A Storm in the Blood

by Jon Stephen Fink

  “There’s a door. That should muffle it enough.”

  “Karl, he’ll suffocate, whoever’s inside there. Who is doing all your hammering for you?”

  “Max Smoller, Jacob Peters. One hour on, one off.”

  “For thirty-six hours,” a skeptical Peter said. “Meantime, what are you doing? Not lending a hand?”

  “I’ll be with Nina in Number 11. Drinking tea. Populating the place like an ordinary couple.” Karl risked a direct approach. “It’d certainly narrow the odds if someone else was in the other flat. Populating it.”

  “Why not Fritz and Luba?”

  “You know why. With their screaming and yelling all the time? She throws plates at him. You told me so.”

  “Luba has a right to scream at him. We’re lucky she doesn’t throw plates at us.”

  “They’d bring the police down on us in five minutes.”

  “Fritz has got his wooden sword for protection.”

  “He’s not so dependable these days.” Karl nudged again with a lighter touch. “Come on, Peter. We can play cards all night. Nina and Rivka will cook for us, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And breakfast again.”

  Without betraying a reason, Peter handed his paintbrush to Karl. “Finish it for me,” he said. “The road needs more yellow.”

  “Wait—I don’t know how to paint.”

  As Peter stepped off the stage, he heard his name called after him as a complaint. “Do what you can,” he called back.

  He found Harry managing the theater’s affairs from the back row of the stalls. Standing in the aisle, formal as an usher, Peter cleared up the mystery of Rivka’s absence from the Saturday night performance. As he piled detail upon detail, Harry’s face flushed; he bit his lower lip, nodded his head, his anger doubling at each revelation. “Tell her—” Harry said. “You’re going to see her? Tell Rivka she can sing at the Pavilion any time, soon as her voice is better. Also tell her…” Now Harry’s anger dissolved in a bath of subversive pleasure. “I thought of a good English stage name for her. Look.” Harry flourished the playbill from Saturday and underlined the moniker with his finger.

  “Show her this. It suits her, no?”

  SO PETER ARRIVED at Rivka’s door the bearer of cheering news. When she recovered, she’d have her debut at the Pavilion Theatre. Not just her debut, her renaissance—as “Anna Southam, the Stepney Songbird.”

  A second before Peter knocked, Carlusha opened the door to him. Actually, the little boy opened it to let his father out. Perelman, his cape, broad-brimmed hat, two bulky pieces of luggage, and bulkier Russian laugh blocked the doorway.

  “Photographic equipment,” he explained to Peter. “You’re walking by Montague Street, come see me. I’ll take your picture.”

  “Can’t afford. Will you tell Rivka I’m here?”

  Perelman assigned the task to his son, who fled upstairs with it. “Listen, I’ll make you a special price. Make you look beautiful, like your friend Karl. Wait, not Karl—he still calls himself Gardstein, doesn’t he?”

  “No.”

  “Gratis.”

  “No, but thanks.”

  “Peter, you’d be doing me a favor. Making portraits—I need the practice. This size.” Perelman cut a square of air with his hands, thumbtip to thumbtip. “In a handsome frame.”

  “I can’t think of anybody I’d give it to.”

  “Not Rivka?”

  “What for? She doesn’t need a photograph of me.”

  “For a token.”

  At the turn of the landing above, Rivka saw the splash of pearl-colored light bleaching the entrance hall floor to the foot of the stairs. As much as it was Wednesday noon let in through the front door, it was the visible breath of her emergence. Her flesh felt it as a physical impulse, her bones were magnetized by it. She’d been touched by the sensation just days before, when she emerged from Holloway’s subterranean shadows back into the law-abiding world, likewise when she emerged from the backstage clutter of the Pavilion onto the bright stage to sing her audition. A stir of air strengthened into a flow that gathered Rivka toward the men’s voices, Peter’s and Perelman’s. Those two would see at a glance why she wasn’t annihilated by catastrophe.

