The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  “No, he will stay.”

  “Then I go. We go,” she said, her voice low and flat, as though to a corpse.

  “As you wish. But Fve no capital for trips this winter, you’ll have to find the money.”

  “I’ll write Father.”

  “Send my love.”

  She dropped her head, covering her face with her arm, lips touching the tablecloth, her words rising in a mumble difficult to hear. “How dare you? ... is this your pleasure, am I amusing you?”

  Taking an opened letter from his inside pocket, the Squire waved it, saying, “No, Tatya, it is business of the highest order.”

  “Yes,” lifting her head and hurling a smile, “to be a peacock in Petersburg. . . .”

  “This is from your father. See how long it is.” He waved the two pages at her, closely. “Both sides covered. . . .”

  I didn’t catch all of it. But enough was plain, though not immediately. The Squire took this letter as the biggest single chance of his life. With a singsong relish he read off his father-in-law’s sour summary of a disappointment in Paris. Arkip Apollonovitch had been maneuvering for an important loan which would give him control of God-knew- what, but following the Panama Canal swindle the Bourse held tight and Arkip had wasted four months until at last he found a willing

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  party; only the party's mistress, an opera singer, unfortunately put her foot down against the old man because of a remark he had made to her about the Jews, without knowing she was one. Good-by to the great loan and also the possibility of a dukedom; tired and disgusted, he ended by saying he’d be in Smolensk that April and would probably come to Golinsk for a few days.

  Tatiana Arkipovna paid merely the slightest attention, but as the Squire put away the letter he said, “It’s the bull’s-eye this time and my sights are fixed higher than the Petersburg canaries, you may be sure! For this reason, Tatya, keep your bloc from bothering Glueck any more!”

  She laughed, the croak of the defeated in it. “I have better for you. Until I leave this house I’ll never step from my room, Kolya, never.” She stood towering over him. “Should I see you once again, it will be your end.” She threw her hand against his chest with such force that the chair fell backward, toppling him to the floor; then she hurried out.

  Vassily ran in from the kitchen. “What was it, Squire?”

  “My wife has had an accident,” he said, coughing in his laughter, by then whirling in his own mania, Glueck and I sucked into it. “We can’t wait,” the Squire said, getting to his feet, “we’ll settle it now.”

  Glueck was sleeping. The Squire strode to his bed, ripped back the covers, and slapped his flat belly. “It’s a joke, dear fellow,” he said to poor Glueck so wrackingly awaked, “and now listen, sick or well . . . when do you suppose we might go to Paris?”

  “Paris ... ?”

  “Give your most careful answer.”

  “When you wish.”

  “I’ve a letter from Arkip Apollonovitch in Paris,” he explained in the manner of those who imagine their thoughts are graven upon their foreheads. “Now don’t grope, think carefully . . . when will our genius here be ready to charm the heart of a certain Jewess of an opera singer, make her embrace him, melt her heart?”

  Glueck replied with a gulp.

  “You, a Petersburg expert, and you cannot reply?”

  Seeing himself fired in the next minute, Glueck gave him what he wanted. “It is a matter of work, a concert, a program. I would say, if you are meaning an informal concert before knowing persons . . . perhaps in three months . . . the freshness, the devotion is there, crudely yet . . . yes, three months.”

  With a second slap of Glueck’s belly the Squire cried, “Get well! Arkip Apollonovitch comes in April and then we go to Paris, a quatrel ”

  Tatiana Arkipovna entered immediately into her pledge, allowing only the Madame and the girls to visit her, they soon becoming companions in exile. The servants were admitted once or twice to clear the room of accumulated refuse, used dishes and what-not, bringing the Squire stories of how she would hide under the covers, the room a perfumed stench. This could not fail to be noticed in the town, the servants leaking it out, many stories being told. Every day for two weeks Dr. Ostrov and Father Semyon arrived in hopes of being admitted to her presence. They would stand in the hall outside her locked door, begging, the Squire shaking his head and saying, “You see, it’s a massive tantrum.” But the door opened at last and the priest and the doctor did not emerge for two hours after which they closeted themselves with the Squire in his study. The next day Rodion drove them off in the big sled, the four of them, and that night the Squire made a dry announcement, “The ladies have gone to Minsk where they will stay until April.” Vassily informed Glueck and me more fully. “The doctor thinks her senses are going,” he said. “She refused to leave without the other three, however.”

