by Peter Martin
I found Uncle Mottel sleeping on his back, his head and a shoulder buried in gray bandages. He lay straight like a mummy under the covers. Liniment, bad air, whiskey, and body waste mixed with the smell of stale cigarette smoke struck my nose and gave me a queer pinch between my legs. Clothes, bottles, papers fell everywhere. A mouse ran out. Everything lay broken in the light of the afternoon; the bed a sideways slant and the walls showed dots, stains, where the whitewash persisted. A sour watering rose in my throat and I ran to the window and opened it. Nothing happened; the breeze helped the room, and woke him.
“Hah,” he muttered. “Lizaveta.”
“It’s me.”
“Stand where I can see.”
I went to the foot of the bed. “I brought you chicken and soup. But she pulled it out of my hands. Downstairs.”
He took a cigarette from under the cover with his free hand and lit it with a match against the wall. “Take a little smoke, Laib?”
“It makes me cough.”
“I smoked when I was seven. Go on, try.”
He lit it for me. I pushed some clothes from a chair and sat next to him, holding the cigarette like a firecracker. By the way he smoked I saw he couldn’t move his head..“Are you getting better, Uncle?”
“Why not? The devil didn’t want me. . . . And how is your brother?”
“He helps Yeersel.”
“He’ll be a tailor then?”
“Yes.”
“And you?”
“I don’t like tailor.”
“Take a puff.”
“I can’t, uncle.”
“Then step on it. So if not a tailor?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a fiddler.”
“Where do you come to a fiddle?”
“I don't know."
“But a fiddler, just so?"
“Not just so. I don’t know. The sound, maybe. Like in the summer, when the Squire has music up there . . . the sound when it comes out on two strings at the same time."
“And that mandolin . . . you play it?"
“It broke long ago."
He started taking long puffs, grunting the smoke out of his nose. With the window open the smell wasn’t so bad and the mention of the fiddle and mandolin also helped, plus my being there not against the wishes of anybody. So we sat without talking, which is sometimes the best way, until my uncle pressed the cigarette stub against the wall and told me to get Lizaveta.
“You’ll eat the chicken?"
“Why did they send soup and chicken?"
“I don’t know."
“Let that be your last lie to me. Why did they send soup and chicken?”
He spoke without anger but I couldn’t lie any more. “They’re afraid of you," I cried, “they’re afraid you’ll harm them after you get well."
“So," he said, much contented. “Perhaps they’re right. Let them be afraid. Are you?"
“No," I lied.
“The truth spoken?"
“I am afraid of you,” I said with a choke. “I’m always afraid but I never want to be; the truth spoken, Uncle."
“Now get Lizaveta."
“All right,"
“You’ll come back tomorrow," he added, as an understood thing.
“All right."
“Tell somebody over there I need what to drink."
“Who is somebody?"
“Tzippe-Sora," he said with the beginning of a smile. “She knows the kind I like."
I ran straight to Tzippe-Sora with the message. “Good,” she said with low happy moans and gentle shakes of her head, the wrinkles around her eyes hilly with satisfied squints. “Tomorrow you’ll take him half a gallon of my brandy, the day after we’ll find something else to stuff him with. . . . Don’t worry, he’ll remain bought off like the rest.”
Yeersel, Hertz, Laib-Shmul, Berel, and Reb Maisha were waiting in our hut. The more I described the visit the more I sensed what side I was on. By the time I came to the finale, my tongue was going like the Chicago Flyer. “I thought he would throw me out with the soup and chicken together but he turned around and ordered me to come back tomorrow. I know better things to do, it goes without saying . . . but if it helps us, why shouldn’t I be willing?”
“Wait,” Laib-Shmul scowled, “I’m not so willing for the damned one to make Laib into his comrade. To me the thing stands in too much of a tremble. What, after all, did we do? We didn’t bury him in the marsh, not yet. How will he know we planned it? Who would run to him with it?”
Yeersel replied, “Forgive me; I’m pleased to hear you disagree for a change.”
