The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  “Ay,” I whispered back.

  “Don’t you see what it means, Maisha? ... It means, truly, that a Jew without a home cannot be more than half a Jew.”

  “Gitel . . . Gitel . . .”

  “And without bringing Uncle Mendel into it at all, Maisha . . . can a man be more than half a man without a wife?”

  . . . What could I do against a dream like that? In the morning

  < l Ttfaisha 6 3

  before breakfast, even before morning prayers, I went to Lipka. “I had a dream ... let Gitel be alone with me for an hour today.”

  “Good,” Lipka said as though he read me. “It’s going to be a match?”

  So that afternoon with the mother removed to a neighbor’s hut and Lipka out on a roof somewhere with his buckets of tar, I sat with Gitel at the kitchen table for the formal proposal. Taking a long cold look at her I began to think of all the advantages ... a devoted wife, a fine home, no other children but Gitel there. . . . “You’re not really pretty,” I began, “but my feet are no bargain either.”

  She gave her head a subtle twist and said, “Well, that’s true. Let’s make up together that you will always keep your feet covered, and I’ll walk around with a handkerchief over my face.”

  “But seriously — ”

  “What’s a face or a foot, Maisha?” Her eyes became full of love for me and I quickly felt ashamed of myself. “I’ll be for you, if you want . . . and if your feet should fail you I’ll carry you in my hands.”

  To be loved so . . . the thought of it alone gave me the last push I needed. “Your face, I should say, has . . . the right kind of eyes. . . . Gitel, let the wedding be during the Feast of Lights!”

  “Let it be as you say,” she smiled, twisting her head a bit, as she always did when she was pleased, like a little bird.

  I became a Golinsker husband and sat at the head of the children’s learning-table in the synagogue from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon. My father-in-law gave us the customary year’s free board and lodging, and then another year on top of it. To pay for our coats and shoes and linens I dragged tiny sums out of the community by selling candles during the time of the Feast of Lights; by disposing of the leavened leftovers in the huts at Passover; by acting as assistant prayer-maker at the cemetery (when the beadle and meat-slaughterer, old Zellik, was ill); but mostly by standing on my feet all day on Sunday at the market-square in the village, selling kvas, a white-barley beer Gitel made during the week, at a penny a glass.

  In our second year Gitel began to carry and I looked for a hut of my own. To get it I needed not only cash but the privilege of a lease on the

  land. In these circumstances I could only go to my father-in-law, himself a poor man. But I had no more than opened my mouth than he said, “Well, of course.”

  “How do you know, ‘of course,’ when I’ve hardly told you more than a word?”

  “That’s how it is with you deep students,” Lipka replied. “Students don’t know how much meaning there is in one word.”

  “A truly holy thought,” I observed. “Only — ”

  “Yes, of course . . . only Gitel is with child and you need a hut and a lease for the land . . . and a little cash. Quite an ‘only’!”

  The manner of my father-in-law’s getting me my hut was a real bit of Golinsker juggling. He went first to the old Squire’s steward and rent-collector, Valentin Buzarov, and told him, “Your house needs a roof and your little boys Profim and Vassily could do with fine coats and leggings, leather, this year. These I will provide you with, as a gift ... if you can arrange a land-lease with your master so my son- in-law can have his own hut . . . and if you will permit him to pay you the first year’s rent, in full, six months after he has lived in it.”

  The steward agreed. Then my father-in-law went to old Zellik, the beadle, and said, “You are too old and rheumy to stand all day in the cemetery, saying prayers for those who cannot be here, be it hot or cold or rain or snow. Your roof, moreover, leaks badly and that’s why your cough improves. I’ll fix your roof, Zellik, at no charge . . . only let Maisha, my son-in-law, stand for you in the cemetery.” Zellik agreed and my father-in-law pressed him further. “Your brother, Yeersel-ben- Mayer, is older than you and more feeble in his eyes, which is very bad for a tailor. Now if you will, as our meat slaughterer, kill Yeersel’s chickens free for the next two years, I will not only keep your roof perfectly dry above your head, Zellik . . . but I’ll also bring you free wood for two years, and send you free kvas, a bottle a day, for four years. Agreed?”

