by Peter Martin
“Why?”
“It was my fault, but no sin. The Evil Eye’s on me, that’s all.”
“I didn’t know you and the Evil Eye were such friends, Laib.”
“Never mind jokes. . . .”
“I’m serious, Laib. Just for the sake of the Evil Eye you’re leaving your brother to roam the enemy’s land, helping them to kill you?”
I stopped the horse and kissed him. “Forgive them, Laib. They called you names only from too much pain. Imitate your gentle father, may he rest, and think of how the next one might grieve.”
“Papa never imitated anyone,” he muttered, “and neither will I.”
But this was said with his fire going down and had I ever gotten back to Golinsk he would have been with me. In Yegor’s tavern something waited.
It was a different Yegor, the real one. “He’s here,” he whispered, “behind me in the corner, Tzip. The one with the cheeks, a new tax man. He’s been waiting two days.”
“Your papers,” he asked, coming to me. “Your permit to sell.”
Laib waited outside on the wagon and I tried what should have worked. “I have my papers, sir, but they’re home. Let me drive by tomorrow and you’ll see such papers, sir! You’ll count, may I say, to an interesting number!”
Quite with respect he seemed not to hear my offer. He said, “This man has confessed he bought from you without paying for tax stamps. Admit you sold, admit!”
I wailed to Yegor, “What have I to admit? Confess for yourself, not for me.”
Well, words; but I saw I was sold and I let the tax man lead me out. He examined the wagon and the horse, hopped up next to the frozeneyed Laib; and so I fell into the correctest hands.
In the Pukop jail they kept me separated from Laib; what they did with him I don’t know. They brought me in time to a judge with the beard of Moses. He asked if I was guilty and I said yes, it was my own doing entirely, the boy was innocent and the landsmen did not know what I had done. Once given his pass, he played the light-bearer with me. “Speak anything, woman. It’s your right.”
“Excellence,” I said, “I have no bad word for anyone, especially the Golinsk officials.”
“Strange you speak so highly of them, woman. They say you’re the coldest shrew of a bandit.”
“Then, Excellence, maybe we’re all mistaken.”
“Ah, we have a wit here,” he laughed. “I ought to put you into some pockets around here to lighten the legal tedium!”
“If so,” I smiled, “they’d have more law in their pockets, perhaps, than in their heads.”
Again my fate-maker laughed. “How so shining a wit, to have fallen so low!”
“Yes, Excellence, it’s a pity. Or is the world itself too high? Yes, difficult sometimes to push the world away with the hands. Often a knife is needed.”
His brow became cold and smooth and his face returned to itself.
Sternly, then, he said between times of lip-smacking, “Those who assign their crimes to bad luck forfeit mercy. You have equaled yourself with any animal. You wanted money, I see, for a serious and decent motive, and that was how you hoped to disguise your crime ? Did you not attempt to corrupt your betters? Yourself certainly — but I ask, what of your betters who must nourish our motherland?”
This and more; the end being seven years for liquor traffic, seven years for attempted bribery; seven years for both, together; a little present from my polite barbarian of a judge.
It was neither good nor bad in that Nikolayev Prison. No markets or Squires, and some politicals taught me reading and writing a bit. In prison one slips away from one’s self, losing even one’s own stink; and what’s outside is soon lost without caring.
Letters from Dvoora stopped after the third year. In the beginning were mentions of runnings in twos and threes (whether good or bad left unknown or unsaid, whether the children taken or hidden, where left or retrieved, not written), but that Maisha died, and Asher and Naftoli-Dovid; and in ’88 the stricken Squire heaved up the cemetery for oats. And after ’89, no more from Golinsk.
All my joints stiffened in Nikolayev. I turned so like rock that I could not hold the crutches after a year, and the last few I was never off the pallet. Then after the seventh year they let me go to be carried by a rabbi’s friends to another pallet in Odessa’s Moldavanka but I became too great a burden there and they carried me up the shore to Limon, on the Sea.
I sat on the sand begging pennies to buy the medicine-mud in that resort of the sickly, among others crippled stiff but in booths and with nurses, carriages, and parasols. And I sat five years in that last market of mine, my crutches on each side of me, my hands out. I grew into a landmark there, each summer being recognized by the poorer. Often in the heated middays I lived in dreamlets of my children dead and away, always pleased my husband Bencha could not see my ending, always in the sun and always burnt by it but never warm.
