov necklaces, brooches, even a Fabergé egg entrusted to Mr. Harris’s firm for repair. The significant fact was that the shop was a success, patronized by a wealthy clientele, gentlemen who worked in the City and other princely types. For four hours on Friday, Yoska watched them arrive and depart. His conservative estimate of the contents of the Harris safe: lengths of gold chain, rings, watches, earrings, and, if they were lucky, a small amount of gold and silver bullion. The haul could bring them—“Two hundred pounds? Three hundred? You’d need somebody besides Leon Beron to move it on.”
Karl made a closer study of the layout. “From this it looks like you can see the safe from the street.”
“You can’t go in through the front,” Yoska concurred.
“What’s behind the shop? Here. These are connected rooms?”
“Flats behind. In Exchange Buildings. Number 9, 10 in the middle, 11. Nine and 11”—he pointed to the boxes that formed the two ends of the T’s crossbar—“they’re for rent.”
Any robbery is a set of practical problems, some general, others particular to the target. Karl quickly became absorbed in the task of identifying the obstacles to the forced entry of the long, narrow jewelry shop at 119 Houndsditch. He concentrated on Yoska’s sketch, marked its margins with a red crayon, asked for missing pieces of information, applied his intelligence to the concrete difficulties of a concealed break-in, safe-cracking, and escape.
Yoska dredged up a host of details, and they tumbled like lock cylinders into Karl’s calculations: The exchange Buildings occupy a cul-de-sac…A narrow yard accommodating the toilets separated the back wall of the flats from the back wall of the jewelry shop…The shops in the area close for business around seven o’clock…He thought ahead to the necessity of raising finance—to rent the flats, to purchase tools, chemicals, and cutting equipment. To face off danger from citizens and police, to take the prize, to prevail—it all depended on choosing the right men.
As little as she thought of Yoska, Nina’s silent geisha withdrawal from the two men’s company conveyed something more to Karl. Her half-smile and gently narrowed peat-brown eyes lifted her man on a wave of the confidence—it was a kind of faith—she placed in his virtue. Nina stepped out of the room and into the chilly hallway, closing the door behind her without a disruptive sound, her part in the male ceremony of serious work.
Yoska left Gold Street elated; he would have clicked his heels if his lame leg had allowed it. After he’d gone, Karl undressed and slid back into the voluptuous daytime comfort of bed. A house to share with Nina in the American countryside is not a thing in this world, he thought, his mind now reflective and clear. A robbery that hasn’t been pulled off yet is not a thing in this world. Both exist in the same place, an ideal future—that’s to say an undecided one.
He measured and weighed the two propositions, dissected them side by side and extracted the difference between a scheme and a fantasy. Karl pulled the blankets up to his chin, shut his eyes, and from the skinny bones of Yoska’s sketch began constructing a plan: to break through two brick walls, cut through an iron safe, and rob H. S. Harris Jewelers of all the wealth it owned.
A Storm in the Blood
Seventeen
IN CLOTHES THAT were not hers, in a part of London she didn’t know, Rivka reentered the world as an ex-inmate of HM Prison Holloway. Where were her plain black dress and half-jacket, underclothes, stockings, and shoes? Scattered. Tossed into boxes and reception-room heaps. Perhaps covering another prisoner released ahead of
her. “Better than yours,” the wardress said of the dark blue jacket she handed to Rivka. “You had an awful tear down the sleeve, the one you come in with. I remember it.”
What Rivka remembered was that they’d incarcerated her for two days and nights, and did worse than that to her besides. They—the policemen in Parliament Square who chased her down, beat, kicked, and arrested her, the one in Canon Row who charged her, the magistrate at Bow Street who sentenced her, the plainclothesmen who interrogated her, the prison doctor who obscenely brutalized her, the wardresses who clamped her to the chair—planted a rock in Rivka’s gut. Each step she took jarred this dead weight until its toothed edges clawed her stomach. Blindly, she explored its hardness, roughness, nauseating bulk, and the cost of cradling inside her something so alien as bewildered fury.
