The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  I exchanged glances with Rochel as Laib leaned against the lectern and began leading. When one does not yet possess his own four walls, in surroundings too poor for him to call even a closet his own, much of his deeper life is hinted by tastes of privacy all the more breathless in their surreptitious emergence. The synagogue contained some twenty benches distributed half-and-half on either side of the center aisle. It

  was unnecessary to look about in order to see where anyone was seated, custom having long since established the main places. By giving my chin a leftward twist and my eyes a strong slant likewise I could see Rochel behind me on the second women’s bench, always ready to make a tiny movement of her head or smile with only the corners of her mouth. Such devoted vigilance wildened me to imagine our being joined in a delicious way and I told myself we were fated to be united, as though the future had come for an early visit to make us Laib’s “second parents” there in the synagogue. Quickened by the holiday yet aching with missing father and mother, such was my joy.

  Very well; the services proceeded unevenly and ended in blasphemy. You must remember this was a great event for Reb Maisha, our old teacher and nominal spiritual leader. He wanted the landsmen to agree as one that he had well merited being named guardian of Laib and me, which would follow upon Laib’s inspired ascension into Jewish manhood. For this reason Reb Maisha stood on his feet from the start. Knowing the services by heart he swayed in a stationary dance to every note of Laib’s chanting.

  At first it went well though not outstandingly. Whenever Laib would drift away from the straight high calls of an enraptured confirmant Reb Maisha would wrinkle up his brow and gyrate more fervently, pressing my father’s old prayer book to his chest as if to dissolve any hesitations in Laib. The more he did this with the prayer book the more nervous Laib became. The landsmen took Laib’s start for beginning nervousness but their tolerance ebbed as it became clearer that Laib was chanting more out of duty than joy — an unacceptable thing to our half-Hasid syndicate for whom prayer without joy betrayed itself as small assurance of redemption. When Laib came to the part — “Who is like Thee, Lord of mighty acts, and who can resemble Thee to kill and quicken and cause salvation to spring forth?” — we expected him as an orphan of less than a year to let this out with at least a natural passion; but his mind was on something else and he chanted it quite without heart. Asher-the-Sour behind Reb Maisha allowed himself a critical cough. When Laib came to the opening of the Ark for the re-

  moval of the Scrolls and the reading of the Law he made no attempt to chant out, “And Moses said, Rise up, O Lord,” with anything like the required triumphal climb even though Reb Maisha dizzied himself with the strongest circular sways of his frame, pressing my father’s prayer book to his chest like a piece of soothing ice. A puzzled buzz skipped from bench to bench on the men’s side and Laib-Shmul leaned forward, growling into Reb Maisha’s ear, “Did you teach him ? Or did he teach you?”

  “Ay,” whispered Reb Maisha to me, “and didn’t he sound like an angel yesterday, going over it?”

  I was given the first reading of the Law. Standing beside Laib at the lectern I began the ritual, touching the fringes of my prayer-shawl to the opened Scroll and then placing them to my lips, when I heard an urgent whisper from my brother, “Tafe Papa s prayer boo away from Reb!”

  The moment I returned to my seat I took Father’s prayer book from the tight grasp of Reb Maisha. Seeing how I held it gently, reverently, Laib sighed. When it became his honor to read the final portion belonging to that Sabbath, his chanting became better; relief gave way to joy in Reb Maisha’s standing sways, his joy spreading to the others as Laib’s chantings continued to soar. Laib had redeemed himself, regaining the esteem of the landsmen for no reason I could see but that I had taken Father’s prayer book into my hands. Then quite without thought, in the simple way of digging deeper into one’s self, I experienced a revelation. Through me had my father touched Laib with his peaceful finger, lifting and guiding him; through my holding of his prayer book, the relic and symbol of fatherly devotion, had my father bequeathed his powers to me, his eldest son, to use them with love. I saw my parents in heaven raining thanks upon me; how warm the sun through the window on my neck, how like their secret kisses; yes, how touched I was by it all!

