The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  23 8 The Landsmen

  there being so many sinners in that line. A comforting thought; the sin was no longer solitary, marking one apart; and I wondered how many of our own had been in “Heaven.” Even if they had not, how serious could it be, actually, when it was well known that the body often behaved automatically? This shivered me into wanting Rochel more than ever. “Not like in there,” I assured myself. “We shall be not like in there; but let it happen soon!”

  Everything in the gully was entering its beautiful phase, the sun high and warming, the muds gone, the blossoms beginning. I noticed it and I didn’t, sitting in my miserable wonder. Where and how my brother had got himself a fiddle one needed to look no further than my uncle, who certainly would break my head if I let the secret out.

  Fear of my uncle made it easy to want to obey him. Still my brother had committed a sin more devious and transforming than lust of the flesh. He had sought and found fiddle-joys under the tutelage of an evil woman believing she was doing something fine (exactly a most dangerous influence). Through her and the music she taught him to play my brother had entered into an alliance with a part of the world which was our enemy. He would be pressed to cast aside his previous life entirely; as Uncle Mottel had said, he and Varya wanted to tip the world a bit to let him roll away from Golinsk. Even Nochim, considered not so much a fiddler as a scraper, was held to have become a running beggar at celebrations only out of fiddle-vanity when he might otherwise have been quite an earning dairyman; but this of Laib was worse, worse!

  Other boys fell out of trees and got into fights; I was a sitter and a watcher at my father’s side during the Saturday night meetings of the landsmen in the synagogue. Their tight grips on a topic, their pungent sallies, the concern for each other in every hot exchange seemed the strongest evidence of our indestructibility. Whether they decided wrongly or rightly lay beyond me and it did not matter. They were themselves. This super-rightness I took for wisdom.

  What kept our stubbornness alive ? While we wavered on the brinks our advisers fell in. When I was eight some Svutzkers proposed that we

  join them in running to America on forged passports. We said no, backwardly preferring the dangers we were used to; and on the ship a cholera took most of them. Once the Lekavitch rabbi begged us to give his son a chance; he was just out of the Minsker academy, the father wanted him near, he made various promises. We said no. The son went to Kletsk, married a German woman, shaved his beard, and became an expert in “purifying” the advanced ideas of Moses Mendelssohn with such ardor that the Chief Rabbi of Minsk voided his certificate; after that he plunged deeper into his “purifying” until he finally agreed completely with Moses Mendelssohn and broke his father’s heart. We thanked The One Above for our sagacity. “Better Mendelssohn purified than us,” said Reb Maisha.

  Also — during my boyhood a famous pogrom befell Warsaw following Alexander II’s assassination; it made Jews a good three hundred miles away start running to America by the hundreds and thousands. The left-backs of these families were kicked out of the villages into the city ghettos. But we had said no. All or none of us would travel to America; and so it remained until Berel with Yeersel made the crack which split everything, even our stubbornness, two days after Laib’s confirmation.

  Alone in the gully after escaping from “Heaven,” it clanged in my head that Laib was for going away, for entering willingly into the enemy’s world, following the call of their music, this feat of my uncle’s overcoming our Golinsker cleanliness and joy, Laib the victim of my own lacks. Thus I would have to risk any punishment by Uncle Mottel and say to the landsmen, “Not for wanting the woman is my brother guilty, but for wanting their world; and I am more guilty than he for I protected him badly.”

  With this appetizer I made my way back to the huts to see if Laib had returned, if they were eating the confirmation dinner; moving toward a worse matter connected to that other fiddler, Nochim. It was well past eating time. The landsmen should have been at their Sabbath afternoon naps instead of standing in small groups outside of Nochim’s. Because of the Sabbath they were not smoking, nor even talking; a foreboding.

  My arrival was hardly noticed. It seemed proper not to ripple their silence. Something in their way of standing silently, something about Nochim’s closed door made me ask Yakov, the nearest, “Well . . . what doom?”

  “Nochim. Brought home to die.”

