by Peter Martin
“The movement against the Government which has come to light during the past few days in this District — taking in the Pukop Scandal, also the illegal departure of Jews from Svutz, Shnavka, Tinka- vitch, Kletsk, and various other places — is evidence of Jews otherwise devoted to the Throne and Fatherland yielding to instigations of ill- minded persons who fan passions in accordance with the designs of the anarchists. It is to forestall such violations of the public order, and to safeguard Golinsk Jews, that this assembly is called.”
Now the lofty tone of this opening and its suspicious familiarity showed that our Administrator was out to play his crudest game with us. We were uneducated, our Russian was limited to everyday needs, yet Selenkov seemed to be saying the same things as five years previous when following the pogrom in Warsaw he had assembled us and made exhibitions of concern wrapped in the reasoning that anarchists had flamed the pogrom to embarrass the government before the world. This cordiality ended with the year, however; and though many ran from
Svutz in 1883 we Golinskers sat still at the insistence of Tzippe-Sora, who had quite well established herself in various illegal handlings.
“In such a light, therefore,” Selenkov said, “we have three things. I will read an enactment handed down by the Government two weeks ago, held by the Minsk Gubernator pending decisions on matters to be later announced. Here it is, listen carefully, questions may be asked.” The Administrator’s voice now assumed its normal nagging cackle. “ ‘The family of a Jew guilty of evading military service is liable to a fine of three hundred rubles. The collection of the fine shall be decreed by the respective recruiting station and carried out by the police. It shall not be substituted by imprisonment in the case of destitute persons liable to that fine/ This is the main sense of the enactment,” he remarked, stuffing the paper in his pocket.
Only the rain was heard for a few moments; then Hatzkel’s Vremya, daughter of Zelyeh and granddaughter of Asher-the-Sour, asked timidly that it be read over. Selenkov obliged with the bad grace of an incompetent doctor repeating how his patient died. Again a wet silence. “No questions here?” Selenkov demanded. “Then it’s understood?”
“Understood, yes, sir,” I heard Tzippe-Sora saying as she came nearer. “Clearly, sir, but one thing.”
“What’s your ‘one thing’?”
“Sir,” she said respectfully, “just the meaning there . . . when it says ‘the family.’ ”
“The family?” was Selenkov’s startled reply. He decided this was a good place to laugh and I heard my lieutenant joining, lightly.
“That’s parents, sir?”
“Parents, brothers, sisters. Family!”
“Grandparents?”
“Family!”
“Nieces, cousins, sir?”
“Family!”
“Take any of us, sir, look closely a bit and you know what you’ll see. In some way or another, sir, we’re all related. Now does that make us one family, sir? That’s my question.”
“Yes,” he said with a tavern friendliness, “if you’re all one family it’ll be easier to pay the fine should any of you choose to evade service, isn’t that so ? Each gives a little, you see, and the three hundred therefore isn’t a burden on just a few.”
I heard a call; Laib-Shmul trying to control his temper. “Pay when?”
“That’s good,” Selenkov said heartily, “it brings up an important matter. First, the recruiting roll is called. A recruit fails to appear at the station. The authorities issue the order to the family to pay. The police deliver the order. And if there is no payment, or insufficient, the family is judged destitute and the Government sells whatever property by auction.”
Now the landsmen began to see the snake unrolling itself. “And if we have nothing to sell?” shouted Pesha.
“You are destitute but not jailed. Only forbidden to leave the village. In that way you have the opportunity, should your position improve, to fulfill the arrears!” He found himself forced to end in as loud a shout as he could make; such cried-out Yiddish was there that Selen- kov’s commands for order became drowned before they hardly left his mouth. Now came the other, the softly confident voice of my lieutenant, not gently as with me before at the stream, but as the dedicated voice of a sincere protector. Speaking quietly, he made the rest of us gradually listen; near as I was to him I heard only snatches, the fever throwing up its wall.
“. . . referring now to the known conspiracy within the Pale of Settlement ... as a means of forestalling excesses against the Jewish population . . . beginning with today, at least one soldier to be billeted in each Jewish home in the Pukop District . . . for a time not more than . . .”
Soldiers . . . soldiers in Jewish homes, ay, people, yes-moan and yes-cry, we’re having guests as in the older times . . . commandeer- ings, our girls, pig-flesh dirtying us, beatings, burnings. . . . Then Oblanski blew his whistle. Selenkov began speaking quite rapidly. “In connection with the previous, the third and final. In view of the outrages in force against the Government involving exits of Jews from
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the Pale of Settlement and gross evasions of military service, it has been decreed by supplementary command of the Army that conscription time be changed from October to any time of the year deemed proper by the District Military Commands. We have been informed late Saturday from Pukop that in Golinsk as in all inhabited places within the Pukop region, conscription time has been changed from October to today.” He brought his hand down upon the rail. “For all, Jew and gentile!”
After this I heard only snatches. Lying on the porch, the fever dulling me down, I had not been aware of the presence of peasants from the other side or that the assembly would have meanings for them too. Names and numbers were called; it was the careful clear voice now of the lieutenant; some Russian, some Jewish. Boots passed close by, the door opening and banging shut; inside Dr. Ostrov waiting to make the examinations.