  All went soft as butter until the final “Amen.” It was a great happy “Amen,” happy for the Sabbath, happy for Laib. “Amen, a good Sabbath,” we cried to each other, thinking of the peaceful afternoon

  coming, of our naps after the best meal of the week and of the festival eating and singing and dancing when we would rise refreshed to honor Laib. Very well; but as he added his voice to the “Amen” our innocent Reb Maisha took my father’s prayer book from me and opened it, kissing a page, then closing it with a hard press of the covers, releasing happy tears meanwhile. His hands shook; the book fell; I bent, picking it up and kissing it before returning it automatically to him as I saw Rochel going to Laib to congratulate him. I followed, Reb Maisha at my heels. We joined the circle formed about Laib on the altar. Nearest to the confirmation boy stood the three widowers, Laib-Shmul, Naftoli- Dovid, and Asher-the-Sour; remembering their incompleteness in this time of joy, tears bubbled through their congratulatory kisses, the sudden added bond causing them to hold the recently bereaved confirmation boy tightly among them. Seeing me, they joined me to Laib and themselves. My hand went to Rochel and she took it; I drew her to our nucleus, into which Yeersel and Bosha pushed themselves, the others all around. Laib turned to me and I kissed his cheek, he whispering, “The book? The book?” I said, “Reb Maisha, give Laib Papa’s book to kiss.”

  By then Tzippe-Sora had begun to sniff. “What kind of smell,” she called, sniffing, “is here?” In the next moment we were all sniffing and discovering the sweetish smell; Reb Maisha also, and clearly the odor was coming from him.

  “Something of a perfume?” he mumbled. Tzippe-Sora took the prayer book from him, bent her head toward it. “From here,” she said, pointing.

  “From the book?” Reb Maisha demanded. “Such a so-fancy?”

  Tzippe-Sora’s eyes, cold and hard, met his; she shoved the book under his nose. “From where else, Mr. Purity?”

  The three widowers broke away from Laib; a new circle made itself around befuddled Reb Maisha. “Perfume, yes,” said Asher-the-Sour, as others came closer to sniff and ask questions. In a few moments the inner circle was sending words to the middle and the middle to the outer; and where a minute before the peace of the Sabbath ruled,

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  now was the roar of the angry river, Sambatyon; and what a Sambat- yon!

  “Perfume, yes!” shrilled Nochim’s Pesha, “Ay!”

  “Our revered teacher has a fancy lady pupil, no doubt!” cried Asher- the-Sour, shaking his finger under Reb Maisha’s nose.

  Over everything else came Laib-Shmul’s roar, “Wait! See! Wet pages!”

  I looked for Laib. He was gone.

  Yeersel stepped to the lectern and shouted, “No accusations in the synagogue, please! Wives, wives ... be good enough to take the children out!”

  The uproar continued. Rochel headed the women removing the children. So this had been worrying Laib! Ay, indeed; that Reb Maisha would press Father’s prayer book with such force to his chest as to break a vessel containing this outrageous perfume!

  “See,” Zisha shouted, holding up a glass phial the length of a finger joint. “Now we’ve the thief by his little neck!”

  “Hidden in a crack of the binding, hidden!” Shmelke cried as Zisha threw the bit of glass to the floor, crushing it angrily under his heel. “Congratulations, dear Maisha, at your age it’s remarkable!”

  “Maisha, Maisha,” Yeersel begged, “what made you do this?”

  Bent and captured, trembling, Reb Maisha sobbed, “I should know so much about the devil!”

  “Say where you got it, at least?” growled Laib-Shmul, controlling his temper. “From whom such a smell but from wome
n whose business it is to make everything smell nice?”

  “And with a gall, to bring it into the synagogue!” cried Asher-the- Sour with such a crash that Reb Maisha fell to the floor, hiding his head.

  I ran to the door thinking only of finding Laib. I needed to be certain of where he’d got it and what manner of consorting with whom, and how. Whose blame, after all, if not mine, mine! Had I watched him well enough? No, I had failed to bind him to me, I had allowed the Evil Eye to win his regard, I who a short while ago had fascinated myself with ideas of having soothed him into a fine chanting by “bring-

  ing father” to him — a burlesque!—when all he’d required was that I hold the book safe from Reb’s pressing the glass phial and breaking it!

  At the door I saw him. He had run out by way of the side, through the small room off of the altar, and had come around to watch. Seeing him I whispered, “Laib, Laib, where did you get it?”

