“I can’t tune it right,” Fritz barked. “Maybe there’s something wrong with the, the, the—”
“Tuning pegs?”
“The pegs, they don’t keep the note.”
Nicholas tuned the mandolin by ear, strummed a quick run of chords, and handed it back to Fritz. “Have you been practicing?”
“Sure, sure. All three songs.”
Nicholas cradled his own balalaika between his knees. “Which one do you play the best?”
“Last night we played ‘Going to Petersburg Road,’ me and Peter. Violin sounds good with mandolin.”
“We’ll start with that one, then. You think he’ll play with us tonight?” Nicholas’s fingers dashed up and down the balalaika’s neck, skill of a higher order, a little flashy, stopped when he saw the guns and boxes of ammunition on top of the chest of drawers. The Browning automatic was disassembled for cleaning. The long-barreled Mauser, blocky and weighty, sat practically on display. As he looked them over, Nicholas felt a rush of something like fascinated embarrassment, as if he’d accidentally opened a bedroom door and seen the lady of the house naked. (Since the squabble with Luba over the guns, Fritz was defiantly less careful about keeping his firearms out of sight.)
Fritz and Nicholas, mandolin and balalaika, appeared in the fog bank of cigarette smoke. The air was even thicker in the living room, a different season from the one that had settled stern and cold in the street: England outside, Russia and Latvia inside. Fritz waved Peter’s violin case. “We’re playing ‘Road to St. Petersburg.’ Little Tomacoff is homesick.”
Peter took the command for the invitation it was, tipped his king on its side, conceded the chess game with a nod, and picked up his violin. Above the loud talking, it was hard for Peter to hear whether the three instruments were in tune. Which didn’t matter much anyway, since they were drowned out by Fritz’s barrack-room howling. “Vdol po Piterskoi, po Tverskoi-Yamskoi, po Tverskoi-Yamskoi, da s kolokolchikom…”
Along the Petersburg Road,
along the small lane
to the Tverskoi-Yamskoi Quarter
with a little bell…
“How many different ways can you refuse to answer one question?” Peter said to Rivka over the noise in the room.
“As many ways as you can ask it.”
“Rivka, you think I’m an informer or something?” Peter kidded her, and her naïveté.
“You can ask me and ask me.”
“Because there’s not much time left,” he said, turning serious. “So tell me: what did you do for Nina and Karl?” He paused a moment, then gave her another push out of her silence. “I’m not trying to make trouble for you. The opposite.”
“What do you make when you make the opposite of trouble?” she asked him.
“It’s a riddle?”
“I’m counting to ten.”
“Then you know what the right answer is.”
“Do you? One…two…”
Peter scratched the beard on his chin, then his mustache, an exhibition of deep thinking. “Security. Comfort.”
“…six…Which?”
“Secure comfort. Comfortable security.”
“No.”
“You tell me.”
A shake of her head. “Torture me the worst you can, I won’t talk.”
Across the room, Luba, Nina, and Rosie gathered around the boy, who was strumming a heavyhearted melody on his balalaika. All the Russian melodies Rivka knew came out of that instrument saturated with sorrow, even the dance songs. The boy dipped the swan neck of his balalaika toward Rosie and she shyly tucked her face behind her hand. Maybe he pitied the deformity of her back, the hump she couldn’t camouflage or prettify with a velvet scarf. “I know that song,” Rivka said. “Suliko.’”
“Why won’t you tell me what you did?”
“So we don’t have an argument. Why do you want to know?”
Peter shook his head, took a draw on his cigarette, glanced away, and repeated, “I can sleep better if I know that Karl’s looking out for you.”
“He is. Don’t worry about me.”
“Who says I’m worried about you?”
A confidence bubbled out on the easy laughter between them. And Rivka gave in. “I pretended I was Max’s wife. For an hour, that’s all. So he could rent the flat there and it looks normal—so it’s safer.”
“A woman makes it safe and normal,” Peter considered. “You think so?”
“Karl says.” She touched his hand so he’d look at her. “I’m going back with them. For the exe. I want to be there with them.”
