A Storm in the Blood

by Jon Stephen Fink

“You’ll fight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Against the Enemies of Freedom.”

  “Who?”

  “To overthrow the ruling class? For your comrades in the revolutionary struggle?”

  “For us.”

  “Us?’”

  “You.”

  “I’m not Liesma.”

  Peter’s sharpness, his anger, baffled her. “For us. To be together. How we were two nights ago. I want to be with you tonight, tomorrow. By tomorrow we can be safe together, in a different city.”

  “Please, Rivka, don’t think about the future! This is the future—of an hour ago! Policemen are hunting for you, understand? For Nina and Karl, for me, all of us, tonight. People saw you, Rivka. Somebody can describe you. You think the police went home afterward? What matters is how smart we are this minute.”

  “It’s smart for me to stay with you.”

  “From your experience of actions,” Peter said, mordant and lucid. “No, it’s stupid. I have to get out of this by myself.”

  “What happens to me?” The shudder in her chest began in terror and ended in trembling courage. On tiptoe, she reached up to hold Peter’s face between her hands. “You’re inside me,” she said.

  “You’ll have a better chance alone.” The fragrance from her palms and hair, its nearness, its memory, quieted Peter. “Don’t go to Perelman’s.”

  “There’s nowhere else for me.”

  “You have to keep away from there,” he said with grim strength to make sure she took it in.

  Rivka’s kiss on his mouth drew Peter’s arms around her. Her breath in his ear: “Promise you’ll find me in a few days.”

  As he pulled free of her, he pressed Rivka’s hand to his cheek. “Don’t expect anybody to help you. Actions never finish. Not exes like this one, when there’s blood.”

  “After this we’re going to be together. Promise me, Peter.”

  “What good is any promise with insanity crashing down all around? You don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”

  Lovers’ language, if roses grew with petals of human skin.

  Twenty-six

  POOR NETTIE PERELMAN, rousted out of bed by her father in the wee darkling hours. Loosely clutched by sleep, she still knew it wasn’t a school morning, it was Saturday—she had the right to stay in bed until her mother called her downstairs for breakfast. But the light in Nettie’s room confused her, and she whined a complaint. “Ssh, ssh,” Papa Perelman quietly comforted her. “Don’t wake Mama, little dollie.”

  Some part of Nettie was still dreaming as she let her papa sit her on the edge of the bed and replace her flannel nightgown with the blouse, stockings, and skirt she’d worn to school on Friday morning. From inside a cave somewhere Nettie heard her father say she was going on a journey to visit her Aunt Hannah. “Where’s your case, Nettie? The wicker one.” One eye open, Nettie’s hand, finger pointing, flopped to her side. “Under here?”

  “I want my sailor dress,” she said to the top of his head.

  “You can take whatever you want, puppy dog.” A kiss on her knee.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “No, I’m bad. Sorry, puppy dog.”

  “Boys are puppy dogs,” Nettie groaned at her dumb bad papa and threw herself backward onto her pillow.

  Perelman twisted around to say to the man standing in the hallway, “She’s a good actress.” To this, the man said nothing. “I’ll talk to your wife. Tell her you’re all right. You want me to say where you are?”

  Max shifted on his tired feet. “No. I’ll get a message to her.”

  “Are you coming back?” Max had no reply for him. “I wouldn’t, either.” Days before, Perelman suspected that Rivka also was mixed up in whatever action George Gardstein had on the boil. Max confirmed it, along with the number of dead. Perelman said, “Nina’s her friend, so all right. But Piatkow…” He spat the name. “Bastard house painter should’ve kept her out of trouble.”

  “What’s a bastard, Papa?”

  Max enlightened Nettie. “A dog.”

  “You think so? Him?” However low Perelman’s opinion of Peter sank, it never reached the depths of informer.

  “Somebody spilled. You ask me.”

  “Piatkow?” He considered the perverse possibility, shook it out of his head. “Cold-hearted selfish bastard, yes. A dog, no.” To Nettie he said, “You can put your shoes on downstairs.”

  “Are we going now?”

  “Yes, doll. On the night boat. Do you remember Papa’s friend Max?” Perelman waved Max in from the hallway.

  His clothes, hands, and face were powdered with black brick dust, his short hair pomaded with sweat. “Hello, Nettie.”

