The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  kicked at the horse and run me down; but I stepped back to the line between Ellya and Nasan and it helped him; he coughed and breathed through his nose again. He gave a sharp pull of the rein which sent the beast’s tail curving. “I return in two weeks,” he shouted, “listen well to Buzarov, his words are mine.”

  With this imitation of a masterly farewell (he tried for a baritone and ended in his natural squeal), he headed for the highroad and his holiday in Petersburg.

  The Squire felt cheated, life had played a trick on him, he felt he should have been born in a time better suited to nobility. Instead he had to suck a living out of one small village when his grandfather had measured the estate by the time it took to cross it in a fast carriage, counting the family fortune in souls as well as rubles and requiring little more of the Jews than to apply them as sponges to the bitterness of his serfs. Relieved of his aberration the Squire might have been the happiest man alive, deeply in love with himself and without a rival in the world.

  With his departure our line lost its straightness. Buzarov said it was not over yet. From under his cap he pulled a paper. “To the Jews of Golinsk,” he read with a schoolboy emphasis, his jowls shaking like fish-jelly under the challenge to his dignity, “by authority of the Colonel Commander, countersigned, and with the approval of the landowner. Until permitted otherwise, Jews of Golinsk may not walk outdoors later than one hour after sunset. Until permitted otherwise, Jews of Golinsk may not cross the highroad at any time. Until permitted otherwise, Jews may not circulate in places other than their own portion of Golinsk.” He stopped to sweep a large fly from his cheek. Tzippe-Sora called to him, “Hey Buzarov, forbidden to stand in the market and work in the fields?” He nodded and the line broke, we surrounded him on his horse, he took pleasure from it. “There is more,” he said, holding his hand for order. “Jews of Golinsk are commanded to gather themselves at noon tomorrow on their side of the highroad to hear a new enactment. Those Jews who absent themselves will be punished properly.”

  “Say what enactment, Buzarov,” we all shouted. He shrugged and turned his horse to follow the Squire’s path across the cemetery and this ended Nochim’s funeral.

  I walked from the shrieking and crying into the next field. Threats, accusations, an enactment ... I could not set them in order. One question stood like a tree in my mind, it would stay a long time before it would be uprooted — why Mottel had indeed gone for Varya after refusing me. A hen lost from somewhere came near me as I stood in the field, it saw me and jumped to a little fly in the air like a bride’s mother happy of the day; the world in a mix entirely.

  Now through that day of the big Sunday market in which we had been forbidden to stand, a day we waited for, the elders kept a council going in the synagogue, looking for ways to grab our fate by the neck. We wriggled through dozens of damaging moods. In the afternoon my father-in-law’s brother Zish brought his axe-man’s hand down upon the learning-table and spoke for making a market on our side of the road, at least. We sent Yakov and Hertz’s Avrum to see if we could get an audience with Selenkov for permission.

  Waiting for them we distilled gloomy portents out of Mottel’s going for Varya. The final remarks here were made by Tzippe-Sora’s aged brother, Asher-the-Sour, who slept in a corner of Tzippe-Sora’s hut and collected manure in a cart. He cooked the manure into small bricks that burned not well, like some kinds of peat, which he peddled to the peasants. “Let the Jew-turned-pig never show us his eye again unless he holds it in his hand. Let him be dying of thirst and drink vinegar for water. Before he finds the woman let him be rended into small pieces by a forest of knives. And let the pieces be left for the wolves. And let the wolves snifT and not eat them. And let the pieces of him all grow together again and leave him blind, paralyzed, deaf, dumb, and with every opening in his body sealed. And let him fall to the bottom of a latrine. And let him lie there until the Messiah passes, sees him, does on him, and walks away.”

  When Yakov and Avrum returned, Avrum held his hurt hand in his

  blouse. Soldiers, we learned, were guarding the road; while explaining to them why they had come down there Avrum had bent to pick up a stone; a soldier took his rifle butt to the hand, saying Avrum wanted to break the regulation and cross the road. He was sent to have the hand bound and Gershon said to the father, “It could be worse, Hertz. Now with such fingers they might not take him for the army when the list is read in October.”

