The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  “Clear,” I replied, “but the truth is, Dimitri, all I have is one ruble.”

  “My dear man.” He spit across my face again, this time nearer to my nose. “This isn’t a money matter.”

  “Then return the ruble and I’ll get down.”

  “What ruble?”

  So Dimitri had only been joking. “That’s right. What ruble indeed?”

  “You never gave me a ruble, never!”

  “No indeed, sir. I simply beg of you the favor. Take me to the Parsovs’. I can’t walk in snow, my knees . . .”

  “Very well — only — one favor deserves another, clear?” I waited. “You’re the tailor, clear? Well, I need a good leather patch on the elbows of this coat, and as you Jews say, one hand washes the other.”

  “Clear. I will patch you,” I mumbled, “only,” I added, my voice shaking with a fear I dared not show, “I don’t have the leather, you’ll have to bring it to me.”

  “Well, meanwhile ... if I just can’t . . . you’ll throw some of your old strong goods into the bargain, then.”

  “Hit the horse, hit the horse,” I replied. I didn’t consider it the worst conclusion; what if I had had to take out the second ruble from my other pocket? It was bad enough that it had to cost even the one; with it I could have gotten my wife Bosha a really warm shawl. I thought about my wife as we started the ride to the Parsovs’. I was sitting under the canvas hood, I reminded myself, protected from the snow, while Bosha would be walking the quarter mile to the stream, carrying dirty clothes on her shoulders. The ground was bumpy and in the snow, on the way back, she would have to slip, and the ice-cold wash would burn against her face. Later in the day there would be extra water to carry; Shim and Laib had slept three nights with us and her brother Berel, the watercarrier and my dear friend, would be standing in the market by then. For a ruble, also, I could have been able to get her a smaller axe than mine. When she chopped wood it was always too heavy and dangerous in her hands.

  In this way, worried about Aaron and Leah and saying good-by to the ruble, we got about three-fourths of the way to the Parsovs’. Dimitri began to curse because of the deep drifts we found going up the hill to the Parsovs’. Then the horse refused to pull, and Dimitri turned to me. “Well, now I’m supposed to whip the horse, I suppose? You can

  get of? here and walk! Oh, what a day it’s going to be on the road, it’s freezing!”

  I looked away from him, sighing, and then saw the three dark specks in the gully below. I pointed to them, asking Dimitri what he thought they were. “Who cares? Now climb down; and remember about the patches on my coat, right?”

  Then, still peering down into the gully, I saw my wagon on its side, and Gritka too, underneath the lumps of drifted snow. Well, I made Dimitri come with me and drag me through the drifts down the side of the gully. Going down we saw what the specks were — bolts of cloth, the cloth Aaron had brought back from Minsk. Gritka lay in the shafts, a foreleg under him; he must have lost the road in the darkness. I saw the new shoe on his smashed leg; in that weather the old ones would have been better.

  A few hundred yards away were the bodies. Aaron’s legs lay in a split, at right angles, almost, to his torso. Leah was on her back nearby. The snow under their necks was brown-red, and their throats were pierced, as was Gritka’s, by the teeth of wolves. The wind had become a nothing, the snow now hardly fell. “Wolves,” Dimitri was saying, “wolves and the first snow, see the marks? Yes, winter is early this year, all right.”

  Thoughts raced through my head. “What a shame to have to be thrown in with a Dimitri at a time like this. Today is Friday, the funerals must be either today or Monday, for tomorrow is the Sabbath and Sunday is Day of Atonement, forbidden. Forbidden to bury on those days. No, wait! What am I talking? Day of Atonement is Sunday? No, not Sunday, Monday, of course! Still, to wait until Sunday for the funerals . . . ay!”

  “Well, now what?” said Dimitri, frowning, already annoyed.

  “The Parsovs have no wagon. Help me carry them back to the village, Dimitri, and it’s another ruble.”

  “Impossible. I’m late as it is and as a matter of fact I don’t know about using a government vehicle to carry bodies, under any circumstances. I’ll take you to the highroad and that’s all.”

  “Dimitri, for heavens’ sake — ”

  “They’re dead, right? So what’s the hurry?”