  Imitating his self-containment I said, “How?”

  “He was in Pukop.” Yakov was keeping his anger in, wetting his lips and looking at the ground. “Something there.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Something there,” he repeated without lifting from his whisper. It made no strain to hear. “The Pukopper rabbi tried to steal a boy from the army . . . gypsies, bribes . . . they killed the boy, arrested the rabbi.”

  “But, Yakov . . . how did Nochim ... ?”

  “Not so loud,” spoke Laib-Shmul over his shoulder. For him to advocate quiet was the best proof of a doom.

  “You don’t have to know everything,” Yakov said, looking up and away.

  I did not see Reb Maisha there and hurried to our hut, weighed now with the same numbness as the others. Hearing my steps Reb Maisha said, without looking at the door, “Laib?”

  “No.”

  He sat at the table looking out of the window, his hands clasped before him in a prison of his own. How broken, Reb, inside his hardy shell; under two difficult knocks, first Laib and now Nochim; and how even the shell would break when he learned the worst, of Uncle Mottel and the fiddle and the loss of a Jewish soul.

  I sat next to him. “Reb, dear . . . what passed with Nochim?”

  “Don’t be frightened ... a brave and sharp briber, Rabbi Sussya- ben-Mordecai. But to rely on gypsies? . . . wrong, without sense.”

  “I heard — but how did Nochim get mixed in?”

  “The Svutzkers say Nochim drove the boy to the gypsies for the rabbi . . . and the police, of course . . .” He did not finish his thought. “The Svutzkers found him in the road.”

  “The Svutzkers brought him?”

  “In a wagon, just before.”

  “They rode on the Sabbath?”

  “How better to hide they were Jews?”

  “Yakov says he’ll die.”

  “They found him yesterday and hid him in the woods until early.”

  “Will he die, Reb?”

  “In God’s hands.” He looked at me for the first time. “Are you hungry?”

  “No.”

  “Jewish boys mustn’t be loose today. Find Laib.”

  “I tried.”

  “Go again.”

  Rochel’s mother sat alone at the table set for the confirmation dinner; no sound in the warm noon but the fading hoinking of a pig and the shouts of children in the lane chasing it with stones. Bosha had taken off her ceremonial wig worn for the Sabbath; she held it in her lap. “Where’s Rochel, Bosha?”

  “With the others, looking for Laib.”

  “I don’t understand it.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. He was shamed, he’s hiding.”

  “I mean it’s only May. Conscription is October. Why did they start bribing and running so early?”

  “Pukopper wisdom,” she said. “Hn, if the police themselves told Reb Sussya this was the best time to bribe, shouldn’t he believe them? Ay, from such wisdom Nochim lies like a stone. And if a fool throws a stone into the water, can ten wise men take it out?”

  “God will take it out, don’t fear.”

  “From your mouth into His ears, only.”

  “I’ll see where the others are. Maybe they’ve found him already.”

  I began to run the moment I stepped into the lane, toward the path to the stream, for no reason but to get away from the pall. Death and danger, danger and death again and I felt alone as when Yeersel brought Father and Mother frozen stiff from the Parsovs’ gully and

  laid them on the bed. I ran faster but not
away from other morbid thoughts; coming to the stream I took stones and threw them angrily into the water just to do something against this preposterous living. Then remembering in a flash the place where Laib might be, the place I had forgotten until that moment, I went far up the streamside away from the highroad.

  The place of last hope was on the other side of the stream where in the summer it became something of a marsh low enough to push barrels across without getting wet higher than the knees. A gully on the other side was used for storing barrels of the Squire’s contraband; wagons could reach it from a side road and the landsmen came and loaded according to the instructions of Profim’s brother Vassily Buza- rov, the Squire’s steward. In the spring the water sat much higher; Zish had made two rafts, one on each bank hidden for emergencies. When I got there I saw a raft on the other side in plain view; someone must have crossed for there was no raft under the boughs on my side. The water might be over my head; I could not swim; how to get across ?

