A Storm in the Blood

by Jon Stephen Fink

  A punch to an old rabbi’s face earned two punches back, though not from him. English roughs laid into Yiddishers, attacked them for the insult of putting up a fight. Over here the crowd boiled, over there it churned. Fists jabbed, boots kicked, women cried out, men cursed each other. Somebody raised an iron bar over his head but didn’t smash it down—a policeman snapped it out of his hand, another one grabbed the brawler in a headlock, tackled him to the ground. Some poison in the cordite you could see bluing the mist across Sidney Street infected the people; it corroded the buildings, gnawed pieces out of the bricks, liquefied the mortar, showed everyone the augury of a ruined city.

  Three rifle bullets had blown holes in the ebony back rest of Betsy’s favorite chair. Yoska fit a finger through each one, lifted the chair back onto its legs and placed it where it belonged at the end of the sofa. He did the same for the little round mahogany table, which he also brushed clean of plaster dust. Then Yoska sat in the chair and rested his elbow on the table as if the destroyed room around him were a boulevard café and his waiter had just gone to fetch him a glass of beer. “What?” he said in reply to a look from Fritz, which begged him to recognize the ridiculousness. Yoska twisted in his seat to examine the three bullet holes. “You think they can hit the identical place twice?”

  “No, I was just thinking—if you’re going to tidy the place before Betsy comes back, you should start in the kitchen.”

  They both heard the shouts in the street and looked toward the glassless windows. Yoska made the same joke about the overdue insurrection in Stepney, the partisans who will break through the police lines and save their brothers’ doomed skins. This time Fritz granted it a soft laugh. “I’m tired,” he said. “You?”

  “Sleepy, you mean? I don’t want to sleep.” Yoska listened again. “What if they’re waiting to see if we come out?”

  “They’ll be disappointed. You have more ammunition?”

  Yoska felt in his jacket pockets. “Eight clips. We can stay in here for a month. Plenty of food in the other rooms. If nothing bad happens.”

  A flick of his eyes. “Bad?”

  “Worse.”

  “Don’t make my head hurt, Yoska. I depend on you.”

  “You don’t want to have a conversation. I understand.”

  “We don’t have time to talk about nonsense, that’s all.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  Fritz held out his hand and jiggled his fingers at Yoska’s revolver. “Let me look at it.”

  “How come?”

  “Make sure you’ve got it loaded.”

  While Fritz reloaded the Browning, Yoska leaned close and asked him, “Is this a leap year?”

  “No. Yes. How do I know?” He passed the gun back. “The safety’s off.”

  “Because I can’t remember if a leap year is when you add a day or lose one.”

  “Add one,” Fritz said, with authority. “At the end of February. Every leap year there’s a February twenty-ninth.”

  “That’s where I’m not sure. If leap years are the ones that go three in a row, then you’d lose a day when it isn’t a leap year and end up on February twenty-eighth.”

  “You’ve got it backwards.”

  Yoska puzzled, “Divide by four…add one to the month…”

  “The year. If you can divide it by four.”

  “Four into nineteen-eleven…Do you have a pencil?”

  “Please forget about it.”

  “Sure.”

  “You want to stay here or go to the ground floor?”

  “Because I was wondering,” Yoska said, “where I’ll be at the end of February. If I’ll get an extra day.”

  As though Fritz had finally reached a conclusion about his friend, he said, “You’re a humble man, Yoska. Don’t let them see it.”

  From the people outside, a chorused cheer—or jeer—flared into the air. On hands and knees, Yoska crawled to the window and peeked over the sill. “What are they screaming about?”

  Fritz listened a second. “It’s English. I don’t know enough words. ‘Long live the king’?”

  “Can’t see them very good.” Gun hand on the windowsill, Yoska lifted himself to his knees and leaned out. “Some gent’s come down here in a taxi.”

  In a heaven where severed souls live through an eternity of their last moment before death, Yoska hears English voices and thinks, What’s the name of that song I know?

  The concussion of thirty rifles, the yellow flash and burst, the red plume and spray of dust: none of these drove Fritz back, they rushed him to the window. He retrieved Yoska’s revolver and fired quick rounds against the bombardment, his Mauser in his other hand firing too, until both guns clicked empty. He slipped down against the kitchen wall to reload. The spare clips for the Browning were in Yoska’s pockets, so Fritz couldn’t look away from the pitiful sight of Yoska’s body sprawled backward on the floor. Arms flung up, bad leg bent under him, a black-edged bullet hole in his forehead, the back of his skull gone, curds of Yoska’s brain in the splashed stew of his blood and hair on the carpet. And in his face a heavy-lidded expression of mild surprise and absence.