  After Zellik had agreed, my father-in-law then went to Yeersel-ben- Mayer, Zellik’s brother, well over seventy-five at the time, and proposed, “If you will sew me two boys’ coats, Yeersel, with leather leg-

  gings, I’ll fix your roof, Zellik will kill your chickens free for two years, I’ll bring you free wood for four, and my son-in-law, Maisha, will provide not only a bottle of kvas a day for two years, but also say your cemetery prayers for you at all times you are away from the village in the course of your sewing.” When the old tailor hesitated, Lipka added, quickly, “And further! I’ll send you a barrel of tar for your wagon wheels!”

  “Tar for the wagon?” the old man wheezed. “And who will cook it?”

  “Maisha!”

  In this fashion I got my land-lease . . . now all I had to do was find the wood for the hut, and the glass, and the door, and the step . . . and build it. How my father-in-law managed all this I never clearly knew for years, except that for the rest of his life he seemed to fix as many roofs for nothing as what he was paid for, and that I dug clay and chopped wood for him and gave away more kvas for nothing than any money I saw, and that my Gitel worked years in the Squire’s fields without Buzarov ever giving her a penny. Even the actual building of the hut was done without me. I hardly could hold a hammer in my hand. But my father-in-law enlisted every landsman in the village to throw up the hut with the lumber he had wheedled from the Squire’s steward. (Much later in his life I discovered that in payment for the lumber he had become a steady cooker of illegal alcohol for Buzarov and had been thereafter unable to get out of Buzarov’s hands.) My father-in-law even maneuvered an iron stove into our hut, and when Gitel saw it her eyes couldn’t have become bigger had she seen an extra sun in the sky.

  “For these blessings, father-in-law,” I assured him, “you shall live eternally near to The Highest One.”

  “And why not?” he chuckled. “Who else could fix His roof?”

  “I would rather have managed to build my hut myself.”

  “Ay, that would be the trick of tricks. One hand washes the other and that’s all, or both stay dirty.”

  Without bitterness and even without much thought I had already begun to make over, slowly, what Uncle Mendel meant to me. From

  having been my life's inspiration, he became my support through it. I no longer looked for him on the road to Ladi but saw him “in every strange hut, on all roads, and in the life of night,” as he had foretold upon our farewell. Uncle Mendel would come to me regularly in my dreams and I would think upon waking, “We are still together.”

  Our son was born. He almost killed Gitel but she recovered, though she never conceived again. The years began to spin fast. New faces at the learning-table, new graves in the cemetery, more pains in my feet . . . where did it all go? My son Haim suddenly sprouts long legs, the beadle is dead, I’m the new beadle . . . the old tailor dies, too, and the Squire’s son comes and goes from Petersburg and Paris like I walk back and forth from the synagogue . . . and faster, faster spin the years . . . and the slower I walk . . . and my son Haim stands on the altar of the synagogue at the age of thirteen, and is confirmed a son of Israel and a man . . . and Gitel and I stand in the first row and look up at him and with him, sing . . .

  “Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is Thine.”

  Now my Haim
is a man . . . sits no longer at my learning-table all day but runs up ladders and cooks tar with my father-in-law . . . who comes to my wife into our hut not two weeks after, his hands black with tar, his sweat-wetted hair matted on his brow. . . .

  Says my wife, “Father . . . here in the middle of the day?”

  “Buzarov tells me he won’t be taken until next month ... as a special favor. . . .”

  “Who taken, what taken?”

  “They put him on the list . . . Haim.”

  “Ay. . . .”

  “Not until next month, Gitel. . . .”

  “The army, ay . . . Haim in the army. . . .”

  “Sh. Between now and next month the heavens can turn over, anything can happen. Clear?”

  c tMaisha 67

  “Clear, what . . Then my wife understands and spits to the floor. “Give him feet like his father, cripple his hands ... ?”

  “Hold yourself in, daughter. . . .”

  “Ay. . . .”

  “Sh. Crying helps nothing! Listen, Gitel.” My father-in-law, blunt honest soul, means every word. “Thank God we have time — a month.”

