The Landsmen Read online

  That week we all got ready for my father. The hut was made spotless. My mother took the shears and clipped our hair. She begged a chicken on credit from Stanya Parsov, a farmer my father sewed for, and on the morning my father was expected I took it to Laib-Shmul to be slaughtered according to the Law. Then that same afternoon, when my father was expected almost at any moment, my mother remembered to send me around to the druggist’s for three kopecks of dried raspberries which my father always put into his tea to loosen his catarrh.

  To get to Yushin the druggist’s I had to pass Profim’s smithy. Uncle Mottel was just inside the door, leaning against a wagon and arguing with a few peasants. I tried to hurry past but he saw me and called out strongly, waving at me to come to him. Uncle Mottel sent away the peasants, flinging a final argument into their faces, and turned me to the rear of the smithy.

  “That’s where we’re going.”

  “No, I don’t want to!”

  “But you do,” he said, gripping my arm and dragging me through the dark narrow place with its earthen floor blackened by soot and the walls dirty-brown and smoked-up from the heat of the forge. His fingers felt like hooked nails holding me, and the smithy like a room of the devil. “You took my mandolin, that’s why I threw the stone,” I cried. “Why did you take my mandolin?”

  Uncle Mottel pointed to a stool under the rear window. “There,” he commanded. “Now we’ll take a little look, eh?”

  From a high shelf near the window he handed me the mandolin. He had screwed a piece of bent tin on to the broken belly, and patched the rest of it with strips of thin wood glued together. He handed it to me. “Go on. Play something.”

  I plunked a string with my thumb. “No, like this,” he said, placing the neck of it in my left hand. I mumbled a thank-you and turned to run but he caught me. “Wait, Laib. And when they ask you who fixed it, what will you say?”

  Ay . . . what would I say? Could I reveal I had been my renegade uncle’s friend, to this extent? Everyone in our community had reason to spit upon Mottel; and besides, how enraged my father would become when he found out this dealing of mine with his heretic brother. “I’ll say I fixed it myself.”

  “They’ll make you tell them who.”

  “I’ll hide it. They won’t know I have it back.”

  “If they find out, they’ll take and break it.”

  “They won’t find out.”

  “Where will you hide it?”

  “I’ll see.”

  “And who will teach you how to play it?”

  “I’ll teach myself.”

  “Listen,” he said, taking the mandolin. He plunked it a few times and laid his fingers on one string in such a way that a dinky tune came out. I was speechless; he knew music.

  “See?” he said. He wanted me to ask him how to play it, and I

  wanted to. But I couldn’t get enough breath into me to talk. “Very well,” he said, breathing in his heavy way, “here, let’s try.”

  Finally I could stammer out, “I can’t. I — I have to get dried raspberries.”

  “Very well. Come back when you have time. I’ll keep it right here, good and safe.”

  “No, I don’t want to come back.”

  “Naturally,” he replied with a shrug.

  “No, I’m afraid of you!”

  “Yes, of course. But do you know why ?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “They say you’re worse than the devil.”

  He spat the cigarette stub out of his mouth. “I’m worse than the devil, of course,” he murmured, smiling. “But did you ever hear this?”

  He took the mandolin and picked out a little song, peering down at the neck, picking it out with difficulty. It was an old barracks tune and he sang some of it in the original:

  I gave her a shawl for her head,

  She gave me the half of her bed,

  And we gave each other what her stupid mother Had told her she’d get when she wed.

  Uncle Mottel sang with a soft quiet voice and very seriously, almost like it was some hymn. But with every word, almost, he put in a smile. He stopped and asked if I liked it. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what the song means.”

  “It’s what they sang in the army.”

  “But what did they give each other?”

  “A kiss.”

  “Oh.”

  “I know better ones. Too bad you’re afraid of me.”

  “When were you in the army?”

  “When? Let’s see . . . from ’75 to ’79 . . . how old are you?”

  “Seven.”

  “Well, I went when you were one and came back when you were five.”

  “My father says they sent you home to die.”

  “I lay very sick in the barracks. They gave me up for dead. But not wanting to bother with me any more they dressed me in my uniform, put my discharge papers in my pocket, and threw me on the train for Golinsk. ‘The devil take him,’ they said.”

  This I considered for a few moments. Then I said, “Please give me back my mandolin.”

  But he returned it to its place on the high shelf. “Better think over what I told you, Laib.” Then pushing me toward the door, he said, “Go — go get your dried raspberries!”

