The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  “Kindly, Arkady . . . tonight I’ll bring you your tip . . . but now I must go home. . . .”

  “As you wish. Yes, I’m a defective,” he admitted calmly. With a

  wide wave of the wooden spoon he demanded, “But did you ever meet up with a convulsionary?”

  “No.”

  “They wander everywhere, boundless ones . . . seeking God in different places. And when believing they’ve found Him, how they lie down and convulse themselves!”

  “Please, Arkady . . . I’ll go now.”

  “You needn’t hurry ofi,” he assured me. “I’m not like the rest. Whether it’s a Jew or not they’d kill doesn’t matter, I shrug equally. Do you know I went into your church once?”

  “Yes ... but . . .”

  “Wait, wait! I wanted to make sure I was not like the convulsion- aries ... if God is in the Jewish church, I thought, then surely He must be everywhere and it is nonsense to wander after Him. Yes. and He was there, so I cried happily . . . not wishing to be like the boundless ones.” He grinned to himself. “Ah, my brother Dimitri . . . he beats me because he fears I will beat him someday. I see how he lives. . . .”

  I took a chance and asked, “Do you know my brother, the fiddle- boy?”

  “The one who Varya ... ?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bad . . . very bad that a boy frequents that place.”

  “I’ve been looking for him, he’s lost. Perhaps here about the woods.”

  “Oh, looking for your brother. It’s simple, then.” He got up and untethered the goat. “Come along. It is solved.”

  Holding his pots in one hand and the goat’s rope in the other he led me to the path turning toward the Pukop side. “It won’t be long,” he said. He did not turn with the narrow path; I saw him pushing the balky goat through some low-hanging bushes.

  “But I thought you were sure, where Laib is . . . ?”

  “The goat is sure.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I am not used to these things,” I managed to say.

  Very well; the goat took it into his head to face the village. With each step I became more terrified; I would be seen; I would be accused of stealing Father Semyon’s goat or be jollied with as Pig- Simple’s companion. The goat stopped to look at a shanty some fifty yards from the village. “Ah, there it is,” said Kluzanov, taking the rope. The goat bleated.

  “I don’t want to go there, it’s Oblanski of the police.”

  “But that’s where the goat is looking!”

  “I’m afraid of Kuizma.”

  He pointed to the goat. “Well, now,” Kluzanov said, “you mustn’t offend.”

  The door closed, everything deserted. We went to the back and saw an old woman next to a blackened pot hanging over a fire by a braced hook. The sun, already quite low, had moved behind some clouds; everything lay dreary. The woman looked as worn as a skull, all bones and eyes, no teeth, hardly any lips, a shawl pulled tightly about her head.

  “Who’s here, Mama?” said Kluzanov easily.

  With a patient whine, “You’ve made the dog bark.”

  She picked up a stick, waved it at the dog, then stirred the shirt boiling in the pot. “Go away.”

  “This boy has lost his brother.”

  “He isn’t here.”

  “Kuizma must know where he is, then.”

  “Whose are you?” she asked.

  “You wouldn’t be acquainted,” I said.

  “The goat,” the old woman screeched. The dog had tried to surprise the goat but was in a rage of barking against the alert horns nicking him away. The door opened. It was Kuizma, barefoot, his blouse open. “What’s the disturbance here?”

  “Be a good fellow, Kuizma,” Kluzanov said, “say where his brother

  “What kind of brother?”

  Shim 249

  “He had a new suit and shoes,” I chattered quickly. “Laib; he was confirmed today.”

  “Jews, do I have to lose sleep over Jews?” he demanded of the old woman.

  “You see how it is,” she said to me.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” I said to Oblanski.

  “If you knew what they tried in Pukop you’d be more than sorry? Don’t come with Jew-yarns about ‘lost brothers’ who’ve run away disloyally! Things are happening, look out for the stick!”

  He stepped back and gave us the door in our faces. The old woman murmured, “He was sleeping.”

