Then Nina swept into Wellesley Street and it felt as though a berobed judge had arrived on an undertaking to confirm the damage, dole out blame, and seek fair settlement. Little Carlusha pushed his sisters and brothers aside for a prime place in the bedroom doorway, while his father bobbed behind Nina and Fanny, recounting what he’d done for Rivka from that morning in Holloway to five minutes before, when he told Deborah to heat some soup. Still agitated, he waited to hear from Nina, from anyone, what else needed to be done for Rivka’s comfort and recuperation.
Nettie, the ten-year-old, edged in for a closer look at the purple bruises on Rivka’s cheek. “Does your face hurt?”
“A little,” Rivka said.
“Did you fall on the floor?”
“Yes.”
“How did you?”
“A man pushed me down.”
“You got up and ran away.”
“Not fast enough.”
“I think you’re brave,” Nettie told her.
“Are you brave?”
“I’m quite brave.”
With her fingertips, Rivka touched the perfect pink-white skin of the little girl’s cheek.
“You can take the children out of this room,” Nina said to Perelman. “And you go out, too.”
Perelman broke off from shooing Carlusha into the hallway. “No, I’m staying,” he said. “You don’t tell me where I can go in my house.”
“I’m staying, too,” Carlusha announced.
“No.” Nina dropped her hands onto the little boy’s shoulders and marched him out the door.
“Try that with me,” Perelman dared her with a cocky smile.
“Throw a jug of water on him,” Nina joked to Fanny, for her father’s benefit.
“I’m no tomcat,” he responded playfully.
“No, you’re a bad little dog, Charles. Go now,” Nina told him firmly. “Your bark-bark-bark’s hurting Rivka’s ears. And mine, too.”
“And mine,” cheekily, from his daughter.
“And Nettie’s. We don’t need a chaperone.”
Perelman disagreed, over his shoulder. “It’s exactly what you do need. All the time, day and night.” Halfway into the hallway, he grouched to Fanny, “Later you’ll tell me what the three of you were talking about in my house.”
“I will, Papa,” she said to him. After she shut the door, she told Nina, “I won’t.”
Nina greeted Rivka silently, with irony, apology, head-shaking amazement, lips pinched together to pronounce sympathy for her and contempt for her attackers. She pulled a cane chair close to the bed, where she quietly sat in her hat and coat. “Did you eat today?”
“My throat,” Rivka said. “No good.”
Without turning away from Rivka, Nina said, “Fenia? Make some tea for me, will you?”
“There’s a pot brewed downstairs,” Fanny replied, but didn’t move from where she stood.
“Make it fresh. Please, Fenia. And a plate of something.”
“For you?”
“For me, yes. You can bring soup for Rivka. Not too hot or salty.”
Nina’s message to Fanny finally got through: she wanted a little while to speak alone with Rivka. When Fanny left the room, Nina unpinned her hat and laid it on the floor. She sloughed her coat off and let it fall from her shoulders onto the back of the chair. She leaned closer. “Show me,” Nina said. “What they did.” She attended to Rivka with a doctor’s intimate concern. “Can you sit up?”
“My neck hurts. My back, and here.” She wiped her fingers across her rib cage, then, with one hard breath, propped herself on her elbows. Nina supported her arm as Rivka bent forward. Her hair had survived the recent ordeals roughly tamed, enough of it upswept, bunched, and pinned to leave her neck bare.
“It’s a rotten bruise he gave you here.” Very lightly, Nina drew the tip of her finger in a line above Rivka’s shoulders. “It’s a wonder he didn’t break your neck. You can wear your hair lower until this heals. I know how to fix it.” From Fanny’s bedside table, Nina borrowed a hairbrush.
Rivka felt the hairpins plucked from the nest of her hair and the nest fall apart. “Maybe the policeman did it, at Big Ben. Or the doctor. I don’t know which one.”
“This will cover it over,” Nina said, “and be soigné. Tell me if I’m brushing too hard.” The slow strokes were as determined as they were gentle. “What else did the stupid barbarians do to you?”