  “Max is taking you to Aunt Hannah’s.”

  “Are you and Mama coming tomorrow?”

  “Soon, soon.”

  “And Fanny? And Carlusha?”

  “Sunday, all of us. First show Max how good you are at playacting. Show me your terrible-illness face.” The ten-year-old let her cheeks and lower jaw sag, her dull eyes half-closed. “Cough.” Nettie’s cough racked her shoulders, caved in her bony chest. “You don’t feel so good, do you?”

  “No…Papa,” in her ravaged, orphan-frail whisper.

  Aglow, Perelman bragged to Max: “Quite an actress, no?”

  “I’m going to be an actress in the theater,” Nettie almost sang, miraculously recovered.

  “I give you permission. Something else. For tonight you pretend Max is your papa. On the train and night boat, Nettie, you call him Papa and make your ill face.”

  “Why do I have to?”

  “Because when you can do your friend a kindness, my darling, you must do it. Max’s own little girl can’t go to Paris with him. She feels so poorly she can’t go out from the house.” In the gentlest confidence a father ever gave a daughter, he said: “I want you to keep Max company so he doesn’t feel sad.” Then Perelman advised Max: “At customs tell them she’s got diphtheria. Everybody will leave you alone.”

  DAUBED WITH A LATHER of shaving soap, in a washstand mirror in a comrade’s bedroom, at the other end of Commercial Road, Peter’s face reflected a numbing fact: escape was just the start. Always, always. Today’s goal was more than just to disappear: it was to avoid ending up like those hotheads in Tottenham last year, Hefeld and the other one, both with bullets in the head. “I must want to live some more,” he said to the mirror.

  So far, success. He’d counted on his friend Pavell for sanctuary, with Fritz and Yoska clinging to his back pockets, and they’d got their temporary roost. Safety at Pavell’s till first light, five hours to catch their breath and make a plan. Together or separate? Somewhere in London or outside? Think for yourself. Choose for yourself. Act for yourself. On every other flit, Peter got away alone, with secrecy to protect him instead of numbers. Look at these numbers! Fritz may be calm for the minute, but he’s a jar of nitroglycerin tipped to explode. Yoska, with his bad leg, moves slow as a wounded elephant. Two more targets, two chances out of three something will tilt the wrong way.

  At each stroke of the razor, an irreversible cut. Inward from the untwisted ends of his mustache, left then right, shallow arcs uncovered his smooth upper lip. Then he scythed clean the neat triangular beard, the angled ruff of hairs under his jaw first, left side then right, and finally Peter erased the point that sat so elegantly barbered on his chin. A dozen strokes, a few more? He’d shed a skin and no twinge of nostalgia pained him. Looking back at him was an unfashionable face Peter hadn’t seen in years—a prerevolutionary face.

  He joined his friends in the unlit front room. “I’m getting myself to Poplar. Out of the city.”

  “Meeting the girl?” Yoska said.

  “Am I the only one with an idea?”

  Fritz brooded, “They won’t try to arrest us. If they see us they’ll gun us down.”

  “No,” Yoska said shakily, laughing it off. “They’ll capture us, Fritz. So they can torture us all day. T
hen they’ll shoot us in the back.” The laugh went, not the shakiness. “For what we know about Karl, the exe, the whole thing.”

  “They have to murder us.” Of this Fritz was convinced. “To prove it to the Englanders they’ve got power over foreigners.”

  “Tame us. Put us back in our cages,” Yoska caught on.

  “We don’t know anything, do we? We weren’t there. In Houndsditch.”

  “No, no.”

  “What do they care? We’re anarchists, auslanders—”

  “Thieves, Jews, yes…”

  “—we’ll do.”

  “Police want a prize. Our hides nailed on the king’s wall.”

  “Our heads hanging on the, the, in the—”

  “Trophy room,” Yoska supplied.

  “The king of England’s trophy room. They’re coming after us with a meat ax.”

  “One for each of us.”

  Fritz hoisted himself off the sofa to declare, “Our people! Get word to them—I don’t mean people like Pavell or Hoffman, not Liesma. I mean citizens, people around here. They’d start an uprising.”

  “Uprising,” echoed Yoska. “Because of us?”

  “In the streets, why not? Barricades in Brick Lane. We didn’t do anything against anybody.” He asked Yoska: “Did you shoot any policemen tonight?” Then Peter: “Did you?”

