The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  "Bevel 219

  “You’re right, we’ll have to touch them,” Knyazev shuddered.

  “Not I,” Drobnis growled.

  Now my brother’s mouth opened, he breathed with rattles, the lips making an “Amen.” Knyazev stepped back and kicked the lantern over, adding the smell of lamp-oil to everything else. Drobnis began to call him a fool and other names, then drove himself into a change. “No, let it! Let’s help it, where are matches? Let the place burn!”

  And from Knyazev, “We’ll make a faggot. Well, it’s too bad.”

  One pulled bed-linen, the other dropped matches into the running lamp-oil. I ran at this; with the last iron in my legs. In the press of their decision they had forgotten me, I was no longer important; whatever, I managed to get down the path and into the synagogue without being pursued, gaining a few minutes alone with the landsmen.

  Inside the synagogue door, seeing the backs of the landsmen at prayer before the altar of seven candles, the shadows slanting on the walls, the sound of them going straight up, the whole softly strong moment of such an appeal to me, a moment of so many familiars yet now with no time to have the pleasure of it . . . and out of this the regret, let’s say, of never when I had the time, to notice these different things about those who in the market saddened me with their gross scratchings at each other, so grating to my pride their bitings and yawpings in the huts, just in the one running after the piece of bread . . . yet snatched away from it there, all of the same heart together, I with no time for these things, still feeling them in a mix of dearness not attended to in time before . . . and in the next second shouting to them, “Say ‘Amen!’ It’s plague and fire! Run, run!”

  Now each moment passed with an explosion of dangerous noise like trainless locomotives chasing each other; first their seeing me and putting me on a bench and making a circle about me; the asking of too many questions; then Ellya making them be still with his screams and letting me say what. “Run to the woods, run,” I told Ellya in his ear, all around me listening, “to Minsk by woodland paths, to the ghetto, then to over the sea, the conscripts.”

  With this the rise of a great cry of landsmen haggling with each other, the synagogue a market-place now of harsh buy-and-sell — to run or not, be crazy or not — and with Yeersel’s legs under my head on the bench, his hand in mine, his voice to me, “You’ll live, you’ll live, Berel, don’t be frightened, you’ll live.” Then up this wall of noise came a fast hard trample of many boots, and cries of Russian into the synagogue, the boards rumbling with hard hits around me. Yeersel and Hatzkel lay themselves over me like a cover, then I ripping the little canvas roll of rubles from the string under my shirt and thrusting them at Yeersel. “Take the lads and run, this is money; to Minsk through the woods, Yeersel, to Hamburg, to over the sea.”

  Yeersel shook me by the shoulders, behind me the first rifle shot, I begging, “Run with them, be father and mother, take the rubles, go.” Then into my face the face of Nasan crying, “Papa, Papa,” and I in a harsh yell over the shoutings and beatings, “Plague, plague and fire, lift me.” Through the window I saw the flame out of Maisha’s hut and soldiers running, more of them, down the lane toward the highroad, and the soldiers seeming then to empty out of the synagogue and join them. In one bellow, I stood to Yeersel. “To the woods, recruits! Look for Yeersel,” and Nasan kissing me and I saying, “Kiss Ellya,” and Yeersel letting a goatish cry out of him, “Kiss Bosha and the children,” then turning to run.

  I made to embrace him and was left holding a button of his blouse; never again was anything of Yeersel close to my hand.

  Then Nasan’s back going away from me; and as though hidden in the ground, curving from behind me, a rifle butt to the side of my head and a second time of nothing.

  They carried the Ox to a cellar of the village hall, revived him with needles, stimulated him with pails of water, and plied him with questions. But how could the Ox reply, not hearing a word, nor even their screams ? Since the synagogue, since the soldier’s rifle to the side of his head, the Ox had become deaf for the second time.

  They brought Dr. Ostrov to prove with angry pantomime how the Ox had lied; For the three to have had the plague was impossible, the

  doctor described; and this pleased the Ox considerably. But the beatings after the doctor's departure swelled his fever through the night so that when they rode him up and down the Jewish lanes as a warning to other rumor-makers, he hardly knew he was alive. Thus the Ox left Golinsk as he had entered it, deaf and fevered in a wagon. Yet nothing else had remained the same, not even his quiet, and this also pleased the Ox considerably; a most elevated Ox, a pleasant fever.

