The Landsmen

by Peter Martin

  It was like watching myself putting my music into the fiddle case, my astrakhan cap into the overcoat pocket — also pawnable in Minsk — like someone else leaving my room. On the landing I peered down and saw a swatch of light. I started one step at a time, keeping to the railing where the carpet was thicker. Leta or Tatiana Arkipovna screamed; feet ran toward the sound. I timed my jump to the landing and hurried down, leaving by way of the unlocked French door near the piano in the main hall, then from the promenade to the front steps, across the carriage-way, and downhill through the trees.

  A hard half-mile for a boy in my situation, until the wind blew more strongly against my face and I heard no more branches crack- ling.

  Now that I was down I had to watch out for their back yards, find the downhill road and slide past the sleeping huts. I saw the first gray splotch in the sky. It couldn’t have been so late, but it was. Without thinking of the noise I ran the last few hundred yards down the

  middle of the hill road, jumping into the carriage stop whose sides and rear wall hid me from any early peasant on their side. Like any traveler I sat down and caught my breath. In a few minutes I’d know how I would be going, alone or with Shim.

  I was about to stand when I heard, not near and not far, a noise of rocks rolling down a hill and bumping into each other. It came from the highroad, from the Pukop direction where the ground was level, louder every moment and less rocky too, and with increasingly complicated clumps yet altogether orderly. Not until it was almost up to me did I translate it into horses; many, in formation. Just horses, no carriages.

  I threw myself back where the walls met. Enough light to see them pass, the Tsar’s proud cavalry, the horses dim and large and prancing, the soldiers riding them slumped, some shaking like jelly in their saddles, doubtless half asleep. Here and there a gray horse in the faint morning gray, the others brown and blended into forage uniforms, the hooves whushing as they fell into the thicker mud around the carriage stop. Thirty or forty feet past me, I heard the order and the rustling down of the hooves. I gambled with a one-eyed look and saw them dismounting.

  Lamps were lit and carried. The platoon divided into three groups, one going to the huts on our side, the other moving up the road on foot, the third remaining and lighting cigarettes.

  Good-by, Shim! And hello to what?

  What were they doing there?

  It got lighter with every passing second, and the Evil Eye was roving. I moved behind the carriage stop. Ten yards to my rear stood Verenka’s tavern; the only thing to do was try for the yards, work my way partly up the hill again through the back yards, circling around the Squire’s house to the drop far behind it where the fields stopped and the woods began. Once there I’d head in the Svutz direction, find my gully, and sit down to figure. The gully was safe. But the back yards weren’t, people rose at dawn, it was past plowing time and taverners did business early.

  How queer to be running away from the Squire while coming closer and closer to the house; I made the circle as quickly as possible for the ground was open from Ostrov’s to the top of the hill. I saw the lights on the second floor, my feet slid faster through the soft earth and I gasped, falling when I got into the protecting underbrush. There was no doubt in my mind that I would be caught; only they would have to catch me. It was no deep trick but it seemed the hardest thing in the world to get to my gully and when I plunked myself down there, fiddle case and all, I felt like half a Christopher Columbus and half a Napoleon.

  Sweating, muddy, I piled some deadwood and sat on it. The sky grew bluer. What had seemed workable in the dark now appeared crazier and crazier. In a panic I began considering going back to the house and saying I had gone for a walk. Who could have figured on the accursed soldiers? At least one thing; whoever they were after, it wasn’t me. If they found me I’d say I’d gone for a walk. I heard their rifles a few times, individual cracks far off, and prayed it was only for fun or practice. The sun rose higher, time passed, and I saw nothing to do but sit. If I wanted to make it fancy I could throw in a lot of onions and carrots here, give you all my thoughts as they came and went, and so on. Just take it from me, I was scared and without hope but loving my father and remembering his look when my mother complained.

  I heard more rifles, further away each time down toward Svutz, which gave me the idea they’d moved in that direction. Minsk lay on the other side, beyond Pukop; very well, I’d put distance between them and me, try making it to the Pukop woods, going slowly, resting; plenty of time until evening prayers and the dash for the synagogue.