  “You’re not a dead animal,” Fritz prayed over Yoska’s corpse.

  Rifle shots sparked through the windows, cracked, ricocheted off the bricks outside. Kill them all. Fritz stood and fired again, every pull of the trigger, every bullet blessed with a shout. “You can’t kill me!”

  I’m absolutely innocent…I told Peter don’t carry Karl home. This from that…I’m clean. My darling I can’t write to you…Two weeks on the run, I don’t know how much longer I can go…This from that…They were guarding the roads…If they catch me they’ll hang me for sure for spite…I want to say this for the sake of my reputation. The good that somebody like me can bring to Humanity isn’t worth a penny…If we were on the ship going to Australia…Be peaceful…We’ll be ashes the same as everyone…

  Threads of smoke wound out between the wallpaper’s curling seams. Fritz watched brown patches bloom in the pattern of pomegranates, leaves, and vines. Then finger-sized flames blistered shreds from the paper and wafted them through the win dows. Flakes of paper, smoke scarves, hungrier fire explored the ceiling.

  “You can’t kill me.”

  In the kitchen, three walls crawled with flames. A thundering wave of dark smoke drenched the outer room, then surged in around Fritz. Blind in this furnace, for as long as he could he held on to a memory—of cool water, a cooling wind on a riverbank, his wife’s bare feet in the mud, the thin dress clinging to her hips in the stream, blue flowers on white, trailing like a water weed. A memory in her, the same.

  “You can’t kill me!”

  And Fritz shouted it again into the squall of gunfire, barrage after barrage from police shotguns and snipers’ rifles, against the eruptions of cinder wind and flames battering property back into dirt: what used to be an accordion, a chair, a carpet, gone to dirt, what used to be a house, the cremation pit for Fritz’s body and Yoska’s, anarchists no more, gone to dirt.

  FOR THREE HOURS Rivka kept her eyes on the door, the solid rectangle transformed by her imagination into gauze lit by wildly spinning thoughts. Staged on its far side was everything Harry said was possible, and more. The police trapped Peter in a house…He’s under arrest, in jail…He’s escaped from London…He’s hiding in Brick Lane…He’s on his way to find her…The police have shot him dead…Each playlet whirled Rivka’s thinking around to its aftermath: if Peter was arrested, she’d stay with Harry’s sister…If he got out of London, she’d borrow money and follow him…If he was hiding somewhere close, she would do what she had been doing for two weeks: she’d go on waiting for him…If he was dead, she wouldn’t allow another man to touch her for the rest of her life; her spinsterhood would be Peter’s memorial. Rivka stared with such intensity at the back of the stage door that she almost believed she could reach Peter, alive or dead, with the power of her mind. Absurdly, she spoke his name.

  The doorknob r
attled; a force pressed from outside. A fist thumped the middle of the door, angry and dire. Here was a different possibility Harry was too delicate to name: the police, come to the Pavilion to take her. So Rivka didn’t call out. The door shook against its deadbolt. She pressed her ear close and said, “Is it you?”

  “Let me inside.”

  Rivka scrabbled at the lock, pounded on it, tore at the doorknob, but the door stood as solid as a headstone. “Harry locked it. He went to his sister’s house. I made him leave me here.” The only meaningful and obvious fact was the locked door; who locked it, why, or when, thoughtfully, thoughtlessly, or secretly, didn’t make a difference.

  “Do you see a key anywhere?” Peter controlled the anger in his voice to keep it from crumbling into desperation.

  No hook on the wall, no cubbyhole, no time to ransack Harry’s office. “Peter, I can’t find it. Tell me what to do.” Both of his fists answered her, drumming on the other side, a lunge with his shoulder, a parting grunt. “Tell me what to do…” Rivka moaned to him and to herself. She hugged her stomach, doubled over, paced to the wings and back to the door, where her moaning rose to a wounded howl. Like a restless spirit haunting the staircase, Rivka climbed to Harry’s office. Each small defeat brought on another moan—the desk drawer stuffed with papers, the locked drawer, the empty shelf, the promising china box—then the ghost of the Pavilion Theatre moaning for her lost lover drifted downstairs again to keep her vigil at the stage door.