  He stepped just inside the door and shouted, “Leave Reb Maisha alone! It was I! I hid it in the book!”

  Yeersel’s Daneel was first to reach us. “All right, where’d you get it?”

  “From Varya!” he shouted with all his might as the others came running.

  “What Varya?” Hertz demanded.

  “The one in Profim’s!” he shouted back, suddenly angry.

  “Profim’s?” they shouted, but already knowing, their hearts sinking. “What, Profim’s?”

  “Yes, the Varya in Profim’s ‘Heaven’!”

  Had my brother shot a gun he could have produced no greater silence; and in that silence he ran. None followed him. They went back to Reb Maisha and began to rain deeper criticisms upon him.

  Wondering what my father might have done, I ran out hopelessly. Why should any heavenly advice reach me when I had already failed ? Ay, my brother had been only too well confirmed long before his confirmation as a man of Israel!

  This was my potpourri as I went out again and saw Berel-the-Ox, alone, nothing remarkable, he always separating himself from clamors.

  “Where did Laib go?”

  “To the stream.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “Go to him. He’ll feel better.” He shook his head. “It’s bad in there. Laib should have something better to remember.”

  He wasn’t at the stream and he wasn’t at a couple of gullies nor at the place where we used to eat walnuts together. I went into the village thinking he might be with Uncle Mottel in the room he kept. But the old woman said, “He’s not here, he’s there.”

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  Neither was he in the smithy. Therefore he must be, I thought, well . . . “there.”

  “Who shall I say you are?” the porter asked, answering my knock.

  “I’m Mottel-the-smith’s nephew, looking for him.”

  “Take my advice and don’t come in,” he said.

  “I must. Go see.”

  He went back, the one we called Pig-Simple because of his idiotic streaks, Arkady Kluzanov, the middle-aged brother of the postman, Dimitri, and of Rodion, the Squire’s coachman. He came back and rubbed his hands against the cleaning rags hanging from his belt. “Well, he’s here, your uncle. But I’ve thought about it, you see, and I won’t disturb him.”

  “Tell him I’m here and I’ll give you a tip.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow. I don’t handle money on the Sabbath.”

  He went back again. I thought of Uncle Mottel who lived on their side of the village. We looked upon him as one who shat upon his own head and ours also. When Laib asked Reb Maisha why the landsmen called my uncle to a reading of the Law every New Year’s even though he never set foot in the synagogue, I saw how Laib sought reasons to put himself closer to the atheist, and I began to wonder if Uncle Mottel’s freethinking wasn’t in the family. I knew little about my grandparents except that they had come from Vilna. My father’s father had been killed in the Crimean War; his wife had remarried and gone South. Meanwhile my mother’s parents whom I remembered hardly at all, Zelyeh and Fendel, had brought Father and Uncle to Golinsk where my parents married. Mother vaguely mentioned about Father coming from a line of Vilna cantors and later in America I thought Caruso resembled Uncle Mottel around the cheeks and mouth. Many times I wondered about “Grandmother being taken South”; she had married a second man to leave her children behind and I feared something wild in her had passed to Uncle Mottel, with Laib similarly infected.

  Kluzanov came back looking puzzled. “He wasn’t angry in the slightest, he says go straight up.”

  He led me down a dark hall smelling of cabbage, and showed me the stairs. The banister was broad and smooth. A cousin of the sweet smell of the perfume in the synagogue filled the air at the top of the stairs; a door was open there and I went to it. I heard my uncle shouting, “In here, Laib!”

  They were sitting at a table in the center of the room, she in a dark wrapper and he in his drawers, drinking tea and playing cards as homey as you’d wish. “Who are you?” Varya said, a small plump woman, pale and sleepy.

  “His brother.”

  “A guest,” my uncle said, slapping a card down and taking the trick. “I thought you were Laib coming from the synagogue.”

  He seemed to lose interest in me, paying close attention to the game. Well, there I was; and this was sin. The room seemed bright and clean enough. A pale blue paper covered the walls, not much of it ripped and streaky. The bed looked well slept in, the linen quite white, with plenty of pillows. Before my eyes I had proof that sin was more than furtive grappling, that people did not meet and slink away; there was even something ordinary about it. They were playing cards; how assuring!