In twenty-four hours, new boots.
He called Nasan, a blackness to my eyes, and a few moments later, my cheek kissed and then the banging shut of the door. After that I heard nothing until later awhile, feeling kissed the second time and knowing it had to be Ellya; then again the closing of the door. Many hands lifted me, I lay swaying high, the rain splashed my cheeks; and from a distance, to the last, the honking of Selenkov. “Of course a bath, Lieutenant. Beginning tomorrow, no bugs for them but the best.”
The insensibility lasted several hours; then came some imagining of clocks, tiny ones ticking in the eyeballs. The second sign was a smell so thick I feared I lay in the devil’s own latrine.
Shouts of soldiers on the other side of a closed door made a sudden cannonade. The smell of feces hung in swirls over the room; a whole revolution of bowels and something more had burst there.
Wood hard under my back; I moved my hand. It touched the side of a boot on the floor and I took it in a hurl-up through the window pane for air.
The door flew open, forms in the half-dark entered and banged it
214 The Landsmen
shut; soldiers, by their rifles and voices. But for the smell it could have been a dream.
A rifle butt tapped against my chin, the voice seeming to travel a distance. “Making a disturbance?”
I whispered, “For air.”
“Yes, a contamination here,” said the second decisively, a youngish voice, a nervous one, the tongue running like the feet of a small boy.
“Why don’t I save the wagon a trip?” the first asked himself, raising the rifle butt over my eyes.
“The smell,” I begged. “Take me out.”
“We can’t,” the second replied. “Be quiet or he’ll give you the butt.”
Still in a fever I groped for the kernel of my condition. To what “contamination” was I linked and what stench was this, and why were the soldiers still shouting, “Away!” on the other side of the door? Then through the hole in the window-glass a sound of something better came, the mass
ed call of a praying.
This fixed me a bit; it was evening, the synagogue stood nearby; this had to be Maisha’s hut, then, the nearest to the synagogue. I listened to the praying with the thoughts of my boys being there mixing into wonders of what wagon the soldiers had mentioned; what trick under this, what smell, why this cancellation by the lieutenant; and what other things had I missed the hours I lay between Gehenna and Golinsk?
They were at prayers: the landsmen, their boys, mine. I wanted to be surrounded by young bodies especially, the blood running with stubbornness through the years of their growth (more of their age in our cemetery than at the praying), who had been spared the too-soon rotting; they were standing flesh alive, the hard-grown fruit of our plowings, spared every last accident which calendared our days — the drownings, the consumptions, the smites of the elements, the agues and fevers which had snatched others in epidemics revisiting with the persistence of starving beggars. Spared, but only for tomorrow; for tomorrow drawn from wombs and circumcised, confirmed and given to wed; for that tomorrow we had bribed and twisted ourselves to
sweat in fields we did not eat from, hauled illegal goods never on our backs, brandies never on our table, putting bread away against the next month. For such a tomorrow we had sent the Squire off gaily to Petersburg and for that crab of tomorrow he had paid his little visit to persuade us that his monument of a brain had formed every last claw to be pushed into us.
In the hut I sensed something sharper than human waste and remembered the herring feast before the assembly. I crawled to the stove; it was cold, I pulled myself up, holding and groping for matches. Maisha lay on his side in a corner, his backside exposed, knees to his chin, a heap of his matter about him. The match burnt my fingers; I struck others, solving the secret.
Now as Maisha so in other corners — my brother Gershon and father-in-law Naftoli-Dovid, quiet sacks lying in their matters — but let me go to the brine, it was the brine that showed what to bring near and what to keep far from myself, the brine that fetched anger from deep pockets of burial, the brine that put an axe in my hand.
Now the fault of the three jolly ones? They had haggled themselves unfortunately into owning a keg of herring pickled in a cloved brine, and eating into it with such zest that the saltiness made them look to refresh themselves with long swallows of something wet. As it happened, Naftoli-Dovid in his hut nearby had several bottles of his own recent homemade that he was letting stand awhile before taking them to certain of his quiet customers; but since we were forbidden to leave our lanes and since it was raining and since there was nothing to celebrate, Naftoli-Dovid brought his bottles to the herring and the three drank not only to pour wetness and warmth into them, but to fix themselves into praying with a joy, thinking, “Perhaps the Angel Gavreel will hear the joy in our praying and open his Book of Days to the right page and find our names on them and call us to ride in his wagon under lanterns of stars toward our first sleeps between covers of finest-spun cloudlets not for sale.” Seeking to bury in childishness what as men they had wearied of, these three jollies had over- herringed and over-liquored themselves into a stupor and had waked
each with ten kittens in his mouth and a body out of water. The celebration over, they had wished neither herring nor liquor, only to pour something wet into them; after so many herrings and bottles of my father-in-law's they needed to rid themselves of their dryness; yet instead, had taken whole tumblers of thick fatty brine poured from the keg of herring to end as I found them, their bowels convulsed, their bodies robbed of the last drop of liquid.