  “But no feet, no feet,” my wife moans.

  “Who said feet?”

  “Then what?”

  “Well ... a finger will be sufficient . . . the right finger . . . the shooting finger, only.”

  She cries, what else?

  “Gitel, have a head! Listen to your father! Which is better — that Haim should lose one finger, or everything?”

  Well, it didn’t come out the way my father-in-law wanted it. There were no committees in the hamlets, no agencies good or bad behind which to pull this way and that; to stay out of the army a rural Jewish lad had really to be disabled ... a shorter leg, a twisted back, a crippled hip . . . and we had them in Golinsk, to be sure. Ay, what it means to cripple a son! Yet many of us chose this wry freedom for them as better than the cripplings of twenty-five years of military slavery.

  We couldn’t decide what on earth to do. Haim was for entering the army and deserting. But in his time of 1847 where could one hide except America, so far away and so little-known a land? In the time of Shim and Laib and their Uncle Mottel, it was possible to wriggle on well-used secret paths leading to ships for America, where landsmen were waiting to receive them . . . but my Haim was born forty years too soon for such good fortune.

  My father-in-law said, “What else is left but to let him fall from a low roof? I’m a tar-maker and a roofer, Haim is my helper . . . how can they say it’s a fakery?”

  “Look at my feet,” I told him. “All my life I’ll have them with me.

  Take a good second look at them, Lipka, and you’ll realize that these feet are my life ... ay, The One Above should help me!”

  For the first time I felt stricken with anger. Of course I understood the sinfulness of it; didn’t our greatest Tzaddiks agree that the life of the flesh was as the life of a fly, that the flesh was only the coat we wore as we passed through the earth-phase and on to the eternal ? And didn’t Uncle Mendel say so, and didn’t I believe it too? . . . But believe today, believe tomorrow ... a parent needs to help his child, I kept thinking, not to baggage him up with worldly sufferings. . . .

  Then came the night that Gitel shook me out of a tremulous sleep. “Wake yourself, Maisha!” she commanded.

  “It’s yet dark,” I mumbled.

  “It just came to me in a dream,” she whispered excitedly.

  “Tell me tomorrow.”

  “Maisha,” she announced, “listen ... I dreamed I stood before the Minsker Gubernator himself, the master of the whole province! ... he wore a long blue coat with tails, and medals with ribbons, and he told me to sit down next to him! . . . and I wept and pleaded for him to save me Haim!”

  “And what did the Gubernator do, make Haim a general?”

  “Maisha! I told him all about you and your feet, and how I almost died to give birth to Haim . . . and the Gubernator told me Haim could stay home!”

  “Very nice,” I replied. “Now turn around and go to sleep. And should you by any chance meet the Gubernator of Pinsk, bring me for a present one of his testicles.”

  “All right. Laugh at me but a present I’ll bring you ... a present from the Minsker Gubernator . . . Haim!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know well what I’m talking about,” she replied. “It’s a sign, Maisha. With this dream God tells me, 'Go to the Gubernator, Gitel. Your plea will be heard > ”

  All the next day she talked of nothing but her dream and how she would really go to Minsk and appeal to the Gubernator himself. I

  <2 Tlfiaisha 69

  thought to myself, “Let her talk herself out. She’ll see herself how crazy the idea is.”

  But Gitel didn’t stop. She told her father, and Haim, and the wives. And the more she talked about it, so help me, the less idiotic it began to sound to me. If my Gitel wasn’t the cleanest, dearest, most joyous little spirit in the world then she wasn’t anything; The One Above couldn’t have chosen a better soul to send down a sign to. By nightfall of the second day after her dream every Golinsker landsman and his wife would ask me, “Is Gitel going? When is Gitel going to Minsk?”

  It began to sound almost sensible.

  That night I said to my father-in-law, “Now really, Lipka, what do you think?”

