The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  “Stop, it’s me,” I called to Laib. He headed to the woods; I heard his painful cries as he ran; the stones were hurting his feet; he was without his boots. Rochel heard and ran to him and between us we held him. I put my arms around him. “Good God be thanked!”

  “Let me alone, get away.”

  “Where, where were you,” Rochel breathed.

  “My feet,” he moaned.

  “Come to the bathhouse and we’ll wash them,” Rochel urged.

  “No, it must be full in there tonight, I don’t want to see anybody!”

  “You don’t know what’s happening,” I said. “No one’s there.”

  He kept repeating, “I’m not saying anything,” all the way. He insisted on our going far behind the huts to the path to the stream instead of by the easy way, even though his feet were paining him. In the bathhouse we found rags to dip into the water-barrel for his feet. The darkness helped hide each other’s fright and misery.

  “Dear brother,” I began as he sat with the rags to his feet.

  He stopped me sharply. “Don’t give me your smears!”

  “I’m only glad to hear your voice again. I thought you’d done with Varya.”

  Rochel’s voice touched sweetly. “Just that you’re here, Laib. . . .”

  “Varya. What?”

  “You don’t know,” I said. “Nochim came home from Pukop to die and sent for her on his last bed.”

  “Ellya and Nasan heard from Vassily Buzarov, she’s away,” Rochel told him.

  “But that’s only why I came back. . .

  “Vassily says she flew from Nochim’s curse on her . . . about the perfume.”

  He said nothing; Rochel and I heard him sobbing.

  I took his arm. “It’s all right. I know about your fiddle. Looking for you earlier I spoke to her and Uncle. Only Rochel knows and she won’t say anything either.”

  “That’s only why,” he sobbed. “I came for the fiddle. She has the key. Good-by fiddle, it lies in hell now. . . .”

  “You’ll get it,” Rochel comforted. “Meanwhile, Laib . . . where were your

  “Tonight, tonight I’ll get it,” he said, rising. I heard him groan as he put his weight back on his feet. “No,” I pleaded, “you can’t even walk. Wait a day, let it!”

  “No.” His mind was made up. “It’s the end of me here. So she’s gone . . . well, there are teachers in Minsk, better ones. Aunt Yiva’s there, too, I’ll stay with her. If Uncle’s over there I’ll still get the fiddle tonight. . .

  “Let it be as you say,” I begged dishonestly, “but with a day later. You’re without clothes, your feet can’t stand ... give yourself a chance.”

  “Where are the clothes?” Rochel asked. “The new ones?”

  “An accident,” he said, beginning to speak quietly, hopelessly; in the darkness I did not notice Rochel stealing out. “From the synagogue I ran anywhere . . . down the back-path to the road. I’d go to Svutz, sell the new clothes in the market, go somewhere else, perhaps find musicians . . . and send to Uncle Mottel for my fiddle. Don’t say anything,” he flared, “I’m finished with Golinsk.”

  “Well?”

  “A few miles down I met a wagon of Svutzkers but didn’t know they were Jews . . . until I tried to sell them my clothes. They told me about Nochim. . . .”

  “Also about the great trouble in Pukop . . . ? About Reb Sussya?”

  “Also. So I lied them a story of how police were looking for me, something . . . anything to get to Svutz. They let me out near, not in . . . fearing for themselves. In the Svutzker market I handled with a peasant on my clothes . . . the bargain made, I went into an alley to take them off and put on his exchange-pants ... he had a bundle . . . and when it came to paying he kicked my face and good-by. . .

  “With your clothes!”

  “What then, without? . . . with walking and a long ride I came back to get the fiddle and maybe a ruble from Uncle, I don't know. But listen,” he said pointedly, “my face is to Minsk. I’ll still go tonight.”

  “You can’t go back to Profim’s. Police must be there, I heard terrible screaming, maybe Uncle’s arrested.”

  “Then I’ll go this way! Hear me, I don’t want to be more of a hurt . . . let them think anything of me! Be a good brother! Let’s kiss good-by, until later. . . .”

  “Like this? Think of Papa and Mama, let them rest in peace . . . !”

  “They lived. So let me!”

  I threw myself upon him. “Laib! If you’re really going go like a person, not like a thief! Rest, explain . . . tell them how the perfume got in the book, tell your reasons, at least . . . after all let them know it was a clean thing!”

