The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  “Only for business. Mama, so I’ll look older,” he soothed her. “I gotta smoke ’em home to get used to ’em.”

  It used to puzzle me that I who had never stopped cherishing my father, who had striven to be father to Laib before I had my own children, should have been of so little inspiration to Aaron.

  Rochel used to sigh, “Ay, ay, America!” “Why America?” I would ask. “If the boat stopped in Africa instead of America, you’d be saying, ‘Ay, Africa!’ No, it’s me, Rochel, my fault; everything.”

  “You blame yourself too much, Shim.”

  “I made mistakes,” I said, secretly agreeing with her. “I shouldn’t have been so afraid for my eye; I shouldn’t have been afraid to give Aaron a few hard slaps across his behind once in a while . . . there’s such a thing as too easygoing.”

  '‘To me you’re the best, Shim.”

  “Ah, well,” I said, kissing her hand, “you were always easy to fool.”

  Do I illuminate or do I obscure myself? Failures often take themselves wrong; even from my vantage point it’s a ticklish stitch. With the frivolous failures, the chance-takers, the trumpers, the squeezers, it’s something else; these blind themselves purposely so they won’t see themselves changing into smaller and smaller coin the more they change their dollars into the higher and higher thousands.

  Very well, it’s sour. But just for the joke of it, when you are alone and undisturbed, say in your room in the middle of the night, think if failure could ever be success; and when, and how.

  Don’t be afraid. It won’t be “the wrong time.” Such a time never existed. What grows, despite the evils in which it finds itself enshrined, grows often with the highest springs.

  Ask the failure the secret of success; the queerest thing, exactly.

  7 . Laib-Shmul

  (1840-1899)

  It was his intention, said rabbi bunam, to write a treatise under the title, “Man. 5 ' It was to require only a quarter of a page and the whole meaning of man was to be included; but after consideration the rabbi changed his decision, lest his treatise lead to false commentaries.

  Thus I contain myself.

  8 . T^ippe-Sora

  (1817-1898)

  When brains were more important than beards, they listened to me; when Yeersel took eight and ran to America. Some said nothing, some said it was time to run all together. I said let fools from other towns run and be killed, we’d stay in Golinsk and bribe them again to let us cook illegal alcohol and pay the official fine of twenty-four hundred rubles. It took time for them to swallow but it ended as always, they waiting to be told what to do.

  The next day I went into my dirty haggles with Rezatskin, Selenkov, and Vassily Buzarov, thirty rubles a month to be advanced us to buy grain for the distilling, we to find the places to sell, they to keep the accounts in their own book and with their own official arithmetic, and every day Buzarov to come and take away the money collected — the usual situation, we to cheat them half as much as they were cheating us or we’d be paying them until we died. But nothing could be started until the soldiers got out of our huts and I told Vassily to give the Squire a prod, for a word from him to the Colonel Commander would make the soldiers disappear. “The Squire is not smiling lately,” he said. “Petersburg turned out badly this time, heavy gaming losses. He sits behind a closed door, Tzip, but I’ll take a chance anyway.”

  Back an hour later with a grunt, “Ekh, he’s disgusted, irritated. He’s lost that Varya of his, her traits amused him. I’ll let you know what,” he said leaning down to me with his tongue out, “I think if that pretty one of yours around here, Baylah, should go herself and ask the Squire to remove the soldiers, nicely, intimately— ?”

  Remembering Nochim’s Lenka I advised him to think of another way because Baylah was with child so he praised her face and gave

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  me a sly push on his way out. Enough, I ran to the girl and told her not to talk with Vassily, not a word. Then we put her to bed, her mother and I, swelling her falsely and shrewdly with pillows since the crow would certainly come to circle around her. He took looks and said, “A shame.”

