The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  “I won’t play if I can’t see Shim,” I said boldly.

  The Squire ran his finger along his gums, cleaning off bits of nuts. “If you don’t, you’re no good to me and I’m sure they’ll give you a fine welcome in the Pukop jail.”

  Whether this was only his child psychology I didn’t try to prove; I kept quiet and that night the worst blizzard of the year began, canceling the Squire’s ball. A barn wall collapsed, pigs and chickens went, roofs flew off in the racing winds. During the first day of it the Buzarovs and the Kluzanovs moved into the main house, sleeping on the kitchen floor and in the Gallery. With plenty of wood in the cellar, meats taken from the smokehouse, and water gotten from a drift that crashed the glass roof of the conservatory, the snow shoveled in buckets through the door, the house was comfortable except for the waste- smells from the barrels in the cellar which little by little spread through the first floor. Madame produced extra perfume sprayers and everybody started making stt-stts! Glueck and I kept mostly to his room upstairs, the Ave Maria more on my mind than the blizzard.

  I did not observe the drinking but Glueck did. By the second night of the blizzard, Christmas Eve, the servants were staying good and tipsy and the Squire along with them. Even Madame and Tatiana

  Arkipovna fell into it and Leta and Lilli made up some game of giggles between them at supper; a huge banquet. Glueck was careful to avoid vodka, sticking to the wine though Madame urged him to all kinds of toasts. And Tatiana Arkipovna said, “Come, dear Ernst, it’s Christmas,’’ in the j oiliest voice imaginable, a new side of her rising.

  In the kitchen they were singing; Vassily almost dropped the roast coming in with it. Everybody laughed and Vassily dropped it purposely. Already drinking from the bottle, the Squire forbade Vassily to pick it up and ran for his hussar’s sword, returning to make running attacks upon the roast. To Glueck and me this appeared dull but the others hailed him.

  “Kolya,” cried Tatiana Arkipovna, her face flushed, “go put on your full uniform! Blizzard or no blizzard we’ll have our ball, let’s all be young and dressed up and make believe it’s Moscow!”

  “And Ernst shall play,” Madame cried, throwing her hand at him in a modest imitation of the theatrical way, “and we shall dance. Come, girls, into our white silk!”

  “And you,” said Tatiana Arkipovna with a sudden point at the aghast Glueck, “you into your best also!”

  “A member of the family!” Madame ventured gaily.

  “Not the boy,” the Squire said, “he mustn’t be wearied, more important matters are waiting for him. Take him upstairs, Glueck.”

  I fell asleep, not for long. The wind woke me and then the hailstones. Downstairs I heard the piano, something very fast, and noise. Then the piano stopped and Glueck soon came in. “Laib. . . .”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “He says he wants you.”

  On the way downstairs, because of the fatal set of his face and the pleated shirt and white bow he wore, he looked not only like the waiter who has just spilled soup on a customer, but the customer as well.

  The closer we approached the main hall the crazier everything sounded — laughs, yells, giggles, poundings, a tide of roars and thumps of weights falling, and above all a senseless ugly pounding of the piano,

  low and high, low and high as though it was being clubbed. One look was enough. Leta sat at the piano, her fists flailing down, her face reddened with wine and triumph while Lilli squirted long stt-stts! at Lukenka and Natalya asleep next to each other on the floor near the fireplace. At the same time Madame was trying to teach Rodion something like a minuet, both pounding their feet and stumbling against each other while Tatiana kept calling, “Again, again.”

  It wasn’t unpleasant or shocking, lacking connection with anything pleasant or customary. The room seemed to be hanging in the air, holding itself perfectly well together while managing to be part of something elsewhere. The Squire was adding his own touch. Circling the air with his sword, he was riding his noble steed Vassily about the room and dealing various deaths to pillows, cushions, lamps and entire sofas, calling out the charges with the bugle in his other hand as Vassily negotiated a crawling tour of a big square marked off by four bottles, stopping at each for a long swallow. Wearing his hussar’s uniform the Squire kept shouting, “Don’t be still, Tatya, stay noisy,” she obeying. Nobody stopped, nobody grew tired; it was a coda refusing to end, the same over and over. As Glueck pushed me into the room, the immense chandelier gleaming over my head, I remembered those moments in Profim’s “Heaven” when they had let me for a show with Arkady’s goat. Glueck pushed me toward the fireplace where it was warmer, then went to the piano for the fiddle. No one seemed to see I was there.