  “A clean thing,” he repeated bitterly. “Who would think it’s clean ? Not even you. Don’t lie and make it worse!” I said nothing, thinking, “Let him talk himself out.”

  He spoke quietly again with a scorn that cut, an echo of our uncle. “Very clean ... to go from the village, but not to a seminary, no . . . to a music institute, eating gentile food or roaming with musicians! A nightly day, clean! To you and the rest of them, the other thing they believe about me, that’s of course cleaner to them completely!”

  “Laib, wait. . . .”

  “Cry till you drown, it won’t help.” He spoke in cold hard pounds, with a frozen mind. “I know what I want, I know what I am, I know

  what I’ll do. Tie me, starve me, scream till your teeth fall out, but you won’t overturn me. I’m not here any more!”

  By this time Rochel came back with Laib-Shmul, Velvet, and Daneel. Velvel held the lamp high. They stood in the doorway, silently. When Laib saw them he muttered, “All right.”

  Laib-Shmul took his arm, not unkindly for him, saying, “Come to bed, tomorrow will be time,” and Laib went with them without looking at me.

  “Come, Shim.”

  I sat down. “I’m dizzy a bit, Rochel.”

  A little later, nearing our hut I noticed a candle in the synagogue and looked in at the door. Reb Maisha stood praying all by himself. His back was straight; his voice rose and fell quietly. I could see he was saving himself for a whole night of prayer. I wanted to go and join him but just stood listening awhile as he said the prayer for sustenance. “My help is from the Lord who made Heaven and earth. Cast thy burden upon the Lord and He shall sustain thee.”

  With an “Amen” to myself I left Rochel and went back to our hut, undressed, and crawled in with Laib who was already asleep.

  The next morning Nochim’s funeral took place and what happened is a separate story all by itself. We entertained two guests there, on horses, the Squire himself and Vassily Buzarov. Together they made terrifying threats. Because through Nochim we were “connected” to “the Pukop conspiracy,” we were forbidden to leave our side even to stand in the market; besides which was announced an assembly for the next day when we would be told about a new decree of the government respecting our fates. But the worst of all for me was the Squire’s announcement that Uncle Mottel had indeed set out after Varya, which neither I nor Laib believed for a moment.

  Immediately after the funeral the landsmen entered the synagogue to hold a meeting. “Come,” I said to Laib, “you’re confirmed now and supposed to sit at the meeting.”

  “In a little while,” he replied. He waved toward the departing ones. “Go along.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then come,” I insisted.

  “You might as well know,” Laib said. “If Uncle sends for me Tm going.”

  “Sends for you!”

  “He’s not coming back. Never. He must have taken the fiddle with him; I’m going to make sure.”

  With that he ran, of course, toward “Heaven.” To stop him was useless. Until then he had spoken not a word to anyone. I was thankful at least for his having said he’d wait until he was sent for; it gave me time.

  In such a frame I went to my parents’ graves to say a prayer but couldn’t. I talked to them
, asking their forgiveness for my lacks. The day was a beautiful one, the air sweet with spring, sprouts of green covering their brown mounds; but in my unhappiness I saw only the mounds and the slanty weatherbeaten gravestones around me.

  Then her voice, “Enough.” I did not turn. Squatting beside me she said, “Come, Shimmel.”

  “I’m no good. . . .”

  “You tried. They know.”

  “I tried to be like Papa to him, Rochel.”

  “Hear me, Shimmel. Who can take the place of a father?” She put her hand to the back of my hair. “You’ll be a father to your own,” she said stroking.

  “My own, yes,” I said absently. “Jumping over the sky, that’s when.”

  “All right,” she said, “so we’ll jump over together.”

  We walked out of the cemetery arm in arm; and when we came to the huts we did not move our hands. Seeing us from down the lane the women pointed and said, “Look, look,” among them, happily amused, understanding we were serious.

  Very well, “serious.” But other things went with wider seriousness. Bosha opposed us even after the letter from Yeersel came all the way from America.

  But wait; let me gather myself here. I am done with everything as it happened minute by minute; time has become money to you and listening quite a paid profession; and besides, I have come exactly to my point.

  Know first that Uncle Mottel never sent for Laib but almost a year after Laib’s confirmation helped him to America. It was during those eleven months that our stubborn Golinsk gave way. Having withstood many past evils it fell under the fines imposed when the eight youngers ran from being conscripted on the day of the assembly, Berel-the-Ox having cried up a false plague and Yeersel guiding them through the woods to Minsk and illegally for America.

