The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  “All right, take a needle and sew up my mouth,” Nasan cried impatiently, “but — ”

  “Quietly, Nasan . . . spoons and glasses to the table.”

  Ellya gave Nasan a push-be-quiet but he said, “I’m eighteen and married, Mama!”

  “So Baylah you gave a contract and me a divorce?”

  “Papa,” Nasan begged, “it’s big trouble!”

  “Let it be quietly,” I said, “and also with a little tea.”

  Nasan curbed his irritation and went for the spoons and glasses, Ellya reached up and unwound the string carefully from the rafter, not to disturb the piece of sugar at the end of it. Hannah poured the almost colorless tea, we took turns sucking the piece of sugar hanging over the middle of the table, the boys kept up their thin silence for my sake . . . they knew how I liked nothing said during the first half-glass. Ellya was always the more patient, he’d already lost a wife, Laib-Shmul’s daughter Klava, and the child she could not bear. The hot one was Nasan, a little husband of eighteen, very fiercely married to Hertz’s Baylah less than a year and she already three months carrying, a girl of beauty that Nasan called “Plum.” Baylah called him “Driver”; a genuine love-match.

  I mention this because it was my last quiet. Now came many hurried steps on my boards, Laib-Shmul, Yeersel, Tzippe-Sora; a real bursting-in, Laib-Shmul’s wild hair all over his face, and his gross greeting . . . “Ay! Everybody’s peed-out with worry, and here they sit drinking tea!”

  “I got the whole story from Buzarov himself,” Nasan told them, “only — ”

  “Not here,” I said, rising. “Not here.”

  “Not here, what?” Hannah asked, suddenly frightened. “What are they doing now, who are they looking to murder?”

  “Make an ending of this chewing-over,” Laib-Shmul roared, “we didn’t need to come here at all! I’ll know how to handle with Mottel, don’t worry!”

  Laib-Shmul turned to run out but the sharp-tongued Tzippe-Sora threw at him, “It’s the quiet fellow here we need to talk to Mottel, not one pickled in angers!”

  A bitter argument began, I walked out toward the path leading to the stream and in the next minute Yeersel overtook me, saying nothing. At the streamside we sat on buckets, I annoyed to have forgotten my pipe, Yeersel silently understanding and handing me one of his cigarettes; then we together smoking. “Well, already . . . what?”

  “Berel . . . two hours after she sat with Nochim the whore vanished.”

  “Good.”

  “Not-good. Varya told Profim how Nochim made her promise to deliver some kind of message for him, she didn’t say where. Knowing of course the Squire has a special use for her, Profim goes and sends for his brother Vassily to come and threaten her in the Squire’s name that no, she dare not go, and no, she cannot. . . well, that’s how she leaves it with Vassily . . . she promises she’ll stay but what happens at eight o’clock when she’s supposed to come downstairs there? A nightly day, she’s not downstairs and she’s not upstairs! And in her room everything off the hooks! Understand, Berel?”

  “Does the Squire know, or not yet?”

  “He’s in a rage, according to Vassily . . . but I don’t believe it.”

  “Then what’s the worry?”

  “Pukop,” Yeersel said. “Nochim came from there, the Squire could make a bad stew about ‘messages from Pukop’ . . . well, I don’t know . . . maybe it’s half and half . . . but if the woman is overtaken and brought back we’d be safer on both sides.”

  “And I’m wanted to go ask Mottel to bring her back?”

  “Not go ask him, go bribe him.”

  “Why him?”

  “He was with her after she came back from Nochim’s. She likes him, she’d tell him where she went. Don’t say no,” he urged. “We can’t let them squeeze us into the Pukop tragedy. And we mustn’t lose the chance of getting the woman back for handy to the Squire.”

  “You’re the one,” I said slowly.

  “Offer him anything, Tzippe-Sora says she’ll go to forty!”

  “Why not you?”

  “His laugh terrifies me,” Yeersel said. “With him I’m a coward. When he laughs at me I’m demolished; I couldn’t get him to listen to me. Please, I’ll mention why another time.”

  “Tell Hannah I’m sitting here.”

  “Good.”

  176 The Landsmen

  Now that's how it made itself with Yeersel and me. It could be “no” till the skies fell down; still such a tailor was this Yeersel, mind you, that he could sew a button even on an ox . . . and what is more, let the ox sew a button on him.