  In Pukop, a second cell where for many days they left him unbothered except as a pastime, now and then, of giving him questions and then blows, each night the Ox praying for morning to come a bit later. It came lastly to a thing of their carrying him upstairs to the grand room of the Colonel Commander sitting behind the finest of carved tables, the wood blacker than any other the Ox had seen; at his right, too, the Squire Konayev himself, weary for Petersburg, throwing down a smile to him lying in the stretcher, a soldier from a battlefield. It was the Boar against the Ox, a sniffing bleating Boar believing he was bellowing, a loose-skinned Boar pluming himself over the fallen Ox with glances of eyes rimmed with blood, a condition gained at no small expense in the Petersburg fun-parlors.

  With peculiar resourcefulness the Boar described the enormity of the Ox’s violations, illustrating the charges with drawings taken from a red leather case — drawings of huge-beaked persons burning children whose tender faces lay contorted in innocent agony, drawings of bestial dwarfs with exaggerated privates waiting to rape a little girl held by a grinning monkey wearing praying shawl and phylacteries, drawings of gowned knife-wielders opening the belly of a prone woman, the blood gushing onto a spread Scroll of the Holy Law — an altogether characteristic performance by the Boar to emphasize his accusation of the Ox’s having by his stupidity brought reprisals against his people, who by running away had encouraged the tempers of the long-suffering gentiles.

  Now following this presentation, the drawings returned to the case, the case to the Squire’s pocket, the Colonel Commander made a long reading from many sheets of thin paper of clauses impossible for the

  Ox to guess. But from his carefully curling lips and from how the Squire nodded between the Colonel Commander’s pauses, the tip of his beard touching the diamond in his cravat, the Ox began to see that he had indeed gored something, that here was an Ox too important to be slaughtered simply, an Ox who was causing them to read an accusation of many pages in the pose of a trial; if without jury or testimony, still forcing the Colonel Commander to a fifteen-minute reading which, had the Ox been less important, could have been collapsed into a few words. “We have treated you badly,” the Colonel Commander could have said to any ordinary Ox, “and therefore you are guilty.”

  The reading sent the Ox to Siberia, as at the end the fingers of the Colonel Commander showed, for twenty-five years.

  A year after “his plague on them,” following his escape from Siberia, the Ox almost beheld Golinsk, so nicely hill-up and hill-down, and learned a bit about his July-in-May —

  — How the soldiers ran from the Ox’s “plague,” and how Yeersel and the conscripts, running into the woods for Minsk, made truly for America, which some reached. Yeersel yes, Nasan yes, Hatzkel yes, Yakov no, Daneel yes, Yussel no. Shmelke a question, Bencha a question, Ellya a question.

  — How flamed by the lamp-oil and soldiers’ faggots, Maisha’s hut burned but for the wet roof, which fell —

  — And how this began the fall of his Golinsk.

  This is how the Ox sat in Siberia:

  First he counted the accidents. He made a list.

  how he came to Golinsk

  how he became deaf

  how he became undeaf

  how Nochim died

  how Varya departed

  how her perfume entered the s
ynagogue

  how Mottel came to kick his groin

  how he forestalled the amorous lieutenant

  how they came to drink brine

  how he became the second time deaf

  Out of these accidents borne to him on winds from all corners had come a flick of thought to make a one of Gershon’s purple face and his father’s in the field; and out of this to make a plague on them.

  And for this to have passed, pondered the Ox, was no less miraculous than from the middle of an ocean a piece of straw should float onto sand.

  What coal had lain secretly in Yeersel and in him, against a moment they could not have foreseen, when they would need warming into flaming? What in him, the tailor with the gentle heart; and what in the quiet-seeking Ox? And it seemed to him sitting on his cold shelf that as he had taken the axe, so had Yeersel carried the splits to hammer and nails, and that the name of the forest in which they lived was Accident, and that the true name of the temple they strove to build was Miracle, out of axe and hammer and nail; out of the this and the near, out of the days of their time.