  First they’d take in the sight of her in new clothes, the dove-gray skirt and dark olive jacket, her high-collared white blouse, buttoned shoes, black velvet hat. Not a shell to hide inside or a costume prettying up any mental damage, just the opposite: they’d see an expression of the clear-sighted resistance brought to birth inside her. Underneath Rivka’s clothes, her body could tell the same story. Skin scrubbed clean, hungry stomach fed, panicked heart tranquilized, health returned. Look at me. She wore her hair unpinned at the back, combed down the way Nina coiffed it, even though her shirt collar covered the purpling, yellowing bruise on her neck. Would Peter see the difference in her? The art gallery visit was less than a week ago. A continent of time. Look at me.

  “Here she is,” she heard Perelman say to Peter, and in Peter’s quick smile Rivka read relief and pleasure. Was it only two days before, on the street outside the Caledonian Road Underground station, that she’d seen her misery reflected in her landlord’s expression, seen the good hope in her crushed and crippled? Men’s faces are better than mirrors.

  Giddy confidence pushed her along into their company, into the afternoon’s misty air, wholehearted, learning her passions. “Can we take a long walk?”

  “How about a short walk and some food?” Here she is, Peter said to himself, materialized from the pain, from time and dignity they stole from her. Somebody must have given Rivka’s dignity back. Not the authorities; her release didn’t come wrapped in clemency. The obvious guess was Nina. Or did Rivka grab it back with her own two hands at the prison gate?

  One of those hands looped Peter’s arm; the other clasped it, arms locked together crook-to-crook. They sidestepped Perelman while he lingered in front of the house—opened one of his bags, resettled its contents, opened the second bag, checked its order, innocent inconveniences that delayed his departure. He squinted up at Peter: “So you’re going to eat?”

  “Probably. After we walk a little.”

  “Good. Make her eat some meat,” Good Uncle Perelman commanded. “What restaurant? The Warsaw?”

  “We’ll see where we are when we’re hungry,” was all Peter said.

  Loitering there any longer to fiddle with his photographic equipment would have made it blatant that he was stalling, so Perelman took his time giving instructions to Carlusha before he shut and locked the door. Rivka’s self-appointed watchdog, he retreated to the window, but the rattling of nearby coach wheels, the wheezing percussions from motor cars, clouds and sprays of street noise, made it impossible for him to hear their conversation as Peter and Rivka strolled down Wellesley Street. She talked, energetic, animated, and he listened—to what confidences?

  Perelman noted the time and place of her rendezvous with Peter, and their likely destination. He made a few educated guesses about the nature of their reunion. Later he’d sit down with her, Perelman figured, and winkle out the particulars. If they added up to serious problems, he was right there on hand with avuncular advice. Was Rivka in cahoots with Nina Vasilyeva? And now with Peter the Painter? A hundred yards behind them, from the turning into Stepney Way, he gauged how closely they walked together, Rivka’s head leaning toward Peter, his body loose and secure.

  Are they lovers so soon? Where did it happen? Not in my house, I hope! Perelman asked himself, How could it, with any of us around? Carlusha’s curiosity; I’d hear a whisper. They must have been in Peter’s bed while his friends played cards in the next room. Fritz and Luba. Jacob and Gardstein. Yoska. All the others, a third my age, a tenth of my experience. I juggle threats and promises and they juggle stolen silverware. Okhrana behind me, Special Branch in front, underground, above ground, then back under again, still light on my feet—dear girl, Rivka, I dance them a dance. While those Pan godlings of yours dance each other off the edge of a cl
iff!

  PETER AND RIVKA walked along to the quiet music of their conversation. Neither one led the other; they agreed on a direction without choosing a destination. In his mildest language, Peter told her that he admired her for meeting the loss of both her “situations” (he used the English word) so calmly, without crushing herself under a useless fit of desperation. “Do you want me to ask Karl if he can talk things over with the Mayor?”

  “Shinebloom’s is finished for me,” Rivka said, though she sounded undefeated. “Nina gave me good advice. ‘Do something else.’ It’s my own advice too.”

  “Better opportunities—that’s right.” He slipped the Pavilion playbill from his coat pocket, unfolded it for her, and stopped so Rivka could read it. “My assignment from Harry is to tell him if you like your name on there, or if you don’t. Anyway, tell him one way or the other before the next one goes to the printer’s.”