  “That way Kuizma won’t ever rise higher,” Kluzanov said, “though he yearns for the courier’s uniform with flaps so that he may legally and dutifully beat and beat with sticks, whips, spitzrutens . . . well, we’ll go.” He patted the goat’s head. “Come, fellow, no more tricks.”

  The old woman pointed behind the house. “In the fields. Nothing hides itself there long.” With a wave of her hand, all bones and hollows: “When Kuizma pulled apples from the trees he was not so fat. Then the uniform, boots, ‘orders’ . . . and his bowing a goodmorning to his wife! Luck, boy.”

  “Don’t fear,” said Kluzanov, “he’ll be found.”

  “Some other time,” I said with a dig of my feet and flying away, knowing Arkady could not catch me for he had to hold the goat.

  Between evening and last prayers all had the same to say. Nochim had passed; toward the end he had commanded the Burial Brotherhood to summon Varya to him. The talk went that the Brotherhood had hesitated yet had feared to disobey a dying wish. Tzippe-Sora had fetched the woman, for what purpose never revealed, Nochim sending all but Varya outside and the woman herself leaping quickly through the door and away; a puzzle.

  Everyone told Maisha they regretted their attacks. “His putting the perfume in the prayer book wasn’t your fault,” Yeersel emphasized. “Berel-the-Ox said a right thing, Reb. The blame lies on us all. We pushed him to spend time with Mottel when we feared what the free-

  thinker might do if he found out where we would have buried him.”

  “I most of all,” Maisha kept repeating, relieved.

  “Come eat with us, then,” Yeersel said.

  “The matters one allows himself to ignore,” Reb sighed, walking with us.

  The meal was strange. Terribly hungry for not having eaten since before the confirmation, we hardly touched the good things on the table, only nibbling. “Well, we’ll feast another time,” Rochel said, putting the soup and chicken away. Once in New Roseville my son Aaron failed to arrive for a birthday dinner Rochel had cooked. We waited, hungry, until five o’clock, but everything lost its taste when it came to eating. I remember Rochel putting the food back into the pots. “Just the same as the day Nochim died and Laib’s confirmation, Shim.” Well, yes; during such times even food can’t fill the space.

  Usually on Saturday nights the elders went to the synagogue after supper to discourse on the sayings of the great Hasids and other ancient lores, with or without a little brandy. On this night, however, a vigil needed to be kept at Nochim’s and respects paid so the meeting confined itself to particular points of the moment. The mentions of Varya tingled me and I had to restrain myself from telling all about Laib’s fiddling, before seeing him first. The meeting decided that Zagzaigel should take over his father’s dairy routes and that Sholem be put to work with Zish and made into a lumberman. The Parsovs would be cutting timber and Zish needed the help, after which the two might begin to make harness and whips; Yeersel volunteered the use of his new horse, and Hertz the grease when it came time for tanning; and among all enough would be scraped together to buy the first stock, at least, of raw fur. Laib too would have to settle into something; being Maisha’s helper was no good; he would never become the beadle and to try to make a tailor of him was also thought bad, there being neither room for another nor such an inclination on his part. “Let’s wait until he comes back,” I said. “We’ll sit down with him then.”

  “He won’t do what’s decided without him,” Berel-the-Ox said. They

  all went to Nochim’s
. I found Rochel and walked with her toward the highroad. “It’s night and he isn’t here yet,” she said.

  “He might not come back at all.”

  Rochel said, “Shim, I know a place we forgot to look.”

  “No”

  “The bath!”

  “He wouldn’t be there now.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Our bath stood near the synagogue down from the huts, in a clearing near the path to the stream. I remember as a boy we* had only barrels to bathe in; and the women, for their periodic ceremonial baths, a wooden tub chinked with clay and kept in Tzippe-Sora’s cattle-shed. One year the whole lot of us walked around holding poultices, suffering risings and great scalings all over our bodies because we bathed so poorly. We had had a bath which some years before had ended its long life in a blizzard, collapsing beyond repair; but “in the year of the poultices” Tzippe-Sora managed to get ten rubles together and buy several dozen of the Squire’s smaller pine trees, her sons cutting and hauling them with our help; also some peasants worked with us in the splitting and building for a couple of kegs of Tzippe-Sora’s homemade brandy. We laid a sloping floor and a corner section for the women’s ceremonials, and later some benches, the outside cracks being chinked with good thick moss, and inside we used clay and whitewash; for years afterward we thought of it proudly as the “new” bath.

