A Storm in the Blood
Page 32
In July 2005, an eighty-nine-year-old retired stage manager (and locally notorious hoarder) named Bernard Burston died at home in Stoke Newington. His place in Osbaldeston Road was declared a health hazard by the Senior Environmental Officer of Hackney Council, and a Court Order of Entry was enforced on the nearly derelict three-story house. A crew of private contractors set about clearing out the decades of foraged rubbish Mr. Burston had methodically assembled inside and outside his home.
The cleaning gang’s archaeologically-minded foreman rescued a tea chest that was crammed with Burston family memorabilia. The accumulation was crowned with a long document written by Bernard Burston, in which he made an eccentric claim: that his father had lived a false life under the name Edward Burston, carrying on a middle-class suburban existence indistinguishable from thousands of others in their neck of north London. That his real name was Peter Piatkow, known to police as Peter the Painter, anarchist, armed robber, and murderer. Bernard’s chief evidence for this was a wanted poster, found in the tea chest nested among the Post-it notes, photographs, Xeroxed newspaper articles, theater playbills, stapled jottings, and other leafy jumble. Down one margin, in handwriting he recognized as his mother’s, were the words Fun mir tzu P. Vie? Avek, and in another, not in her hand, the reply Naben dir greener tir. Vart. Haynt.
A beguiling picture emerges from Bernard Burston’s cranky forensic research into his parents’ double history: Rivka’s and Peter’s history, if we’re inclined to believe it.
Edward and Anna Burston lived in France before moving to England at the end of World War I. Edward taught French lan guage and geography at a boys’ school in Highgate. Bernard describes him as a father he mocked for his shuffling conformity, his petty-bourgeois pleasures and a vacancy in him where political consciousness and moral outrage should have been. Edward’s fussy table manners were tokens of a restrained man, untroubled and untroublesome. Untroubled because he was untroublesome. A stickler at the dining-room table, preparing his next day’s lessons and nibbling his vegetarian suppers, who delivered the phrase “please yourself” in his slight Talsen accent with a retreating shrug as he unhitched himself from any responsibility whenever his cocksure son demanded his way.
For instance, the time teenage Bernard trooped out of the house to hector Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Barracking them from the pavement, lobbing the odd brick, getting into dustups with Blackshirt roughs, Bernard writes, he “notched up the hard experience” that gave him the right to slam the door on his father and brand Edward “a physical and moral coward.”
Edward Burston’s neighbors saw him as a good citizen. The right sort. A decent chap, considering—considering that he was a foreigner and Jewish to boot. Unambiguous evidence was out in the open. He was a professional man, industrious about getting and unostentatious about spending, a serious-minded gent who harbored no evident grievances and partook of no outbursts. Once, Bernard remembers, he was helping his father bury daffodil bulbs in the back garden, when Edward’s eyes suddenly misted over. “Look at the life I’m living now,” he said. A teacher, taxpayer, honorary Englishman, settled down and bedded in, an orderly man, guided by the natural exercise of self-control. Bernard called his dressing table a “jeweler’s showcase” of hair brushes and combs, a silver tray under a bowl of cuff links, a French pocket watch always wound and accurately set.
Of his mother, Anna, the tea chest contained photograph upon photograph. Playing roll-the-ball on the lawn with her toddler daughter, Maisie. Performing a piano duet with Bernard. Then, forty years later, sunning her legs at the Brighton seaside. Where, in her collection of hundreds, Bernard wondered, were any snapshots of her husband? Edward the bridegroom? Mr. Burston Sir, the French master with his Field House students? The New London Synagogue bridge champion? The weekend watercolorist? The enthusiastic amateur photographer? Well, exactly. His father was more at home behind his lecturer’s gown, behind a hand of cards—behind the camera—than in front of it. To be there and not there in the same instant, that was Edward’s way.
The lone photo of Edward Burston that Bernard possessed he’d clipped to the top of the wanted poster. It was a portrait of his mother and father together, snapped on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They sit on two dining room chairs, pushed together for the purpose. A snatched memento for their children and grandchildren, a formal photograph: Edward and Anna as husband and wife. She leans toward him slightly, bent sideways at the waist, stiffly but fondly angled. Anna’s near hand is clasped under Edward’s, resting on his thigh, while her far hand clutches the arm of the chair—for safety, it seems, as if they were posing on the deck of a rolling ship. From behind the fancy eyeglasses, her look is direct, unapologetic.
Edward’s nervy eyes are elsewhere, on the exit. Somebody (his daughter or one of his grandsons) has cornered him with a Kodak, trapped him in the spotlight. He’s not a relaxed performer. The fidgety smile. Indulgence fading in the strained corners of his mouth. How much longer is this ridiculous nonsense going to take? he seems to wonder. Behind them, on the sideboard, you can make out a small watercolor of a pond and water lilies. Edward inhabits a room and an existence of harmless comfort arranged by his wife. Not even fifty years of it can relieve him of the feeling that he has infiltrated some English gentleman’s territory.
The Others
Late in January 1911, Jacob Peters and Yourka Dubof stood trial for the murder of Sergeant Charles Tucker, harboring a felon guilty of murder (George Gardstein), and conspiring to break and enter H. S. Harris’s jewelry shop intent on theft. Nina Vasilyeva was charged with harboring George Gardstein and with conspiracy to break and enter. Luba Milstein and Sara Rosa Trassjonsky went to court on the conspiracy charge, a charge of “assisting the escape from punishment of two others whose names are unknown,” and as an accessory to the murders of police sergeants Charles Tucker and Robert Bentley and Walter Choate. Within weeks, everyone, except for Nina, had been released on grounds of insufficient evidence.
