The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  Miss Faitoute shook her head.

  Berel said, “Wait ... it is helping Yegor burn something? Do I understand?” Mottel nodded and Berel said, “No good ... we would have to ride far, then . . . and you forget ... I wanted to look again at Golinsk.”

  He tried unsuccessfully to hide his disappointment. Lenka said, “Miss Faitoute is right, Mottel.” And to Berel in Yiddish, “We’ll see. . . .”

  “Having got him so near to it,” Uncle Mottel said, puffing his cigarette hard, “it’s bad to think of denying him his wish. But our best chance is Yegor.”

  “Uncle,” I cried in fear, “he put Tzippe-Sora in jail, I saw with my own eyes how he threw the tax man at us!”

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  “Sh . . . well . . . looking at it another way, then ...” He thought for a while, the others waiting, and he grunted a few times before he glanced at Lenka. “Maybe you, Lenka . . . let’s see . . .”

  He picked up a handful of stones and moved closer to the candle.

  We all watched. “Here’s the road,” he said, making two lines in the dirt with his finger, “and here is Yegor’s.” He put a stone down beside a point in one of the lines. “Pukop sits towards me . . . very well, now here we are,” putting another stone near his foot and away from the lines, “between us and the road, thick forest going downhill. When it’s darker, we strike for the road. Here.” He marked a line with his finger to a point on the road down from the tavern. “It’s a good half- mile from Yegor’s, about a mile from here to there through the woods. Next . . . we’re in the bushes near the road, it is already dark. Lenka — you and Miss Faitoute will walk the half-mile to Yegor’s. Miss Faitoute will be the tearful mother with a daughter just ravished by a soldier down the road . . . who paid nothing for the favor, clear?”

  “That again?” Miss Faitoute replied doubtfully.

  “Sergey swears it is your most sympathetic performance,” Uncle Mottel smiled.

  “We were lucky to win with it the other time,” Lenka said.

  “Not according to Sergey. But remember his criticisms, Lenka,” he teased. “Don’t cry too hard, simply sniff and look angry. Come, show me. . .

  “Consider the soldiers,” Miss Faitoute said. “Constables wouldn’t be too important.”

  “When it’s dark and a tavern’s near that’s where you’ll find soldiers, not in the woods. It’s an international trait.”

  “Enough nonsense,” Lenka said.

  “We’ll be here,” Uncle Mottel said soberly, tapping the stone that meant us near the road. “You will get the wagon, by what I know will work, and ride to us. It will be dark, but you will hear us singing Sergey’s little song just loud enough.”

  “And we’ll be in Minsk in four hours,” Timo said.

  Lenka and Miss Faitoute shook their heads but Uncle Mottel asked, “You know the song I mean?”

  “/ had a King though Ym no good at chess,” sang Timo through his

  nose.

  “That’s right,” from Uncle Mottel. “And if you’re not back in an hour, Timo and I will go to Yegor’s.”

  The way he said it showed this was his best thought and Lenka realized it was up to her to say yes or no. Without answering, she crawled up to the front of the cave and lifted the pile of thick boughs enough to allow a glimpse at the outside. “Soon dark,” she called back. Uncle Mottel began talking to Berel, combining gestures with silent slow mouthings. Lenka crawled back to Miss Faitoute and started whispering to her.

  I said to Timo, “Please say what it all means?”

  “They’ve done it before to get wagons. They’ll go into a place with their story and complain heavily about somebody taking Lenka and not even paying. Miss Faitoute then makes an arrangement with some eager fellow, and it’s to be done out in his wagon, you see ? Once they’re out there, he’s unconscious before he can open his fly.”

  “How?”

  “They choke him.”

  “But if they’re caught?”

  “They haven’t been.”

  “What are you all anyway — robbers?”

  “Ask your uncle.”

  “Ay A it went through me, “they’re Avengers .”

  I would have asked him about it immediately, but Miss Faitoute turned from Lenka and called to Uncle Mottel, “Very well . . . but look at the dirt on us, we should go first to the stream. . . .”

  “That’s right,” said Uncle Mottel very softly, happy, turning from Berel and crawling to Lenka quickly for it was too low in there to stand up. “Yes,” he said, touching her cheek with his fingers, “we must let them see how pretty you are.”

