The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  “You believe that? Truly?”

  “Sir, I don’t lie.” His smile stayed, his eyes drilled into my chest. “We Jews have been believing it for at least hundreds of years. My father never went without his fox’s foot, and he lived to an old age and like an ox.”

  “You’re a Jew?” he cried, amazed, rising. “Never! But in Odessa they don’t grow such broad strong ones!” All intrigued, he stepped near. “The foot of a fox, you say?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then as though not to startle me he pulled, very carefully, the little canvas roll from under my shirt, using a light probing pressure to turn it between the tips of his fingers as though it lived and must not be hurt. “Remarkable.” A calculated wryness peeped from under his diffidence now. “Such great strong arms on you . . . how ever?”

  “From carrying water-buckets, sir.”

  “And a Jew, you say.” He put his palms to my arms and pressed not unlike the way he touched the roll of bribe-money. A light flew from his eyes like birds into the morning. Then I began to see how he was in fact making coquettings. Never having met any of those who must commandeer themselves into such ways and habits I had nevertheless listened to Zish’s stories of army commandeerings, of how soldiers put on dresses to make mock weddings and honeymoons, many times forcing Jews into playing this with them; and to everything else which came to glue itself onto a person this too I had to handle.

  “Well,” he said, becoming further drawn. He took the “fox’s foot” into his hand and with a light move placed it under my shirt, letting his fingers bend against the hairs of my chest, giving me the feel of lice walking. Seeing how I shook a bit he frowned into my face as he removed his fingers and stepped back. “And what were you about to do when you saw me?”

  “Put on my blouse and perhaps fish, sir.”

  “Very well, then. Go, let’s see you fish.”

  Now I wanted nothing of the kind, I wanted to go back but feared giving any offense. With the bribe-money hanging on my chest, an assembly at noon, and affairs generally on the march, I had in the midst of all to be a fox for this hound. He watched me put on my blouse, fix the hook to the pole, dig a few worms ... a good few warm minutes crawling by until he decided to sit on the rock next to me. “Married?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I moved the pole a bit. The string lay on a slant toward the rushing water. “So am I,” the officer said unhappily. He looked away, struck by a mood. “I left her in Yalta.” He sighed, still glancing away from me. “Do you know what it’s like there?”

  “No, sir.”

  Looking straight ahead at the water, I listened to him. “The sea is almost green, the sky is blue with white in it, the sands are very fine. But she’ll die there.” oo, sir . . . so.

  “Yes,” he sighed, “the doctors agree. Married only three months, you understand. I’ve just come off furlough and I’ll never see her again.”

  “A pity!”

  “The good-by,” he continued, “so typical of her ... no cries, no words . . . simply, in her formal way . . . ‘Fiodor Antonovich, stop and think of me when you are walking close to a river.’ ” He took the fishpole into his hands. Shaking with pity, whether for her or himself a question, he spoke down to the water. “She’s dying, she’s gone. The only one, the only . . . and I’ll never see her again, the one woman I saw no misery with. Yes, I’m the steady companion of unhappiness, he’s with me everywhere.” He let the pole drop into the water, it floated away, it was a good pole.

  The officer chose the moment to break into slow tears, to drop his head to my shoulder. “Don’t grieve so, sir,” I said. He heaved himself into more sorrow, holding me to him, his head to my chest, pulling me to him. “She was the only one,” he sobbed. “You see how I don’t make myself this way easily,” whimpering, “be good, give me a treat. . . .”

  “No, you mustn’t grieve so,” I replied with an imitative gentleness.

  “But you’re a Jew,” he urged, his head down, his ear pressing the bribe-money, “you know suffering, anguish, the cruelty of life!”

  “Well, yes, sir. . . .”

  “Be human, then,” he begged, holding my arms, looking up at me,

  his chin a wobble, his eyes a despairing glaze. “It’s hard for me, everywhere I go. . . .”

  It happened that in trying a tactful wriggle-away I gave my injured groin a bad twist, and it popped into my head to say, “But, sir . . . understand ... let me be really kind to you, I beg you. . . .”

  “You don’t,’’ be pouted, “you’re lying, you don’t wish to be kind. . . .”

  “On the shore,” I said. “Allow me.”

  This he permitted. So standing at the streamside I exhibited the hard blue knot that rose high on my groin. He peered at it, interested.