Three Graces at his feet flattered Nicholas into an encore. He sang the song again, pouring on the creamy anguish. Rivka wondered how such soulfulness could pour from the mouth of a fresh-faced boy. Or from the flurry of his fingers, which made the neck of his balalaika resemble a woman’s spine. Rivka added a harmony just loud enough for Peter to hear. “Ya mogilu miloi iskal, no yeyo naiti nelegko. Dolgo ya tomilsya i stradal, Gdye zhe ty, moya Suliko?”
I was looking for my lover’s grave
but it was hard to find.
For a long time I languished and suffered,
Where are you my Suliko?
“Those Russians”—a loose laugh, confidentially for Peter—“misery is the only thing that makes them happy.”
“Riga Prison is worse,” Fritz anted. “You can believe it, because—”
“The one in Libau,” Jacob cut him off, turning to Yoska to make his case. “Fritz broke out of Central Prison. At Libau they walk you out, the guards—a normal transfer, all right, rifles in front and behind you. Then they shoot you in the neck for attempted escape!”
Fritz said, “Maybe in 1905. A year or two ago, even. January I was in Riga and they beat my brains out—”
“Latvians in Riga, cousin. Russians in charge in Libau.”
“—then they hit me some more. Russian hammers, Russian pliers, Russian knuckles.”
Yoska had nothing to contribute to this comparative survey of Baltic penal regimes. But now he teased Jacob: “You’ve got plenty of friends in Russia. Russian ones.”
“So I know what I’m talking about, don’t I?”
Fritz brandished his hands at Jacob—so do I—fingertips shaking an inch or two under his cousin’s eyes. A few of the nails had grown back crookedly; many showed the still-unhealed yellow and purple skin beneath, and white scars where the flesh of each finger had been sliced with a razor and torn back with pliers. “This is how serious they think of anarchists.”
“Because Russians are stupid as a bowl of borscht,” Jacob replied. “Anarchists are nothing to begin with, and Fritz, let me tell you—you’re no anarchist.” Jacob showed Fritz his own hands, scored with identical wounds: who had more authority in matters of political theory and physical torture? “They do it to nationalist revolutionaries for a better reason.”
“Oh? What is it, then?” Fritz said, and sat back, all ears.
“To show us how much they love the tsar.”
The cousins stared each other down. Whether one was going to erupt in cackling contempt or fly at the other’s throat—and who would do what—Yoska didn’t want to bet. So he took the heat out of the moment by rolling up his right trouser leg and jabbing his finger at the long, sickle-shaped scar. “I’ve got worse pain than both of you put together.”
Jacob said, “From an accident, you told us.”
“No, no—”
“Jumping out of a bedroom window.” Fritz leered at him.
“I wish it was!” Yoska laughed back at Fritz. “Ask Max Smoller. He was there. When we stole some furs. I’m telling you!”
“An accident! I thought so. You tripped over your own big feet.”
Jacob didn’t laugh along. He grabbed Fritz’s hand and pushed it in front of Yoska’s face. “This was deliberate. They hurt us because they wanted to—that was their only intention, to cripple us.” He let go of his cousin. “Before they took out their tools, we sat in a cell very sure o
f what was coming. Our friends were screaming on the other side of the door. One of them they gave back to us with his eardrums burst and his private parts torn to shreds, as if a dog had chewed him there. But they didn’t have any dogs—it was just the Russian guards.”
“You sit in the chair and believe them,” Fritz said quietly. Tears glossed his eyes, unhidden from Jacob and Yoska. “I believed them. ‘Your life is worthless.’ I’m nothing to them, so I’m nothing.” He glanced up. “Not now. I feel better.”
“You’re right about that. Our lives don’t mean anything,” Jacob said, “except when we resist.”
“Jacob, can you be quiet for five minutes?” Yoska said, his hands open, shoved toward Nicholas, Peter, and Rivka, a plea on their behalf. Rivka’s dark head was bowed as she conferred with her musicians, choosing a song they could play and she could sing.
Jacob tabled the discussion in favor of the music. Peter’s violin, Nicholas’s balalaika, Rivka’s soprano all silenced him. The silence of good manners. Silence as strength. Endurance. No, both false.