  “What does Dr. Ostrov say of the Squire?” asked Glueck, whispering.

  “An old story. From putting his foot into it too many times, as is said.”

  Ostrov and Father Semyon continued to visit but the Squire refused to allow Father Semyon to continue his baptizing campaign. “We are too busy here,” he assured the priest, “it is crucial that he not be baptized yet.”

  Father Semyon began a severe lecture. “Konstantin Andreyevitch,

  you choose a poor time to oppose the will of the Lord our Father — ” but Ostrov pulled at his sleeve, and soon visited more and more by himself. The Squire would greet him from the third landing, shouting down, “Ah, you’re here. Well, go away,” and then run nervously to him, almost tripping sometimes on the steps, to ask about Tatiana Arkipovna, thanking him for the news, and always ending the visit in some abrupt way yet not before the doctor had counted his pulse and warned him, “Kolya, you must restrain your enthusiasms or you will take a stroke.”

  Actually the weeks of our upside-down existence since Tatiana Arki- povna’s withdrawal had but one meaning for the Squire — to press my musical mobilization to the utmost in preparation for the epochal storming of the Jewish opera singer’s Parisian barricade. To keep his vision clearly before him the Squire required us to sit nights in his study, whole nights. We slept when we could and ate at all hours, never in the dining room any more, our only chance for air being a walk on the promenade towards evening. Less and less the Squire left his study, leaving Vassily to decide all estate matters, throwing himself into his project as a father dives into the pool where his child is drowning, running about all afternoon in robe and slippers, popping into Glueck’s room or wherever we were working at least four times an hour, listening, criticizing, approving. Sometimes he read aloud, with gestures, drafts of letters to Arkip Apollonovitch detailing our progress, or long passages from Oblomov to prove he had emancipated himself from his unpatriotic sloth. Only towards evening did he dress and after some bottle-work usually changed into his hussar’s uniform or his salon garb or his formal hunting outfit of red coat, high silk hat, and shiny boots with turned-down red cuffs for the climax of that particular twenty-four hours, the midnight-to-dawn celebration before us in his study.

  We saw only Rodion and Vassily, their wives too superstitious to leave the kitchen; and they kept Ossip and Sashenka away from us.

  Some weeks after Tatiana Arkipovna’s departure Stanya Parsov climbed up to the Squire’s study. The Squire made short shrift of him.

  3i 6 The Landsmen

  “Fm not selling. Good-by, Stanya, come back next year and I’ll give you the field.”

  Parsov spread the news in the markets that the Squire did nothing but rave since his wife had left, “and with two streams of froth,” Vassily reported him saying.

  The main thing now, I was being drilled for “an hour’s informal concert before the Jewish opera singer.” There I would run prodigious gamuts supposed to make the lady forgive Arkip Apollonovitch’s insulting remark against her people. It was perfectly clear within his preposterous
head that somehow my fiddling could persuade the woman into believing that not only Arkip Apollonovitch but his entire family actually lived only to devote themselves to Jews; impossible, therefore, for her to block the great loan any more from her influential protector. Ah, what a triumph for the Golinsk branch! The old man made into a duke, you see, by the previously regarded little pimple! And out of it all, the Squire would receive a just reward, a slice of the inheritance right away! Then hurray, and let the old man live to a hundred and fifty!

  Since she was in opera, various arias had to be included. From his trunk Glueck finally selected “just what will overwhelm her and what you will be able to play well,” the “Evening Star” and a potpourri from Russian and Ludmilla to promote the Russian side, “Wonderful Dream,” “Shining Star of Love,” and “Oh, Field.” My lack of command made me feel defeated in advance but Glueck imagined he remedied this by playing along with me and having me copy his touches. However, in time I could put in my own, and with Ave Maria mine from the start these grew into pleasures.