  She brushed away his fingers, her own lingering a moment upon his, then saying, “Over it once more,” and ag^in they bent to their lines and stones, deciding distances and times and searching their memories for landmarks. I was accustomed to the Golinsker way of chewing things over together, which was never quietly, soberly; here words were being

  counted as well as weighed as they estimated how they might live, without any fear in them that I could see. The morning already seemed years away, my months at the Squire’s compressed into some crucial prelude. What was the fountain of their calm, I wondered, and who was Sergey? And how could they be anything like Zasulich’s Avengers with Timo a gentile and Miss Faitoute from France so far away? As they settled the plan in each other’s minds every moment stretched and teemed for me; I needed answers as much as I needed to breathe, yet whenever I thought I saw a chance to ask my questions something more important happened.

  They appeared to be done with their diagramming and Uncle Mottel had picked up the stones, for some reason dropping them into his pants pocket, when Lenka said, “But perhaps we should better stay,” her Yiddish framing a hope of winning a wagon by other means, “until later at night when there are fewer about.”

  “That’s our time for traveling,” Uncle Mottel replied, “and the quicker on the way the better.”

  “The safer the start, the better,” replied Miss Faitoute. “We could snatch the wagon later.”

  “And be trapped by daylight?” he asked. “What a shame, after all the work of swinging Berel off the train! No, ladies . . . daylight must find us safely back in Minsk!”

  Berel had read enough from their lips to understand and said haltingly, “All right, but a night here ... just a night ... I’d bring water, and I saw berries . . . and,” he added with a shy twist of one side of his mouth, “to see Golinsk would be good too, having come this far. . . .”

  Lenka shook her head at him and drew a finger across her neck but Miss Faitoute said to Uncle Mottel, “He wants to see Golinsk,” making it sound proper that he should see it.

  Uncle Mottel showed some annoyance. With much mouthing and pantomime in which Timo collaborated, he explained to Berel for the second time that it was impossible to complete their original intention, reminding him of his previous promise to get him back for his precious

  visit, here emphasizing that Sergey would definitely arrange it. Berel neither argued nor surrendered, simply saying in a mumble, “I wanted to walk down my path once more, perhaps see somebody,” and I would have settled it there but could not find the words to let him know there was hardly anyone to see; let him believe his wife was alive, though the chances were against it; why give him that to carry?

  Uncle Mottel turned to Miss Faitoute. “Come on, help me. We’ll hardly get out of this, and without trying for Golinsk now.”

  “They’d grab us in Golinsk in a minute,” Lenka said.

  “Then convince him. He knows Sergey needs him badly for the Nizhny meeting.”

  “What Berel needs is also important,” Miss Faitoute said stubbornly.

  At this Uncle Mottel stood up quickly, forgetting the low ceiling, banging the top of his head against one of the beams. He swore in low tones, the words viler that way.

  “Are you bleeding?” Lenka said. “Let’s see.”

  “Not the point,” he said harshly, s
hoving her away. “No,” he said to Berel between his teeth, wanting more than anything to scream it, but controlling. “No, no, no,” he kept saying, each time less angry, more begging. “No, Berel, no, for our own sake at least. . . .”

  Seeing him so angry yet appealing, Berel blinked his eyes and turned his head away, letting his hand fall and rise and fall again.

  Timo went first, removing the boughs, showing the approaching twilight. The others crawled out one by one. Uncle Mottel blew out the candle. “Now you, Laib.”

  “Who is Sergey?”

  “A man. Go . . . we’ll talk in the wagon, on the way to Minsk. How would you like it in America?”

  “Are we all going, Uncle?”

  “We’re starting, now out. . . .”

  “Why does Sergey need Berel in Nizhny?”

  “If you were supposed to know, I would have told you. Now . . . don’t be afraid, it’s all right.”