Her clothes on an unknown stranger; a stranger’s blue jacket and chocolate-brown skirt on her. Also shoes from somebody whose feet were a size larger than Rivka’s. If she had to run in them, she’d break both her ankles. The blouse they gave her was another disaster—yellow sweat stains under the arms, too tight in the bust, a button missing. A clownish costume altogether. As she stood waiting for Charles Perelman to materialize from the thin stream of faces passing through the station entrance, Rivka was worried by the thought that he wouldn’t recognize her; she’d have to approach him and watch him recoil from this vagrant come to pester him for a handout. “It’s me. Rivka,” she’d have to say, and watch his disgust break into pity.
Along with the secondhand clothes, the wardress had handed her a message written in English and Yiddish on an official HMP form. It instructed Rivka to meet her landlord at Caledonian Road Underground station. How Perelman had found out so quickly where she was and the date and hour of her release was a mystery. A gentleman had bestirred himself to fetch her home; to know that satisfied her well enough.
In a minute, here he was, unmistakable in his cape and wide hat, with his mountaineer’s stride. Perelman reached to touch Rivka’s hand. His compassionate, courtly greeting disastrously failed to camouflage the grim surprise that tightened his mouth and weighed down his eyelids.
“How else would you find your way back? Ask a policeman?” A step ahead of her with his explanation.
Rivka walked slowly toward the platform, Perelman leading her by the arm. “I could do it,” she said.
“You could, I’m sure,” he said. “Now I’m here and you don’t have to.”
“It’s a long way to come. It is, isn’t it?”
“On the train it’s not so far.” He escorted Rivka into the carriage. With his gloved hand, Perelman brushed the seat clean before letting her sit down. “Any way you cut the pumpernickel, toybele, you’re my responsibility.” He’d used his sincerest tone, but—beholden? humiliated?—her cheeks reddened and Rivka quickly turned her face away. Perelman explained: “You didn’t come home so I went looking. Then the police came to talk to me.”
“I’m sorry. Mr. Perelman, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have trouble from me.”
“They’re the ones with the trouble!” he said wickedly. “My good friends in the London constabulary told me you hit one of them with your belt.”
“I don’t remember. I’m not sure if I did or didn’t.”
A gloomy frown. “Every time they breathe on you it’s a lie. You didn’t come home, so I demanded, I protested. You know they wanted to keep you in for six more days? I protested. You’re a good girl. You work hard, pay your rent and keep away from bad types. They made some mistake, I told them. I made a solid case, it convinced them.” Perelman sang this from the crest of a wave of eager sympathy, as though he doubted he’d be believed.
Though, sincerely, Perelman felt bound to the girl by kinship. She’d just taken her first steps in the foothills; he was a veteran climber, stood high above at the summit of the same mountain of entanglements. It’s a blessing she hasn’t got the okhrana also on her back, he thought—only lesser demons, those low-voiced, mannerly gentlemen of Special Branch. Because she’s the object of police attention, they can cover her with dirt. Anytime, on a suspicion, a whim. There’s no end to the varieties of damnation they can rain down on Rivka’s head. Sickening rumors about her. Prison again. Deportation. From this depredation, Perelman told himself, he had the power to defend her. To fix things through his contacts in the Metropolitan Police so that Rivka could stay in England unmolested. Beat coppers at Leman Street, plainclothes at Old Jewery, higher-ups at Scotland Yard. Strings dangled to be pulled.
The train bumped on the track and jostled Perelman’s shoulder against Rivka’s. He pressed her hand. “Pardon me,” he said, and heard his apology swallowed up by the rushing, clacking noise that filled the carriage like tatters of paper in a windstorm. One more assault to add to the intrusion of random stares from passengers clustered around them. Eyeing up what perversity? A swaggering old satyr repulsively, publicly parading his enjoyment, his tender prey, a blemishless, blameless child, the old goat’s pleasure, the rosebud under his hoof trampled and damned…An outward show Perelman couldn’t help, which, as usual, contradicted the finer truth of it.
He felt pleasure, yes, from Rivka’s physical closeness. Warm and unashamed, close as family, especially here among this traveling congregation of their English hosts. Closer than his family, even. This unspoiled young woman, whose name two months ago he didn’t know, was singled out by circumstances that brought her to him. All things considered, wasn’t closeness the natural feeling? The trace of warmth his arm felt when it bumped against hers reflected back to Rivka and connected them. Affectionately, naturally, decently.