  Having no buckets to carry in Siberia, no familiar whiles in his cold imprisonment between tasteless dawns, the Ox began wider thoughts. He would have plucked the underplan out of accidents groping to each other to make crowns; he saw how he and all were as stones tied to strings held and whirled, how strings broke, stones flew free of the string-holders; and how some stones soon fell and how others flew higher and met in the air and did not fall but took from the other new strength.

  So sat the Ox in Siberia, urging his thoughts to the farthest rim, then faltering. For the Ox, hovering on the rim, no more than this —

  — How fearing their ropes no longer held, the Squires had gone to chains, taking youngers summarily, soldiers thrown among the landsmen as in older times, and a new trick of a three-hundred-ruble fine for each conscript; unthinking that though rope burns, iron cuts; and that from such cuttings came only greater strainings and deeper thirsts —

  — How they themselves had made the plague on them, how they who called the landsmen misfits were themselves misfits of a higher misfitment, they not able longer to bear the world of their own making. It became too small to be handled by men of subtle mind behaving like beasts, too slippery to hold the lads from running to the ships, too small and slippery for them to have simply slaughtered their trouble of an Ox —

  And now his Siberia was not the same old ending of the Jews. "‘Ocean, make way, crap is swimming,” Naftoli-Dovid had said when the Ox was five. Later, the Ox a special man in Siberia, it was no longer plain crap, but polished; the Ox sitting in Siberia for more than his Jewishness, for more than his piety, for more than his remembered dead, for more than his sons alone; for his need to love the new and living and imperishable. And this was the Ox’s meaning, that love for the new and living and imperishable lay as a lance against the chests of those misfits of a higher misfitment. They had not put the Ox; the Ox had put them, pushing the youngers to sail over the sea.

  6 . Shim

  (1871-19x1)

  When i was twelve yeersel’s rochel numbed me. i could not hold an easy conversation with her. After my confirmation I went steadily on the roads with my father, took confidence in my advancing manhood, and brought her presents. When Yeersel began me on his wagon after my parents died, I improved myself to the point of being able to amuse her with various appetizing topics gleaned from the roads.

  Yeersel praised my needle and my conduct, citing hints thrown my way by mothers of dowried daughters in Tinkavitch and Lekavitch; but my eyes for girls were left at home. I wanted Rochel, and equally important, I would never go to another village and leave my brother Laib in Golinsk. Our parents were dead; Maisha was our appointed guardian until our marriages, yet he hardly fitted to be as a father and I promised myself I would be as a father to my younger brother until he himself became a father. I was a serious fellow; I had respected my father and tried to design myself after him, whom poverty had lessened without coarsening. My mother would have refused riches rather than have missed a minute with him. The more I could be like my father, the more Rochel would have to love me; and the more like him I could be to Laib, the sweeter the rejoicing in The Next World. Thus I molded myself, on the way to becoming sixteen, until the burdens of my particular manhood became first difficult and then insupportable.

  My numbness with her somewhat wore off and more than ever I wanted to seize her in a grown-up manner. The winter Laib lay ill she sat quite a bit at his bedside with me. It gave me wonderful thrills which after she left changed into melancholy worries. “What did I say ?

  Nothing, worse than nothing. She thinks I’m bored with her and why not? Two coats, two coats I boasted about cutting all by myself as if a tailor shouldn’t know how! Such grossness! And after that? Nothing. All she’ll remember is how I sat without taking my eyes from her bosom! And my mouth was so dry! How couldn’t she have seen me licking my lips like a beast? Ay, I’m a beast, plain talk, up and down!” — and so on.

  But these things settled themselves during what we afterward called the Three Bad Days which began with the Sabbath of Laib’s confirmation in May 1886, the day that Nochim died and Varya disappeared and Uncle Mottel after her.

  The light was still gray. Reb Maisha slept on the bed-shelf over the stove, making frightening snores, each breath a triumph. I gave Laib a push with my knee. “Laib, today is here, get up.” But he still slept at my side.

  Two things struck me with equal importance, whether a sleeve of his confirmation suit wasn’t too long and how my parents would have enjoyed that day, Laib safely through boyhood’s gauntlet and ready to walk manfully with honor. I gave him another knee-push. It woke him. “Laib, look through the window.”