The cleaner dirtied me. Theirs was a low guilt, my own much higher. See by what doubtful roads I returned to myself, let others blame the villains; I say there are higher blames. But since nothing ends or comes too late, and happy the generation wherein the clever listen to the fools, here, to the last, is my only song:
When the wind of pigs thickens the air,
And it stands even whether to run or stay,
Neither fear the exodus
Nor look to bribe the pigs away.
If you’d run, make the bold step quickly,
And if you’d stay, still your own place loving For all the foulness of it there,
Stay. But clean the air.
I only bribed,
Held I was right too long,
And became wrong.
9 . Laib
(1874-193x)
I’m back, 1 didn’t finish:
Me, Uncle Mottel, the fiddle. The whole idea of chasing a music rolling down the Squire’s hill one hot summer night, and the effects . . . Varya, her perfume in the synagogue, Nochim sending her away, Kluzanov’s goat upon me; then the assembly, the conscriptions and the eight running with Yeersel, and Berel grabbed for Siberia. Also the soldiers, the end of Baylah, the synagogue burning, Tzippe-Sora folded away in the Nikolayev Prison.
All right; arrested at Yegor’s tavern with Tzippe-Sora, held separate from her in the Pukop jail, brought back to Golinsk the next morning in the wagon of Vassily Buzarov, he explaining on the way, “We didn’t want this trouble. V/hile she did her crooked business in our own neighborhood, we could look the other way.” But the local gentlemen had now put themselves on guard; all I would have to do, Vassily pointed out, was “explain how she alone pursued the crime”; in other words, hide the bribery of the incorruptibles. He pressed to no immediate answer, in Golinsk taking me to the village hall where Kuizma Oblanski gave me a wooden cell in the basement all to myself.
A few days passed, they trying to make me answer their way. When left alone I would play fiddle and try without success to think of reasons to do as they were requesting. Rezatskin brought the Squire to me, Konstantin Andreyevitch Konayev, who spoke quizzical threats as he walked back and forth in the little room, his boots shining from under his coat. Though not much taller than our Nochim was he carried himself with the set of a giant in his own mind. I feared he
would not see my fiddle in the scanty light, and step on it. Seeing me pick it up he asked where I had got it.
“From my uncle.”
“You play it?”
“Yes”
“Who taught you?”
“Varya.”
He said he’d like “to hear a bit of Varya coming out,” so I did a gypsy piece I remembered from that summer’s Pukop Fair. “Rezatskin,” the Squire said with charitable languor, “I’ve heard worse from better players. Isn’t it our duty to pluck a flower out of the weeds, now and then?”
“This one doesn’t pluck,” the sour clerk replied.
“Here’s a boy, a fiddler. Let’s take him for tutoring instead of sending him back to Pukop for the trial. We’ll notif
y the Pukop Council officially and I’ll be dining with the Colonel Commander in any case. It is interesting!”
Rezatskin’s eyes shone. “You are the one for the Tsar to keep on his right hand,” said the clerk with relieved snivels.
“We’ll take him up the hill tomorrow,” he announced while buttoning his coat. “Yes, you will play, you will do nothing but play your fiddle. Yes, Petersburg, I’m coming.”
I heard him telling Rezatskin as they went, “Hot water in the barrel for this boy — to the brim.”
Very well; chosen for a hobby then, for amusement in an elevated manner. The Squire gave himself something interesting to boast of to his Petersburg intelligentsia; he had a protege and he would show them that even in the distant nowhere of Golinsk there lived one who knew how to extend a hand to anything artistic, be it found even in a small Jew. So it started, between him and me, and how it finished I would not have believed even if I read it in Balzac. Yet, ridiculously, it did happen. Understand — since the moment he had married, the Squire’s days had stretched themselves before his face like rubber bands which snapped back and stung. With every sunrise another
soldier had been added to the army of his enemy. The longer he had waited for Arkip Apollonovitch to die, the longer the inheritance had eluded him; year after year he had felt merely older and further from his true era. Arkip Apollonovitch’s prepared tomb had remained empty; and who knew when his own dozing paresis would wake for breakfast? Meanwhile there had been no entry into those comptroller’s halls where crudities could not live, where the graceful possession of unlimited funds filled the air with wondrous chemical lifts causing love to fall like rain and muffling the sounds of all clocks. Hating the ruble-pinched infestments by which he was surrounded, the Squire had filled his days as one fills a swamp until he had seen in me the means of being accepted by the aristocrats of Petersburg. It had been a modest wish. He would have liked to have been remembered as “self-emancipated from provincialism,” “a savior of genius plucked from offal,” “our little patriotic Konayev” — on such terms hoping to be displayed to foreign ambassadors at official parties as an amusing but relevant example of true Slavic strivings — with perhaps, due to the connection with Arkip Apollonovitch, the luck of some expensepaying post thrown in. However, Arkip Apollonovitch had not yet sent him the crucial letter revealing a need of help for an epochal loan which would transform this original whim into the project to bring him all he yearned for, and while Arkip Apollonovitch still lived. Fie on Petersburg footmanisms! Little neglected Kolya from Golinsk would get him his loan, make him a Duke! What rewards! And the trump? Me; my fiddle was supposed to win the opera singer who held the top card, but more about this later.