And he thought, She’s as fresh as my girls were in the beginning—how all daughters are at first. Until they change into children who flaunt their disrespect, and wives who cheat in the open, in the street, in closets and offices. He looked at Rivka, who sat beside him with eyes lowered, and saw the child she was half her lifetime ago. That little girl was visible to him, frank enough for him to photograph. Rivka is comfortable with me; living in my house she is unafraid. Perelman pressed Rivka’s hand again. She patted his forearm, then pulled back her hands, made two prim fists of them and curled them in her lap.
So it happens again, back again like a curse! Misunderstood, he thought, brought into the light his secret intentions never failed to look vulgar.
FROM THE ALDGATE UNDERGROUND STATION, they walked home in a light rain. Rivka clomped along in her oversized shoes, clumsy as a dray horse, but quieted by the brick walls of terraced houses—not the brick walls of Holloway Prison, as the wet pavement of Commercial Road was not the wet floor of her cell. Outside, there, the fundamental dignity of having a name was returned to her. Speaking it with forced good cheer, he asked Rivka if she wanted to eat something when they got back. Instead of a direct answer, which would have been simple enough, she told him how the English had treated her, capture to release.
“I made up a bed for you in Fanny’s room,” he replied when they arrived.
With a daybed next to Fenia’s green bedstead, the narrow room was cramped. Fenia had arranged a little table next to Rivka’s bed, set with a candle, pitcher, and washbasin. “Can I sleep?”
“You don’t want to eat some soup first? Deborah put some on the stove,” he said.
“Tell Mrs. Perelman thank you. I need the bed more.”
“It’s terrible trouble you had,” he agreed. “You need to look out for yourself and know who protects you. I’m your friend saying this.”
Rivka let her shoes fall off her feet. “I won’t go to Big Ben anymore.”
“Tell me—that’s what I want you to do. If people—Karl and Nina or anybody else—try to talk you into trouble, just tell me.” He gave her a clipped nod and shut the door.
Anybody else? Did he mean someone she knew, or strangers? The police? The Letts, other Jews? Their faces—the constable who grabbed her, the doctor, the warden, the Questioner, the Yiddisher—broke apart and reappeared with Karl’s fine brushed hair, Peter
’s tall brow and artist’s beard, Perelman’s Spanish doe’s eyes, Yoska’s pocked cheeks. Then the mob of them stood together in the Underground, in the guttering light and slashes of tunnel darkness, a circle of nine men yelling nonsense at her. Voice tangled with voice, their lip-flap noise electrifying Rivka’s solitude while her body traveled on ahead of her, sleepbound.
HER TRANSFORMATION was not a dream; it was her dream’s substance. As she dipped her head to drink from a moonlit pool, Rivka saw the reflection of her half-human features. The blue eyes of her mother, unmistakable, their color leeched from the high atmosphere, blinked back from a silver-furred face, and above it feline ears that stood sharply erect. The hands that supported Rivka at the pool’s edge, tucked close under her chest, were paw-like. No matter how much water she lapped, dryness still crusted her lips and tongue. The thought flared in her mind: This is me reborn, my new life, a nocturnal animal scavenging in the forest.
That midnight blackness covered Rivka as she awoke, though it was not the middle of the night but early evening. And a knock on the door told her it wasn’t a forest, either. Fanny Perelman’s voice, asking if she wanted to eat, reached her from a rectangle of light.
“Some water,” Rivka said. “Please, Fenia. What time is it?”
“After six.”
“At night?”
“You slept all day. We thought it was better to let you.”
“What day?”
“Monday.”
Fanny disappeared again through the rectangle of light and came back with a pitcher of cold water. The liquid burned Rivka’s throat on its way down; still, she drank two glassfuls, then floated into a light sleep. At around seven-thirty, Fanny returned with a visitor for the convalescing patient. The version of the story that roused Nina Vasilyeva reached her by way of Fanny, who’d got a vividly indignant secondhand chronology from her father. The Perelman tribe, child and adult, each in their own way, was agitated by the barbarity and injustice suffered by Rivka.
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