  Now their side lay at the foot of the Squire’s hill, the town for his toes, the stream running between the Squire’s and the Parsovs’ smaller hill to the east, the water still giving jumps of white in early May, edging a slope and curving down under the highroad and then flowing to our side with less tumble. I followed the stream back from our side where I kept my yoke and buckets, climbed up to the road from under the bridge, headed for the village to look for Mottel first in the smithy; then came near Profim’s “Heaven,” and stopped . . . go in for a minute, I thought, take a chance, he might be there, and to the bargain, after all I would have liked to have seen what such places looked like, once. As I stood, a distance away, the door opened, he came out on the landing walking backwards and cursing at the brown lights inside; a woman screamed, the door slammed and I saw him holding a fiddle in his hand. I had found my customer, quickly but badly, with no faith in my goods. He turned for the village. With a feeling of making an impossible charge I ran to catch him.

  He heard me at perhaps ten yards and met me growling drunkenly in Russian, not seeing my face in the dark, winding himself into a quick run at me and without hesitation meeting me with a powerful kick into my groin, I falling too surprised to say my name. Two, three kicks found my head as I lay until I gave myself a shake and said, “It’s me.” The Yiddish surprised him, he lost all interest. He went to the side, I heard him drop down all in one muttering, his thumb monkeying with the high string of a fiddle. I was bleeding from the head, the groin was stabbing, he was telling himself about the postman’s brother, Kluzanov; nothing to me until he mentioned Laib, the confirmation boy. “Kluzanov, I’ll kill him,” Mottel was promising himself in Yiddish, very tired under his drunkenness, “dead as his little goat, his little sweetheart with the whiskers . . . what

  sweetheart? They’re married, he married it, he’s a widower now, a widower, Kluzanov, hey girls?”

  Crawling to him I said, “Mottel, it’s me, Berel. . .

  “I killed it, killed his wife, he brings it to the girls back there, offers to pay them for a show. . . .”

  “Enough,” I said, sitting heavily up, “Mottel, hear me. . . .”

  “Yes, and when the girls wouldn’t work with the goat . . . that’s when Laib came in, just a kid,” now he shouted, “just a kid after his fiddle!”

  “Listen, Mottel — can you?”

  “That’s for you to do. Listen why I almost kicked you into your Next World . . . now he brings this goat of Father Semyon’s into the front room, that’s where Laib comes looking for the fiddle . . . you see? ... I thought you were Kluzanov following me . . . well, I was upstairs sleeping all right, Rena wakes me about Kluzanov having the goat there and pushing the boy to the goat ... I ran down and absolutely yes ... so I threw the kid into the hall . . . where is he, Laib?”

  “Stop it, let me say a word, something’s happened. . . .”

  “And then I gave it to the goat with the piano stool, with the side, one crash down in between the horns. . . .” He rose. “The kid must be in there, I’ll get him now and if I see Kluzanov . . . !”

  “What fiddle?” I said in any effort to hold him. “How does Laib get to a fiddle?”

  “It’s this one, his ... I got it in Minsk. . . . She says he’d play well but now he won’t have a teacher . . . whatever got into her!” The way he began to curse it became plain the teacher was Varya. I waite
d until he stopped to breathe. “Varya showed him only fiddleplaying?”

  “The perfume in the synagogue — I’m sorry I missed that one!”

  “Why did she go?”

  “That’s how it is with these bedpots,” he said, calming enough to put the fiddle under his arm before lighting a cigarette.

  Then boldly, “But where could a Varya fly to like a bird?”

  “Ah, these plowed-out Varyas,” he replied more to something in his own head than to me, “when they don’t get themselves pensioned in jails or nunneries they begin listening to themselves like to fortune tellers . . . one night they’ll call themselves Cleopatra and the next, Josephine . . . and if it’s nothing lower than a half-ruble tip, it’s enough to persuade them they’re Catherine.” And then an angry spit, “Yes, all these Varyas; they finish up playing with themselves! ‘Any time you’re in Riga,’ she tells me as a favor, ‘just walk down Sport Street there, don’t forget it, Sport Street in Riga, and ask anybody to take you to the Queen and I’ll be where they take you.’ ” A laugh now, a splittingness, a mix ... a laugh and also not . . . “As if they don’t have enough stale ones in Riga!”