  Another fierce slam against the other side of the door shook Rivka’s bones. “Peter?” No answer came back to her. She leaned close to the door and said his name again.

  From somewhere deep in the theatre a soft cracking sound disturbed the air. Rivka stood where she was and stared into the silence and the backstage shadows until one patch of dark came loose from the rest. She saw the figure of a man.

  “It’s all right.” A sudden uncertainty tightened Peter’s voice. “Rivka?” Space collapsed between them. He pulled Rivka to him with one arm, Rivka bent him down to kiss his mouth, his smooth face, his tall brow. “Your hair,” he said. “I thought it wasn’t you.”

  “Me,” she said, scraping the blond wig from her head.

  He fumbled with a couple of the hairpins, plucked them free and buried his face in the scent of her red-brown hair. “You,” he said. A squeeze from Rivka’s hand shot a pain through his and he flinched it away. “Not as bad as it looks.” He let her look at the sticky, still weeping, gash in his palm. “Cut it on the window getting in. My knee, too.”

  “But you’re here.”

  “Yes. Here I am. Look at me.” He sounded ashamed, not triumphant.

  In front of her, Peter’s torn trousers and ripped jacket, the mud spatters, bloodstains, trailing shoelaces, askew necktie. And his control disintegrating. “Thank God for Charles Perelman,” she said.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” he said, looking at his rescuer: Rivka, not Charles Perelman. It was Rivka’s hand pulling him from the suffocating wreckage of this earthquake. She was the one to explain how catastrophes can be reversed, this long ca lamity that’s ended by crushing the good out of everything he’d done. Rivka waited for me here. His cheek trembled, his shoulders softly shook. “This time…”

  “Peter, we’re here. Together.”

  “This time I knew I’d get caught.”

  “But you didn’t. You’re here.”

  “If they caught me—no, what I’m saying, the police…” Peter wept to her, sobs that broke his words and emptied the fragments into Rivka’s hair. “It would be a good thing if they caught me. Did I rob people because I’m a thief? Kill them because I’m a murderer?”

  “You didn’t kill anybody. I know you didn’t. Jacob did. Karl and Max did.” She tried to hang on to Peter’s arm as he pushed away from her with a disgusted groan. He stalked the backstage corner, grabbed at the curtain ropes, brushed his wet eyes with the back of his hand. He wiped his brow and trailed a smear of blood across it. “You did what you did. Then the next thing.” All she had was the throb that choked her throat (since she’d temporarily lost the power of speech) to tell Peter her dearest faith was in his goodness as a man.

  “What did I do? Opposed them. Oppose, oppose, worse than Jacob or Karl. That’s the truth. I was against the Romanovs in Courland, and imperialists everywhere. Social Democrats, too, because I was a nationalist. First! First I called myself a nationalist. ‘Russia out of Latvia!’ Until I woke up, whenever it was, et voilá, I was a socialist revolutionary.” Another pained, self-disgusted groan, an impotent swipe at the curtain ropes.

  “Those Cossacks on the Talsen road,” began Rivka.

  “With your father. You told me.”

  She sat on the staircase. “He tried to kill Russians, yes,” she said. “A Russian tried to make him look weak in front of us. My mother, my sisters and brothers. That army colonel, Orlov, he smashed up my father’s beautiful work. Well, Papa couldn’t fight this big-shot officer, so he tried to get him a different way. He wanted to wreck something that belonged to Orlov and make him look small. Not because Orlov was a Russian. He did it to make himself equal.” Rivka laughed, in pity, at the memory. “That rope across the road! To ambush the Russian army!” Her head shaking had the look of palsy, uncontrollable, afflicted. “When the Cossacks were chasing me across the field, all I was thinking was, Next get to the woods, next get to the farm road, next my cousin Jankel. Then I went on a boat, and then I was here. Here I am. Not because of politics. To stay alive, that’s all—because then I’ll be with you.”

  Peter sat on the step below hers. The color of Rivka’s eyes, the blue that captured particles of the unreachable high atmosphere, reflected the substance of his own sorrows. “It’s the same thing,” he said.