  Such proof of their venom threw us into children's logics. We smoked as we spoke and made bigger fogs with our words than with our pipes. When there was nothing else to wonder about we began to ask ourselves timidly if after all there wasn't something going on in the villages around us, something similar to the Pukop accident which had led them to the charge of conspiracy. That so trembly a man as my brother Gershon should ask whether this mightn’t be proofed out in some way threw us into a debate beginning with whispers. “I don’t say must,” Gershon made clear. “I don’t say . . . but if Jews are indeed heating them up in other places, wouldn’t it be better to know instead of thinking it's all made up in their own heads?”

  None of the elders spoke for this, Naftoli-Dovid gave a fall on Gershon with, “Very nice, proof it out, he says . . . but who’ll crawl to other villages between soldiers; does Gershon offer himself? A man with blood so thin he bleeds a week every time he gives himself a scratch! Yes, it’s understood Gershon won’t go himself but stands for sending our best youngers on such killingnesses! Proof it out, Gershon? Then go yourself, please, you’re not such a great loss! I’m older and sicker than you but I can’t be kind enough to go in your place, my head isn’t the dried-out pickle yours is!”

  The youngers off to a side, listening dutifully, now leaned forward to hear who might come to defend Gershon. But only gentle Maisha spoke. “I am also a little old and unhealthy,” he said. “And I don’t give strong slaps like Naftoli-Dovid to another sick man. Don’t feel insulted, Gershon. The reason why he’s Asher-the-Sour is because, as we all know, Asher thought he had married a woman with a strong back and a weak mind (may she rest), but soon found how it was just

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  the opposite. Such a mistake could cause sourness even in a plum, which Asher is not.”

  By evening prayers a hundred suggestions had been made and discarded. The women came with bread and tea; we tried through the night to find something that looked like a plan, our senses dulled by poverty of facts and a fear of putting up any search for them. When to the last we stirred for home, Tzippe-Sora came in and read our failure in the silence. “Well, brain-men,” she said with a cackle, “have you arrived at the Sensible Station?” We said nothing. “Silence, as is said, is a fence around wisdom,” she remarked. “But I think not now. Open windows, it stinks here. That’s all you’ve been doing, brain-men, smoking and sitting on your eggs?”

  “All right,” spoke Laib-Shmul. “Tell us your word, Mother-in-law.”

  “What other but bribe?” she demanded.

  “Bribe?” Laib-Shmul threw at her, roaring. “You didn’t hear the Squire making his entire case on accusing us of bribe?”

  “Fools,” the little woman shrilled, “a day and night you sit and can’t count a two-and-one! The Squire opens the door and you don’t go in! He travels to Petersburg, no? But Buzarov and Selenkov are here, not so? At Buzarov and Selenkov rubles must be thrown like pebbles and in two days we’ll be standing in the regular market, and that’s all!”

  “Nicely smeared, Tzippe-Sora, ” said Laib-Shmul, “only remember the Squire at the cemetery saying they’d first fill it up and then make a field of it if—”

  “Such whistles they’ve blown before,” she shouted. “It’s May and conscription time is in October! It’s how they bargain!”

  “What, to you it was only the Squire giving hints he’ll take bribes?” Gershon’s Hatzkel asked, not believing his ears.

  “And why not?” she demanded of him. “How long since he’s taking? How many harvests
have we made him for no pay and how many barrels of alcohol cooked and sold for him and how many times the dam fixed and how many times wine out of his grapes for him, and his trees cut down and his roofs fixed?”

  “Wait,” Asher-the-Sour commanded, triumph growing under his

  eyelids, “it’s all neat as a wedding to you, but one thing, my sister, you forgot. Didn’t they bribe in Pukop? And where did it leave Sussya- ben-Mordecai and who knows how many more? If bribing in Pukop helped like a pillow under a barren bride, how will it be otherwise in Golinsk?”

  “Caught, caught,” Naftoli-Dovid cried at the widow.