  Well, of course no Laib. I jumped into the tub, felt all about in the dark while Rochel tapped the benches. I kept saying foolishly, “Don’t worry, it’s us, Laib — Shim and Rochel.” Climbing up and sitting, Rochel next to me, I received unexpected thoughts, seeing Varya’s thick legs out from under her wrapper again, and then Rochel’s white thinner ones. I wanted to kiss her, take liberties, say anything. But she would become angry. This bound itself into the tightness of the whole day and I said, “Rochel, let me sit alone awhile.”

  She went out. All right; this was how one became alone. I alone, Laib alone somewhere if not worse than alone, with the woman, a double outcast; his feet on the wrong road, without father and mother and away even from my own childish will to be as a father to him. I began to cry in low flows out of pain that had pushed itself slowly and deeply in and would not go away.

  How long after, perhaps a minute? Rochel’s open hand patted my sleeve. For the first time she called me by my intimate name. “Don’t, Shimmel.”

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I stood outside, and then — it’s all right, Shimmel, to cry,” she added.

  “It does good?”

  “Then . . .” she said without finishing; and we sat.

  After a time I put a hand to her face, first on one cheek and then the other; against her chin; on her brow; over each eye; to her ears. It was too dark to see but this was the first time I saw what she was. Her eyes were wide, a real half of an O under the pupils. Her nose was strong and big, the lips with small ridges near the corners; but the thing was her hair, curled and not very neat, falling behind her ears but already a little pile staying on top, exactly the hair of one who thinks through feelings; altogether under my fingers, a face tired yet awake, a dignity there. The way she sat quietly, then taking my hand, that moment began a century; she thought only of me.

  “I’m no good,” I whispered. “My fault about Laib . . . Papa and Mama are dead, and Nochim . . . and I’ll die and Laib and everybody. . . .”

  She put her hands to me and laid my head to her neck. “Say, say anything,” she whispered.

  I cried; not as before but knowing she heard, knowing she knew why, and here I took my first step from childishness. This with her came from deeper than a kiss, a fuller opening of the heart letting something not out but in.

  “Shim”

  “What?”

  “Could Nochim lay a curse on Varya? For making you-know-what with Laib?”

  “She didn’t. Perfume, yes. But that’s all.”

  “Truly?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Who said?”

  “My uncle. I was there.”

  “In there?”

  “After synagogue. I saw them. She taught Laib to play fiddle there.”

  “Then it’s nothing, thank God!”

  “They’re both away, Rochel. I think Uncle fixed it so. He wants Laib away from us.”

  “Where away?”

  “The gentile world, one of their fiddlers . . . who knows?”

  “You’re sure?”

  “We’ll see. . . .”

  “Shim, tell me if I’m wrong. If they went away in a two, Laib and Varya, around that place of hers they might be able to say for sure. Somebody . . . even to say where they went . . . then we might get him back, it’s not too late.”

  “Perhaps . . . only . . .”

  “Shim . . . let’s try; if it’s truly a two then they can’t say a curse drove her away. Not so?”

  “Yes, only . . . maybe my uncle’s there. He’ll fall upon me with two feet.”

  “Then let’s tell Papa.”

  “Not him or anybody yet,” I said quickly. “It’ll only go worse. You know my uncle.”

  “All right, just you and me.”

  “You mustn’t go near such a place, Rochel.”

  “I’ll wait from far, then.”

  “It must be full in there. They’d be too busy to bother with me.”

  “Think what’s going around! Let them only believe about a ‘J ew ~ curse’ and you know already what.”