  I shouted, “Laib, Laib!” with all my might; no answer. But the stream had been crossed that day for the raft and paddle on the other side were wet. I took up shouting again and heard a distant cry, not any word, but a cry pitched high; a female sound. Realizing it might be Rochel for she had gone out after Laib I yelled her name again and again “Rochel, is it you?” — but all I got back was more wails.

  “Trouble, trouble,” I thought, “or is it some trapped animal?” I made up my mind to get across. It was a good fifty feet but it couldn’t be over my head all the way. To go back to the highroad and come around on the side road would take an hour. “Walk in and keep walking,” I told myself, “and if your head goes under it’ll come up again. When the water’s to your shoulders take a deep breath step by step.” With this in mind I took off my boots, socks, trousers, shirt and Sabbath jacket and laid them on the shore. In my undershirt and long drawers I stepped in, shivering but striding swiftly, sinking in the muck to my

  neck but kicking my feet forward, making the other side without my head going under, but soaked from head to foot.

  “Rochel!” I shouted. “Is it you?”

  Again the frightened wail from high and far. My teeth were chattering. “Rochel, Laib!” I kept shouting until I reached the gully. But nothing, no one.

  Home to the gloomy shanties leaning which-a-way on our piece of hill (winter clay falling out of the cracks and always new seams opening), I put on dry drawers and went to Yeersel’s. Still no Laib; Daneel and his wife Lippe were there with Rochel, the table not yet touched, all the places neat, Yeersel and Bosha at Nochim’s.

  Lippe; a scary one. “Nochim lies in a dying fever, Shim. What are we standing here for? Wherever he is, Laib, let’s find him. Since Nochim is back, they’re saying — ”

  “I don’t know w 7 here to look any more.”

  “Wait,” said Lippe, “did anyone try the Parsovs?”

  “Why there?” Daneel said.

  “So let it be without a reason,” Lippe said. “A person hides where he isn’t expected.”

  “I’ll see anyway, then.”

  “You’d better not, Shim!”

  “Daneel’s right,” Lippe said. “Don’t go to the Parsovs after all.”

  “But didn’t you say — ”

  “Daneel is right.”

  “Right, wrong.” I looked at Daneel suspiciously. “Very well, and what’s the big secret?”

  I walked out and he followed. We stood in the lane.

  “That wife of mine ... I told her to keep it to herself. I don’t want Rochel to know because she’ll tell Mama and you know Mama, she’ll take a fit.”

  “All right. Well?”

  “I went with Lippe to fetch Yushin for Nochim. You know, his cupping-glasses . . . and Yushin makes a speech to us on the way. ‘It’s already quite digested, this Pukop outrage,’ he says to us, ‘we’ve

  an entire report by the Pukop carriage-driver. You Jews again are up to your befouling,’ he says. ‘And we’re quite vigilant here, you’ll see! If only once any of you here,’ and so on.”

  “Heating themselves up, is that it?”

  “Stay away from the Parsovs. And the taverns.”

  “It’s not good for Laib to be away.”

  “Keep my words to yourself.”

  “Where else?”

  Daneel went in. Rochel put her head out of the door. “Shim, I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” said Lippe, appearing behind her, “we’re needed at Nochim’s. Come with me.”

  “Better,” I said. “Until later, Rochel.”

  I started up the lane toward the synagogue. “Where are you going?” Rochel called. Could I answer? Very well, where indeed? According to Yushin they were looking to start something with us; better to avoid the village.

  Where else to try again for Laib but in the woods? He might have seen me but let me go on. Perhaps the second time he would call out to me.

  I sought him as one patting grass for the needle dropped there, first gently and then carelessly pounding, impatient to feel the needle pricking the finger. But no; a nightly day; no answers to my calls, no Laib, no sounds other than my own or here and there the birds, or the breeze flecking the leaves and changing the light, or different buzzings on and off.