  I had a big never-absent headache. I was supposed to dazzle her down to a melt by the Beethoven D Major sonata. In the beginning I believed it was something Glueck composed to show off in Paris with. I watched him writing it out. He said the D Major had been composed by Beethoven for ’cello and piano but it was his thought to alter the cello part to violin. I would be able to play it well and my concert would be imposing. This I accepted without believing; in America I saw he

  wasn’t lying. Glueck had made a most respectable transposition into A major, bringing up the piano part so the counterpoint came out not too tinkly and also simplifying the piano harmony to make my violin part stand out better. I told him I could hardly read it; if I practiced ten years I’d never stop making mistakes. “Nonsense, four and a half months ago you couldn’t read a note and look where you are!”

  Meanwhile every night in his study the Squire continued to worship himself sincerely before us and with complete freedom. Having at last admitted his true religion nothing in him could be unimportant. Sitting at his desk in his great tall chair he unwrapped all the dusty ancient bandages of his mummyhood, fearless against humiliation and without the need to be contradicted. With his hussar’s cloak draped over his shoulders, the dogged commander unbothered by the rigors of field headquarters, the bottle always near to hand, his eyes saw again what lay in the far-gone days of his faithlessness. He shook his sins out of him, his little nasals whirring with small trembles as he renounced those years, even the ones furthest away, when the world was a closet filled with wonders and he too blind to go and open it. I cannot reproduce his repertoire of rigmaroles but here are a few samples, not word for word yet more true than word for word, because I wasn’t listening that way. About ’61 —

  “I remember old Buzarov, that’s Vassily’s father now. He could tumble a bull off its feet with one push of his boot. It was in this room he told my father that the proclamation was up, the day set, the rules there before everyone’s eyes. My father drew old B. to this window and looked down upon his souls, whole thousands of them covering the hill, all their hats off, singing as though in the church to thank Father for giving them the land. Father said to me, wearing his favorite tie, a bow made into doves’ wings, ‘From hence onward we shall be striving. You will be teaching yourself a new word — “forward” — the people are no longer a theory.’ Father turned his face to old B. and asked if he would like to spit upon it. Old B. fell to tears and this angered Father, he took his revolver from the desk here and swore to shoot, but old B. shook his head merely, sobbing, ‘Shoot, Andrey Fedorevitch, I

  cannot,’ whereupon Father hurled the revolver out of the window and then spit in the direction of old B. ‘This is what we shall be doing for the rest of our lives,’ he said to me. ‘Prepare yourself, Kolya.’ Then he went downstairs. I experienced a wrench, wanting a harmless willy- nilly about me, no angers, no difficulties ... I was not fit for the times. ‘Forward’ is a ship that rides on blood, I was gentle, I sipped Pushkin. Well! With brothers in the army long gone from the estate, what was I? Just my mother’s, the one that was left and out of love I allowed her, as they say, to comb my bald head every morning. In two years they both died, I came to Moscow for the winter, and that’s the Tatya of it. Kept from anything higher I drank, others were amused by me, I was a dwarf among giants, I led pageants of disgust, debauched myself clearly — and for what? For the gone willy-nillys, for the old dear tediums, to wait ghoulishly for Arkip Apollonovitch to die! But that’s over! Now I have with what to strive! I have become quite orderly, I care not that the orchards are dull, the fields poor in the market, the grapes never right any more! Let the roof leak, the lamps stink! No, in the honesty of my plan I can pronounce the word ‘forward’ with joy. When Arkip Apollonovitch comes next month and hears what I prepare for him! What prizes he’ll yield! The world will see me!”