After he left me alone in the basement-jail, I tried to cheer myself up by reminding myself that jail was jail, and that if I was to be his personal prisoner he might think to drop a little mercy on the other side of the road.
Deep October was hurrying to winter when I became a member of the Squire’s menagerie. The time he occupied himself in Petersburg, about two weeks, I was put among the servants in a place over the
stable. My main comrade was Vassily’s fifteen-year-old son, Ossip. Short for his age and fat (the cook Lubenka his mother), Ossip cut wood, chased the cows home, and looked to make use of me in a way that showed something not bad in him. He said he would catch a bear cub during the winter and teach it tricks. He would take it to the city. I would go along and play the fiddle while the bear did tricks, including dancing. From Minsk we’d go further, even in the winters we’d have a gay city life, the bear dancing on skates in fashionable winter parks, and after that we would join some circus and become acquainted with life as it was not seen in Golinsk. “Well, fiddler . . . do you agree?”
“Catch the bear first.”
Ossip wanted to jump in with the coachman’s daughter. Her mother was Natalya, the chief maid, and her father was Rodion Kluzanov, Pig-Simple’s brother. Sashenka happened to be a strong and well- contained young lady, alert for her fourteen years, and she found it easy to ignore his teasing. One day he said, “Be good about something and I will show you how you can see that other one of yours here, the pigsticker, fair?”
I replied eagerly, “What’s fair?”
“When Sashenka comes to clean your alcove, go to a certain place and there he’ll be.”
“And if it’s said to be my fault?”
“Your fault,” he said disgustedly, pushing me to the floor with his ham of a hand; but at least I had found out that Laib-Shmul was somewhere about the manor.
After a few cold evenings they allowed me to sleep on the floor of the Kluzanov kitchen. I heard them cursing “the Madame” more than once, so I asked why the Squire’s mistress was so hated. Sashenka explained, “Madame is not the wife, she is the governess to the two girls.”
“But they’re old enough to be married.”
“Old enough and that’s all.”
Between Sashenka and Ossip I learned that Madame was the aristocrat of the servants. She lived in the main house and called the mistress
“Tatya.” A girlhood chum, she had broken a hip before Tatiana Arki- povna’s marriage to be left with a bad limp and a tiny income after her father died, remaining a lonely seamstress in Smolensk until Tatiana Arkipovna had remembered and rescued her. Given a proper home Madame “helped” prepare the daughters for married life. Sa- shenka dropped several jealous remarks about her. “She steals,” said Sashenka with a spit, “all the time. Her room’s full of little things, that’s why she doesn’t allow anyone in to clean. In case she’s left out of the will.”
I’ll go a bit ahead and say that Leta and Lilli were no prizes, in fact innocent freaks around which Madame manipulated her self-advertised expertness in the husband-catching game. By her own testimony she had visited many fashionable spas with her sick father and had absorbed methods. Each summer she would plan lantern balls for the officers up for maneuvers, bitter failures resulting, and then spend the winter planning for the next summer. Madame’s main activity in addition to providing the house with noises passing for female whimsies was her habit always of spraying the girls upon the slightest excuse with the perfume sprayer carried with her at all times. The house acquired some stale hints of a garden smell. Madame’s bad hip made extra use of her arms necessary, some touch of grace and gaiety to her movements. She always prepared the girls’ entrance into a room by making quick stt-stts! in the air with her sprayer, her arms moving upward in circles.