  With the turning of the afternoon the sun took a deeper slant; I came to a patch of pine stumps where the Squire had taken lumber the winter past. The stumps sat close together; boughs lay all about and pine needles covered the ground. In my long patrol I had circled fully around our huts to well below the village, perhaps a third of a mile on the Pukop side. Not far from home, then; good, time to rest; the stump I put my back against felt like a cushion; relieved of my weight, my feet on the ground before me tingled pleasantly. Hunger

  and the weariness which hides itself in the welcoming mind pushed me into closing my eyes, into a lonesomeness at once gloomy and protective, and I thought, “Let me wake up in my own bed, having dreamed this.” I made dreamlets of my brother’s face close to my parents’ as they sat around our table, and of Rochel and myself at the streamside, a longer spell; in a dizzying mix of joy and boyish sadness, kissing her again and again, happily “not here and not there,” in this way shutting my eyes against the immediate.

  This for a minute or ten; until from behind a new sound thrusting, a rustle in the bushes and behind them a pleasant “Well, we’re here” to a clinking of feet softly on small stones; then a “This for you, this for me,” as at the beginning of a picnic.

  Ah, he alone speaks. The peasant has led a girl into the woods, how shy she is yet, how kind his tone, how he anticipates. Against being accused with short words and hard blows of observing so intimate a celebration, I crawled toward an opposite thicket careful not to disturb the pine needles above the slightest, hearing him talking and eating.

  Stooping through the thicket and making the curve to the back- path, I glanced through the trees and saw them in a bit of a grove. My first thought was that Arkady Kluzanov must not see and again idiotically harangue me for his tip; nor might he like to be witnessed sitting cross-legged on the ground with a pot in one hand and a gesturing wooden spoon in the other, meanwhile maintaining the most lively speechifying at a goat tethered before him, paying no attention and eating calmly from its own pot.

  “Well, it can’t be denied I’m an authority on disorderly persons,” Arkady discoursed. “No, Dimitri’s not really clever, only shrewd. Now there’s where Profim has it over my brother; a villain out and out but he knows what he does. Yes, I might want to choke Profim some morning, which I’d never do to my brother but on the whole I hate Dimitri more. Wait, it follows! Simply, you see, when Profim looks in the mirror and sees his crooked face there is no argument; he blames himself and there is nothing to be done about him; the man sees himself yet doesn’t bother! Well, such are always found among

  the murdered! But my brother Dimitri, he will view himself and curse his crooked face and as we say, blame the mirror. Ah, among civil servants this i
s called a bold thought, it comes of being a postman too long. Do you think I live in GolinskP I only loiter here. Sleeping in the loft of Profim’s is tedious and cold besides in winter; sometimes I pay for a bed in ‘Heaven’ all to myself. The women there, I am something French to them, ‘spirituel.’ False, false, false, and false! Why, even Father Semyon isn’t immune, his housekeeper agrees and she’s my sister Oulia. When he sees me he says, ‘God loves you, Arkady, you are not like the rest.’ And what do you think the girls say to the men in ‘Heaven’? ‘I love you, you are not like the rest,’ only so they’ll come back again!” — and so on, for some minutes.

  I made to lift myself to my feet when a thick black snake with a shining skin swished past where I crouched; the yell I let out made the goat bleat and Kluzanov turned his head around.

  “All safe down here,” he called, friendly enough, with a wave of the spoon. Well, I’d stay on his good side awhile; going down to him I warned myself not to make a slip and call him Pig-Simple.

  “Here, see. It’s cider and hash we’re sharing today. Have a taste.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, sit anyway.” He pointed to the ground. “The snake is gone. Or is it me, eh?”

  “Yes,” I said honestly, with a gulp.

  “I’m a laugher today,” he assured me. To say something I asked if it was his goat. “No, it’s Father Semyon’s. But we are friends.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “We know, don’t we, old fellow?” he nodded to the goat. “Our guest thinks I am defective. Well, it’s not worth arguing. Yes, yes,” he continued lightly. “All swimming in the same sea . . . each saving himself as he pleases. . . .”