  Again on the way ... in the gray of the morning deepening now,

  under the same stirring of wind, dawn and dusk always the same to me after then, my personal intermission; only now soldiers lay against us in cahoots with nature. Crouching one behind the other we twisted through thick brush, Timo and Berel leading; we passed trees marked with rocks Berel had placed for signs of the way to the stream; and we came there safely. In the summer it would not be much; for a few weeks the water would run with a temporary roar to it, just going into May, into some tributary of the Berezina. It was lighter there, a crack among the great oaks, the water’s sound marking the stillness of everything else, and we came to it as travelers from a faraway and ridiculous land of stupid turmoil, reveling in the sudden difference. Timo stripped to his bony skin and waded in to his armpits, shivering joyously as the water ran by him. Uncle Mottel squatted at the bank, put his hands in to his wrists, washed his face. Timo ran out and let Uncle Mottel rub him with small rocks until his skin reddened, and I gave him my overcoat for a towel. Meanwhile Lenka and Miss Faitoute were wading, their skirts drawn up high, Berel in the water to his knees washing their faces carefully with Miss Faitoute’s shawl.

  Timo threw my coat off and dashed in, unable to deny himself the encore, and went to Lenka after he had immersed himself, to shovel water up her skirt with his hand. She kicked him down and he did it once more, both laughing and hooting; and Uncle Mottel watching and enjoying but urging haste and less noise. I watched him watching Lenka becoming cleaner, the dirt being removed from her face by Berel, something most contented and admiring in the set of his neck and the clasp of his hands as he squatted not smiling but with his mouth open a little. When she started coming out of the water he took his blouse off and she sat by him and he dried her face and feet with the blouse, being thorough between her toes. When he was done, while wringing out his blouse, before putting it on again, she laid her cheek to his and said, “Smell me.” He sniffed and she helped him with his blouse, saying, “You smell filthy,” but gently. He shrugged the damp blouse down his torso, then touched her ear, and I saw it did not matter to them whether they were clean or filthy and it made me think

  Laib

  363

  they were married or wanting to be. Berel helped Timo dry and dress, Lenka went to Miss Faitoute. It was a family; this was home, soon they’d walk slowly back to their house and have supper and go to sleep in beds and it was crazy to think of sorrow, pain, and danger.

  Out of that, I asked, “Uncle, why am I the only one who is afraid?”

  “Because you are on your way to America and because you are a boy.”

  “Do you ever think of dying?”

  “Yes,” he said, giving his head a cocky twist and seeming surprised.

  He took the fiddle case from the ground beside me. “We’d better be rid of this in case of questions anywhere. It could be said you stole it. And there might be news sent of your escaping from the Squire meshing in with this pretty thing.”

  “Who told you?”

  “There you were,” amused thinking of it — yet with a deeper pleasure too, the picture of it holding a meaning I was too young to guess, belonging to the hard privacy of the denied — “like a baby in her arms, snoozing and waking, talking and snoozing ... so it was the wife and Ostrov, the Squire butting himself in his rear with his own horns. . . .”

  “Anything too about Arkip Apollonovitch and — ”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The father-in-law.”

  “Rezin, that’s right. . . . No.”

  “It’s the best part,” I said eagerly, the harsh comedy beginning to dawn on me. But the women were ready and he stopped me by reaching for the fiddle case and standing up. “This can’t go, what’ll we do with it?”

  Curious, the others watching, he took the fiddle out and held it up. “Nice. . . .” Then he gave a string a plunk with his thumb. “Remember that mandolin, Laib?” I didn’t say anything; I didn’t know when I’d ever be able to get another fiddle. “All right,” he said, “now before we do away with it, why don’t you take it and play something quietly . . . something like birds. . . .”

  “Did I say anything about my teacher . . . before?”

  “What teacher, Varya?”

  “No, Glueck. The Squire brought him, he — ”

  “On the way,” he reminded, “on the way we will exchange gists of everything. Quickly now. . . .”

  “Mottel,” spoke Lenka, warningly.

  “It’s all right. Let it mix with the birds and the water a little.”

  I did not know what to play that might sound like birds. I played the first thing in my head, without stresses, going easy on the bow: the Ave Maria , my favorite. The water seemed to rush faster to it, the birds stimulated likewise. A suspicious blackness had begun mixing into the gray light, twilight’s grip loosened, and the sky appeared to be lower and fighting to stay blue. I closed my eyes, the tone sounding stiff, and I was sorry not to have played for him in the cave where everything had reverberated.