“What pleases you,” said Laib-Shmul, “helps like a syringe to an empty digestion. Let’s not please ourselves so much but think what we’re doing.”
“Not what we’re doing, Laib-Shmul, but what’s done,” Yeersel said. “All together in the synagogue, we came to a burial decision.”
“Indeed,” said Reb Maisha with a quaver and a nervous sniff, “the words left our mouths and flew like birds into the air, and who knows where they will light and when? Do we not find it written in the Talmud, ‘The angry man receives nothing, but anger’? Are we not dealing with this?”
“But the boy,” Berel said thoughtfully, throwing his eyes to me. “Are we not also dealing with him?”
“Never mind Laib,” Yeersel replied gently. “He knows already, for a long time now, the Mottelness of Mottel.”
“The truth spoken,” I jumped in. “I know it from Reb Yeersel and also from Reb Maisha. Right, Reb?” Reb Maisha jerked his head at this. Believe me, the way I was handling myself with the Golinskers a Huckleberry Finn couldn’t do better. “To me he’s nothing but a broken zero,” I said with a small spit on the side to show how I was with them. “For my part let him choke tomorrow. But until then I’ll sit with him and know everything in his head.”
“This spoils nothing,” said Berel, making up his mind. “Let it stand, the boy goes there. It won’t hurt to have one of our own hands taking his pulse.”
In such a way I played to go and sit with my uncle every day from then on, with permission.
I never came with empty hands. The landsmen gave me cigarettes and meat and kvas and candle-sugar when I mentioned his cough. The more I sat with Uncle Mottel the less I thought he would hurt anybody. I believed this from the ways he told me, with such a pleasure and a directness, anything I happened to ask. We acted as two men, two friends. In less than a week the first thing when I sat down was to take a cigarette from him and puff like a ferryboat.
The mouse that lived in the room used to run from its hole in the corner of the wall through the door and back a few times a day. After Uncle Mottel began to sit up in bed and look for different things to do, he used to watch for the mouse and throw what was nearest — a glass or a bottle or a plate — but the mouse ran in quick curves and always got through the door or back into the hole. That side of the room looked like all garbage.
“Maybe I ought to find a broom or something,” I mentioned. “It’s getting into a deeper smell, around.”
“When I go to walk,” Mottel said, giving himself a long stretch, “the women will come in and fix-around.”
“How soon, maybe?”
“A few days . . . I’ll see how my legs go tomorrow.”
Just then the mouse came out and Mottel gave it a plate. “Leave it alone, why not,” I said. “It asks you to feed it?”
“I had enough of them in the prisons.” He gave himself another stretch and cleared his throat. “Did you know I was in two prisons, one because of Dimitri and the other when I was in the army?”
“What did you do in the prisons?”
“What I’m doing now,” he shrugged. “Give throws to mice and rats and sit with bandages on me. But in the military prison I gave many a thought . . . yes, to the person who had me put in.”
“What was it like in the military prison?”
“Very interesting, but bad.”
“What military prison?”
&nbs
p; “Odessa.”
“Big or small?”
“Big enough.” He started scratching himself inside his shirt, yawning. “The bread they brought in was a month old and they left the pot a week in the corner.”
“What kind of doors — iron?”
“No, just doors. Doors left open, remember . . . but put your head out an inch and that’s all they needed for the nice little game they had.”
“What kind?”
“Standing with their guns ready . . . sportsmen.”
Until I saw him again the next day I kept imagining him in his cell, the soldiers just outside with rifles in their hands waiting for a chance to take shots. I had heard of bad prisons but never like this one and I wondered what he had done to be put in the Odessa prison. When I asked he said one prison was much like any other, and that in the army he learned about many girls.
“She was a pretty one,” he said. The words must have brought the way she looked into his head; he had intended to stop there but went on in clusters of sentences with rests and pickups and quiet stops as I noticed years later in the sonata-form; and what he said to me when I was a boy sitting through a sickness with him, I gave in my own time of big troubles the name of “Mottel’s Sonata.”