  She threw at him, “How I’m caught, we should all be so sick! . . . The Svutzkers who brought Nochim said there were gypsies mixed into it in Pukop . . . therefore why shouldn't the Pukopper police take the boy from gypsies bribed to ride him away? Fools! Open your heads! If the boy had gone free, the next time the gypsies would have gotten a bigger bribe and the police less!”

  The only answer to her was Yeersel saying gravely, “Tzippe-Sora . . . God should have made you a man.”

  “Better an insult than such praise,” she told him. But how couldn’t she be pleased? We were waiting for her next words. “To the first, I say nothing should be done until after the assembly tomorrow when we’ll hear what's their ‘new enactment,’ which can be what? Only the latest excuse for making a big price for the bribe! To the second, we’ll bring what’s easy to carry to the highroad in the morning and stand with it on our side, making a show of a market . . . not to do business, only to show them we need every penny; it’ll help the bribe-price.”

  “A good word,” Yeersel agreed. “It’s a market and yet not a market, and there won’t be any need for permission.”

  “Wait, not a little thing,” Laib-Shmul said with false thoughtfulness. “You said we're to throw rubles at them like pebbles . . . where does one find such pebbles, Mother-in-law?” he added in a sly. “After all there’s only one Rothschild, and he’s not here.”

  Now, we knew how brazenly she traded and how shrewdly she managed to sell her own illegally cooked alcohol (made in the woods somewhere by herself and her sons, and sold and hidden in ways well concealed from the agent Rezatskin and from Selenkov and even Vassily Buzarov) ; and where the widow hid her rubles, and how much, was an old topic with us. In times past when a bribe-purse had to be

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  The Landsmen

  made up Tzippe-Sora never failed to supply the difference. She gave Laib-Shmul one of her dry cackles, fixed her spectacles more firmly to her nose, and told him, “After their assembly tomorrow I’ll sit down with Selenkov and make a price. Then we’ll look to see if we’ll have to bother Rothschild.” She pointed to me. “Berel, come. I need you.”

  Spry as she was, she had a rupture. I thought she wanted me to help her down the dark path. “I think you’ll take out my rubles,” she said without an introduction, softly.

  “Not your own sons?”

  “Sons shouldn’t know everything,” she told me.

  Home, Hannah waited for me, she sat me down and washed my swollen groin. I soon slept. After a long time my eyes opened, it had to be morning. But the height of the moon and the brightness of the stars showed how far morning still was. Perhaps like this death began; we died every night but The One Above opened our eyes for the morning, and each had his time to be skipped.

  “Berel?”

  “Hn?”

  “Sleep.”

  “Slept . . . I’ll walk, take a smoke. . . .”

  I thought to sit by the stream, maybe fish. Passing Hertz’s . . . someone sitting on the step. She lifted her head, my Nasan’s Baylah, and made a whisper, “It’s Nasan . . . not here . . . not him, and not Avrum.”

  I woke Hertz, he shook Baylah by the shoulders. “I should know where?” she whispered in the lane — a tall girl, one of our beauties, her face in one shine with the softness of three months’ carrying.

  Hertz and I woke Yeersel and told him, and sat on his step. “That’s a boy, my Avrum,” Hertz said quietly. “Always looking for squirrels on the top of a mountain.”

  In time a whiteness approached us, Avrum. By woodland paths without a lantern he had gone three difficult miles to Kapula. “And they also, Papa ... at noon tomorrow like us, an assembly.”

  “For what?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “And Nasan?” I asked.

  “To Shnavka. The Kapuler rabbi said not to try tricks but do as they say and leave all to The Most High. In Kapula, according to the rabbi whoever is taken when the time comes will be given money to use in escaping.”

  “No good,” Yeersel said. “I saw how soldiers are searched. They’ll never be able to keep money hidden.”

  We took Avrum into Yeersel’s and made him lie down there next to Yeersel’s Velvel so that Baylah would not see him, since her Nasan was still absent.

  Bosha sat with us, she took my hand. “Don’t worry, Berel, Nasan is a careful one.”

  I said, “A careful one would have remembered his carrying wife. And stayed home.”