  I felt his fingers on my cheek, and stopped in the middle. “It’s getting too dark,” he whispered. I opened my eyes. “It’s good, Laib.”

  He took the fiddle and I handed him the bow which he put into the case. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Timo and Miss Faitoute kneeling beside each other, their heads down, whispering to themselves. Lenka came and put her arm about me. Berel looked at me with a little smile and said, “I almost heard it.”

  The birds still chirping high, I said, “I played it on their Christmas and the Squire also knelt.”

  “It’s not the same here,” Uncle Mottel replied absently. “He never walked.”

  He stepped a bit into the stream, the water running over the toes of his boots. In a high arc, spontaneously, he let the fiddle fly out of his hands. I saw it bobbing and skipping a moment, atop the little springtime river, and away; then, picking it up and clicking it shut, the case. He called softly, “Well, religious ones,” and they rose.

  Silently Berel followed Uncle Mottel’s leading steps, the others behind in a single line. I stayed close to him until the brush ended. Coming to the edge of the tall trees Berel and Timo took the lead, we just behind. We went that way, through the unending thick grove, a

  downhill slant to our steps soon beginning, the light giving way more and more, and when it became almost dark I whispered, “How far?”

  “Not far,” Uncle Mottel said. “Don’t think, hold my hand.”

  A shot burst from the left, then another from the right.

  “Ho,” Uncle Mottel whispered. We stopped. Lenka moved to us, the others motionless.

  “Signaling?” she whispered.

  “Maybe. Each to a tree. Not near and not far. We’ll see.”

  Lenka drifted back to Miss Faitoute; I followed Uncle Mottel to Berel and Timo. He gave Berel a revolver I did not know he had. I heard Berel sigh; I could not see his face. They separated and stood each against his own tree, all but me; I couldn’t leave him.

  We waited.

  Then ano
ther shot from the right and a second later one from the left, both louder.

  “Signaling?” I whispered, imitating Lenka.

  He took my hand and guided me to her tree. “Joining,” he told her. “Take him. And no changes, the plan remains.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll follow.”

  There was enough light to see the white of her teeth. She said, “But the soldiers . . .”

  “What they’ll do for me they won’t for their God,” he whispered. “They’re only two, now all right . . . until I hear you singing Sergey’s song.”

  She kissed him briefly. He said to me, “Do not be afraid, the night is our friend.”

  I would have kissed him but Lenka held my hand and was already in motion.

  After a few steps I twisted my head back. A tiny bit of white stood out of the dark, the stub of his unlit cigarette doubtless in the exact center of his mouth. I could frame his face around it, and that’s how I saw him then and again and again and no other way at all.

  # # #

  I never found out how Berel escaped from Siberia or who Sergey was or what common harness these five had braced themselves into. From them I received experience of the conduct of heroes and of how these grow like weeds over the world, it being the luck of history that promotes some to flowers. Such were these, unnoticed, but true blooms anyway.

  Just for that it was never worth merely to put on clothes every morning and take them off at night, to eat and sleep and go to the bathroom for its own sake. The thing was to refuse to reconcile to what was held proper or worthless in view of the prevailing, ever to be contemptuous of such arrogant advertising. Thus I said No running from the huts and from the Squire straight to Uncle Mottel and No again later to my nephew Aaron in America, and now again and forever, No.

  We made the road that time, all but Berel and Uncle Mottel; perhaps because of them, since we had shooting behind us.

  We waited for them long in the bushes of the roadside, until Lenka and Miss Faitoute went back into the forest, refusing to allow us with them. So it was Timo and I after that, and if it wasn’t off my point I could give you a cowboy and Indian tale of how Timo’s ingenuity wormed us to Minsk in four days, he nourishing the mystery of Sergey to the last, silent to my questions “until we come to Minsk, so if we’re caught they won’t squeeze anything out of us.” Our final maneuvered wagon ride ended in a Minsker open-air junk market. Timo said he had to go somewhere but would return; meanwhile I sold my overcoat there, and when Timo did not return at all I went into the first street I saw, muddy and lined with shops. One had a sign with Yiddish lettering; I looked inside, I was beckoned, and that began my longest journey.