As carefully as her memory allowed, Rivka repeated the history of each wound. Her hoarseness and sore mouth were from the rubber tube, the boot kicks to her chest. There were other souvenirs she couldn’t explain—red abrasions around her wrists, scratches on her neck, scrapes on her knuckles. “Why did they jump on me? I didn’t do anything against them.”
“You insulted them.”
“No. I don’t remember. Not to the policeman.” Rivka thought for a second. “The doctor. Maybe him.” She shook her head; numb memory, another punishment.
“You do it by living here,” Nina said. “Did you speak English to them, the police or the ones in prison?”
“First I tried. They didn’t want it.”
“They hate you more when you try and fall on your face. Your ugly foreign accent reminds them how strong they are.”
“Over me,” Rivka said, for Nina to confirm the absurdity of it.
“No, all of us. To them each of us is all of us.” A jet of pain flashed a wince across Rivka’s face, and Nina winced in sympathy. “Let me look.” The hem of Rivka’s nightshirt had bunched around her waist. Slowly and with great delicacy, Nina raised it over Rivka’s breast and held it there. Her other hand moved over Rivka’s ribs, only the lightest breath of pressure from her fingertips. “Did they touch you here? On your breasts?”
Did they? Rivka couldn’t remember any lewd assault. “For sure not while I was awake.”
“They threatened you? In your cell?”
What a remarkable thing. Rivka remembered so clearly a welter of ringing details: the prison corridors, how they echoed and smelled, her cell, the side room, the cruelties done to her there and before. Yet any recollection of what she did to defend herself remained foggy and beyond her reach. Didn’t she put up a fight? How was she with them? Obedient and weak? A timid girl begging on her knees? Where was Rivka Bermansfelt when they threw her onto the vomit-slicked floor or pinned her to a chair and pushed a rubber tube down her throat?
The cold shock that she had done nothing but squirm and scream and take the blows trembled through Rivka’s chest and arms; its ice sank through her legs, preparing her body for the paralyzing fear that the nineteen years of her life were gone. Time flows in only one direction, and it had carried Riveleh away, far enough now so she could see her life as it was just days before she had become an unreal abandoned shadow figure in the distance. Dragged downstream, between there and nowhere, dragged under. This river knocks the breath out of you the same. Rivka covered her eyes to keep hold of herself, to stay in one place, inside her skin—but she was going, she was lost.
Tears leaked through her fingers. “I think God made us good. He’s better than men are, a better man. And men want to do good and be like him, for God’s favor. Jews, Russians, English, they’re the same. Like that, anyway.”
Nina gently pried Rivka’s hand free, uncovered her eyes. She didn’t let go of it. “You want an answer? They think everything they do is good because they’re doing it. You want to wait for them to make apologies for what they did? You’ll wait a long time. Not just those men. All of them are romantics.”
“Your man is?”
“Karl? He’s the worst kind. Dedicated.”
She knows men. Nina knows the men she knows. She stays close to her Karl, cleaning, writing letters, while he spends hours in bed. Him and his entertaining thoughts. He entertains himself with elaborate delusions. Sometimes in bed with Nina he describes them to her, calmly and earnestly. She knows that the Nina-Lena-Minna he sees in bed, haloed in romance, is different from the Nina-Lena-M
inna he watches pile lumps of coal into the grate. In bed, languid as a cat, earnest as a young priest, Karl twines his limbs around hers and strains to hold on to a passionate vision of her, her face aglimmer on a silver icon, until his eyelids flicker, his whiteness splashes out, he breathes her name. Then, quickly, the physical world spins back into place and takes over. Karl faces what’s necessary. Daydreaming a different world in bed is another necessity to him, so it doesn’t worry her.
She knows Yoska: a man who found his talent and trusts it. His confidence makes you trust it. This good thief makes me laugh every time I see him, Nina reminds herself. He stuffs more into his pockets than he gives Karl to send to Russia. “All right,” he said last time, “I’m guilty. You want me to go?” Protesting, dragging his poor leg around the room, behind puffs of romantic honesty. For the hundredth time, he flung his reason against their smiles. He fights his battle against the smug collaborators of empire…Imperialists teach their citizens how to act—cold-blooded and greedy. Yoska is their chastiser, loss of property their comeuppance. Stay here, Yoska, sit down, eat some more.