  “Anything,” Glueck said with a raised voice, to be heard. “You’re to play, he wants it.”

  In my nightgown I played the Ave Maria, closing my eyes on the long notes, hardly hearing them myself in the beginning. First the piano stopped pounding, then Tatiana Arkipovna subsided. Toward the middle of my playing it the first time, the room touched quiet and stayed there, the storm outside meshing with it in a counterpoint. When I finished Tatiana Arkipovna called, “Again,” her voice low, a need in it, and I saw the Squire kneeling. “God be thanked,” he said, moaning religiously.

  I played it again. Lubenka snored next to Natalya, Leta ran to her mother and Madame to Lilli, Vassily eyeing a nearby bottle and Glueck encouraging me with pleased nods. A short while before the room had been evilly squeezing itself. Now it was some place of holiness to them, because of my playing. The Squire got up when I finished and came sobbing to me with healthy tears. He put his hands on my hips and spoke with wonder, “You will do, Lev, you will do.” He kissed me on the mouth, his fumes choking me; the act of a drunkard turning toward his good side, a rusty impulse. Here, as though hit on the head by a halo, Leta ran to Glueck and threw herself against him, hanging onto the lapels of his coat and blubbering, “Teach me, teach me too,” the eruption causing him to writhe with polite control. Tatiana Arki- povna hurried over, happily taking Leta’s hands. “But Leta, girls do not do the violin. See, you are hurting Ernst’s jacket.” Leta threw of! her mother’s hands and clung to Glueck with a desperate strength until he said, “Miss Leta, perhaps the piano. . .

  “The piano, the piano,” she said, looking at him and going all loose, a hunger in her eyes not missed by Tatiana Arkipovna nor Madame who had by then come over.

  “There, little Leta,” Madame cooed with her best syrup, “you shall play the piano and our dear Ernst . . .”

  “We’ll start tomorrow and prepare the moment now,” Tatiana interrupted, holding Leta by the shoulders and starting to turn her away; but Leta turned herself to Glueck, shot herself up on tiptoes and gave him a quick peck on the cheek before running out of the room, followed by Madame with Lilli in a giggle.

  “You have made the child happy,” Tatiana said dashingly, smiling at the astounded fellow, her own cheeks paler now. “Good night,” she said in a new way, the words elbowing themselves through other, more exciting thoughts.

  Vassily began uprighting the furniture and glumly the Squire pointed to the sleeping women. “Drag them out, Vassily.” And to Glueck, “For heaven’s sake take him back to bed. He’s cold in his gown.” As we left I saw him turning to the fireplace, getting ready to

  pass some water, his cavalry bugle hanging from his shoulder, the cord under an epaulet.

  In the hall I asked Glueck why the Squire had knelt and he said, “You reminded him it was Christmas. You see, don’t you? Lev, music always arouses the cleanest feelings, it is supreme.”

  The blizzard left more than snow. Each evening before supper Glueck gave Leta her lesson at the piano; new sounds, Leta’s bruised tinklings and Glueck’s calm correcting ripples. A week passed into the next and the next, hints of changes peeped out of the winter gloom, the buds of that crazy spring — new bright ribbons in Leta’s hair, a lightness to her step as she went to practice afte
r supper, a variety to her, sometimes braids, sometimes her hair rolled up into a shy crown; and once I saw Leta outside the dining room before supper, biting her lips to make them redder.

  Supper changed; gone were the silences broken by gruntings and sippings. We had conversations, a facade of domesticity, chatterings about changing the positions of pictures in the Gallery, of replacing draperies in the spring, of converting the conservatory into some kind of a summer sitting room “for the girls,” Madame agog with letters to various stores in Petersburg. Through all this Leta would take long looks at Glueck every time she put a glass to her lips. It was fairly plain. The women were plotting the match. Tatiana Arkipovna took care to hook Glueck into descriptions of the musical life in Petersburg, spoke of “giving up the estate here” and settling in that city “when the right time came,” Madame meanwhile making exclamation points over Leta’s head with her perfume sprayer. Not entirely crass; Tatiana Arkipovna retained a portion of her reserve, nevertheless pushing herself further than she imagined she could.

