The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  The door opened and closed before I could turn to see who it was. In the dark I caught the smell of horses and as the man stepped closer the smell grew stronger. “Well, now,” he said, speaking in Russian. But no voice in Golinsk was deeper than his; that and the smell told me it was Mottel.

  “You? . . ”

  “Tell me, Maisha,” he said, going into Yiddish, “what have you been teaching yourself lately?”

  “Go away,” I begged whispering, trembling. “It’s enough that I’m here. For the sake of your dead brother leave me alone before they find you and make everything worse for me.”

  “Hold yourself in,” Mottel replied calmly. “You’re here because of me.”

  “What have I to do with you? . . . Mottel! You didn’t mix me in with your Dimitri business? . . . How could you!”

  “Hey,” he said quietly, putting his hand to my mouth. “You think

  this is simple?” He gave me a little shake and took his hand away. “Listen. What they will do with me is a question. It depends on how much of the truth Dimitri tells and on how much Buzarov will work the Squire for me.”

  “It’s not my concern about — ”

  He gripped my arms so that I winced. “This has to do with Aaron . . . sh! ... he didn’t want to buy goods here from Rezatskin, understand? So he went to Minsk and bought there. Now . . . Dimitri helped bring the bodies back and so stole Aaron’s goods that he bought in Minsk . . . and sold them the same day, you see, while he was on his mail route.”

  “I know nothing about any goods, Mottel,” I whispered fearfully, “and if this is only to mix me up in your troubles, I won’t say a word to them about it, I — ”

  “Wait,” he commanded. After a few moments I felt him putting something in my hand.

  “Know what it is?”

  “Some kind of paper,” I replied.

  “It’s money. Twenty-five rubles I took from Dimitri. It belongs to the boys, Laib and Shim. It’s the money Dimitri got for selling the goods.”

  “I don’t understand this, I don’t . . .”

  “Simply listen, then . . . when Dimitri got back from his route he came to the smithy for a horseshoe. I asked him about the goods in Aaron’s wagon and from how he answered I knew he took it. So from one thing to the next, I broke his shoulder and took the money, understand?”

  “But from where did you know about Aaron . . . buying goods in Minsk?”

  He spoke as though amused. “Maisha, you think I’m still trying to make tricks with you so that you’ll end up in Siberia?” And then a pleased tone entered into his voice. “What’s the matter? You don’t think Laib would tell me why his father went to Minsk?”

  “Laib?”

  “He isn’t afraid of me. . .

  It was too dark to see, but he sounded pleased. Yet . . . “Why didn’t they take this money away from you when you were arrested?”

  “Why?” He chuckled. “Because I know how to hide money. Never mind, after it’s dipped in very hot water and dried, nobody will ever guess where I hid it.”

  “But they’ll take it from me!”

  “No . . . put them in your pocket, the bills. They’ll let you go in good time.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t act so surprised, Maisha.”

  “It’s a trick!”

  “Of course, what else?” He walked to the door and stopped to say, “Oblanski will be back in a few minutes. And whatever he tells you, remember to say only, ‘Yes, Sergeant/ Clear?”

  I couldn’t talk; it was too much for me to understand. Then Mottel had another thought. “Oh . . . where will the boys stay?”

  “The boys? . . . Shim and Laib?” I decided to lie. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, Maisha . . ”

  “Wait,” I said hastily, feeling the anger in him at my clumsiness. “They’ll be with me!”

  “It could be worse . . . you’re better than the rest of them . . . you, at least, are an honest fool.”

  He opened the door and went out, leaving me twice-fold in the dark. Only much later did I come to the realization that it had been Mottel who arranged the arrest somehow so that the boys would have the money rightfully theirs, should he be sent away for having attacked Dimitri.

  Yet even as it opened up in my mind that the apostate Mottel had this goodness in him, to think of the welfare of the orphans to this extent, it pained me to listen to his judgment of his Jewish brothers. He had spoken as our enemy, yet in him was a goodness connected to his own ignorance, it seemed to me then, the one struggling to overcome the other; and in the cell that evening and all that next Day of

  Atonement as I fasted and prayed, it was not only for myself that I asked The One Above for forgiveness, but for Mottel also, one whose works were greater than his knowledge of God, as the Talmud tells, “like a tree with many roots and fewer branches, but which all the winds of heaven cannot uproot.”