Two guards came for him in his Libau Prison cell. Here comes the start of it. They tied him to a hard wooden chair. The same kind of chair he knew from the schoolroom. In place of a desk, though, a plain wooden plank strapped across its arms. Wet with blood and saliva—not his, not yet. Four guards stood around him. A stinking cloud of sweat and vodka rolled over him whenever they moved. A fifth one, the officer who stood behind the chair, the Guiding Force, smelled of other things. Shaving soap. Hair oil. It was early in the morning. “Ten questions,” he said to Jacob. His friendly hand patted Jacob’s shoulder. The Guiding Force knew this man wouldn’t say one helpful word, and anything he did say was a lie. No answer Jacob could give would satisfy him.
“What do you do for a living?” A toss of his head, a sincere smile that wouldn’t look out of place on a bandstand, coming from a singer devoted to pleasing the spectators.
“Dock worker,” Jacob said. One guard gripped Jacob’s left wrist; then he felt the nipping pressure of the pliers’ rodent jaws bite the rim of his thumbnail. Lines of pain flashed back into his arm, liquid fire ran down his thumb, through his palm, the nail split lengthwise in two pieces, sheared from the pulp of his flesh. Jacob screamed.
“What whore are you fucking?”
“No whore.”
Pressure on his right wrist. The Fat Guard leaned the weight of his whole body on Jacob’s arm, and one of the others had to pry Jacob’s fist apart. When its nail came away, his little finger burned, blowtorch fire, buried under his screaming.
“You nationalists. You want Latvia for yourselves. Tell me something—is there a difference between Latvians and Jews?”
“All the same,” Jacob answered.
“Index finger, left hand.” The Guiding Force leaned down over Jacob’s shoulder to clarify: “That wasn’t a question.” It was the only time he saw the profile of his torturer’s unremarkable face.
Jacob knew this man. To him, Jacob wasn’t an enemy, not at that moment; he was a task to perform, a broken machine that could be repaired with simple tools. A mechanical problem, nothing more complicated than how to remove the next fingernail—to give rest or pain, a slow peeling or an abrupt pull, a predictable rhythm or jagged, unexpected. For this little time, everyone inhabits the same clear world. And for everyone’s benefit, the Guiding Force will change a man in front of his own eyes. Look quickly and you see a perverse act of mutilation and destruction, but stare at it, if you’re strong enough, and you’ll see how creative it is…
He looked at the guards’ hands. All of them bloody. Jacob’s mouth hung open, dripping blood. Without moving, he could see his ten fingernails scattered on the stone floor. Behind him, Jacob heard the officer say, “One more question—”
Rivka’s singing reached Jacob then, and the warmth of Peter’s room, the closeness of his friends. Fritz whispered to him, guessing, admiring, “So you didn’t scream.”
“Loud enough to break his glasses,” Jacob said. “Looked him in the face every time. Strong screams.”
“I screamed too.” Fritz felt Jacob’s hand reach for his and he clutched it. Shyly, behind his downturned eyes, he was glad of that intimacy. Better than cousins, like Jacob said once—brothers. Persuasive enough for him to throw anarchism over and return to the nationalists.
Jacob put words to the one thought ringing in Fritz’s mind. “We have to show them we’re strong. Weakness provokes them.”
INSIDE THE ROOM, a few feet away from the chance privacy of the landing where Peter and Karl huddled, Nicholas played a few bars of melody on his balalaika, slowly singing the Russian lyrics. Then Rivka sang them back in her peppery soprano. One or two refrains and she’d mastered the new song, even improvised a harmony for the chorus. Peter pretended not to be listening and spoke intensely to Karl. “Tell her you don’t need her.”
“It wouldn’t be the truth,” Karl said.
“She doesn’t have to be there.”
“It’s a help. It’s only what the girl wants to do.”
“Rivka shouldn’t be doing this, Karl. I don’t care what she thinks of herself, she’s no recruit.”
“Who recruited her? I did? No. What the Russians squatting in Latvia did to her father. What the English did to her.”
“And you’ll protect her from the English police…” Peter doubted, his voice sharp. “Not in the middle of an action.”
“The girl will be sitting in a flat for a few hours, Peter. Drinking cups of tea.”