  It is pleasant to take a walk in the woods when you and nature are on friendly terms. Everything stands on display, the interesting poke of a bough, the unexpected clump of sweet berries, the busy scuttles of rabbits, the arias out of the trees, the whirr of wings. How nice, then, to walk in a sporty jacket with perhaps a cold chicken-leg

  wrapped in a pocket and with a rifle on your shoulder, ready in case something like a bear or a wolf should venture into your preserve. However, I was hungry and without the chicken-leg, and I carried no rifle but a violin case, and my overcoat was long and wet and muddy at the hem, and the rabbits looked like foxes and the foxes looked like wolves. Moreover in the thick woods to see the sun was never easy; I knew I had to keep facing it, when it started dropping, to be bearing correctly for Pukop; many times I’d come to a clear space and see it on my right or left. It would have been a relief to walk in clear spaces and sometimes I did, always forcing myself back into the woods, having to choose safety against false relief.

  I rested more and more, trying once or twice to sleep. There had been no clear spaces for a long time, everything went uphill to the west and I had to circle around many hilly rocky nubs. The woods sat thickly there, the oaks and maples mostly only a few feet apart. I kept stumbling and stumbling up what could only be the darkening side of something mountainous. Not sure even of heading west any more, I had to get to the top to see; lost or not, that’s how I felt, not remembering any such mountain near Pukop.

  I’d been moving some six or seven hours. The fiddle case felt filled with rocks but I couldn’t stop, so exhausted I’d surely fall asleep and wake up after dark if I took a rest. No, the place to rest was at the top; and if I happened to see Pukop everything would be all right. But more and more I started falling; once against a large rock, the fiddle case banging so hard against it that I was afraid to open it and examine the fiddle. Then came the last time that I fell. To protect the fiddle case I turned with the slip and hit my face on stones. I lay there crying a little while, got to my knees, and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. I was rising from the ground when something like a rock caught me in the back of my neck and everything went away.

  My head lay in a woman’s lap. The flame #f a thick candle on the grit of the earth showed me the rough curve of the cave-walls rising briefly to a few crude log-splits blackened by old fires.

  I pushed myself up. A mural of faces circled the candle at my feet, the four of them squatting and watching.

  Two of them had hair cropped closer than Glueck’s, their beards in stubbles, the familiar under something transformed. New things had stamped themselves on these features, reckless things, luxurious humor and efficient cruelty, the set of beginners at using printed thoughts.

  It might have been the night that never goes away, when faces return for a little visit, refreshing and lifting you; everything puzzling beside the point because you are part of the secret.

  The boy of fifteen, Timo, the mop of straight dark hair over his large wild begrimed face; he seemed hardly human, more bulldoggish. And Miss Faitoute, her old cheeks sagging above her high-necked gray blouse, could have at that moment been some wise and grumpy cat with its hair molted off and swollen to human parity, also part of the secret; never having seen them before they were immediately precious, by being with the other two.

  Was this The Next World, that “life of night” so many times with ecstasy described by Reb Maisha at the learning-table
? Was this where you felt the sun without seeing it always ? My first thought was, “It is,” I must have been elevated to the last heaven; for surely though their ears were larger, the eyes smaller, the cheeks very flat and their chins naked, these two melted-down faces belonged to Uncle Mottel and Berel-the-Ox. It could be neither dream nor in life but a true union of both.

  They said nothing and I could not produce a sound. Sleepless since long before dawn, drained and wracked by what you already know, I thought again, “Yes, it is”

  Without taking his eyes away from me Uncle Mottel put a cigarette stub in the exact center of his mouth as he always did. He lit it with the candle. As he put it down the spell dissolved to a weaker version of itself, less rigid and mysterious, distorted by living motion. I heard Uncle Mottel’s quiet Yiddish.

  “These are Timo and Miss Faitoute.” So calm, yet not bored as he ever was, no more the words beneath his words saying, “I am weary

  of myself and everything”; it was Uncle Mottel but also . . . who? Who was he now? In Russian he said, “Timo, you struck him too hard.”