“Her name she told me right away, Vavra. I wasn’t rough with her
and she liked me. A very small person and she had many ways. A child really, earning from dancing.”
“You mean in the street?”
“No, she wasn’t a gypsy though she did have an uncle who made his living feeling the heads of people and discussing their futures. Vavra danced in a cellar open for soldiers. Sometimes with her brother but mostly by herself with her shoes off. She brought me to her room many times. We used to eat and drink there . . . what she brought home from the cellar. She had me put in the prison.”
“Because she found out you were a Jew?”
“No.”
“Because her brother didn’t like you?”
“He didn’t like anybody. Maxim ... he lived by himself and long times passed until she would see him. This was after he stopped dancing with her in the cellar. My company remained part of the Odessa garrison over a year but after the first few months Maxim did not dance in the cellar . . . the Last Resort, they called it. Vavra didn’t mean to put me in the prison, we were fond of each other, she would sit teaching me Russian in order for us to carry on conversations. She could understand a little Yiddish after a while. Certain things in Yiddish amused her. A child, really. Vavra was very in love with her brother Maxim and after he went away she would explain about him, how he took affairs very seriously and how he believed in going around with others like himself, protesting affairs by blowing up trains. Vavra would describe Maxim’s pride when once a train with some generals on it was blown up. The brother got himself in with a whole crowd, you see, which didn’t care for the ways the Tsar held the reins, and with this bunch of people he went about making noises and explosions to arouse attention and, as Vavra said, to give courage to the oppressed. I asked Vavra if her uncle had ever felt Maxim’s head. ‘Of course,’ was the answer, ‘and he put it in writing that Maxim’s was the head of a genius.’ Well, there are such families. . . .”
“Weren’t they caught?”
“Every one of them. The brother they put in the Odessa prison,
asking him many questions with their rifle butts and pointed sticks. I heard them on my guard duty and didn’t want Vavra to know about it, but it came out anyway between us in her room. I supposed it would make her feel better to know I had my eye on him but as it turned out this was a big mistake. She had her own ways of asking questions.”
A half a glassful of Tzippe-Sora’s liquor stood on the small shelf near Uncle Mottel’s hand. He picked it up to drink, lifting it slowly to his mouth. But with a strong wrench of his sick shoulder he threw it high against the wall behind me, his cry of pain mixing with the crash. “Ay, that mouse again,” he breathed. “Such small feet she had and nice, dancing without shoes.”
“But, Uncle, she put you in prison.”
Rubbing his shoulder he continued. “Not she, exactly. The minute I told her where he was and that I was on guard duty near his cell, she bothered me the whole night. I started shaking her but in the end she made me say what part of the prison they had him in; then she ran to the other crazy ones and with them made a plan to pull him out. Such a child, really. . . . The bomb was thrown. It broke the wall outside, the crazy ones came running through the hole, shooting guns. What fools, they didn’t know the least about shooting properly . . . the soldiers gave them, yes, the way the elephant gave the flea on his tail . . . one blast, that’s all.”
“Uncle?”
“Well?”
I tried to make it sound unimportant to me, but I had to know. “And you too had to shoot?”
“Guard duty is guard duty. All right, so I shot high. . . .” His breathing came and went in harsh little sips through his mouth with what anger only he himself knew. “It helped like diamonds cure the blind. And these great heroes, these idiots, left Vavra outside in the carriage with a bundle of women’s clothes for Maxim to wear to freedom. However, not Maxim but soldiers came out and dragged her into the Odessa prison, the same fellows that used to throw her a few
kopecks when they liked the way she danced in the cellar. And of course the officers were regular Frenchmen, so polite in their questions . . . in between times the specialists jabbed her with little pointed sticks, plus the rifle butts and delicate whips that found all the tender places ... in order to make her describe her brother’s small society of crazy ones.”
“But how does that come to you?”
“To who else then? She knew about her brother’s society the way you know about evil. She could not be blamed; it was ‘say something or be left for dead.’ They nudged it out of her, the way I told her what side of the prison Maxim’s cell was. So I sat two years in steady bandages inside the Odessa prison before they sent me home to die. I got good strong good-by claps, figured-out ones.”