  That week a new piggishness entered our lanes, the soldiers remaining, no work anywhere, nor for us nor for them, the hole in the zero growing bigger and bigger. The silences in the huts were worse than the loudest wailings and Baylah in her bed heard both and said nothing and thought only of her Nasan gone and her misery piling; and one morning where is Baylah ? Not in her bed. The second morning and the third, the same; and on the fourth we woke to see the soldiers marching off. I ran to Vassily with her father and brother. “Why does the sun set?” he asked in a lazy tease. “Because it is time. Sh, when the bear sleeps don’t sing him songs.”

  “He got Baylah for the Squire!” yelled Hertz in Yiddish. What else could I do but push him out, away from Vassily who was saying, “Much to do, cry later! Back to your side, the minutes fly, promises are to be kept! Fines must be paid!”

  And Baylah our second Lenka; not seen again, or why.

  We worked after that in a deep gully, Laib-Shmul and Hertz mixing the mash, Zisha cooking, Asher tending the horse, boys chopping wood, everybody doing something, and whoever could stand in the market with something tried to make a penny, and the women and children steady in the fields. We were to make six barrels a week, each barrel twenty gallons, the price as near to four a barrel as we could get, and that’s the wheel, as we said, that we danced upon — “not falling off and not staying on.” The fullest burden of the selling fell on my daughter Dvoora and myself (hers a good nature under a face too hairy, held herself haughty, remained without a man and taught herself to read and write, making herself delicate and lonesome), and together we rode the wagon through the worst side-roads looking for buyers, sometimes leaving a barrel or even a jug and taking anything broken but fixable to sell in the market.

  So it went into June and a new style came to our lanes, one warned the other to speak quietly for somebody was always trying to get a little sleep at any hour. I became the leader, the daily decider, an honor impossible to like.

  One night Laib came with news, his Uncle Mottel had been heard from by a letter he sent to one of his “Heaven” ladies, telling the boy his fiddle was in the cellar there. Great news, but not for me; then he said, ‘Til get my fiddle, Tzippe-Sora, and go on the wagon with you when you look for barrel-business, and I’ll help sell many barrels with my fiddling, Tzippe-Sora, and once it’s seen how my fiddle has a use then the landsmen won't mind my playing it openly in my own hut!”

  Could it harm? I allowed it and once rode with him far, nearer to Pukop than Golinsk, to a large place, no run-down vodka station but a country stock exchange, a tavern where banditries are housed and stolen goods haggled over. The man yelled us out but the woman heard us say we were from Golinsk, and spoke of “Onion Nose,” the nickname of Nochim. Thus reminded, the man became angry and shook me with his big hand, demanding why I had come so far “to find out something.” Wishing to avoid any Nochim connection I spoke of Laib as a talent, of how I was trying to get him money for eyeglasses so he could learn to read music. He told the boy, “See this hand, Squinty? I’ve broken many a bone with it! Say why you’re here — the truth!”

  “I’ve seen stronger hands on better people,” said the brazen Laib. “I have an uncle who could break you in one spit.”

  “Fine, bring your uncle.”

  “He’s gone. But if you ever meet Mottel-the-smith of Golinsk, try him!”

  With the mention of Mottel, a new sun in the sky! The man said, “Mottel’s your uncle? Here perhaps a month ago I saw him take three and then three more, a Jew to watch!” So, in a quick joviality, glasses set before us, a new customer — Yegor described with a sportsman’s passion every move of Mottel’s when he piled up six; and when alcohol was mentioned he fell easily into a bargain, settling for a barrel at

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  three and a half and the same steadily all throu
gh the summer, ten barrels a month. And always when we’d go away after delivering he said, “Bring the boy again, I liked his uncle.”

  Ten barrels a month and quick pay; and I imagined I was really dragging two skins from one bear. He even insulted his landlord to me, how Vlad Ryba piled the rent so high ever since Yegor had sold crucial strips of land to him. This and more; too friendly for my taste; and when I stopped imagining and thought a little, I feared he’d turn, as he did.