  Glueck acted as if everything went over his head. One morning when we were resting a minute I said, “She likes you.”

  “She?”

  “Leta.”

  “A child. . . .”

  “She bites her lips to make them red. I saw her.”

  “Ah,” he said, “nature has plotted against her too well.”

  “They’d make a king of you if you married her.”

  “If I married her?”

  “They’re throwing a house in Petersburg at you. You haven’t noticed?”

  “Impossible . . . she’s as strange with me as I am with her. Relieved to see a face as ugly as her own.”

  “Glueck, I’ve seen matches made. . . .”

  “Now we’ll go back to our Etudes he cut me off.

  For the rest of the day he failed to correct me as much as usual. When it came time for Leta’s lesson he asked me to tell Madame he would not be coming downstairs. “These headaches of mine,” he explained. “They strike me a few times every year and then go away, sometimes after only a day . . . nothing to be done about it but rest and drink plain tea.”

  This was said for rehearsal purposes. As the wife of a tailor always having to fight for a price my mother used to listen carefully to the speeches my father tried out on her before giving them to his customers. She was quick to detect overlapping vibrations, unnecessary bravados, anything which might wrinkle the total plausibility and especially the greatest giveaway of the worried man — too many different faces being made while much was being said too quickly. Having observed my parents in this activity for so long, it was easy to see Glueck was only playing sick. “Here’s a better idea, Glueck. Just say you are already married.”

  “No, I must take care,” he sighed, too upset to deny anything. “I must be aloof, somehow, without offending. The girl is freakish. How foolish and blind of me, I am not ready yet to be dismissed. . . .”

  “Well, I’ll go down and tell it to them in your way.”

  “Thank you, Lev.”

  I performed my mission in the ladies’ sitting room. Madame made piteous gasps about “our poor chronic” and suggested to Tatiana Arki- povna that Glueck be tenderly nursed “at all times, not to feel forsaken.” A samovar was ordered to be sent up to him and Leta ran into

  the kitchen to make sure everything would be just right. For her more than a piano lesson was being missed. Within her arrested and ignored spirit lay something pushing her to conquer the handicaps of her body, an extraordinary natural effort to be like others.

  “He will need poultices and medicines to sleep,” Tatiana Arkipovna said pleasantly, putting down her sewing and standing up.

  “I think I have some good things too. I’ll see,” said Madame. Tatiana Arkipovna told her this would not be necessary. “Stay here with the girls,” she ordered. There is a certain calm in many women behind which may be found a crouching power that waits and waits, knowing it can pounce but once, and only for a kill; such was Tatiana Arki- povna’s.

  I left her at her own landing and flew up to ours to report to Glueck already undressed and in bed. “It’s all right, very good, they’re worried,” I told him in a gross miscalculation.

  Glueck’s imaginary headache became soon real. He had thought to make a fortress out of his bed but the women came at him in waves. Tatiana Arkipovna smiled herself in with pills and poultices, Madame made herself the girls’ escort “to prove to them, the little dears, that he wasn’t dying, now they’ll sleep,” spreading it hard and thick a few times about “the big one especially, you never saw anyone so upset.” There could not fail to be complications; while setting down the samovar on the writing desk Natalya stumbled, the inkstand tipping over some fanned-out pages of his precious manuscript, a concerto; and when he groaned Leta knelt and held his fingers against the pain, begging him to accept the doctor. Madame meanwhile made her little stt-stts! around the bed as though anointing them with a double halo. Tatiana Arkipovna insisted on making him take three kinds of pills, and after the pills came a poultice and then a glass of tea, all this with Leta before him, holding his hand and mumbling “the doctor, the doctor.”

  As she lifted the girl away from him Tatiana Arkipovna said, “You must conquer this, Ernst, you are needed.” She touched his cheek, coldly possessive in her dignity.