  UPSTAIRS THE WATER was cold; the carbolic soap covered his skin with the unlucky odor of a hospital. But for those moments, Peter sleepily bound himself over to Rivka’s care. She bathed his body, washed the cuts in his hand and leg, and dressed them with strips of clean muslin. In the wardrobe room, she had an easier time digging out a new suit for Peter. The collection of men’s costumes was mercifully short on peasant shirts and sashes; male characters in the Yiddish operettas seemed mainly to be landowners, burghers, and comfortable city-dwelling bourgeoisie. The costume that happened to fit Peter was the apparel of an altogether higher-caste gentleman: dark woolen trousers, a morning coat, a pair of dove-gray gloves, a top hat, and a walking stick from the prop box.

  Peter and Rivka stood in front of the mirror, framed like a couple in their wedding photo, and saw two conspirators who had come through their disasters to conspire in each other’s survival. Looking him over, Rivka said, “We can leave by the front door.”

  “Maybe, if it were nighttime, after a performance.” Heading to the turning of the staircase, Peter grabbed the fire ax from its corner; he didn’t stop until he was standing at the stage door in a woodsman’s stance. “Stand back,” he warned Rivka.

  Peter brought the ax down on the broken wood in a powerful arc. His first blow glanced off of the lock. His next one split the doorjamb above it. The fourth stroke cracked a hole twice the size of the ax head in the door where the deadbolt used to be. Rivka and Peter left the Pavilion like burglars. But they entered the jostle of Whitechapel Road like any couple on an afternoon promenade.

  Down the hugger-mugger row of market stalls, barrows, and shopfronts, their clothes attracted glances. Beggar boys held out their grimy caps, tin cans, or just their hands, following Peter and Rivka along the pavement. Other youngsters noticed them too, with the fidgety loafing, keen eyes, and nimbleness of veteran pickpockets. By the entrance of one shop, the owner deliberately blocked their path with a grinning invitation to be amazed by the beautiful quality of his rugs, and by his even more beautiful prices. Without obvious hurry, Peter smiled his thanks and led Rivka around him.

  The sluggish foot traffic stopped dead at a fabric stall, where a clutch of buyers and sellers jammed the pav
ement for ten yards on both sides. Peter’s gloved hand pressed Rivka’s elbow as he walked her to the street side. At the other end of the stall, a plump, fair- haired police constable, dispatched by his sergeant into the wind and cold to patrol for fugitive anarchists, did likewise. Rivka saw him step from behind the barrow—half a second before she noticed the seep of blood staining Peter’s glove. She took his arm, covered his injured hand with hers, and stopped dead, staring into the constable’s young face. Blocked on one side by the barrow, on the other by motorcars, wagons, people on their blind business, and—between their shoetips and the policeman’s—a muddy green-brown tower of horse manure.

  What civil rulebook tells a person whose right it is to go and whose duty it is to halt? It was one more conflict decided on the spot, down in the grains of a human being’s passions. The PC glanced from Rivka to Peter and back again. Peter’s grip choked the handle of his cane. Then the constable raised his finger to his helmet’s brim, took a step back, and made room for the immaculately turned-out English couple to pass.

  “Thank you,” Rivka said quietly, her eyes lowered.

  Peter accorded the policeman a genteel nod. “You’re most kind.”

  “Keep an eye out for whizzers, I was you, sir,” he advised Peter with a dipping gesture of his hand. “Pickpockets. Ten a penny ’round Little Jerusalem.”

  Brown-tiled, begrimed, loud with public conversation and train-track clatter, Whitechapel Underground station opened to Peter and Rivka as bright and teeming as a Tahitian beach. Together there on the platform, someplace beyond it, they could hear the slap of water on a boat’s hull, see an edge of land divide the sea—the single prospect that filled their view a fresh beginning in an unmade world.

  Epilogue

  TO SAY THAT NOTHING IS KNOWN about the life Peter the Painter lived after the Stepney siege would be to deny a weight of heartfelt testimony. What can be said is that little is known for certain. After his supernatural disappearance, British newspapers, urgent for triumph, reported that the terrorist Peter Piatkow had burned to death in the holocaust of 100 Sidney Street. But neither of the two bodies salvaged from the ruins belonged to him. Death-defying Peter, criminal mastermind, avatar of the anarchist underground, disappeared in a shimmer of heat and smoke. Willo’-the-wisp Peter, nemesis of immigration police, sighted in Australia in 1917, in New York the next year, the south of France in 1926, in Siberia after World War II. A Russian apparatchik turned loose from there in the fifties testified that he was in prison with an Englishman who spoke perfect Russian, and this foreigner ad mitted, confessed, to him that he was Peter the Painter. Who had died in the gulag in 1949. Nothing you could verify.