  “They must be buried today, for reasons, and — ”

  “You Jews,” Dimitri nodded, irritated. “You just can’t wait to throw yourselves into the ground!” He shrugged and turned away, speaking over his shoulder. “Either stay here or come back now with me. I don’t give a dump either way.”

  “You fool,” I cried, running to him. Surprised at the anger in my voice, he stopped and examined my face. “Can’t you be a little decent? Two people are dead and all you know is to make filthy talk!”

  “Do you want me to cry?”

  “They must have a proper burial according to our faith, don’t you understand? Before that rotten brother of his, Mottel, can mess everything!”

  I turned and looked at Aaron; his lower lip lay curled thickly under his front teeth and it seemed to me that he must have bitten himself in the pain and terror of the last moments. “Forgive me, Aaron,” I mumbled hoarsely in Yiddish, “I shouldn’t have lent you the horse and wagon. . .

  “Be still,” Dimitri said; something thoughtful in his voice made me look at him. I saw his eyes fixing themselves at the bolts of cloth. “Well, Jew . . . this is an important little thing, right? Very well, then, and we’ll gather up that stuif over there, too.”

  “The broadcloth, yes,” I replied quickly, jumping ahead of his thought. “Aaron was a tailor and used only the finest.”

  “Give me a hand, then.”

  Together we carried the bodies up to the roadside and lifted them into the wagon. I sat on the seat while Dimitri slid back into the gully after the cloth, which he dragged up and threw into the wagon. I was afraid to mention that one of the bolts had dropped on Leah’s face.

  Riding down the hill Dimitri asked if everything was now to my satisfaction. “Yes, thank you. Without trouble, that is if Mottel causes no disturbances, they’ll be able to get a decent, holy burial.”

  “Yes, of course. Bury them as you wish.’" He chuckled. “Even the wolves should be thankful; they’ll get a whole horse out of it.”

  By the time I got to Aaron’s hut and laid the bodies side by side in their bed and went to the synagogue and announced the news and returned to my own hut, it was seven. My Bosha had already begun preparing for the Sabbath; and my nose ached with the smell of the warm friendly meat cooking in the pot.

  “Was it a good praying this morning?” Bosha said when she saw me.

  “I got to synagogue too late to pray.”

  “What do you mean, too late?”

  “Where are the children?”

  “Out playing in the snow, where else?” Bosha began to notice my shakiness. “Yeersel, what is? Why are you asking about the children?”

  “Shim and Laib are out also?”

  “What is, say, say . .

  Then I sat down and told her. I omitted mention of Dimitri’s theft of the goods, and my remorse at having lent the horse and wagon, but it didn’t work. “Woe is me,” my wife moaned, “the poor children, the poor children . . . and now God knows when you’ll be able to buy another horse and wagon; you’ll wear out your feet, your feet. Ay, they’re already worn out . . . and what will be with the goods Aaron bought?”

  “Be so good as to tell Shim and Laib. I can’t, Bosha . . . and anyway,” I said, getting to my feet, “the Burial Brotherhood is meeting at Aaron’s and I’ve got to go there.”

  “Wait, put a bite of something in your mouth first.”

  “Later,” I said, leaving.

  And such is the way with human beings that walking to Aaron’s hut, bowed down and crushed by self-reproach, I could still remind myself that I was freed of A
aron’s gentle competition. Now I was the only tailor in the village; it might not be too hard, certainly not quite as hard as the first time, to get another horse and wagon. But I threw

  this thought out of my mind and concentrated on my being a member of our Burial Brotherhood, well versed in the proper care of cadavers and a dutiful student of the protocols of grief. It was always I who used to be the first to enter the hut of the bereaved and utter the ancient consolations. “What is death, if not a fated thing?” I would demand of the bereaved. “Who can quarrel with the decision of The One Above? Remember, in the book of eternity it stands written on the same line when we shall be born and when we shall pass away. Ay, the years are short, but eternity is long and in eternity we shall meet our loved ones, in the eternal Jerusalem.”