  “Mottel, hear me out.” I gave him a quick account of the Pukop affair, of Nochim’s end, bringing in Vassily Buzarov about the Squire’s rage over Varya’s leaving; when I stopped he said, “Let the Squire be lucky and break a vein in his head and let Varya go to Riga or hell . . . to me it’s the same.”

  “We need to find her, Mottel.”

  “Take a walk in the morning, look at the trees. Maybe she’s only hung herself.”

  “How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “To bring her back for us, Mottel.”

  “You offer money?”

  “Perhaps forty . . . good?”

  He spat his cigarette into the road. “Forty won’t catch your mice.”

  “Not enough for you?”

  “Forget her. . . .”

  He began to walk away with nothing said, like any gross bargainer. Running, I cried, “Wait, have mercy. . . . Forty is the most we can do!”

  His feet stopped moving, I had hopes; but the word turned him full drunk again. “Ask that God of yours for mercy! And also what He’s been doing since He finished the world! The Squire’s got a mirror in

  his house from the floor to the ceiling, did you know it ? Any time he wants he can look at his bare behind . . . but you’ll all die and never see your bare behinds! Very well, you’ve forty? Then keep it, don’t look for Gods and whores to help anything! Look from where your feet grow, idiots — disappear!” He pushed me away from him. My groin gave a twist and I fell again. Meanwhile he turned toward “Heaven” and ran, pulling at the fiddle strings just any way, flecking such a mockery that as I lay in the road the thing in my head was Yeersel saying, “His laugh terrifies me.”

  In that living, what a mix of friends and enemies, what blind traffics under stars so easy to see, so hard to read!

  Now I dragged myself home, Hannah put wet cloths to my groin, I sent Ellya after Yeersel. He came with Tzippe-Sora, I acquainted them with my failure. “Don’t say it’s a failure,” Tzippe-Sora replied quickly. “Varya went to Riga, he said? Well . . . we’ll send someone there, one of our own!”

  “Tomorrow,” Yeersel said. “Berel, you did well.”

  “I’ll go, let me,” Ellya said.

  “We’ll decide after the funeral,” Tzippe-Sora told him.

  We buried Nochim following morning prayers. Sholem and Zag- zaigel chanted the mourners’ prayer firmly and loudly, their heads to the sky, trying to be like strong men for their mother’s sake. Pesha crouched at the grave. Now that the blundering little man was gone she loved him again, her open scorn of him and her bitterness forgotten, all his intentions remembered and itemized as she begged Nochim’s first wife to care for him in The Next World and not to hold it against Nochim that he had remarried so soon. With the heartbreak proper to such a demonstration she promised the first wife that when she herself would be lifted up into The Next she would bend humbly and adore them both; she pleaded with them to be good askers for the Lord’s grace to fall on her and her children and all who loved in misery (here we noticed how she seemed to be depending more on the first wife than on Nochim), after which she signaled the depth of her loss by trying to fall into the grave. But hands ready for this restrained

  her and we made a circle around her as we said our last words to the dairyman. In our grief we failed to see Vassily Buzarov and the Squire until they were upon us. Their horses had made a straight run across the cemetery, ignorant of where they put their hoofs.

  The Squire’s steward ordered us to make a line. Both remained mounted. Vassily Buzarov looked even bigger on a horse, the curve of his belly pushed up by the saddle, the eyes under his broad cap still dull with sleep. The Squire sat on his handsome gray son of Commander and wore a high hat and frock coat for Sunday. I had not seen the boyish-footed little man in several months. The beard struck me as being less pointed, the eyes wider apart and not so prying, the hips softer and puffier in the saddle; but the way he held himself stiff remained the same as ever, and also the way he had of giving a horse little kicks and pulls with the reins, from moment to moment making the animal move and stand still in proud alertness to commands as though from a general viewing his troops. The Squire looked at the line before him; something else crossed his mind. He gave Buzarov a sharp look. The giant (so unlike his needle of a brother, Profim) had forgotten.