  “You see, sir? It wouldn’t have come out if I’d had my fox’s foot last winter. It will go away now . . . and I’ll surely be protected against other ones, their sickness won’t get me like this whore’s . . . but meanwhile, sir. . . .”

  “I touched you,” he breathed, horrified.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rubbing his hands against his uniform, his eyes to the knot, he backed away. “I had to take a walk along the river,” he accused himself, stumbling away, more and more merging with the green, toward the bridge. And when the last sight and sound of him was no more I whispered, “Thank You, Dear God of Israel, for the kick.”

  Now corning up from the stream, wet through the boots and my beard flat to my face, the two days’ troubles and the nights of bad sleep summed themselves — I needed to be out of the rain, in bed with hot bricks, giving myself a hard sleep. My romantish time at the stream forgotten, the knot yelling, “Rest me,” I hobbled to the top of the path. Maisha’s hut stood nearest, down some yards from the synagogue. I had no attention for it but the noise was rare and I looked in, seeing a singing of three. My second look showed me the platter of herrings on the table, a high heap; a feast was being made, a bottle stood at Naftoli-Dovid’s further foot; and they sang, on the same words and on different words, but understood as together.

  Now this is how the Tsar, the Tsar, eats his potatoes —

  Into a butter-wall, with a cannon,

  Shoots a soldier hot potatoes,

  And into the Tsars mouth they go,

  The way he eats potatoes . . . !

  Naftoli-Dovid saw me in the doorway (another annoyance, men over sixty sitting in foolishness without bothering to close the door when it was raining), and threw me a loud half-sincere greeting, “Come in, son-in-law; take something for a warming!”

  “What’s the big holiday?”

  “Don’t hold yourself so stiffly,” my brother Gershon said, “we’re making our own holiday. Ay, did we give them a good trade!” He pushed the plate of herring toward me. “You never tasted such fine saltiness!”

  “That’s your reason?” I demanded. “Better stand praying in the synagogue!”

  “Berel, Berel,” Maisha grinned, “what are we doing if not preparing to pray? We’re following a teaching of the Master of the Good Name.”

  “Yes, who else?” said Naftoli-Dovid with a wide wave of his hand that ended in a reach for the bottle.

  Gershon pointed to a keg in the corner, saying, “A hundred herrings, Berel, for a few of my shoes, and Naftoli-Dovid’s broken watch, and Maisha’s old chest without hinges!”

  “Who gave?”

  “A peasant from Kletsk, an angel,” Maisha testified. “No haggling, no insults, just a one-two-three! A hundred herrings . . . take, Berel, make yourself dry inside at least!”

  “So early in the day in such a drinking?” I asked. “Nothing else fits before the assembly? Not even to ask The One Above for a blessing on us?”

  “Ay, don’t be an ox,” Naftoli-Dovid said, somewhat depressed.

  “And should one pray without joy?” Maisha countered. “If prayers are to bear fruit, if blessings are to come, they must be offered with joy and would you deny that?
”

  “Instead of asking me to deny,” I said, “why don’t you admit,

  Maisha . . . that if silence be good for wise men, how much better for fools?'’

  “Angry, you?” Gershon demanded. He took the bottle from Naftoli- Dovid and pushed it to me. “But so wet, Berel! Take a little for your own sake.”

  I downed a few swallows of Naftoli-Dovid’s homemade. It burned but I wanted it to.

  “You hear?” Gershon said in amazement. “My brother, angry!”

  The calms I had built about me were splitting, winds were in the thickets, brinks were nearing; as I went out, they resumed their song.

  And here s how the Tsar sleeps, how he sleeps, the Tsar,

  His bedroom filled with feathers, the finest —

  And into it himself he throws, the Tsar,

  With a regiment of soldiers outside shouting —

  “Shhhh!” “Quiet!”

  So he sleeps, how he sleeps, the Tsar!

  At home something else; in the guise of trying to make peace between Baylah and Nasan, Hannah was reminding the girl of a few things a wife should understand. “Enough! If Nasan says he fell asleep in the synagogue it’s as true as the Holy Law! A wife believes her husband!”

  “Lies,” Baylah replied quietly and therefore more disrespectfully.

  “The more you keep on the more you’ll be sorry,” Nasan said anxiously, looking neither at the mother nor the wife but shrewdly between them.