  “So he wouldn’t make a sound,” replied the boy.

  Then in Yiddish, puffing, “Laib, don’t be afraid.”

  I flung myself to his chest. Close to his hard body, his chin touching my head, I felt the spell wriggling off terribly fast. My numbness became pins and needles of questions clamoring to be heard, questions which could have only the most frightening replies. I shook with my sobbing. “Sh, it’s not so bad.” He turned me to face Berel. “Now,” with a gentleness novel in so brusque a spirit, “you will feel better. Do you see who it is, Laib?”

  “Berel, is it you?”

  “He doesn’t hear any more.”

  Berel neither smiled nor spoke. In the days of his beard I never suspected he had such a fierce Adam’s apple. Now it was rocking up and down.

  “See, Laib, how happy he is.”

  “Is this Siberia?” I cried.

  “If it is,” said Uncle Mottel, “Siberia has moved.”

  Impossible to call him “Ox” any more. Thinner, sharper-faced, Berel had surrendered his patience for some boon clamping a pride to his neck. He held his head as I have seen heroes of opera doing it, the easy rigidity flowing along the cheek lines and affecting the chin, but this was not on any stage.

  I could not stop shaking my head.

  “It is too much,” Miss Faitoute said in a slow and nasal Russian.

  From behind, a laughing sound; I turned to the last of the strange faces. She was younger; I’d had my head in her lap, and though not beautiful, she encouraged the eye to linger. Her face was fouled with dried mud, everything about it longish and settled but full, the mouth wide and definite, the lips thin promise-keeping ones. Her forehead perched narrow. Her hair looked coppery in the candlelight and she wore it parted to a side tightly against her head, twisted in

  the back. Her mouth a bit open, she looked at me with an easy jolliness that could become serious in a flick, her skirt hitched up and her knees out, showing battered run-down shoes of the high-laced city style. Despite her size and dirtiness and the splotch of a mole on her cheek, some daintiness remained.

  “I used to hold you in my arms when you were a baby,” she said, the memory entire in her eyes, the Yiddish made into a line of melody, full and vibrating in the contoured closeness of the cave. “Many times, on the back benches of the synagogue. I’ll show you.”

  I let her pull me close; she was strong, easily lifting me into her lap. “Just like this,” she said. Not for more than a year and a half had I been offered anything motherly. I took it without shame.

  “Me, too,” said Timo, humorously exercising his adolescent lust, “every fellow needs a mother.”

  “You need a wife more,” was her light answer.

  “Come on, Lenka, me next?”

  I drew myself away. Lenka? Nochim’s? “. . . You’re Lena?”

  Its me.

  “Nochim’s Lenka that — that — ”

  Too shy and dazed to finish the rest, how her father had carried her out of the village after her time with the Squire, I tumbled of? her lap wondering why and how she and all these were so banded and near to Golinsk. I said, “Your father died.”

  “I know it.”

  Looking at them one by one, I put my hands to my head. Everything was spinning too fast and out of fear it would go faster, I began to fight for breath. “Water,” I said.

  “Water would be good,” Lenka nodded.

  Uncle Mottel said, “Water would be wine.”

  “It’s too far away,” Miss Faitoute said.

  “I’ll go,” said Timo but not eagerly.

  “You can’t,” Uncle Mottel said. “It’s too soon. When it’s darker and the soldiers have given up.”

  At the mention of soldiers I heard in my head echoes of the morn-

  ing and began trembling. The last I saw, Uncle Mottel was watching me gravely.

  When the faint was over, my head lay again in Lenka’s lap and Berel was not there. “Where is Berel?”

  “You can’t tell an old water-carrier what to do,” said Uncle Mottel, patting my leg.

  Again I thought about how gentle he’d become. “Uncle, I’m in such a mix. Where are we and what are we all doing here? Where did you come from, and — ”

  “Sh, there’s time for stories. We’ll tell them all, every one.”

  “I lived in the Squire’s house six months.”