  “Sh.”

  “A good day.”

  “No clouds,” he said, looking out sleepily, leaning on an elbow, then falling back upon our pillows. Watching him I thought that with his eyes and cheeks instead of my own dull face, Rochel might have already encouraged me to kiss her.

  Laib sat up in bed, his look of inner busyness returning. “Yes, it’s really today!”

  Reb Maisha woke up with a cheerful hiba-hiba; people knocked upon our shutters, calling gaily, “Is he ready?” and “Is he beautiful yet?” We had saved father’s best shirt. Bosha cut it down; and with father’s black bow tie stuffed under the new stiff collar Laib looked like a cabinet minister’s son, a very good fit across the shoulders; and Reb

  Maisha pointed to Laib’s new shiny black boots. “Remember, nobody wears better on his feet today than you!”

  “They pinch,” Laib said.

  Reb Maisha slapped his hands. “How else can boots give their congratulations? The best to take out a pinch is to dance.” He made a careful turn with a tight little kick at the end of it.

  Laib shook his head gravely. “It’ll be dancing without music. Unless Nochim got home during the night.”

  “Feet before fiddles,” Reb Maisha cried, smoothing the air happily with his palms, brooking no obstacles to this happy day. “You’re late. Look, the sun’s on the leaves already! Take him to the synagogue, Shim, don’t wait for me!”

  Reb Maisha started hunting for his best shirt and Laib and I stepped out of the hut. A few small boys waiting there ran before us on the way to the synagogue, shouting, “He’s coming, he’s here.”

  The landsmen stood waiting outside the synagogue. Some ancient whitewash remained on the door, the wood deeply seamed and softened by many weathers; it hung carelessly on its one hinge at the bottom. The landsmen grouped about it hung also a bit carelessly on their own over-burdened joints, here bent out, there curved in, the illnesses and injuries of past years leaving little monuments of bone over the fractures, dropped shoulders for the dislocations, bent backs for the ruptures, open mouths for the asthmas; and various kinds of gaits, each the result of a combination of pestilences. Berel stood straightest but did not hear well; once a man married and had children limps an
d bumps and morning aches and swelling hands followed naturally along, with the phrase “Papa’s sick today” a frequent distress signal until it seemed that the landsmen had always been old, and their wives always thinner or fatter, quieter or more hot-tempered, smarter or more stupid, but never the same and all in time like the synagogue door, ready to fall off the hinge.

  The landsmen always walked the confirmation boy down the aisle behind his parents. This day I walked Laib down in a proud march, the women and children watching from their benches, the moment as

  holy for the conformant as his wedding procession and to some even holier, for this was shared with none but The Highest, a joy solitary and ever sustaining. As my father would have, I put my hand to Laib’s far shoulder and so led him to the lectern where leaving him to begin the services I kissed his cheek and went back to my place next to Reb Maisha, looking among the women for Rochel and spying her at her mother’s side, her milk-white cheeks puffed into a proud oval smile for me.

  Hertz nodded to me and I nodded back, and Laib-Shmul also and others; even Asher-the-Sour paid me a nod. Many things make a man’s blood rise and his spirit lighter; a woman may be seen trembling for him, and the sky may appear to him in a certain way, and he may hear the happy cry of his ch Id sighting him from afar; all these are balms, but none such as standing well in the place of one’s father, which I felt.

  Chanting the opening prayer, “How goodly thy tents, O Jacob, thy dwelling places, O Israel; as for me, in the abundance of thy loving kindness will I come to thy house,” we lifted Laib with us in a sudden rush of saying to him, “See, you have many fathers and mothers.” We are made early, and though we put on many clothe^ they wear out while the underform persists, growing well or badly but never away from the beginning symmetry; and we knew without thought that the Laib-Shmul who bellowed and ranted through the week was not the real Laib-Shmul, nor the acid Asher, nor the giggling Naftoli-Dovid, nor the temperous Pesha; but that the Sabbath brought us to ourselves again, all mothers and fathers and children into a burst of belongment, of no huddles in a corner, out of the weekday insanities straight and fine back to the best freedom we knew, to stand together in the way of our fathers.