  “Caps,” called Buzarov, and we took them off, waiting. The Squire still disliked something and looked at Buzarov again, speaking in an undertone. Buzarov ordered us to make our line “straight.” It forced us to trample many graves. The Squire had not wished it exactly, it simply pleased him to address a straight line. Now this was a self- disgusted individual living in hope of spitting Golinsk good-by at any moment, yearning to enter the higher existence for which he felt fated, that of a graceful lion of the western boulevards, of a witty loiterer in purple saloons, of an accepted member of many cliques of imposing parasites discussing in French matters great or small with the same bows or the same sips from the thinnest of glasses, and always under crystal chandeliers and surrounded by mirrors on all walls to multiply their presence. To achieve this apex, however, the Squire needed his wealthy father-in-law dead but this holy day had so very long postponed itself that desolated by impatience he drank steadily when not

  inviting invalidism in other ways. By manipulating the hundred Jews or so at his command in the hamlet he owned, he supplied himself with the means of making occasional pilgrimages to the most fashionable “Heavens” in the larger cities, and once in a crisis of bravado at a nobly attended shoot in Poland he had forced himself to down thirty- one pork dumplings. The hour’s notoriety thus gained left him a stomach thereafter called “delicate” but which remained an organ of massive strength, groaning with all kinds of colics at its outrageous burdens but nevertheless performing its labors as we performed ours — for him — “somehow.”

  The Squire began at us with a deep sigh which led into a squealing address of imagined crispness. “I am just to leave for Petersburg,” he announced as a complaint that we were delaying him. “Out of duty alone I show myself here, I’ll be short about it. You haven’t enough graves, it’s a fact, to accommodate the results of the honest anger of the district if you people continue with your usual stubbornness in the outrages being committed against the regime — and not only in Pukop, let it be known and understood. Let it be known and understood,” the Squire repeated; no disturbance of feeling, no tinge of grievance or heat of threat showed. “I have given my word of honor to the Colonel Commander of the Pukop garrison that this year there will be unaccounted for not one single conscript from Golinsk. Nothing, no conspiracy, nothing but death can cause me to break my promise to the Colonel Commander. Such is my warning, let it be known and understood.”

  He threw his eye from one face to the next, searching for s
igns of provocation. To frighten us was easy; the Squire had bothered to come on no such simple errand; what he wished and waited for were denials, protestations, anything he could twist into an avowal of “the conspiracy” we had just learned we were part of. Had he told us the day was night and had we not then immediately begun lighting torches against his proclaimed darkness, he would have accused us of thinking him a liar. Accustomed to his style of reasoning we said nothing nor glanced at each other. “Go further against this year’s conscription,” he

  continued, his eyes moving past me, “and I will dam up the stream and put you to work turning this cemetery into a grain field.” The Squire pointed to Laib-Shmul, a known hot one. “You — do you deny your corpse was in Pukop Friday?”

  The meat-slaughterer mumbled, “He didn’t say.”

  “Do any of you deny it?” He waited until the silence grew heavy. “Then you know the corpse was an ally of the Pukop rabbi.” Again he waited. “Yes ... his fiddle was discovered in the rabbi’s house.” A moaning rose from our line and the Squire allowed a stir of hatred to pierce his mantle of high-toned boredom. “Let it be known and understood, we are not deceived. We know your corpse spoke to the whore and we know what he said to her, where he sent her, and why! We know she’s one of your bought couriers, bribed, a messenger! Sending Mottel to bring her back was shrewd but not shrewd enough . . . you think she won’t confess?”

  At this I stumbled one step to him, saying “Squire, Squire . . . bake and burn me a thousand times if I didn’t ask him to go for the woman and if he didn’t refuse!”

  “Indeed,” he murmured coldly, glancing sharply at Buzarov, who spit over his horse’s head and said with effortless resonance, “Mottel left during the night in a fast rig borrowed from my brother, saying he would bring the woman back . . . that’s refusing you?”

  I wanted to swear that Mottel had laughed at the money; for him to have gone after her was unbelievable ... I bit my lip, what good was it? Their plan was clear, to “discover” some “conspiracy” of ours against them and in the guise of thwarting it to do with us as they wished while posing as our protectors from “the honest anger of the district.” As this rose in my mind I became aware of the Squire’s boiling eyes on me. He seemed to be pushing himself to some bursting act, he looked at me as though into a mirror of some devilish nature which had abolished his image and now reflected my own. His gloved fingers tightened over the reins, he sipped air through his mouth, his lips thickened, puffing it out again, his eyes swelled with the melancholy glaze of a dog in hopeless heat. In the next moment he would have