She knows Fritz. He suffers like a saint and his mauled spirit skewers Nina’s heart. He can thank his Russian torturers for turning him into such a romantic anarchist. They drove him deep into himself. He’s no patriot anymore; no country can claim Fritz’s affections. Why should he fight? He’s already free. He has the power to make promises to his wife and lie to his mistress, for freedom’s sake. I should detest him, thinks Nina, but my heart won’t let me.
She knows Peter. Be suspicious about paintings and men who put their value so high. Later, Nina decides, she’d find a better moment to pass along some sisterly advice to Rivka: If you’re smart, you’ll protect yourself from someone who makes paintings of landscapes so beautiful and welcoming; it’s because he yearns to live in them. Unreal places. No, Peter’s eccentric fascination with color smeared on canvas isn’t romantic, and it isn’t his most annoying trait, either. Nina bristles when she thinks of his pathetic delusion—the romance of refusal: he isn’t a man trussed to the consequences of past deeds; he isn’t bound to his own history; his passion has been sapped. A comrade, Peter the Painter? He reminded her more of an exhausted roué.
The men Nina knows are moons circling close to her in wobbling orbits. Except for Indrik. Her father is a planet, a burning sun, enormous, steady and solitary in black space. He traveled the furthest of them all: Father made a revolution of his own. By the strength of his two arms and two legs, he crawled out from under the tsar. He traded his warm, dry quarters in the Winter Palace for a bivouac in a field of mud and snow. He was the only undeluded man Nina ever knew, one who didn’t look for romance in the battles he fought, or in the fighting, win or lose.
In the low lamplight, Nina’s eyes deepened. Rivka noticed they were wet, and briefly, before Nina brushed it away, the wetness glossed her cheeks. “Karl is good to you,” Rivka said. “Anyone can see it.” Nina tucked her chin, gave a nod.
Oh, this intimacy undid Rivka. As it emptied her out, it left her as close as a sister to Nina, both of them daughters of men savaged by the jaws of the same fate. Gulp after gulp of air stopped in Rivka’s throat; her lungs ached, she cried out, but no sound reached her mouth. Nina’s hands rubbed her back. Nina embraced her to quiet Rivka’s panicked shaking and then kissed her forehead. “What? Tell me. That’s right, that’s right…”
Fanny clicked the door and, food-laden tray in hand, lightly kicked it open. Nina shouted at her, “Not now, Fenia. We’re all right.” To Fanny, none of it looked all right. Not Rivka’s uncontrollable, choking cries or Nina’s helplessness to comfort her.
Rivka’s failures and misfortunes drubbed her head; they cascaded down from heaven. She caught her breath enough to say, “Because of me…my father…”
“That’s right, tell me. What?”
“Because of what I did, my father—Because I didn’t help him. Now he’s dead. I know it,” Rivka said. “I’m alive because of him and he’s dead because of me.”
“You don’t know. Did your cousin write you?”
“They’ve killed Papa in jail in Riga. Because nothing stops them. Policemen beat him to death, I know they did.”
“Maybe.” Sober-voiced, unsparing, Nina showed her how to face down the horror of reality. “You don’t know for sure. We haven’t heard anything from there.”
Rivka, for now buried, unreachable. “They caught him because I’m not so good. My family hates me. They should. God hates me.”
“Don’t talk like that, Rivka! Who is God?” A trace of a smile tickled the corners of Nina’s mouth. “Up above God’s a policeman; on the earth, a policeman’s God. London, Riga, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Talsen, anywhere.”
Though she was calmer now, Rivka wouldn’t be consoled. “Yes, because I hate the soldiers and I want to go back and beat them to death. They put this hate in me. I want to break their bones and cut their faces with a knife. I hate them for making me want to hurt them. Now I’m somebody God hates.”
“Who do you think God is? Your big friend on a gold chair in the sky watching over you? He protected you, Rivka?”
“Yes. Before what happened on the Talsen road.”
“So yesterday he was your friend but not today.”
“Because I want to hurt those men. The ones who hurt my father. God turned his back on me because I was a weakling. I didn’t help. What’s good in me anymore? Nothing—not a drop of good anywhere.”
“I think God stopped watching over that Cossack you killed.”