  “The Squire, Buzarov . . Yes, from such bitter greens what a hate they could cook against us. It had to be done; she was right. “Well,” I hesitated, “let me think what to say to them.”

  “On the way,” she urged.

  We went behind the last row of huts, not to be seen, waiting until we passed the village to cross the highroad and approach “Heaven” from the woods the rear way. From just inside the woods we fumbled down to even with the back of the house, seeing the lights and hearing the noises, a piano playing in bad snatches, laughing going up and down, then pieces of quiet. “I’ll wait here,” Rochel said, giving me a push.

  “Let me think what to say at least, instead of going with potatoes in my mouth!”

  “Ask where Varya went. Say there’s a message you must give Laib, and hear the answer . . . make out you know Laib’s with her and listen if they sound the same way . . . then say there’s money coming to Varya and where should it be sent? . . . and that’s all.”

  “Good,” I said. “Yes, one of the other women there, that’s who. . .

  “Use respect, Shim . . . understood?”

  “Such a head I never thought you had.”

  “Quickly, quickly . . . say more such, later.”

  Waiting for Arkady Kluzanov to open the back door, wondering what his face would look like when he saw me again (would he suppose I’d brought his “tip?” Another difficulty, not a penny in my pocket.), I knocked. “It’s in God’s hands,” I whispered, knocking a second time. I waited minutes; still no one. A tumult of many in one room rose louder than my final knocks; I pushed the door open and went down the dark hallway to the noise, first going up some short steps.

  The light improved, the banisters of dark wood shining polished in a golden splash from the room filled with the hiba-hiba of the debauch taking place on the ground floor. From behind the banisters I looked

  into the room strongly lit, two lamps on top of the piano and a third from the ceiling, a smallish room overcrowded with more peasants than women, lying on benches, slumped about in chairs, a woman’s head on one chest, her rear on another, her feet in a third’s face; with all the unmixed laughing and waving of hands and shaking of bellies and kicking of feet, everything pressed together, it was some dream peeped into, exactly someone else’s dream. A loud senseless bravado; everything outside loosely forgotten as all lay in one curl around the room like parts of a big twisted snake of light and dark colors, the women’s partly dressed white flesh, the men’s brown bare feet and dark beards, a green wrapper, a blue arou
nd the ripped faded red carpet; all of them playing little by-games and watching the main thing, you see, the show. . . .

  In the center of the room, Arkady Kluzanov stood crazily present behind his goat, the same one of the afternoon, pushing its front legs up around my brother Laib’s shoulders. I’d last seen Laib in his brand-new confirmation suit but he was wearing old filthy pants too large for him and no shoes, with Arkady clucking and cooing drunkenly, “No, boy, no, boy,” pushing the goat closer to my brother who backed away to be again shoved toward the goat by the bare foot of a peasant behind him.

  “Don’t ever hire a mistress,” advised Kluzanov wildly. “No, boy, no, boy.”

  The goat stood willingly, the beard quite mature, an eagerness in its back haunches pushing it forward with Kluzanov behind it grunting, “Boy, boy,” at Laib in the impatient manner of a teacher to a dullard. My brother parried with his knee, shouting, “No”; each time, the women giggled higher and the peasants made urging remarks to him out of their laughing. One put out her foot and hand toward Arkady as if to stop him; the peasant who had her around the middle pulled her back.

  I saw nothing evil there, only the other side of the tedium of Golinsk, higher and noisier than the everyday thrash. But thrash-high or thrash- low, it was still with their heads under water; no relief, too much between them and the highest truths; whereas our side knew what not

  256 The Landsmen

  to expect from the world and so looked further. But the main thing; I had found Laib.

  From above, a quick pattering of boots down the stairs. Uncle Mottel jumped into the room. With a shout in two jumps he yanked Laib away from the goat and pushed him toward the hallway, yelling, “Out of here!” Thus freed Laib flew past me into the hall, not seeing me, and I followed, hearing a harsh banging of some weight on the keys of the piano and then a wild mix of screams from the women. Passing through the back door I heard the screams continuing and my uncle shouting.