  Yeersel’s first letter arrived in July, sent to Dvoora by a Minsk relay; the news that four of the eight had gone all the way with him, no names mentioned, with a word that Yeersel wanted his daughter to marry her choice, meaning Shim, and think of a new life “afar.” This caused a two-week excitement and wonder. Which four well and safe? But a clear hint that all of us should run away to America. Talk of running rose among the youngers but the elders feared it, I also. My heart knocked with the doom of my sons Yussel and Yakov surely lost now and my Mayer long dead in the Crimea, food from my own mouth I had sent him, and a blanket and pillow against his army misery. I spoke against running and half never arriving and the other half to be among strange enemies. I said, “Whoever gave us teeth will give us what to eat. No bargains in America, the whole world is one town.”

  Bosha opposed any wedding of Rochel and Shim, giving them the same steady answer, “Too soon yet. It’s easy for Yeersel to say because he doesn’t see what is here. Love is sweet but tastes better with bread, and do you want children like our others are?” And every day we heard new gossip in the market. First, that Baylah was traveling with some captain, then that she was in Petersburg, sent by the Squire to have her stomach flattened, with her consent, studying also how to be a fine lady; and then it was further said that if we wanted to find Baylah we should look in the forest for a mound and she’d be under it. Every day something else — once Hertz found Laib-Shmul’s chicken-knife in his son Avrum’s shirt. Avrum screamed he would kill with it in

  vengeance over Baylah. I gave Laib-Shmul a few words for letting the knife into the boy’s hands, but he said, “I gave it to him,” and I told the others to watch Laib-Shmul carefully.

  Watch today, watch tomorrow — on the fast day for the destruction of the Temple in the Jerusalem days, we had a nearer cause to mourn. The crazy partnership between Avrum and Laib-Shmul broke into something larger, Yesse, Frayim, Sholem, and Zagzaigel joining them one dawn after the gully-work; and they ran away without a plan, some even without boots. In two days Laib-Shmul was back, the others caught in the woods by soldiers on maneuvers, behind bushes, seeing and falling upon them. Selenkov told me it was a lucky thing they weren’t conscripts. They would be kept in jail, merely, until they were of army age. The Squire made Laib-Shmul his new pigsticker, a joke; and soon we saw him on one of the Squire’s wagons with a row of gutted pigs hanging behind him. It was Asher who shouted, “Don’t stay there and kill pigs, better death!”

  “Pray for me,” Laib-Shmul called as his wagon passed. Poor fellow, my son-in-law, a fool with noble motives; when he killed a chicken it always hopped, and when he wound a clock it always stopped. After this everything worsened, five men less for the gully-work then, and for the fields and market, and the rest grew weaker with a soon October and a new conscription. Quarrels began. Zisha said he didn’t dare wish for health, only for potatoes. When Maisha said The One Above would provide, Bosha answered, “If only He’d provide until He provides!” Fathers and mothers blamed each other, and other fathers and mothers for their sons’ betrayal, and tempers rose all too easily even though Maisha kept begging us to be less proud. Our afflictions came from love, he said, and could not therefore be in vain. They were meant only to arouse our penitence, he tried to tell us. Old Zelyeh gave him the answer, “I am penitent enough to die. Only not here and now.” Then a newborn choked to death and a lad of Vremya and Hatzkel’s could not stand the dysentery, also a girl of Daneel and Lippe’s, and on the second day of our New Year Zelyeh fell of a stroke in the synagogue, receiving half his wish —this and

  more which you can understand without my saying became the harvest of our months of straining. Then less quarrels, more silences until I feared a second senseless running and I said the same thing all the time, “Hold. The more we pick and choose, the more well lose. Remember the ten barrels a month we’re selling Yegor, and remember we’re paying the fines well enough for them to leave us alone. Hold, hold!”

  But Yeersel’s second letter pushed them even stronger for running. “Why not?” they asked themselves. “Dying’s dying anywhere.”

  “What God controls is often vague,” I pleaded, “the rest a blind tapping of walls! Time for other tries when there’s something in our pockets that buys!” But I did not hope to tie them down with proverbs.