Before the whole story poured out of her, Rivka shook Nina with a confession. On the Talsen road that night, she said, she had tried to save the Cossack’s life, not help her father take it. Back she went, to the months Mordechai devoted to building the Louis Quatorze clock, his intricate and beautiful work, Colonel Orlov’s rampage, the grim hopelessness (and worse) that infected the Bermansfelts because of it. By the end of it, Rivka was leaking tears again, her shoulders shaking under Nina’s hands. The roadside melee with the Russians dreamily folded into the Parliament Square riot and she wept. “What did I do there? What did I do?”
“They decided for you what a woman does,” Nina said. Whether she meant Russians or Englishmen, fathers or lovers, she made it clear to her new little sister. “From now on, we’ll decide. Won’t we, Rivka?”
“Yes.”
“Won’t we?”
“Yes.”
This one was not a cowering woman like Rosie or a man-pleaser like Luba or a butterfly like Fenia. Nina could bring Rivka home to Karl the very next morning—yes, in the shape she was in, and still a better class of prize, halfway to a comrade.
TOWARD THE END of the next afternoon, Karl slipped in through the stage door of the Pavilion Theatre. He knew he’d find the Painter there, installing his Girts Wilks backdrop and the bits and pieces of scenery Harry hired him to produce. As Peter added dabs of green paint here and there to a tree in the foreground, streaks of golden brown to the distant bend of country road, Karl stood at his back, softly blasting away at the crimes committed by police, law court, and prison against Rivka’s body, mind, and spirit.
Backstage was the ideal spot for Karl to do his seductive turn. Alone with his friend among the shadows, crawl spaces, and hidden machinery, he leveled his shoulders and bore down on the other man’s heart. “They made sure the woman they let out of there on Monday wasn’t the same one they locked up on Friday.”
“How bad is she?” Peter controlled his worry, at least kept Karl from hearing it. “You saw her?”
“This morning she came to us. Nina doesn’t want the girl to go back to Perelman’s.” A shrug that said it was all the same to him. “She took Rivka to find some clothes. Holloway Prison zookeepers stole hers.”
“Which one has money for new clothes? Nina or Rivka?”
Karl’s mild laugh answered him. “You know how persuasive Nina can be.”
“Moses on the mountain—I’ve seen her. But she ca
n’t persuade Rivka to spend money she doesn’t have.”
“Not Rivka, no. Mrs. Teitelbaum—the furrier’s mother? She’s a dressmaker, or she sews new from old, some thrifty trick like that. Nina will talk her into giving Rivka credit,” Karl said. Then, reassurance and goad: “Nina didn’t have to persuade Rivka of anything.”
“Except to pawn wages she hasn’t earned yet. Nina should put her powers to better use and talk Rivka out of doing that.”
“At the moment it makes no difference to Rivka. She doesn’t have any wages anymore. Her friend the Mayor gave her the sack. And the coffeehouse the same.”
Peter’s brush stopped mid-stroke. “Can you help her?” he asked.
“Not this time. You mean with Shinebloom’s? I can’t.”
“No?” He pushed Karl a little harder. “What about Clark’s?”
“Peter, no. It’s going around now the police picked her up. It’s too soon. They’re shopkeepers,” the word a repulsive taste in his mouth. “Nina’s looking out for her.” He gave a slight, equivocal shrug. “We both are.”
Considerate as it was of Karl to seek Peter out to break the news of Rivka’s ordeal, it came second to the visit’s meatier business. He’d come by himself, by back street and alleyway, to comb through the details of his plan to rob the Houndsditch shop, and to hear Peter’s assessment of it. For the Painter’s genuine talent was scrutiny: he could see under and around. You could count on Peter to shine a light on hidden obstacles, as long as his imagination was engaged. Karl didn’t insult him by dangling crude promises of treasure; he invited Peter to jab holes in the strategy wherever it looked weak.
As a favor to Karl, Peter reviewed each step. But his observations—of the hazards to escape complicated by the cul-de-sac; the time needed to gain access to the office, then the safe; the nearness of other residents—were obvious and he dispensed them listlessly. “Hammer and chisel? The noise from it echoes across the yard, which goes along the back of the building.”
A Storm in the Blood Page 13