“Ay . . ”
“They threw her away some place,” he added, more to himself. “I never heard where. Idiots.”
“And Maxim?”
“Tomorrow we must surely make an end to the mouse.” He gave his shoulder slow rubs with his open palm. “Bring ten or twelve flat stones. They’ll do it.”
“But the brother.”
“They ended him where he stood.” He spit across the room. “The stones must be flat, remember.”
He began to try short walks in the afternoons. I visited him in his room as he rested, answering his questions about who talked against who, who had hard livings and who the hardest ones — anything that came into our heads we talked out. My fear of him was fast asleep, if not dead. The Holy Law taught me that one bitten by a snake forever fears a rope — but what kind of snake is one who fixed my mandolin and sat in prison for my father’s goods-money, and two years more before that out of trying to get Vavra’s brother free? In the three weeks he readied himself for the smithy again, I parceled out what the landsmen had said of him, how they worried about if he knew they wanted to throw his body in the marsh, and how it had been explained to me,
now that it was getting close to my confirmation-time, that I should be a tailor like my brother and father.”
“And what reasons did they give?”
“That in a few years Shim would be a tailor for himself and that it fitted for us to be partners. And that wherever in the world I would go or be pushed, I could always carry my living with me on the tips of my fingers.”
“And you had answers?”
“Plenty,” I replied, telling him with wavings of my hands and in all the tones I had tried — pleading, stern, amused, disgusted — how my eyes were unsuited to sewing, being crossed and teary in harsh light; that there were too many tailors on the roads already and not enough customers; that Reb Maisha was getting older and more feeble and needed me to help him stay beadle;
that when I grew old enough to have a wife, I wouldn’t want her sitting and waiting for me weeks and weeks to come home with a capful of kopecks, as my mother had waited for my father; and finally that personally I didn’t want to be a tailor. To end my case, I told Uncle Mottel I had offered to agree to the decision of one in authority such as for instance Rabbi Sussya-ben- Mordecai of Pukop. But this only made Yeersel and Reb Maisha angry: “And if the Pukopper should tell you to walk with your behind in the open air, would you do it? ... Listen to him! He thinks the Holy Law was handed down from Pukop! . . , Lions are before him, yet he thinks to inquire of a fox!”
“Ay, lions,” said Uncle Mottel with a laugh. “Your case was weak, you dragged in too many arguments. You should have stamped your feet and said no, no, no . . . and that’s all. But if not tailor, then what?”
Then I went back to the mandolin. The story ran out of me like water from a broken bottle. I said, “It never stops pulling me, to be a fiddler.”
“Fiddlers are fools,” he said, spitting.
“I can’t help it.”
“If it’s in you to be a fool,” he said quietly, “then be a big one. Be
a doctor, a millionaire, a smuggler, a lawyer, a rabbi . . . but a fiddler, a runningness in the nose of the world? What for?”
“For pleasure.”
“What pleasure fiddlers give and get,” he said in a slow muse, “remains only to themselves and helps nothing. In a body which is a nothing, and has nothing, and belongs to nothing, what can a soul draw from sounds that live for a minute in the air and fly by like crows?”
“But, Uncle ...” I stumbled how to say it. “My fiddler that I heard at night, from the Squire’s hill ... I remember; I hear him.”
“Ay . . . what can be the end of such pleasure? You’ll fiddle, sitting in one whole pampering of your ear and live by yourself away up on Soundy Mountain with the winds. Ay, Laib, it’s a world of more than pretty sounds. If it’s only sounds you want, better be a monk before a fiddler. Together with all kinds of pretty sounds the whole day, a monk gains a free lifetime of eat and sleep.” His hand put itself under my chin; he spoke with a harsh and bitter voice, but that was just the outside. “Don’t fiddle for them, Laib. Don’t give them a soothe, don’t rub their kittens’ necks. Don’t be the dog that brings back the bird and gets only the bone. Be the hunter with the gun in the red coat.”