  And if the death happened to be sudden I would say, “At least, dear brother, it came quickly and without suffering. Thus does The One Above close the eyes of the dearest and sweetest souls.” But if the end happened to come after a long-drawn-out sickness I would point out, “At least you knew it had to happen, at least you were prepared, spared the shock of being demolished in one black moment. Be thankful. The One Above granted you a long farewell, a long time of looking upon the dear face of your lost one.”

  Yet this time with Aaron and Leah, I could bring myself to say nothing to their two boys. As soon as they learned about it, they hurried to their hut with my Bosha, where they found the house full of heartbroken Golinskers. When I came there I saw them sitting together in a corner on the floor surrounded by weeping women all talking at once. They seemed not to be listening, containing themselves in a quiet that was more of a numbness. Only when one of the women remembered to turn the mirror to the wall did they look at each other and begin to sob.

  The moment I stepped into the hut I was hailed by our brilliant widow, Tzippe-Sora. She came at me like a horse galloping downhill. “Well, where are they, the Burial Brotherhood? You know what today is? You know what Mottel is?”

  “Yes, Tzippe-Sora,” I said. “Yes. Hold yourself in.”

  “And what will you do about Minsk?” she demanded. Oh, Tzippe- Sora was a real darling, a golden person, but she had hammers in her

  head and if you gave her the slightest chance she’d twist you into a shape of her own liking.

  “Minsk, Minsk,” I said deprecatingly.

  “But Leah’s father and sister are there,” Tzippe-Sora said, making it sound like a demand in itself. “You mean they aren’t to be notified?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” I said absently. “The men will try their best to make everything come out right.”

  “Don’t forget, there’s a telegraph office in Pukop. Perhaps a telegraph message, at least so that if they’ll want to come . . . and the funerals could be in the afternoon, of course, let’s say three o’clock, the gravedigging will take a long time, I passed the cemetery on the way here just to take a look, the drifts are piled high . .

  “No doubt, no doubt,” I said listlessly. In order to answer Tzippe- Sora shortly, one still had to say everything twice. That was her talent. Tzippe-Sora dragged the best and the worst out of you.

  “The family in Minsk, Leah’s,” she continued, “a gold of a family, Yeersel, it’d be a sin not to let them know the news, nGt to allow them to try to come here to the funerals — ”

  “But, Tzippe-Sora — ” and her digging began to arouse me, then — “please don’t handle me as you handle peasants buying your alcohol. Say what you say, but to somebody else.”

  I turned away from her, feeling I must get to the cold air outside. I needed it to sting my ears. Outside the wind began to whistle itself up into a cutting thing and I was wet from the knees down, the damp snow still clinging, and I was inviting a bad chill; but it was better to be outside, away from warmth and comfort and safety, away from people and their voices, away from the familiar signs of everyday life that were to me then only temptations to self-comfortings and self- justifyings. My belief was that I had committed a great sin in which I had somehow managed to involve The Highest One Himself. In the name of true piety, of the adoration of the one and only Lord, I had sent two people to their deaths, saying I was helping them get two chickens a week for a year. But underneath the saying and into the meaning, I had really acted for another reason — to guard my piety, to

  keep the name of Yeersel-ben-Daneel clean in the book of eternity. The strength of the indictment against me lay in that only myself and The One Above knew of my sin, a terrible weight to carry into the synagogue on the Day of Atonement, so terrible because so secret, so apparently its exact opposite, a good deed; so terrible because so easily explained away, so unimportant a sin compared to sins men commit openly against each other. This, without doubt, was a very high sin, a sin so complete that it had become a world in itself, an evil thing growing and growing and which I could not smash to pieces as I could smash a snake to pieces. “My piety is not the true piety such as I have my life through striven for/" I tortured myself. “It is only vanity, vanity dressed in the coat of piety. But why, why have I been so blind, Lord, up to now?”

  Shivering to myself in this fashion I stood in the snow outside of Aaron’s hut until the landsmen of the Burial Brotherhood came out looking for me. Seeing the tears on my beard little Nochim ran to me. “Ay, Yeersel . . . you were like a brother to him, helped him when he needed, showed him even how to hold the needle in his hand!”