  “Only trouble brings me here,” I said and waited for my uncle to notice me again. “Close the door,” Varya said. When I did not do it immediately she dropped her cards and half-rose, an anxious look on her face. “Play,” my uncle ordered and she sat down again.

  “What is the trouble?” Varya asked, throwing her cards down; a few dropped to the floor.

  “He ran out of the synagogue.”

  “Good,” my uncle grunted as he picked up the cards. “May he never go back.”

  “Then he’s not here, Uncle?”

  Varya rose to close the door and her wrapper opened. I saw her thick legs and barrel of a figure; not attractive yet with an exact appeal.

  Trapped and wishing to save myself I twisted toward the door. She closed it, pushing me into the middle of the room near my uncle. “As long as you’re here,” he shrugged.

  Up to then I had used Russian out of deference to the surroundings. Now I spoke burstingly in Yiddish about the scandal of the perfume. He scratched his ear with his thumb as he listened. “Your perfume,” he said to her, amused. “It spilled in the synagogue.”

  “How foolish. I’ll get him more.”

  “You’ll never see him again,” I warned, shouting in my fear. “You don’t realize!”

  “He’ll be back,” my uncle said. “He’d never leave the fiddle here.”

  “Hold your mouth, Mottel!”

  “Let him know,” he told Varya. “See her, Shim? She gives him lessons how to play fiddle. It’s kept here, she gave him the perfume . . . but remember, it’s only for you to know it, clear?”

  “Is that correct, lady?”

  “Yes,” she told me. “And I don’t like you.”

  “She’s a liar, she’d like anybody,” my uncle said, pushing himself up from the table. “Just tell anyone about Laib’s fiddle and these two hands will make jelly out of you. He wants fiddle? Let him have it!”

  “But if it’s the truth why can’t I say it? You don’t know what they’re doing to Reb Maisha, Uncle. They think it’s something else!”

  “Let them,” he growled, and I saw he must be drunk. “The fiddle. Yes, that’s the worst, you see! Now remember to keep quiet like a good brother!”

  “But if Laib really didn’t ...” I had spoken in Russian when he went into it; now I fell back
into Yiddish . . . “If he didn’t do you- know-what with her, I’ve got to let everybody know!”

  “To play!” he said with a snap I suddenly saw reason for. “Not for weddings, you understand, but to play! That’s the worst! Clear?”

  “No.”

  “It pulls you away,” he muttered, his hands making circles in the air before coming down in two hard fists upon the table. “Of course

  you’re not Laib, you don’t wish anything but crap, you wouldn’t think of going where there’s a bit of air!”

  “Of course he would,” Varya said. “Anyone would!”

  “Quiet, you,” he said to her. “Shim . . . it’s true the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But the apple can roll far far away ... all that’s needed is to tip the world a bit downhill and then you’ll see the apple roll! Clear?”

  “It’s crazy.”

  “Then be crazy yourself and say nothing about fiddles! Let him only understand how to begin to play! Then watch him roll down the hill!”

  “I’ll look for him again,” I said, going to the door.

  “Nothing about the fiddle,” he warned.

  “Be so good,” Varya said as though she understood our Yiddish, “allow me to explain a few things.”

  “You said you didn’t like me,” I replied without hiding my contempt.

  “I lied,” she smiled, lying.

  I ran into the hall. My uncle threw me a farewell warning. “Remember, Shim! Take care of your head!”

  On the way out I stumbled into Pig-Simple. “That was quick,” he said, holding my arm above the elbow. Pulling myself free I opened the door. “No tip for letting you in?” he complained. I ran ahead of his squealing curses toward the woods.

  There was a gully we’d go to, Laib and I, when we were younger, where we’d have feasts of berries and walnuts poached from the Squire’s fields on rainy days when no one was about. We’d sit in a rough shelter of boughs, cracking the nuts with stones and burying the shells when we were done, all pleasant and partnerish. I went there hoping to find him but mostly to puzzle out what I’d do. I felt weak and out of my depth, nothing like a father at all. Truthfully speaking, though I didn’t admit it I found I hadn’t exactly disliked my first glimpse of “Heaven.” Within its walls one had no need for imaginings. How simple, one merely paid to commit a sin, a known matter to all parties of course including The One Above, Who after all must have had quite a department for forgiving this particular sin,