  The consequences struck all with equal force. The village changed and we changed; led by Tzippe-Sora we made ourselves into a company of contrabanders, cooking and selling untaxed alcohol for the fines and escape-money until Tzippe-Sora was caught and jailed and the synagogue burned down by the peasants after they found illegal stocks hidden there. Then a vest-pocket encyclopedia of evils: Hertz's Baylah spoiled by the Squire; Laib-Shmul caught trying to steer five boys away, he being made the Squire’s pigsticker and the boys drafted from their jail at the next call in October; arrested with Tzippe-Sora was my brother Laib, who despaired of Uncle Mottel ever returning and allowed himself to accept an offer of the Squire to become a protege, living in his stone mansion, wearing a cadet’s jacket and studying violin with a special master brought from Petersburg.

  Other things; our side became an unofficial prison, all of us looking in the end to flee. I married Rochel in the autumn, on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles; she quickly became pregnant; by miracles of tailoring and with great help I whisked her to her father in America.

  I could mention more but it is not in me to tally evils. I don’t believe in stimulating the listener into giving his conscience a sudden tap as though to his wallet among a crowd. Too much of this has been done by denouncers of evils “against which man stands helpless,” evils “difficult to abolish at the present time,” with the result that the un-

  breakable thing about this “man” they are always burying — his way of growing — is completely left out by these nearsighted heart-readers. It is a scandal; speaking broadly, one so lies at the mercy of these selflifting spiritists that one may almost be pardoned for forgetting that man exists and grows, “despite”

  Everything we did, Rochel and I, we did “at the wrong time.” In the midst of death and climbing danger we fell in love. When life itself made a question mark, we married. I sent her to a strange country thinking I’d never see her again; and joining her there I committed “mistake after mistake,” went into the “wrong” business, raised five children on little money and less time; as the saying went, we “didn’t catch on.”

  Even our children thought this. I remember the many times my son Aaron used to send the car down to Rochel and me in New Roseville, New Jersey, about two o’clock of a Friday afternoon. We would ride to the big hotel in Lakewood where Aaron “thought it would be a good idea, just for a change.” A room would be waiting for us and I would put on a pair of white pants and a blue coat and pray the Sabbath Eve in a special chapel of the hotel, and there would be a nine-course banquet with a string ensemble costing at least three-fifty a head which didn’t taste any better than the sixty-cent dinner Rochel and I offered at our twelve-table restaurant on Front Street. And on Sabbath morning I would put on the English walking-suit Aaron had made for me at Schanz for my thirty-third anniversary and we would go strolling among the pines, father and son — “when do we have a chance to talk together, it’s all right to miss one Sabbath in the shule” — and despite the high tone and seeing Aaron and Rhoda and the boys, and the car and chauffeur taking us home at nine o’clock — “come on, Pop, honest, stay over, sit down and take a hand, help me make expenses!” — I enjoyed the Sabbath better in Golinsk. There I had Rochel to look at and smile at me. Those times in Lakewood everything was a worry, whether her dress looked right, whether it was a mistake not to eat the lettuce she called “grass,” whether her hands were still too red from the kitchen even after fifteen minutes of smearing them with lotion Rhoda

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  sent to our room with one of the boys; ana Rochel didn’t play cards like other Lakewood elderlies. When they would pass her in the lobby and say, “Well, Mrs. Golinsky, taking it easy now with such a fine son,” she would say stubbornly, “No, my husband and I keep a restaurant, my hands have to do something.” Then she would worry; she “said a wrong thing”; people would gossip; “the rich Aaron Golinsky lets his mother get up five o’clock in the morning to make breakfast for truck drivers.” Rochel would look the other way when Rhoda would begin with her, “For heaven’s sake, Mama,” and fuss over how Rochel “didn’t have to work worse than a janitor” when she could be “a parlor lady” or at least “something easier, Mama; I shouldn’t live to wake up tomorrow if I don’t have big fights with Aaron the way you sit cleaning fifty chickens every Friday for the Sunday trade, it’s a disgrace.” Aaron would sometimes smoke two cigars trying to “open a little store like a department store” for us, where Rochel could “sit at the register like a manager, with bobbed hair.” Rochel would beg Aaron, “Let me live, don’t bury me in a drygoods and don’t bob my hair.” He would laugh and kiss her and it would be quiet until the next time. We were glad to go and come back; I always gave the chauffeur, Royal, a dollar tip.