  “Even so/" said Hertz the grease-maker, “hold yourself in, we have a decision to make.’"

  “The burying,” said Berel-the-Ox. “Ay.”

  “When and how, that’s it,” added Laib-Shmul, the meat slaughterer. “Let’s talk as we walk, the five of us.”

  “No, let’s just walk and wait to talk until we sit down,” Hertz said.

  “To decide correctly one has to be sitting down,” Berel added.

  “Sitting, standing, but let it be settled without too much chewing- over,” Laib-Shmul said. By unspoken agreement we went to my hut. I was considered perhaps the most pious member of our congregation, and because in the past I always was the first to speak at our burying meetings, they sat and waited.

  “Well,” Hertz asked, leaning toward me. “What do you think, Yeersel?”

  “I think I’m catching a chill.”

  “And I think,” Berel said then with the same concentrated calm in

  which he spoke, to make us call him the Ox, “that in all decency the funerals can wait until Sunday. After all, Leah has a father and sister in Minsk, and if we waited until Sunday they could be at the buryings. They’ll have to be told today anyway, they’ll have to sit out the period of mourning. . . .”

  “Leah has a sister in Minsk, yes,” Laib-Shmul said, “but Aaron has a brother here in Golinsk right under our noses.”

  “Ay, and what a smell he makes, that Mottel,” Nochim said, shaking his head in long twists.

  “If all Mottel was able to make was smells, that wouldn’t be so bad,” Berel interposed. “It’s a lot of trouble he can make, too.”

  “Not too much, maybe,” Laib-Shmul said. “After all, they are already dead and they’ve got to be buried. Where’s the argument against it?”

  “There doesn’t have to be a reason for Mottel to make trouble,” I said. “His talent is to invent reasons.”

  “Listen,” Hertz said, “what trouble can he really make? A death certificate we don’t need, for to grant us a death certificate would mean they admitted Aaron and Leah were human beings . . . and money for graves we don’t ask anyone for. . . .”

  “Certainly not,” I agreed. “Aaron has paid his head taxes faithfully and well into the burial fund for I don’t know how many years.”

  “So what remains to worry about, then?” Laib-Shmul demanded.

  “Something,” Nochim said.

  “How?”

  “If you will recall,” Nochim said, a bit pleased now to be explaining this to Laib-Shmul, who had a blunt and intemperate attitude of seeming always to
know everything, “Aaron’s father and mother lay side by side on the northwest end of the cemetery, and Aaron’s father’s grave — please follow me carefully — lies one grave from the boundary of the cemetery. Clear?”

  “Of course,” Laib-Shmul said. “Here is Aaron’s father’s grave, next to him is an empty unused plot, and next to that is the boundary. Well?”

  “Aaron naturally belongs next to his father — but who knows if Mottel would agree to that? Who knows if Mottel wouldn’t want to lie there himself?”

  “He would have to be asked,” Berel said. “After all, he is the brother, and if we buried without asking him he could go to the courts, and the courts would without doubt be on his side. And even further ... we must ask his opinion on whether to bury today or Sunday.”

  “Berel is right,” Hertz said, his mind made up. “To Mottel’s funeral I’d gladly go, at any time, but he still lives and so he must be considered.”

  “As for the father and sister in Minsk,” Berel began, “they, too, must be considered. . . .”

  “Only if we can afford it,” Laib-Shmul interrupted, finding a good moment to make a strong remark. “And there is only one way to find out what we can afford to do. One of us must this minute go to Mottel and find out a number of things — first, if he knows about what happened; second, if he has any objections to Aaron lying next to his father; and third, would he object to holding the funeral over until Sunday so that Leah’s father and sister could attend?” Having said all he wanted to say in one breath, Laib-Shmul stopped, sighed deeply, and looked at the rest of us. “Well said or not?” he demanded.

  “Why,” asked Nochim softly, “should only one of us go to him? Why not all? Five he can’t yell down as easily as one.”

  “Five he could knock down much easier than one,” Berel said gently. “No, it’s not a question of numbers but of shrewdness and tact. And for that, we have Yeersel.”