Early one morning a week after I arrived, Ossip told me I was wanted in the kitchen of the main house. A tall blond lady of about fifty was there and gave me a coat with a double row of buttons. “This was Leta’s,” she said. “Put it on.” It was tight at the waist and snug in the shoulders, but warm.
Seeing she didn’t limp as she went back into the house, I knew it was Tatiana Arkipovna. Three heads taller than the Squire, her face lay hardened in hollows, a strong and regular expression to it, full lips, eyes wide apart, a thoughtful nature.
“They’re madly in love,” Lubenka said in a satisfied tone, “he with
himself and she with herself,” bending to pick up wood for the stove and hurl it in. Natalya nodded, peeling apples into a pot. “Sashenka went the last winter in chills and sweats, and she had the coat upstairs all the time, twice a week saying, ‘Natalya, remind me about Leta’s coat, it will do for Sashenka. 5 A whole winter of ‘Natalya, remind me.’ A good warm coat! Ekh, her word was warm,” and she spit into the apples.
Lubenka and Natalya insulted the girls without pleasure. They were ugly, stupid, dirty, backward, and helpless. “And let the country be invaded,” Lubenka finished, “from the north, south, east, and west every year for fifty years and they’d still be virgins.”
Having now a warm coat I yelled to Ossip against the bugs and stable filth and in favor of a bath. Vassily told Ossip to build a fire in the yard and fill a barrel with warm water, down in the barn. The luck went furt
her. Once he started the fire he turned the job over to Laib- Shmul and went off somewhere. No longer rough, burly, gruff, he had gone to all straight lines, the quick-to-boil melted out of his eye, his face reduced like a bear’s carried to some tropical place, his beard longer but thinner. Saddest' of all he spoke with a mouth half opened, a stone in his ear, nothing but a mumble coming out, his head to a side. But I could speak to him in relaxing Yiddish.
“Laib-Shmul, anything heard about our side?”
“Only from the simpleton. Arkady. Comes begging sometimes from his brother here. It’s true? He put you here to fiddle for him?”
“Better than jail, anyway. Anything of Shim, Laib-Shmul?”
“Ay, a done thing,” he said in wonder. “God moving the hands of a simpleton to take a Jewish body to Minsk in a wagon, free. In Minsk they say they have places for ship-tickets.”
“Shim? On the way to America?”
“Not Shim, Rochel . . .”
“Rochel running to Minsk?”
Laib-Shmul nodded, his tragedy to be where he was. “A week ago, or two.”
“And otherwise?”
Laib 28 y
“Sickness, burials. Arkady says many things, who knows what to believe?” A momentary shine of the old Laib-Shmul came out. “I’ll run anyway, in winter.”
“Who can run in winter, Laib-Shmul!”
“Ask who can chase in winter?”
“Wolves.”
Ossip returned with fresh pants and a blouse. Laib-Shmul rose from his squat and trotted of? without another word.
Towards evening Vassily Buzarov took me across the yard into the main house. I followed him through the kitchen into a dark wide hall. “Up,” he said, pointing to the grand staircase. “There’s been a letter,” he added in a puzzled way. He took a candle from a stand to one side of the massive balustrade and led me two flights up to the room bigger than any of our huts, the bed as high as my shoulder.
“He says you’re to live here until he comes. The closet is in the hall.”
The first thing was to go with my candle and look at the toilet-closet in the hall, a new thing. It had an enameled pot with a removable seat- rim and special handles to make it easy to carry out. Back in the room, going about from corner to corner with the candle, I saw the stove and how big houses were heated. It was a stubby one built into the wall between colored tiles on both sides for about five feet and to the ceiling, to hold the heat; also a wood-bin and a poker, and the stove had been fired. Next, opening the packages; it was a wardrobe that fitted almost perfectly, warm drawers, socks, boots, a cadet-type suit and a gray overcoat with an astrakhan collar and cap. I put the cap on and went to the mirror, quite seeing myself in the big sled, being carried back and forth on the Squire’s hill, already a member importantly connected to the main reception hall running the length and half the width of the stone lodge with “his” sitting room, “her” sitting room, “the Gallery,” and on the second floor various bedrooms and the suite for guests. My own room was on the third floor down the hall from the Squire’s private study. I did not think whether this was good or bad, only that such was my location in the house I never dreamed I would enter. From the outside, with its rows of wide windows divided into small regular