  Until this deranged notion was aimed at him, Peter had kept his distance, happy to let Fritz shoot off sparks. Now, though, survival was at stake. Someone had to douse the firebrand with a bucket of cold water. “Ring a bell and see who comes running, why don’t you? Walk down the street, Fritz, ring your bell. Call on your comrades to join you. ‘Save your brothers from the bastard English police!’ You’ll die of loneliness. Or a brick in the head. Krauts, Polacks, Russos, Letts, Wops, and Yids—the Yids more than any of them. What do you think? They want to be Englishmen! They want people to leave them alone, that’s all. To forget about them. That’s the reason they came here. You think they’ll come running to help like your house is on fire? You really think so? You’re lucky if nobody turns you in.”

  “Englanders don’t want them! It’s the funniest English joke. We’ll always be Wops and Yids,” Fritz said, pointing his finger. “The English are English. Everybody else is—you know it’s true what I’m saying—everybody else is down in the dirt. If Yids and whoever around here don’t believe today, tomorrow they’ll see for sure. When the children walk around thinking they’re English. They’ll act like Englanders, learn how to talk like them, drink tea, and put on English clothes. Then we can have a big laugh. Listen to Englanders talking behind Yids’ backs. And not just behind, either—sometimes right to their darling faces.”

  “All right, then. Let’s sit here and wait twenty years, all right? For the Great Uprising,” Peter said.

  “You have to educate the people.”

  “Tonight? Why don’t we educate them tonight, Fritz, so they’ll make a revolution in Brick Lane and save our skins?”

  “When they look outside their windows and see how the English are persecuting us they’ll get educated.”

  “Too late for you and me.” Peter made a curse of the word uprising, turned away from Fritz, and called himself a fool for not borrowing money from Pavell to buy a train ticket out of London.

  “He’s your friend, so he must be all right,” Yoska said to Peter. “If you trust Pavell, I do too.”

  “Good. What do you mean?”

  “Nobody wants the police on them.”

  “We can’t stay with Pavell,” Peter said. “Before first light, if he’s back or not, we leave.”

  “Where?” Fritz, throwing down a dare.

  “I’m heading for Poplar.”

  “I’ll go to Betsy, then,” Yoska decided. “She’ll hide me.” Then, a thought. “All of us.”

  “How far?” Peter said, suddenly interested.

  “Ten minutes. Sidney Street. By her flat you can get to the roof.”

  Peter figured the odds. “A yard? A back door?”

  “It’s a quiet place. Normal,” Yoska said. “Quiet people live there.”

  “Where is it in the street?”

  “Middle. On a little road. Also there’s a yard behind there, a good alley.”

  “Middle house.” Peter considered it. “Who knows you know Betsy?”

  “Mr. Gershon does.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Betsy’s husband! A whole year and he doesn’t know about me and Betsy. She can keep a secret. It’s perfect.” Yoska massaged his leg. “Don’t worry about Gershon. He won’t be around.”

  “It’s good,” Fritz joined in. “We should go by Cable Street, stay off the big road.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Peter guessed. “Yoska, you have a key to the street door?”

  Yoska took a pebble out of his jacket pocket, showed it to Peter. “Sure.”

  A melody plinked in a corner of the room, glassy, leisurely, as if, arguments and decisions settled, the balalaika player understood he had permission to play. Friend to them all, to Peter and Fritz, Yoska and Pavell, who used his brains and tracked the persecuted men here to offer what he could, to comfort, to sympathize, to help. Fritz swayed to each strum, limp as sea grass, overwhelmed by a nostalgic mood. Nostalgia for his peaceful life before the calamity in Houndsditch galloped down on him and mangled him under its hooves, taken over by the homely memory of a few nights ago. “Petersburg Road,’” he requested.

  Nicholas Tomacoff plinked the steel strings, sang the first few words of Fritz’s favorite song. “Vdol po Piterskoi, po daro-zhinkye,”—and Fritz joined in—“po Tverskoi-Yamskoi, s kara-koltshikom…” the two men’s voices, balalaika simpering underneath, and Peter in a strangled hush, “Are you crazy? Stop it! Hang a sign on Pavell’s window and tell the whole neighborhood we’re in here!”