  And in the two remaining years of my life when it would be asked of me, “Why do you, his guardian, let Laib run to the smithy ten times a day even though we know it is for a reason approved by the landsmen?” I would reply, “It is better for Laib to know his evil and to reject it, than not to know it and wonder that it might not be evil at all ”

  This was hypocrisy. After the time he had got me in prison, I loved him. I loved him not alone because of the twenty-five rubles he had sent to the orphans, but also without a reason. And as you know, such a love lasts forever.

  There remains only to tell you of my first moment in The Next World.

  My Uncle Mendel came to me as in a dream and he kissed me a welcome and said, “Now, dear little Maisha, what do you think?”

  “For want of knowledge have our people gone into captivity,” I replied. “For that, and from the arrogance of the world which commands them to remain ignorant and suffer.”

  “But that is an old story,” smiled my Uncle Mendel, “up here.”

  3 . Laib

  (1874-1931)

  Theoretically i am supposed to be resting in peace and minding my own business. But believe me, that is real crap.

  I died angry, and I still am.

  They named me Laib, son of Aaron and Leah. Then in the U.S.A. I became first Loy Golinsky and then Dr. Laurence Golin, a fiddler and leader of restaurant orchestras, with a Damrosch collar and white pique edging inside my vest. Never mind what I was called; the big thing was ... in my whole life I behaved the way I wanted, not the way I was expected. I was true to myself, you follow me ?

  Wait, please ... no sympathetic romanticism. You’re not on my side, we don’t agree at all ... or I wouldn’t be so angry. Not at you, of course. Or at any particular somebody. It’s a matter of the State, the entire State, a thing that is not even a thing but yet the greatest enemy mankind ever had, you follow me ? Don’t take me wrong, I was never interested in politics and always hated politics but unfortunately politics gave me tremendous bothers and aggravations, always coming into my house without knocking, saying, “Who the hell do you think you are anyway and what the hell right have you got to want to be yourself?”

  The State gets irritated by such childish people, hunts them down and robs them of love, bemerds their dignity and honor, and puts signs on them, “/ Am a Shnoo .” Oh, the State has its good side. If a person likes to buy a little net and go in the fields chasing butterflies, that’s okay; ditto chasing golf balls, women, and streetcars; also all kinds of legalized evils. But let a person start chasing the truth, chasing it and

  not giving up . . . well, ladies and gentlemen, that person is not going to be very popular even among those who mean most to him. I’ll go further: the person who remains true to himself so strongly that he runs up against the brick wall of the State can turn out to be a very excluded person if he’s not careful.

  Wait again, please. Follow me carefully . . . you think I’m in favor of thieves and murderers? No, sir. I am interested in how the State goes against the person whose interests don’t fit the interests of the S
tate. Keep that clear, otherwise you will believe I am being sorry for myself alone, which is not correct. The terrible thing about the State is not what it does to the persons who remain true to themselves, but what it does to the innocently corrupted who live out their existence doing what is expected of them, automatically} dreams of childhood and youth forgotten and buried long before their bodies. This is the crime, the murder. And in the victimized, believe me, were my own flesh and blood whom I loved without end, who did not understand me, and to whom I could not make myself understood at all. So how can I rest in peace?

  Born in Golinsk, Russia. Died in the Bronx of New York.

  Observed life in the following places: Warsaw, Vilna, Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, Philadelphia, New York, Miami Beach, Lakewood, Atlantic City, Ellenville, et cetera.

  Played the fiddle and was a leader of restaurant orchestras including one entirely composed of ladies.

  Married an actress.

  Observed the differences between Plato and Hegel, Milton and Gorki, St. Augustine and Spinoza, Shakespeare and Ibsen, Bakunin and Lenin, Pavlova and Duncan.

  Took Mozart over Bach. Not excited about Beethoven outside of the Second. Considered Ravel a good faker. Took Rimsky-Korsakoff as the best.