  He exchanged looks with Lenka. They thought I was out of my mind. Lenka was stroking my head, her fingers hardly touching my hair. A wave of dysentery went through the lanes when I was four or five and the kids lay in one diarrhea, me included. My father would kneel beside my mattress on the floor, stroking my hair delicately with his tailor’s fingers. “You will surely sleep, Laib, I promise. How can you fail to sleep when Papa gives you the magic pat?” He would stop a moment for the effect and say, “Now I’ll give you the magic pat that always makes boys fall asleep. A wise man taught it to my father, and he taught it to me, and when you are older I shall teach it to you. Now, see ... I am starting and you will sleep . . . magic pat, magic pat, magic pat,” he would say in time with his stroking, his voice going softer and softer and his fingers hardly touching my hair. Soon I’d be straining to listen and feel, and it never failed. I would sleep. Lenka’s stroking my hair brought me back to this.

  I whispered to Lenka, “When you stroke, say ‘magic pat, magic

  , > 5 »

  pat. . . .

  She did. I slept or winked and nodded, a layer of peace rimming me. Distant sounds of danger intruded several times. When I stirred I would hear Lenka whispering, “Magic pat, magic pat,” as she stroked.

  Then a few drops of water on my forehead, and a small nozzle to my lips. I drank. Uncle Mottel held the military canteen close. “There, better . . .”

  Behind him Berel was speaking. His Yiddish was high, wavering, and not only because of his deafness. “They saw me.”

  “How do you know?” I saw Timo gesture, questioning.

  “The bushes moved too much,” Berel said to Uncle Mottel.

  “We could go for the road, they wouldn’t expect it,” Lenka said, looking from one to the other. Berel crouched himself nearer, his eyes going from mouth to mouth, reading.

  “It is a very poor chance, the road,” Miss Faitoute said as an estimate.

  “Yegor might fix us with a wagon,” Uncle Mottel said. “The tavern isn’t far once the road is reached.”

  It was hard for Berel to lip-read Russian, he deaf again not so long this time; but at the mention of Yegor he cried, “Yegor, no . . .”

  Uncle Mottel put his hand on Berel’s arm and spoke to the others. “If he was seen, he was also followed. And if followed, they would be shooting long volleys into us now. The road is sensible.”

  “Frenchmen would be throwing torches here,” Miss Faitoute said. “Still, even if Berel is wrong about being seen . . .” She shook her head. “I don�
�t agree about the road.”

  “Or I about Yegor,” Lenka said.

  “Uncle,” I asked, “who does Berel say . . . who is ‘they’?”

  “Soldiers.”

  “Why are they looking for us?”

  “Because,” smiling, “someone told them to. Sh . . . you will know all about it some other time. . . .” He spoke to Lenka now, as though once she were convinced the others would agree. “Here is my meaning, regarding Yegor. . . .”

  Now a monologue began which branched into a discussion held as quietly and with a sense of confidence as might be seen in students or book-lovers holding up idealistic points for examination and settlement. Surely it couldn’t have been too dangerous a pinch we were in.

  Squatting and puffing as he spoke, Uncle Mottel said Yegor was a peculiar fellow in some ways and it was possible to predict what he might do about helping us with a wagon. Owing to being a discontented tavern-keeper with paradoxical hatreds it was possible to get him

  on our side by means of the following stratagem: The peculiar thing about him was his excellent talent for crookeries higher than those coming his way; whenever he strived for richer prizes than what might fall into his tavern from off the road, his landlord Vlad Ryba always stood in the way; Vlad was his prime hatred and whatever would hurt him was good. Additionally, he had once admired Uncle Mottel in a fight and would listen to him and that meant everything, for what Uncle Mottel proposed was to go to Yegor and in exchange for the loan of a wagon reveal to him how he could damage Vlad Ryba most heavily with full safety to himself. “I will say to him,” explained Uncle Mottel, “that I ‘happen to know’ about the escaped prisoner the soldiers are looking for, and that there is a band with him which would do anything against any landlord; in the circumstances it would be easy for Yegor to torch up Vlad Ryba’s barn, report the theft of his horse and wagon, and the blame for the burning could be laid upon us . . . but by then we’d be far along on our way . . . yes or no?”