  “I’ll give you sorry,” Baylah flung at him. “Let the child choke in my stomach than have a liar for a father.”

  I said, “Put up bricks,” and then they saw me. Nasan jumped to the stove, Hannah cried, “Look, he fell in,” and Baylah burst into tears. Seeing me throw off the dripping blouse, undressing, they turned their backs to me and continued with each other. I put on a dry undershirt, careful not to show Nasan the roll of bribe-money hanging on my chest, and got into bed.

  Baylah turned with a point at me. “You’re his father, tell me, did you believe it? He didn’t sleep in the synagogue, he’s up to something! But his mother, anything her Prince says must be the golden truth!”

  Nasan tried to quiet them but said the wrong thing, “Mama, let her talk herself out.” Baylah showed her temper, I could see why Nasan was crazy for her. “Look out, lad,” she flew at him, “you didn’t marry any pot of water, I don’t empty out so easily! The way we were married we can be divorced, in ten minutes!” The tears flowed, she couldn’t stop, she loved him. “You stood with me before Rabbi Sussya, you were then willing, you said, for us to be made into a one, you swore it! But there you lied! You’ve hidden yourself from me, you don’t let yourself be with me a one, you do what you do and you don’t tell me — to hell with such a life!”

  “Don’t rear yourself so, it’s bad for the baby, Plum. . .

  “Your Plums I don’t need,” she cried, her hands pressing her stomach, “but the truth!”

  “Wait,” Hannah said, “think a bit! If he didn’t sleep in the synagogue, then where?”

  “Nowhere! He slept last night? Like Avrum slept!”

  “She hacks Avrum in again?” Hannah cried with furious impatience.

  “I don’t want a liar!”

  “Nasan,” Hannah appealed, “don’t let her wipe her feet on you, give her a few words!”

  Nasan couldn’t. Scratching his head, he looked at me to fish him out. “Baylah,” I said, working to postpone, “why can’t you believe him?”

  “Do you?”

  “Did he say he saw a camel dancing on a pail? Why shouldn’t I believe him?”

  “I know better,” she trembled.

  “Yes, better than his mother,” Hannah threw in.

  Baylah put her shawl over her head, told Nasan not to come home,

  and went out with a great bang of the door. Nasan hung his head. I told him to go after her. “How can I, Papa?”

  “All ugly and beautiful ones come with tempers. Go to her, Nasan.”

  “What can I say to her, Papa?”

  “Don’t say anything. Remember, sometimes a man listens to his wife with a profit and sometimes with a loss, but he listens.”

  “That’s all, Papa?” he asked with a special meaning.

  “Entirely.”

  “I’ll tell her you’re sorry, Mama?”

  “Call me names, anything,” Hannah said, calming. “Do I have to live with her?”

  With this Nasan left. Hannah got the hot bricks ready, wrapping them in a piece of old cover and putting them to my feet. “Ellya looks for you.”

  “I had to go to the stream.”

  “Finished the carries and you ‘had to go?’ ”

  “You, too, Hannah?”

  “What, me?”

  “The same as Baylah?”

  “It’s so bad you don’t say what, even to me?”

  “Stop fishing.”

  “I see something to fish for.”

  “Hear me, Hannah. The truth spoken, I’m sick; I haven’t the strength to parcel out upsetments.”

  This quieted her. She soothed the groin with hot wet cloths and I waited to sleep. My head wouldn’t let me, my feet a bit warm and the rest ice. She sat next to me. Now Hannah wasn’t anything in the beautiful line, the face too broad, the lips thin, the cheeks bumpy. However, it possessed a great gift, it was a face that informed with an accuracy putting years on a man of my constitution. So with one eye open I said, “It’s not so terrible. It won’t be anything until perhaps July. And by then the world could overturn itself a dozen times.” In small bits, slowly, I explained Nasan’s trip to Shnavka the night before. When I got to the part about secret wagons riding for Hamburg she

  clasped her hands, her lips grew thinner with doubt, her right cheek began tremoring pictures of disaster.

  “But how else then, Hannah? How much longer to bind ourselves together with bribes? I came here a boy of five, there were twenty families then. And today still only nineteen or twenty, the best going to the army, few coming back. And what’s left? The old, the sick ones, the cripples.”