  Next to Balzac, Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky were babies just passing time crying. Walt Whitman could have sounded better.

  The definite best American was Mark Twain, his Yankee. Also about the two boys.

  And two singers . . . Caruso and a colored girl from the gin mills but with a call like the mother of the world, Bessie Smith.

  And Vanzetti . . . for him I sat down in 1927 and wrote a whole symphony, which was no good. Out of this my son Lester took a melody and wrote up a song that sold nineteen thousand copies in 1930, entitled, “Oh Boy! What a Wonderful Girl!”

  Never liked music as a business but had no better way to make a living than with the fiddle. Wanted to play for myself only, but no money that way. Wanted to play for children, started a music school once in Philadelphia, loved to give the little kids free haircuts . . . everything not covered by the saucer-on-top got clipped off. Mothers didn’t like it. Used to teach them notes by cutting up apples ... a whole note equals a whole apple, a half note equals half the apple, a quarter note equals a quarter the apple, and so on . . . and the whole apple equals all the parts of the note. Mothers complained, said I taught the kids how to play with knives. Couldn’t make a go of the music school, went back to playing “Ave Maria” in $1.50 nine-course restaurants. My wife’s opinion, “A good-natured feller, but no head for business, never grew up.”

  I think I went with a little dignity and honor, I think I didn’t let the State get its hands on me and twist me into something not myself. I kept the way I was, when I was a child in Golinsk.

  The way music got under my skin had to do with the big Squire of our village who was to Golinsk like John D. Rockefeller to New York. This Konayev used to give parties for friends who would come to his castle from all over: all kinds of people, military, government officials, other Squires. All the rooms in the castle on the hilltop would be lit up like for the coming of the Tsar. In the summertime lanterns would be strung along his promenade and in the night music would roll down the hill, and drunken enthusiastic baritones would sing, hitting the top notes like nervous mothers slapping their children’s cheeks. This music

  was the sign of a life much different from mine. It excited me to learn that somewhere was a kind of life in which worries and troubles and praying were not so important. At the age of seven the mixed-up sounds of the music and dancing and free laughter rolling down from the top of the Squire’s hill were a revelation; lying in my bed and listening I would think secretly, “It must be good sometimes to be a gentile.”

  One day in the fall when I was going on eight my mother and brother Shim and I were walking home from picking grapes in one of the Squire’s vineyards. My father was an itinerant tailor without a horse and wagon, so you can imagine what he made out of trudging the roads with his goods bundled on his back. Many times he would come home from two-three weeks on the roads with little more than hard-luck stories. The fall of the year was the best time for us with everything to be picked, apples and grapes and cucumbers and all the different things the Squire raised and shipped away; and as we picked we would eat.

  That particular afternoon I have mentioned, the sun was already down and it was getting cool and windy. Shim and I understood that the times my father was on the roads he became almost like my mother’s third child. As we were walking home that late afternoon from our grape-picking I could see my mother missing him, her eyes calm as she walked silently, unlike the way she had been in the field, in a chatter with the other women.

  We had more than a quarter of a mile to go when a junkman’s horse and wagon overtook us. He wasn’t from our village and we didn’t know him but he stopped and let us ride with him. I don’t remember what he looked like but he must have been either drunk or just a very jolly peasant because everything he said was with a big laugh. We sat back of him surrounded by pieces of rusty tin, useless chairs, jagged panes of glass, ikons, bed slats, and what-not. My eyes fell on the neck of a mandolin. The belly of it was crushed but two strings were still attached to the bridge. I gave a plunk.

  “Look, Mama! It plays!”

  “Put it back,” she whispered, “or he’ll say you broke it.”

  When we got to the village we climbed out and I said to the junkman, “How much for the mandolin, please?” Before he could answer my mother said quickly, “Pay no attention to him, thank you for the ride.” The junkman said, “Let me take a look at it,” and leaned back into the wagon. My mother pushed me again to make me walk away, but I said, “Wait, wait ... I have two kopecks, you gave me two kopecks,” I said to my mother, “maybe he’ll . . .”