  Bosha saw the wonder in Hertz, that his Avrum should be so brave; and also with it the pull of his anger. “Go, Hertz,” she said, “you put your head down a bit also, I’ll watch him.”

  “I’ll remain here the while,” he said.

  “Enough now, Bosha,” Yeersel said, knowing his wife meant two things — Hertz needed to rest but also she didn’t think she could stand the smell of wheel-grease that never left Hertz though he scrubbed himself summer and winter once a week steadily. With a friendly flick of his fingernails against Hertz’s arm and a cheerful-looking snap of his wrist Yeersel said to Hertz, “Come, let’s the three of us sit a bit down at the stream, it’s the best time to fish now.”

  “I’ll remain here the while with Avrum,” Hertz said much more quietly, but greatly annoyed. That was Hertz to the bones. If you liked him you also had to like his smell.

  “Remain,” shrugged Bosha, but with a slow lift of her shoulder and a twist against wheel-grease. Yeersel rose. “Come, Berel . . . you and I, then.”

  To be left just with Bosha was too much for Hertz. “What’s the

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  matter,” he said as a statement, “is I stink better to men than to women, right?”

  “Sh, you’ll wake people,” Yeersel reminded him.

  I walked out followed by Hertz and then Yeersel. With no good-by Hertz went back to his hut. Yeersel and I found ourselves headed up the lane toward the synagogue. As we walked he said, “In Kletsk they’re musical, in Kapula they’re hintful, in Svutz thievish, in Pukop educated . . . and here we’re stubborn!”

  Without having to say, we took the path to the stream down alongside the cemetery. The wind made little noises in the dark, the stars still shone with a hardness. Then came a sound from the cemetery, from behind the bushes, a quick thrust of it. We stood listening, our hands went looking for each other’s, wondering. . . . “No,” Yeersel whispered, “it’s a living person.”

  To find him took a whole minute. He lay against a footstone, we lit matches. His head held to a side, he smiled up at us, Nasan. “Your head, your feet, what ... ?”

  “Sh, Papa . . . not so loud!”

  “Nasan, what ... ?”

  “We’ll carry him to the stream, the cold water,” Yeersel said.

  “No,” quickly from Nasan, “I mustn’t.”

  “Sh,” I said, bending to lift him.

  “No, Papa,” he shouted. “Ay, you’ve made me noisy, no one must find out I did it. . . .”

  “Are you broken somewhere?”

  “No, Papa.”

  “To the stream, then.”

  We lifted him up and took him there, listening to him meanwhile. “I couldn’t help it, Papa . . . others mustn’t be punished for me ... I thought I’d wait until light to come home.”

  At the stream we helped him wash, then sat him on a bucket. “Well . . . say quickly, what?”

&n
bsp; “Things are doing, Papa. I went to Shnavka the woodsway, and first I saw the beadle there, and then others . . . they have soldiers there

  also, and an assembly at noon today. We spoke in their cemetery, they were glad I came . . . they gave me their news and on the way home near Shnavka in the woods . . . two soldiers . . . from the back of me.”

  Yeersel then grimly, “You were seen?”

  “I don’t know if my face . . . but a fight, then . . . one I kicked quiet, the other with a stone, then running . . . with their pistols shooting.”

  “Ay, Nasan . . .”

  “And what news?” from Yeersel.

  “Here, it’s written down in Yiddish,” he said, putting a paper in my hand. “They read it out, I know what it says . . . Papa . . . Papa . . .”

  “Well, what?” Yeersel pressed.

  “It’s on the paper . . . and it’s yes, yes-a-conspiracy.”

  As if flecked with a whip Yeersel put a match to the paper, saying, “Who needs it written as long as you know what’s there?”

  Nasan said, we seeing him now the few moments it took the paper to burn, “It came from Minsk, they say on the top of a keg of nails, a week ago . . . how Jews should run from the villages well before October ... to hide in the Minsk ghetto and from there to take wagons to Bialystok and how they’ll be hidden there until a wagon from Warsaw, and then the same to Stettin and Hamburg ... to ships, they say on the paper.”