“I’ll have to talk her out of going to Houndsditch.”
“Good luck. Nobody talked her into it.”
Peter sidestepped the argument. He rattled the geometry of Karl’s plan. “Give me a reason. Why do you need somebody in the other flat while you’re digging?”
“You know why.”
“A lamp burning that the neighbors can see from the street, that’s enough.”
“And Mrs. Levi in the window ironing her husband’s shirt. Which isn’t enough, either.”
THEY COLLECTED IN the back bedroom, the Sisterhood (as Rivka nicknamed them tonight, herself included). Luba’s blankets sprawled over the mattress, a skirt and jacket lay strewn on the floor next to a pair of Fritz’s boots, his overcoat and a shirt bunched together. Rosie, Luba, Nina, and Rivka lounged in their salon. Rosie and Luba took the bed; Rivka camped on the floor and pushed Fritz’s clothes against the wall to pillow her back; Nina stood by the door, with one ear trying to follow the men’s conversations stirring in the other room. Out there, Fritz on his mandolin plunked his way through “Along the Petersburg Road” for the ninth time. Rosie said, “The Russian boy plays it better.”
“He’s teaching him,” Luba said, defending the stumbling and cracked notes Fritz was bullying into a melody. “Fritz is learning.”
“Nicholas was a musician the day he was born,” Rivka said. “The music is in his fingers. He doesn’t think about it, he just plays it.”
“He can strum me!” Luba, naughty, arms stretched above her head, slim as a balalaika’s neck, not really meaning it.
Rosie’s monotone muffled the pity that crouched inside her words. “His wife is somewhere,” she said.
Luba sparked, “How do you know?”
Nina said, “He only got here in the summer. Fritz brought him home from the theater.”
“Little chickadee,” Luba said sympathetically.
“He’s married, Rosie?”
Rosie continued on her own track. “Every man has a wife. She could—”
“Every pot has a lid,” Rivka chipped in.
“—or it doesn’t mean he’s married to her yet. Maybe she isn’t born yet.” She said to Luba, “Fritz has one.”
“Maybe Nicholas is your husband but he doesn’t know it,” Luba snapped back, thinking, I’m Fritz’s true wife.
“No, Nicholas is probably Rivka’s husband. The way they play music together.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Tomacoff!” Luba k
idded her.
“My name’s Mrs. Levi, please,” Rivka corrected her. Then she protested: “He looks like a boy.”
“He’s older than you,” Luba said.
“Anybody can sing. All the best musicians are men, I’m telling you.”
“You sing so beautiful. Everybody listens. Men look at you. They stop and—”
“Just now?” Rivka said. “They talked the whole time.”
“Not Peter.”
“That’s true. Peter didn’t,” Rosie agreed.
“Music isn’t serious,” Nina said. She stood at the dresser now, tidying away the boxes of ammunition in their drawer. She covered the pistols with one of Luba’s underskirts. “I can’t sit still and listen to it. Karl, either.”
Was it that he’d heard Nina say his name? On his way past the doorway just then, with a bottle of beer in his hand, Karl glanced in on the Sisterhood. He raised the brown bottle in gentlemanly salute and vanished again. Cowled in her own silence, Rosie kept her eyes on the empty doorway and saw his shape in the air looking back at her. She thought, Everything outside the square of floor with him on it is a madhouse.
IN THE CORNER of the room by the bedstead, Yourka Dubof approached Peter with the humility a young apprentice shows a venerable master. Six years’ difference between them, that was all, both men in their twenties. “Can I show you my painting?”
Peter dug through his jacket pockets, gave up, and said, “No more cigarettes.”
“I’ve got one. You want a cigarette?” Yourka said, grabbing the chance to be useful.
“Is it your last one?”
“I smoked all the rest. Enough cigarettes for one night.”
Yourka pulled out the flat, rectangular package from behind a chair, where it had waited all night. Without fumbling, he untied the string, scraped away the brown paper, stepped back, and held the unframed painting for Peter to view, a watercolor landscape of scrubby countryside, slender, wind-blasted trees and grassland in the foreground that led the eye back to dense green woodland and signs of habitation.
A Storm in the Blood Page 17