  “But at least were planted here . . . it’s our own land a bit. The truth spoken,” she said, “I like sitting on the step talking with the women while you’re at last prayers. It’s nice to look up and see what kind of day tomorrow . . . and everywhere a familiar face. If we dragged ourselves to the other side of the world we’d have to learn to stand it all over again and with us it’s no longer six o’clock in the morning.”

  “Should the children stay because we’re too old? Could you send them alone? If they’re running from Shnavka they must be running from all over. That’s the thing ... I don’t say to be the first, but if it’s truly an exodus . . .”

  Tm afraid.”

  “Of course. But be afraid only to me. Say nothing. Between now and the October conscription we’ll find out more. Be nice to Baylah.”

  She kissed me and said, “Your head is hot. Try, sleep.”

  I closed my eyes, made bits of talk to myself. Carry, carry. Coming here, getting deaf, hearing again, Mottel’s kick, the lieutenant, what next? Will it stop, Ox, will He send a little richness better than Rothschild’s, a pinch of quiet in the heart? Something lighter a bit, Ox. Not the yokes of Gershon, Maisha, Naftoldi-Dovid. Elders again children becoming, with herrings. You too in time if allowed, old hay in their barns, Ox; dry for a fire, the what’s-left. When the head’s hot. Wait, Ox, for sleep. Go down, knot. A good month, July. Come in, Mr. July.

  In my sleep I felt three times bigger, and into it a babble thrown, a large hand shaking my eyes open — “Up! Up!” — Kuizma Oblanski, pencil in ear, ledger in hand, the sergeant of police.

  “He’s sick,” from Hannah anxiously. And hovering near, Tzippe- Sora.

  “He’s avoiding the assembly.”

  “No, it’s my fault,” Hannah told him. “I should have waked him.”

  Oblanski slapped his arms against his flanks, a big man making his impatience larger at every opportunity, his
whole pride in his shovel of a beard. “You know the order. I’ll report him if you want.”

  “Kuizma,” the widow said, “help take him to the line.”

  “Am I his servant?”

  “For a bottle of the right stuff?”

  “Two . . . one for respect.”

  Hannah dressed me in dries, took my winter coat down. When the bottles arrived Oblanski put them in his pants and supported me down the path to the high road. The fever was strong; I saw the rain falling in sways. At the road the others had made themselves again into a line, standing in one dripping. “Let him sit in the carriage stop, at least,” Tzippe-Sora suggested.

  “Not allowed.”

  “All right. Two more.”

  A grunt from Oblanski. I lay on the bench, seeing more roof and sky than people, the line a blur of high sounds.

  A blessing not to see Rezatskin’s face, always worrying into you with its rat’s glance, thin between the ears like the undersides of toadstools. It had been his experience that open air endangered the health, he wore his long winter coat in the rain and certainly hated us for getting him out. In a thick voice broken by spits and snorts (he seemed always having tremendous colds) Rezatskin began reading our names from his ledger in a voice freighted with unusual anger. The reading took about twenty minutes. Naftoli-Dovid created an incident. He reeled and waved his arms as he answered to his name, the last, causing Rezatskin to remark loudly, “Leave it to him to add to the stench here.” At this my father-in-law found some crazy reason to take off his cap and sway over to Rezatskin, saying, “A thank-you, sir.

  Now if you were of our own I might say such a homey curse! But as it’s you, sir ... a good thank-you!”

  Yeersel and Zish had by then pulled him away. Zish called back, “He’s only angry at his own failures, sir, we all laugh at him.” Becoming nervous Naftoli-Dovid began laughing, saying, “Yes, that’s right — ” Oblanski then called strongly, “Now to the next, follow!”

  The soldiers pushed the Golinskers into a little crowd trailing the policeman up the hill. Ellya and Nasan made a seat of hands for me. I was glad to be in the rain. I opened my mouth, it felt drier than a fire. The rest were directed to stand outside the village hall; they permitted the boys to set me down on the porch; the roof leaked. I put out my hand to catch drops, keeping my lips wet. Through the rails I could see faces — Baylah’s mother Dena, up close, raindrops flattening her bit of a mustache, the suspicious heavily-lidded Shprinza, a few small boys with pieces of canvas on their heads, and to a side a bit, Hannah with Ellya and Nasan, the boys watching her, she keeping her eyes on me. Meanwhile Selenkov had begun in the slow sharp style of an official with much to develop.