  Rochel refused to give up the restaurant exactly because she could have been a real “manager” no place else. On Passover and on the Feast of Lights, and sometimes in between, we would close the restaurant and pull down the shades. The tables would be put together and Aaron would come with Rhoda and the four boys, Pauline and Hannah with theirs, and Milton until he went to Palestine; and sometimes Laib and Gitel and theirs, and all the Kalmenitzkys from Rhoda’s side, Ida and Lena and theirs, even Moey all the way from South Brooklyn; easily fifty people, often, the restaurant filled with our best fruits. They would go promising “not to wait so long until next time,” but when they came it felt a bit like Golinsk again, like the synagogue on Sabbath where we walked the hardest path to the greatest joy, ignorant of the world being round or indeed of any history (being history ourselves), putting the world aside one day of the week, keeping our faith in something better known. Yes, exactly; seeing how our fruits had put the

  world aside to come back to us I would say to myself secretly, “Aaron comes back, too. He, also, wants something better.”

  Who was I to criticize? Other tailors had become manufacturers, other restaurant-keepers had built big hotels but all I had done was “run away from chances.” The first year in America I could have become partners with Zalman Tekulsky in Broome Street; he would have taken me in for a hundred dollars and I had it; but after I hurt my eye I was afraid I’d go blind. I stopped bei
ng a tailor entirely, putting my hundred dollars into a chicken-farm Utopia in Jersey where one had to choke the eggs out of the chickens no matter how wonderful the farm life was according to the platform lecture they gave me in the Baron de Hirsch farm school. We had to eat so we opened a restaurant, I in the front and Rochel in the kitchen; and so we lived most of a good twenty- five years; in all that time nobody had to tell me I “ran away from chances.” In 1910 Aaron brought me some kind of a Rubenstein; he had half a loft in Canal Street and a dozen machines. “Why not?” Aaron said. “I’ll lend you fifteen hundred, Rubenstein will sell and you’ll be in charge of the shop. You won’t have to sew a stitch, just watch the operators.” I tried it for a season. We leased the restaurant and took a flat, the two of us, in Jackson Place, Brooklyn.

  It was a year for velvets but Rubenstein bought velours and with everybody else busy we played pinochle with the operators. Rubenstein didn’t like the price I got for the velours and we had fights; I criticized him for buying them in the first place; then he went to the bank and took money on Aaron’s signature to buy velvets but by then everybody else was closing out and buying goods for the spring. Aaron said, “Well, it’s only one season. Wait, you’ll see.” Meanwhile Rubenstein became disgusted with his brother-in-law and fired him just at the time we needed a quick shipment on two hundred coats for Lipitz in Alabama. Rubenstein said to me, “Sit down now at the machine.” Truthfully speaking, I had never worked a machine and had no wish to learn; my eye was weak again, irritated by the dust of the city. So I said to Rubenstein, “My son’s money you’re entitled to but my eye I’ll keep.”

  “Who needs you to stand around like a manager?” he roared at me. That night I came home and said to Rochel, “It’s good we only leased. Were going back to New Roseville.” When I told Aaron he said, “Let me talk to Rubenstein,” and from the way he spoke when he brought the dissolvement papers I could see he took Rubenstein’s part. “Agh,” he said, smiling at me quite gently, “what do ya expect? America!” After that Rhoda began her campaigns to take Rochel “out of the kitchen” but Aaron made no mention of any business where I would be the main thing. It was always “so Mama should take it easy,” and so on, with “Papa is no businessman” under everything; which was true. This meant little against the feeling that I had reared Aaron into making this mistake. Hadn’t Aaron since the age of fourteen conducted business on the Sabbath? When times were hard and there wasn’t enough in the restaurant for ourselves much less for customers and I rode a rented wagon peddling anything I could get on consignment, hadn’t Aaron gone out on his own while I took my Sabbath nap? Rochel had said, “Shim, you’ve got to stop this,” but I had not; there were piles of “I had nots” until one couldn’t talk to Aaron any more, coming home with his cigars and twenty-dollar gold pieces and order books filled. “You’re a baby of sixteen, do you have to smoke cigars?” Rochel begged him.