  Into this pot was thrown a wedding. One morning Bosha called me inside. Her lamp was still burning and Shim and Rochel were there, both hot with the mother to let them marry. “Help me,” Bosha said. “Show them the tears they wish to buy!”

  Shim said, “What’s left here, Tzippe-Sora? I’m sixteen and it’s nearly October. They’ll take me for a recruit! They’ll say I’m twenty- one after a single look at me, haven’t they done it before?”

  “Yes, and Papa said yes,” Rochel cried.

  “Before you take Papa’s advice why don’t you look the devil in the face?” Bosha demanded. “What if Shim never gets to America and you’re a widow?”

  “As God wants it, Mama, let it be!”

  They went outside together and I saw how it was. They were not playing love. “They’re fated,” I said to Bosha.

  “They’re children.”

  “No more. Bosha, let them marry and he won’t run so quickly. He won’t go without her and won’t let her go with him. It’s a deep hot love there, clear?” With this and more I trussed her down into saying, “Ay, how hard it is to see, sometimes, how the best horse needs a whip, the wisest mother some advice, and the purest daughter a man. Let there be a wedding!”

  Ay, the wedding, hiba-hiba! Nine o’clock at night, the synagogue warm and crowded; all of us tried for a joyous moment. Reb Maisha stood under the canopy with them and gave the seven benedictions, and the candles went down softly. I remembered my own husband Bencha of long ago, how he hummed hymns while I wept for nothing to eat in the house, and also how we would pick berries together, he sly with his hands and so loving a man, sometimes making me sick and sometimes well again. Ay, Shim and Rochel married! Everyone shouted “Lucky day” and danced while Laib played his fiddle, and we sang and clapped hands and drank from a special barrel brought up from the gully, and all of us hoped Shim and Rochel would remain as they were for a while.

  Mothers began carrying sleeping children home, the dancing slowed, and some of the men kept close to the barrel. The wedding could have been said to be over when they came from the other side into the synagogue, a dozen peasants lurching in and Vassily Buzarov among them calling out, “We heard the noise, are we guests?” The peasants went straight to the barrel, not for the first time that night. I asked Vassily, “Why this?” and he shrugged, “Give them a drink and they’ll go. I tried to hold them.”

  Like the devil they went, our men sobering as they to the opposite. Hertz and Zisha took the bride and groom out, against any wedding- night tricks; meanwhile our guests grew curious and climbed to the altar to open the Ark and examine the Scrolls, dropping them. One put his head into the little room we had off to a side, and that caused the woe. With a tight finger he showed his brothers what a big prize he had found for them, two whole full barrels of our homemade alcohol; after that, what else but to open them and swill?

  How did it happen the barrels were there ? Laib told me, whispering, “Yesterday when you were sleeping Vassily came and said he needed two barrels and I went to the gully with him and put them in his wagon. He said he would take them home but then remembered he had to be with the Squire. He told me to leave the barrels in a safe place for an hour. Safe? Where is safe?
”

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  “You put them in here, in the synagogue?”

  “Av

  1iy• • • •

  And Buzarov not back for them? It smelled of a mesh to me, a two and two in my head. “Vassily,” I said, “what can make them go now?”

  “Give them a present, the two barrels. Go out, all of you, leave me with them. It’s all right.”

  Done; and in our huts we waited, but not long. First there was a great laughing and yelling, they still holding to their drinking. We watched from our windows until we saw, to the last, a true nightly day — torches, the wood flaming, an explosion, and the synagogue flaming; the Scrolls unsaved and everything a smoke.

  Laib was held to be the villain. All fell upon him, even Maisha, for using the synagogue as a store for contraband. They called him a second Mottel, a belittler, a defiler, and held morning prayers in a clearing. We had to go to Yegor’s that day to collect what he owed, and Laib wore a thick coat, and I saw a tight bundle next to his fiddle.

  “Where are you going, Laib?”

  “Away.”