  With this and more the Squire burned himself for sparks, until again on the following night. One time he revealed “the Tatya of it” — a tomboy girlhood, her father mostly away from the estate, the daughter scorning the dainty manners of an heiress, growing taller and stronger, drinking vodka by the glass like a man; engaging in intimate frolics with peasant boys, storming, laughing, insulting her father’s important people and finally managing to be sent away from the estate. To stir her aunts and cousins into frenzies she had compromised various visiting uncles; hoping city life would polish her down, Arkip Apollonovitch remembered a second-class aunt in Moscow and sent Tatya there for a winter. The aunt gave her books to read, took her to teas, museums, and balls. The dressmaker lived nearby, out of which a confidential friendship grew between herself and the dressmaker’s daugh-

  ter then occupied in a secret flirtation with an apprentice bookbinder, a frivolous dispenser of charms. Tatya invited him to the aunt’s house to bind some books after which he visited when the aunt was absent. Within a month Tatya’s first and last love fanned up and down; there was to have been an elopement but at this point the friendship between her and the dressmaker’s daughter ceased being confidential. The apprentice bookbinder told the dressmaker’s daughter who told the aunt. The fellow disappeared, promising to return. Tatya soon learned that the aunt had given the lover a hundred rubles to go away. She took herself for a stone and tried to jump from a window. In this condition she met Konstantin Konayev at a ball. They were suited, sharing negative needs, he for an heiress and she never to be happy and never to go home.

  The nights droned away. He kept up with several of the polite magazines, remaining languid and authoritative on certain topics, up to the moment of twisting them into his mania. In this fashion he once sermonized, “After all” (with a look at me, I had seen him only as a hater of my people and now he would enlighten me), men like Arkip Apollonovitch and by adhesion himself, “had the mission of raising Russia from the pesthole of Europe to an example before the world.” Before this could be done the Jews would have to be conquered since they refused to renounce their “heathen gall,” by which he meant our history, “preferring to remain scavengers, to cheat and outwit and kill, forcing methods not yet enough harsh to curb the pollution of the honest peasantry.” There existed some good individuals among us but these were “helpless against the making of meadows into latrines.” He insulted, with patriotic phrases, wealthy and powerful Jews, such as the Vysotskis and Brodskis whose existence demanded the control- ment of “the Golinsk gnats” which must never be allowed to graduate into the fraternity of “poisoners of the mass” — interpolating various frauds about how rich Jews were contributing sums to subsidize roving bands of “Zasulich Avengers” killing and burning throughout whole provinces — though of course Vera Zasulich had been hung long ago for her part in the assassination.

  It got to what the Squire never allowed out of his mind. The history of crusades demonstrated how nothing inspirational was possible “without the firing of the youth.” It had to be the duty of such as himself to snip th
e Jewish fangs by taking the best of their youth away from them. However, the expropriation must not be gross; youth in whom appeared some possibility of bettering should be molded for proof that in Russia even the Jew received a place of worth, and a hand. Here the Squire grew wholly emphatic, his eyes shrinking and his words spittling in a monotone rant. “Two struggles! The dull daily, the spooning down to the people of the anti-Yid medicines! And the other, proving we are no longer devotees of kvas and radish but farmers of the spirit, Glueck! Yes, reapers of Pushkins by the rows, out of Jewish weeds!”

  He had carried himself past the opera singer, Arkip Apollonovitch already a duke and himself long since possessed of the spoils due him for accomplishing this; and during such moments he convinced himself of his future commemoration, with parades, as a cleanser of the stable, a Russian Hercules.

  A

  The sun was stronger, everything winterish in drips, the roads canals of mud, and you could walk outside without buttoning your coat. The domestic props began to be replaced; Arkip Apollonovitch would arrive in a few weeks; the house had to be pulled together. Meals started being served at regular times downstairs though supper still did not come before ten.

  Ossip began requiring many private conversations with me. In between his boastings about his friendships with a few of the ladies who worked in his Uncle Profim’s “Heaven” he gave me news about our side that put weights on my heart. Through the winter, a funeral almost every week: Faiga, Naftoli-Dovid, Asher-the-Sour, Pesha’s Fendel, Shprinza’s Zish, YeersePs Bosha and their Mayer; also children whose names he did not know. Of the nineteen huts only two now were being lived in, the land-rents unpaid as well as the fines of July, death foreclosing mostly ahead of the Squire, the junk in the empties taken for whatever could be realized. And what about the last two

  now? How many were alive I could not guess; the number had to be tiny if only two had people in them.