  In Hebrew and English, from the well-known to the obscure, tummlers to escape artists, twenty acts decorated the little poster. But she couldn’t find what she was looking for. “My name isn’t on it,” she said.

  Peter pressed his thumbnail underneath the last name on the bill. Through the underbrush of her accent, Rivka pronounced her stage name. “Anna Sout-ham d’ Step-eny Song Bird. Songbird?”

  “Anna South’m, the Stepney Songbird.”

  In those last two syllables, Rivka thought, rested all the alias’s beauty. She knew “song” and “bird,” but this was the first time she’d heard the two English words tethered together to name a third thing. It magicked an exotic picture into her mind, of a bird whose lifelong activity and sole purpose on earth was to perch in full sight of humanity and cry out its song. “I don’t know when I’ll use it. Please, Peter, tell your friend it’s a good name for me.”

  “Yes? Good. I will.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  And so are you, he thought. The trick of her hair nearly brought that sweetness into his mouth. So primly brushed down, a schoolgirl’s style, but somehow she made it look womanly. A beautiful transformation. But remind yourself, he thought, beauty isn’t the prize. What is, then? To see her as she is. Because I slept with a French whore and made believe her face was the face of the girl in Manet’s painting. He fell asleep curled around an ache that his room was not the bar of the Folies-Bergère. To hell with make-believe and the fictions you use to smash uncertainty. Do what you’ve always done: name the thing when it shows itself. Yes, then. What do you call this? Peter felt the throb slide through his lungs, down his arms, into his palms. He left its thick emotion unvoiced, escorting Rivka past the Warsaw and on down Brick Lane.

  Call it the Brink. Because that throb he felt had a jolt of fear mixed in it. Fear of dreaminess. Rhapsodic hope, love song of the anarchists he hated, who lived outside their bodies in a future always pure and perfect and remote. Here’s the name of this fear: dreaming Rivka into a woman who never arrives. Peter imagined a future twenty-four hours away and its one real possibility: I’d wake up with her in my cold room. With that thought for company, he was careful how he touched her. Careful not to communicate any particular feeling. Women are supernaturally sensitive to vibrations created by concealed emotions. Or by the concealing. What do you call this? Peter calmed himself with the thought. Let it show itself in a simple action. His hand found the small of her back and he guided Rivka around the tall wheels of a peddler’s stall.

  The cloudy tangle of ideas about her dissolved in his saying her name. “Rivka…”

  “Peter.” Her echo teased him. “Yoska’s friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Shinebloom’s,” he decided.

  “Not there,” Rivka stopped to say. “I don’t want you to beg for me.”

  “I’m taking you to Shinebloom’s to eat lunch.” He smiled back. “Let them serve you for a change.”

  Rivka’s excited laugh fired out of her like the shot of a starting gun. Her legs wanted to race. She tugged Peter’s arm to hurry him toward Sclater Street. Shinebloom’s for lunch—after the Mayor sacked her, because he sacked her. She’d seen it now: a sample of Peter’s easy genius. Karl bragged to her about it and Nina didn’t disagree. For strategy and tactics, they said, Go to Peter, he is a luminary. “I’m hungry!”

  “That’s a healthy sign,” he complimented her. “We’ll order all the side dishes.”

  “Chew each bite twenty times.”

  “Stay there for dinner, too, and we won’t give up our table. We can talk for hours.”

  “Will you tell me what you did that time in Kiev?”

  He turned his face away from her and let go of a sharp sigh. “What time?”

  “The post office…No”—concentrating to get it right—“a customs house.”

  “So you heard the story from Karl. Why do you need it twice?”

  “It’s not just a story. You did something.”

  “Not very much. We didn’t grow wings or anything.”

  “But you did it—”

  “Did what?”

  “Whatever you did, it was for a reason.” Rivka let the implied question hang in the air.

  So did Peter. “It’s all just roaring,” he said, then clamped his lips.

  “Sorry.” She let her hand drop away from his arm. “I thought you felt comfortable enough with me.”

  A few slow steps in a vacuum of silence took them to the corner of Sclater Street. Peter said, “Did Karl also tell you I’m not a Jew?”