  The junkman had the mandolin in his hands and was looking at it, somehow very amused; with what I can’t tell you. “It’s no good,” he said, as though making a joke, “but take it for two kopecks and give yourself concerts and concerts and concerts!”

  “I’ll take it,” I cried, fishing out my two kopecks. My mother held my hand and whispered to me, “You’ll play concerts on that banged-up thing when hair grows on your palm!”

  I ran nearer to him and offered him the two kopecks. He began to laugh again, taking the money and handing me the mandolin. I didn’t see him drive away, only the mandolin in my hand. “Ay,” my mother cried, “you’ve thrown away two good kopecks!” I felt the sting of my mother’s hand on my cheek.

  Then my brother Shim spoke. “It’s like Tzippe-Sora says, Mama. When a fool throws a stone in the water ten wise men can’t pull it out.”

  “It can play,” I said as I wept.

  “Ay, well,” my mother said, “let’s go home.”

  As we made our way up the lane I said to her, “It can play, Mama, you’ll see.”

  “Don’t tell Papa I slapped you,” she replied. “After all a mandolin isn’t a stone. Maybe it can be fixed.”

  The next day at the learning-table I told Reb Maisha my stomach hurt, got the mandolin, and went looking for Nochim, the dairyman who fiddled on the side at weddings and christenings. He would know how to begin to fix my instrument. He was nowhere in the village. I sat down outside of Verenka’s tavern, put the mandolin in my lap, hunched up my knees, and waited for him to pass. I sat so for a long time. The

  sun weakened, the wind became like a knife, and every minute that passed made it worse for me. I should have been with my mother and brother picking in the Squire’s fields. When I would come home the first thing my mother would do, she’d break the mandolin into pieces. Just as I was deciding to hide it someplace and go home, a voice threw itself down to me.

  “You, Laib!”

  It was a harsh quiver of a call in Yiddish. When I looked up and saw it was my father’s brother, my Uncle Mottel, I almost choked. I had been told over and over again never to have a single thing to do with him. I scrambled to m
y feet and began running but dropped the mandolin and had to stop and come back to pick it up. He handed it to me, squinting as usual, the stub of a cigarette popping out of the exact center of his mouth. His way of breathing very heavily had a frightening effect and I imagined the devil himself breathed that way too. Why Uncle Mottel was considered so evil by the landsmen I didn’t know except that everybody said he’d thrown away his Jewishness since he came back from the army, and that he’d outlived his lung fever only because the Satan himself had refused his soul, spitting him out from hell.

  “Where’d you get it?” he asked.

  Then my feet finally got the message and I started to run away, but he reached out and pulled me back. “No, no,” I cried, kicking at his shins.

  “Wait,” he commanded. “This damn thing, where did you steal it?”

  “I bought it,” I muttered.

  “A fine purchase,” he grunted. He took it and I wailed, “Give me!”

  “What for?”

  “Give me my mandolin!”

  “Tell me, what for?”

  “To play!”

  “To play? Not to sell?”

  “I said give me my — ”

  “Go home,” he laughed. It sounded like the laugh of the junkman, the laugh of a stranger and yet the laugh of a would-be friend. But

  when he turned his back and started to go into Profim’s smithy with my mandolin I did not consider him anything but a robber. I picked up a stone the size of an egg and hurled it at his head, turning and running in the opposite direction without seeing if the stone hit him. As I ran I could hear him laughing again. My ears played a trick on me. Mixed in with the laughing of my renegade uncle was the sound of the music rolling down the Squire’s hilltop late at night.

  All the way home I cried for what had happened to the mandolin and for what was waiting for me. But when I told my mother the story all she said was, “Ay, that Mottel. Don’t cry, Laib. Take a pee and you’ll feel better.”

  “I don’t want to!”

  “Then don’t,” said my brother dryly. “But shut up.”

  “So we’ve arrived at the town of Shut-Up, have we?” smiled my mother. “Boys, let’s climb right back on the train and ride to the town of Quiet-in-the-House.” She took an envelope from her bosom and waved it. Before she spoke my brother and I knew. “Good news, boys. Papa’s coming home for the Sabbath.”