  He leaned back in his chair, looked at Gitel, and said, “If she had dreamed a dream that would make her want to go to Minsk and ask the committee there for help, I would have said it was useless. And if she had dreamed a dream that would make her want to go to Petersburg and ask the Tsar for help, I would have said it was crazy. . . .” Here he paused to take a few puffs on his pipe. And then he said, very slowly and with a hammer in every word, “But since she has dreamed a dream that makes her want to go to Minsk and ask the Gubernator for help . . .” And then he stopped.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Finish the word, Father,” Gitel demanded, but softly.

  “He will,” Haim said faithfully, his long, pointy jaw moving fitfully.

  My father-in-law tapped his pipe against his palm and let the live fire from it drop into his hand. He looked down at the little gleaming spots, nodding and sighing.

  “You’ll burn yourself, look out,” Gitel said. He turned his palm facing down and the burning tobacco fell to the floor. Then he said, “The end I don’t know.” Pounding his strong fist on the table, he shouted, “Oh dear God, what will the end be?”

  “See?” Gitel demanded of me. “Even my father can’t say it’s useless or crazy and isn’t he a standing man of the world?” Her voice rose in a joyful call. “Father! Go to Buzarov, promise him anything . . . but

  let him see to it that they don’t take Haim away until I come back from Minsk! . . . Father?”

  “Hnnn,” my father-in-law grunted thoughtfully. “The least that could happen, the very least, would be a delay. It could take weeks, even months. You’ll have things to prepare, assembling papers, certificates, and so on.”

  But Gitel’s voice rose even higher; she pressed her hand to her bosom as she spoke. “What papers, what certificates? I need no more but what’s in my mother’s heart . . . what else could I bring to the Guber- nator? In my dream he raised me with his hands and told me not to cry!”

  “Gitel,” I asked, “what face did the Gubernator have?”

  “What other kind,” she sobbed like a child who weeps while he laughs, “but the face of a King Solomon ? A serious brow, a beard with curls!”

  My father-in-law turned to me and pushed my arm, his face showing grave wonder, his voice urgent with stubbornness. “Well, Maisha — what it is, a sign or a simple craziness?”

  “At the first look,” I said, finding my way from one word to the next, chanting, “it appears as only the sorrow of a mother . . . neither simple nor a craziness, but by no means a sign.” I became caught up in the melody of my chant, the sweetness and truth and ecstasy of it, and the gates of
my heart opened as they had not for many years, and in my heart I was again the happy lad sitting at the learning-table with Uncle Mendel, watching him nod to my chanting, hearing the full richness of his voice joining with mine. There was in me then a great loosening, a great flowing-over, and my veins glowed with the power of my joy. “Yet to look at it not in the way of the nose, the finger, the eye, but in the way of The Highest One . . . when I look upon the world it sometimes strikes me that the universe has died and that I have been left the only living man . . . and from whom else then can I ask help outside of You, O Lord? . . . And since I and my wife are the same, from whom else could she have begged help, and from whom else could it have come?”

  “Hold, hold . . .” Lipka interjected. “From where do we know the dream comes from on high?”

  “Ay, we know, we know,” I chanted, going to my son, Haim. Pressing his face between my hands I sang to him, “Haim my son, didn’t the great Sassover Tzaddik teach us? . . . and what did he teach us, my son? . . . that The Most High first uses simple measures to aid His troubled children . . . but ... if our trouble is of an unusual nature, then He comes to our aid in an extraordinary way. . .

  “He believes me,” my Gitel cried, overjoyed. “Maisha, Maisha!”

  “It’s a true sign,” I chanted. “True, true, the word of God, absolutely true!”

  “Ay,” my father-in-law sighed, getting himself to his feet heavily. He picked up his pipe and put it in his pocket, thrusting both hands deeply out of sight. “Maybe it’s all a dream,” he sighed, “. . . maybe I’ll wake up in the next minute and thank God I’m in my bed. Meanwhile I’ll go looking for Buzarov.”

  And old Buzarov was found in the drinking-room of the Nikolai Inn, and my father-in-law pleaded with the steward to petition the old Squire to direct the military to hold off Haim’s conscription until his mother returned from Minsk. Buzarov laughed but my father-in-law persisted; in desperation he spoke of the mother’s dream. And this amused the steward, so that he ran to his master with the story of a mad Jew-woman’s fantasy.