  “He didn’t say anything about it.” Rivka wondered how the question mattered. “Are you?”

  “No.” To let her in on something true about himself, that was his reason, and to stand there and make sure she believed it. To see Rivka believing the truth about him. Beginning with this. “My life isn’t settled, you understand? I make money any way I can. Any place I can find work. They chased me out of Latvia. I’m through with Russia, too. So for the sake of survival—mine, not anybody else’s, not Liesma’s—in Germany I’m a German. In Marseille I’m a Frenchman. In Paris, or here, with Jews all around me I’m a Jew. It’s my freedom, you understand? It means I’m free to run for cover. Things aren’t right in this city? Good. I’ll go to that one. But it’s a trap, how I live—Rivka, my life is a permanent offense. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t worry, Do they know I’m hiding, pretending I’m harmless, the bastards who want to finish me? I know how they think: there it is, I’m hiding from them so their suspicions about me must be right. Round and around.”

  Rivka thought, He’s a Jew who doesn’t know it. She said, “It was a good thing, what happened to me. Until last week I was a baby. Stupid. Blind in both eyes. No, I knew about dangers in the world. Or I was sure I did. Russians, God knows. They came out of the ground one at a time: there’s no crop of dangers. What I say now is, Thank you, Englishmen. Before last Friday I didn’t know, yes, it is a crop. Something bigger is underneath them—they’re the part of it you can see. I didn’t know what goes on.”

  The teenage Russian soldier, his commanding officer Orlov, the Russian gendarmes, the policeman by Big Ben, her interrogators, her torturers, the tsar, the king, the kaiser—all of them the same malicious crop. The correct terms escaped her, the political language Karl and Nina used, Peter’s language; she groped to describe a grand revelation and it crudely shrank into a picture of her world, the world, divided into sides white and black. Eager and stammering, Rivka started, started again, and kept trying to tell him that she’d faced the reality that he’d been facing for years: this struggle between sides gives you opportunities to declare your loyalty and morality. And hatreds. Before her days in prison and talk with Nina, she didn’t realize these were political feelings. Political ideas.

  “I don’t know how to say it.” Then she tried again. “Here’s the side my feet are on.”

  “Here? ‘Here’?”

  “With you and Karl and Nina.”

  “To do what?”

  “What I can.”<
br />
  “Karl doesn’t need you to sing or wipe tables.”

  “He thinks I can help him. And Nina. She thinks so.” Underneath the grain, a simple, human force. “They helped me. I want to help them.”

  The door to Shinebloom’s opened. Two customers ambled into the street, lit their cigars, and for a few seconds brought the rumble of the room outside with them. Peter’s touch on her shoulder kept Rivka from going inside. “How? Did he say?”

  “Nina will tell me tomorrow. She’s taking me to meet somebody.”

  “You should turn them down.”

  “I already promised them yes.”

  “Whatever it is, it won’t make a difference. It’s a mosquito bite.” By now Peter didn’t care if what he said was an insult to her intentions or trustworthiness. “Do something to help yourself—keep out of trouble.”

  “Too late for your help, but thanks for it.” A jet of anger in her publicly hushed voice. “I’ve got a father and one’s enough for me.”

  “You’re not the kind who listens to her father,” Peter joked, lightly serious.

  From Nina’s ear to his. Common property. “Even when he’s right,” she admitted. “I made a mistake. It taught me.”

  “Tomorrow you can add one more to learn from. Rivka, think for a minute. It’s better to be a singer once a week than a criminal from now on, no?”

  If that was true, though, then the calamities she’d survived were merely portions of bad luck. Her long talk with Karl and Nina armed her with a reply. “I’m not a criminal. I’m a fighter.”

  Straight from the manual, Peter almost said out loud. A criminal is a counterrevolutionary who wants to join the established order. A criminal is a professional who robs, steals, and swindles to make a bourgeois life for himself. A revolutionary fighter is the enemy of every criminal. A revolutionary fighter breaks any law to overthrow the old world and punish its supporters…He dropped the subject, held the door open for Rivka, and both of them were swamped by the steamy kitchen odors of Shinebloom’s. At their table, Peter looked at Rivka from a great distance.