  “Sorry, Peter.” Nicholas laid the silenced balalaika across his knees. “I’ll keep quiet.”

  Twenty-seven

  DO SOMETHING. When they can’t do anything else, people go. Going is something they can do. She shut the door behind her and it’s the same to Luba as finishing. On this side of the door it isn’t finished. I still help him. We’re not dead and gone. This is dying. This is my home. Forget Settle Street, all of this city, nowhere outside is in the world. This room. This floor. This fire. This man. With him is the last place I’ll live…

  Rosie’s memory of Luba shutting the door behind her flickered in her mind. An hour ago, it could have happened a hundred years ago—when together they trailed around Stepney to bring a doctor who’d come out before dawn to tend to a suffering man. “He doesn’t want to go to hospital. So this is all I can do.” Medicine to quiet the pain, for ten shillings dug out of Karl’s trouser pocket. “Can you hear me? What name do you want me to write on the certificate?” Karl dredged the strength to answer, “George Gardstein.”

  The doctor said it to Luba; Luba said the same to Rosie: “I did what I could.” Then, “I can’t think about it anymore. I’m going to my brother’s.”

  Rosie stopped herself from replying, Somebody to do your thinking for you. Luba abandoned her in the room with Karl, who was leaving her too. Blood-soaked sheets underneath him, towels wet and red on the floor, butcher’s flowers, more blood on Karl’s pillow, his clothes. Gray light chilled the window’s edges, un-haltable day pushing in, the last of Karl’s life. Forsaken.

  Not by Rosie. Not by me. This is our home today. We’re one body. Rough or tender, no one touches us anymore. Is this how it feels when you’re finally a ghost? A Presence watching, like the medium told me. I’m a Presence for you. You be one for me. A ghost can’t touch the world. You can’t be helped anymore or hurt. You’re a memory. While they’re alive. Then you’re forgotten, same as if you never lived.

  “Rosie?”

  She crawled over to the side of the bed. “I’m here.”

  “You don’t have to wait. Go home.”

  “What do you need?” Rosie poured some water in
to a glass and found the small brown bottle the doctor left on the table.

  “Do something for me.”

  We aren’t dead yet. I’m not a ghost or a memory yet. I can do this. For Karl. My Karl. If it’s my last act in the world it will be this act of love. Help him remember it for an hour.

  Strong instructions in a weak voice from the bed. Rosie emptied the drawers and shelves of papers and photographs, moved stacks of Karl’s notebooks and pamphlets from corners of the room into a bigger heap next to the fireplace. The bullets she found she collected into a flat cap, which she laid on Karl’s bedside table. Then, one by one, she fed papers from the heap into the fire. She stirred them with the poker to do a thorough job. Now and again, she glanced back at Karl to persuade herself he was awake and watching.

  Twenty-eight

  KARL’S EYES STAYED OPEN; he lacked the strength to close them. Strength of will. A minute before, Rosie asked him if he wanted her to give his hair a brushing. He failed to reply. So she neatened the damp, flattened nest with Nina’s hairbrush. The strong beauty of Karl’s face had slipped, sunk back, like the concavity of a cliff weakened by brute winds. Second by second becoming less of what it was.

  Now comes this: Nina is smart to get out quick. She knows the police will come tonight, tomorrow, to lift her. She knows good ways out of the district. It’s best for her. And me. Tell me the use of it, Nina standing over me, bunching her handkerchief between her hands. “What a rotten terrible thing got done to you!” My boy. My love. Nothing can be done about it. She knows what I know. Thinks my thoughts. My girl. My comrade of the flame. I’m thinking of you in the streets, safe. Friends in Poplar. There by now on the trolleybus. I don’t care. Even if she isn’t thinking this, she’s doing it, which is better than the same thing. Together, escaping them, split apart.

  He worked to concentrate on the few things he could see from the bed: his bootless feet, the bedside lamp, buttons on his coat, the gentle peaks of red-orange fire bobbing across the coal in the grate. Rosie’s back, her unkind hump, a shadow between him and the heat. He wanted to ask her to move aside a little, but even as he struggled to breathe a word, it ended as a pocket of air in his mouth. His body shivered, cold and wet, overture to the next round of pain that rolled down from his neck and shoulders, crested in his back and side, surged downward and deeper into his stomach.