Found guilty of conspiracy, Nina was sentenced to two years in prison. At the start of her second month in Holloway, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed her conviction; the trial judge, Justice Grantham, was found to have misdirected the jury in his summation. The appellate court decided that the probability of Nina’s guilt could not be inferred, as Justice Grantham had emotively suggested it might, from her intimate association with George Gardstein. Freed from prison, Nina returned to her work as a cigarette maker for Abdullah’s.
Her political beliefs survived unshaken. Not long after the 1917 Revolution, Nina took work in London with the Soviet Trade Delegation, an organization known to be responsible for fostering more espionage and political and economic subversion in Great Britain than commercial trade. She lived alone, apart from the old community in Brick Lane—an exile among exiles—and died in St. Bartholomew’s hospital in 1963.
In the summer of 1911, Luba Milstein gave birth to Fritz’s son. She named him Alfred, after Alfred Dzircol, who was known in East End revolutionist circles by the alias Karl Hoffman. A friend of Fritz, who felt something deeper than a playful fondness for Luba, Alfred promised he’d look after her if ever Fritz could not. In January 1912, Luba and her son sailed for New York; a year later, they were joined by Alfred, who landed in America as an illegal immigrant.
Together Luba and Alfred had a daughter and built modest lives for their family of four in New York City, where Alfred worked as a house painter and Luba as a seamstress. Marxists to the end of their days, they believed that a better world could be shaped through socialist revolution, but turned their backs on terrorist action as an unacceptable danger to innocent people and a cloak that too easily protected naturally violent criminals. Alfred died in 1961. Luba died in a nursing home in 1973; the last people to see her were two gentleman callers bearing bouquets.
Of the Sisterhood, Rosie fared worst. The mental shock of George Gardstein’s death, her arrest, and three months on remand in prison—followed by
the hammering strain of a public trial—broke her already frail condition. By turns comatose and sui cidal, Rosie was confined as a “pauper lunatic” in Colney Hatch Asylum until May 1911, when even that poor haven fell under threat. London County Council, the municipal body footing the bill for Rosie’s incarceration, initiated deportation proceedings against her as an “alien in receipt of parochial relief.” Illness prevented her from answering the summons to appear at Bow Street Magistrates Court, and in her absence the court granted an expulsion order. The Clerk of the Asylums Committee advised that Rosie remained suicidal, needed to be force-fed, and was unlikely ever to be healthy enough to survive deportation.
She remained an inmate of Colney Hatch Asylum until her death a few years later. At Christmas in 1912, Rosie received the anonymous gift of a perfumed sachet. It was from Nina. The note pinned to it read: “To the nurse who so kindly tended Carl Garstin (alias Gardstein) during his last hours.”
While Yourka Dubof drifted out of the city and into obscurity soon after his release, Jacob Peters stayed in London, politically active and, if anything, more visible. He founded the Latvian Social Democratic Bolshevik Foreign Bureau, an organization dedicated to the task of raising money and manpower to support Lenin’s faction in the communist struggle. A little more than six years after Houndsditch, the February revolution cleared a way for Jacob to join the Bolshevik ranks in Russia.
In Petrograd, Lenin’s officials recognized his accomplishments and devotion by enlisting him as an operative of the Bolshevik Military Organization. They dispatched Jacob home to Latvia, where, as he’d done in 1905, he roused workers and soldiers to the revolutionary cause in marketplaces and cafés, at political meetings, demonstrations, even funerals. After Riga, he moved up the ladder from agitprop specialist to the Mili tary Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, prime movers of the October coup d’etat that slung out Trotsky’s Mensheviks and elevated Lenin to supreme power. Two months into the October revolution, the Cheka was energetically in business, sniffing out and crushing the forces of counterrevolution. Jacob—“courageous to the point of fanaticism,” to borrow the description of his Houndsditch comrade George Gardstein—won the post of deputy chairman.
As a high official of the revolution’s guardians, Jacob signed scores of death sentences and oversaw the judicial murders of hundreds of men and women. In 1930, now a senior member of the Central Control Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, honored with the title Hero of October, Jacob presided over a tribunal assembled to purge (among others) “disaffected elements” in the Red Army. Five years later, rumors began to circulate in the Kremlin that Jacob had roused Stalin’s suspicion and fallen out of favor. In 1937, he was arrested. In 1938, Jacob Peters was purged from the Communist Party and executed by a Red Army firing squad.
Acknowledgments
MY THANKS to Roger Appleby, curator of the City of London Police Museum, for guiding me through material relating to the Houndsditch murders and the Sidney Street Siege. I’m also grateful to the staff at the Corporation of London Records Office for their help in locating and providing copies of photographs and police documents.
Among many books useful to my understanding of the era, locale, and personalities dramatized in A Storm in the Blood, Donald Rumbelow’s The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street, through its crisp scholarship, rendered the complicated chronology of overlapping events and relationships with unparalleled clarity. I am also grateful to the Arts Council, East of England, for a grant during the early stages of this book’s research and writing.
About the Author
JON STEPHEN FINK is the author of the novel Further Adventures, which has just been reissued by Harper Perennial in an edition newly revised by the author. His poetry has been published in the Chicago Review and The New York Quarterly, among other magazines. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Los Angeles, he now lives in Great Britain, where he is working on his sixth novel, The Return of The Green Ray.
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Copyright
A STORM IN THE BLOOD. Copyright © 2009 by Jon Stephen Fink. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition September 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-194340-9
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