  310 The Landsmen

  I met the Squire coming down the hall from his study. “Why the noise, Lev?”

  “Glueck’s sick.”

  “Impossible!”

  Washing, I heard the Squire being cheery with Glueck. “An impossible time to be sick, Glueck!” he shouted. “You have no idea! No time to waste! We’ve matters to settle — the moment you’re well!”

  From Glueck, a moan.

  At supper things began with unusual spirit. Glueck’s illness had expanded itself into a family event of immediate gaiety (though Leta kept saying the doctor should come, he might be dying). The Squire directed her to shut up but Madame said comfortingly, “Oh, he is not really ill, we are happy to show him our wishes, to care for him, to surround him as never even in his own home. No, Leta, we must be cheerful, anything may happen. . . .”

  Tatiana Arkipovna reminded Leta to be thoughtful, to let Glueck see nothing but smiles, to conceal all worries, “to show we are fondling him as a baby.” There was more of this until the Squire said, “What a fuss over a headache!”

  “We wish for him to see one dear heart beating faster because of his pain.”

  “Oho,” the Squire said with a wink at me. The happy mood of the others disappeared when he added, “Well, there it is . . . next they’ll be tossing her into bed with him, these two.”

  “Come, girls,” Madame gasped, seeing the Squire was bringing up his larger cannons. “Papa’s not himself again.”

  Tatiana Arkipovna closed the doors, after Madame and the girls had gone, a burn of hate in her eyes as she came back and stood over her husband. “Do sit,” he said, nibbling on something, “it hurts my neck to look up at you.”

  “Kolya, you must listen.” She took an apple from the bowl and spoke in reasonable tones. “It is not Madame. Leta found it for herself. She loves him. Kolya, it is so. She has confided in me voluntarily. She is awakening.”

  “Give her a medicine to sleep.”

  “Kolya, please — ”

  “Don’t you see the cruelty? Who would ever want her?”

  “God has given Leta a chance. We cannot be blunt, Kolya. She wants him. That is the blessing.”

  “Well, let her want the Tsarevitch. You care for her? Spare her feelings, men do not marry sexual cripples. There’s no price on it.”

  (She cut the apple into small strips with a horn-handled knife, speaking the while.) “You haven’t studied him. He is shy himself, gentle, enough of a child. One of those who lives in his heart, a little bit priestly with his music. Women are strange to him, he is afraid of them. But to be worshiped, to be taken for a god as Leta takes him, to be su
pported in his career as my father will do . . . Kolya, please, it is sinful to interfere. And you, Lev . . . you are a child, you are not fooled. Leta is pure!”

  She waited for the Squire to reply, cutting the apple into smaller and smaller bits. He drained his glass slowly, enjoying his triumph, a smile hardening itself. He said nothing. “Please give him a chance to become used to her. Please, you must not interfere, Kolya, with any of your jokes.”

  He stretched his smile until he had to make a sound, the words oozing out with careful laziness. But he sighed first. “Well . . . how fortunate Leta is Leta and not Tatya, the girl sent to Moscow . . . and our Glueck is not that young bookbinder who took the sensible way out . . . this way, Leta won’t marry to bury herself. Better not to marry at all than your way, Tatya. . . .”

  The reference to certain facts as yet beyond me caused Tatiana Arki- povna to lose her calm and to stiffen, the knife in her hand loosening, then catching it again at the blade, tightening, the pain not felt. The Squire reached over and took the knife. “There,” he said as she looked down at her hand, the scratch rising, “you hurt yourself.”

  In the quiet as she kept her head down I said, almost whispering, “Mistress Konayeva, but he has a sweetheart.”

  “It is a lie.”

  “Go on, Lev. . . .”

  “It is so,” I said. “She is in Novgorod, he’s spoken of her to me. He came here for the money. He wants to bring her to him, with a new harp.”

  “Shy,” the Squire mocked easily, “a child, afraid of women. . . .”

  “I will hear it from his own lips,” she trembled. “And if it is so, he will leave!”

  “But he is under my orders, Tatya,” the Squire said. “I have a use for him here.”

  “He will leave this house.” She brought her fist down upon the cut-up apple. The plate cracked.