Using one match after the other, striking them against the floor as I lay on my stomach, I circled the room with flickers of light — the keg of herring tipped over under the table, a few fish near it, only a small circle of brine out of it — then two large tin tumblers that we used to take on our travels, good for water or picking berries — now I crawled to the tumblers and smelled of them and one had an inch of brine still in it, brine in a tin tumbler, brine out of the keg of herring, a killing thing to drink, a thing to make the insides explode; no wonder the stench there; the product of the soldiers' sport, convulsing their bowels with brine when they cried for water —
I went to look at Gershon. His lips flew up with each breath, his head had some purplish color, and his eyelids also. Now Gershon had of late years let his beard grow fuller and this increased the resemblance to my father, so that seeing him in that color and in the position of a goner, the wheel spun backwards and I seemed to be the little boy seeing how my father lay in the field that day out of Minsk, in his purple dying of the plague. Father dying in the field, Gershon the same, the cords of years burst. In such times the senses take their angriest moves, either toward clarity or animal blindness; here with me it went the first way; I grasped why I had been hidden with the three. Here was concerned my diffident lieutenant of the streamside when I had gone for the rubles; the lieutenant had coquetted until I had horrified him by showing my blue-knotted groin, tricking up the fable of getting it from a woman to be rid of him. But he had not forgotten what he truly believed, he had well swallowed my story of venery and thought to have me put away from the soldiers; which was why I had been taken where no soldiers would be quartered.
until “the wagon” would remove me elsewhere. And when it might be found that no disease such as I had informed the lieutenant existed in me, then what? Would I be returned and would the lieutenant then laugh at the great joke played upon him? Or would he contrive a more delicate punishment for my impudence?
Now all this lay in my fever, a broil of anger fired by the sight of what had been done to the three with the brine. The anger clamored to come out, it could not be pounded back with my fists against the floor, with my rolling this way and that; and when my hand felt Maisha’s axe in the darkness my strength rose me to my feet and I smashed the axe against the window, the glass in a crash, and this brought the soldiers. The door opened to their shouts of “Order!” but by their lanterns I saw clear signs in their eyes, fear that their amusement had been detected, that this wild fellow with the axe in his hand might crazy-wise bring them to justice. They stood in a pause, regarding me, and now through the broken space I could hear the praying well and this cheered me, to conceive some lance against the poisoned poisoners and for us all.
“Well, you’ve gotten into trouble,” one of the soldiers said, putting his lantern down and poising his rifle butt. He charged at me and I swung the axe, but badly, only deflecting the rifle butt to my stomach, the blow felling me. I felt his boot on my face, waited for the butt to follow, but the second had run up and was saying, “Now if you’ll wait and think, Drobnis . .
“But he’s trying to escape, he’s contaminated, it would be obeying orders,” Drobnis argued, “and they’d be saved the bother of carting him away.”
“Well,” the second hesitated, “I suppose . . .”
“Go shut the door.”
He did and in that moment I whispered to this Drobnis who’d forced my landsmen to drink the brine, “I’m contaminated, it’s possible . . . but so are they and can’t be helped.”
He said, “Bring the lantern closer, will you, Knyazev? I’ll show you a clean job, once and over.”
This gave me another few seconds; everything became plain and I said, “There’s plague here, you didn’t do it with the brine. . . .”
“I’ll give you plague,” Drobnis muttered.
“No,” I cried in acted-out anxiety, “they’ll give it to you! And don’t I bitterly know the look of plague ? Didn’t I see my own father dying of it before my eyes just as I see you, just as close?”
“No Jew tricks!” he shouted, lifting his rifle butt to smash me quiet.
“Go ahead,” I said. I didn’t believe the face real, the shadowy holes of his eyes and his dark form before the lantern shooting up to the ceiling as one sees an event with the soothe of a secret fantasy ending when one wakes in his bed. “Now I swear that’s plague over there . . . the herring was
poisoned, don’t you see they would have been stricken even if you hadn’t given them brine to drink?”
“How do you come to say brine?” the second demanded, Knyazev.
“I struck matches!”
With this Knyazev’s hand began to shake, the fingers took hold of Drobnis’s rifle, I threw more wood into the sparks. “Yes, they’re contaminated, it’s the plague here. That’s why I took the axe to the window, it’s our death here!”
“Let’s look,” Knyazev gave a blurt, backing to the lantern and taking it to the corner where Gershon lay. Drobnis poked him on his back with the rifle barrel; I dropped my eyes on Gershon for just a glance at the purple face. It was the soldiers I had to watch to measure the temper of their fear, my mind running to the next gambit. “Now there’s the thing, billeted in a town with plague! I tried to warn the lieutenant, I knew the herring was poisoned, I suspected . . . but I lost my senses . . . and now you’ve kept them locked up these hours and the thing’s in the air!”
Knyazev rapped Drobnis on the arm. “We’d better go to the lieutenant.”
“And what will he do?” Drobnis replied. “Nothing but get on his horse and run! And of course we’ll be told to ‘gain control’ here! We’ll have to bury them and wait around to bury others and then be buried ourselves!”