  My father came home and the presents he brought were down to the usual, showing how little my father had made out of his long hard trip — a six-inch cut of old cheese strudel from Mrs. Put-a-Patch-in-My- Sleeve, homemade cherry brandy from Mr. Make-My-Pants-Fit-My- Son, and a bag of candle-sugar to be divided by Shim and me. These and something under four rubles cash came from his weeks’ walk of the roads. Dogs had barked at him. His best beds had been the hard benches in synagogues. Bread, cheese, and water had been his menu except when he came to a village with Jews there on a Sabbath. Once or twice he brought back stories of his great fortune, of his being allowed to stay in rich Jewish houses with the help, and of eating like from the plate of King David — and once, even, he had come home with three pairs of hardly-used shoes for my mother and Shim and me, the miraculous gift of an innkeeper. Privately (when my father thought Shim and I were asleep), he told my mother the shoes had been stolen and that the innkeeper had taken a ruble for the lot. But this particular trip brought nothing remarkable.

  “And what have you been doing with yourself, boys?” my father asked Shim and me when he gave us our candle-sugar.

  “The same,” Shim said.

  “Just the same as always,” I added. But how could it be so? Tomorrow, when my father and mother would lie down for their Sabbath afternoon nap, I would give a jump over to the smithy.

  He was busy with the postman’s horse, at the forge, turning a horse-

  shoe over the flames with expert twists of the tongs. Dimitri was shouting at him, “Come on! Hurry up! What do you think you’re doing, making pancakes?” Then Mottel saw me standing uncertainly just inside the door and shouted a Hey. With his tongs he pointed to a broken-down wooden loft behind him. “Climb up, take a rest, boy. It’s the day of rest today, remember?”

  I climbed the ladder to the dark loft. It smelled like a lot of cats and as I sat there waiting for Mottel to get through, I began to take strong stock of all the things to be done in the future just to play imitation music on a hacked-up mandolin. I would have to listen to jokes about the Sabbath; I would have to be ready to lie about having anything to do with my outcast uncle; I would have to be ready for anything, including a good bundle of fingers against my face from my father. “Why is he my real uncle?” I asked myself as I waited. “Why can’t he be just a plain gentile?” Then without warning I felt attacked. Coming to the smithy and sitting in the middle of stinks and climbing ladders and getting mixed up in all the evil doings of a place like the smithy was altogether too strange and dangerous to go through for the sake of making a few plunks on a string. I wanted to climb down the ladder and run home.

  But my uncle’s foot was on the first rung. The mandolin in his hand rose with his climbing and when he got up he handed
it to me. In a few seconds he sat explaining the mandolin; had I climbed down before he climbed up, I would have hurried home and that might have been the beginning and end of music and me.

  I did not in the beginning hold Uncle Mottel to be enjoyable; I saw nothing of interest in him except that he knew a talent I had to learn; I told myself, “The minute I can play, I’ll take away the mandolin and never come back.” With such reasonings my conscience was soothed and I visited the smithy faithfully on many Saturday afternoons that year, far into the winter, until it became too unusual to go out without manufacturing crazy excuses for walking in blizzards.

  I learned a couple of songs. It took a dozen lessons to learn to play them badly. I began to think of all the music there must be in the

  world; I thought Fd need a thousand years. I told this to Uncle Mottel.

  “Not so, Laib. Like words have letters, music has notes. You look at the music paper and read the notes, which means that the paper tells you what to play . . . clear?”

  “But when Nochim plays a fiddle to weddings he doesn’t use music paper. . . .”

  “Here, look.”

  Uncle Mottel played the scale. “These notes are the a-b-c. Everything comes out of these notes, with little differences.” He explained further. The musicians who played for the Squire’s affairs came with bundles of music paper and played off what was written without having to keep all the music in their heads. My uncle didn’t know any notes other than the scale, he told me, but he swore that music existed on paper. This was a relief.

  “Well,” I said, “how does a person learn to read music?”

  “A person,” Uncle Mottel replied, “can find no better place than the Petersburg Conservatory. It is a beautiful building. There a person studies music day and night if he wishes, and wears fine clothes and eats the best food, and finds dear friends among his fellow students, boys and girls.”

  I said eagerly, “It’s just what I’d like.”

  “You?”

  “Me, yes.”

  “Ay,” Uncle Mottel laughed, pushing me a gentle push. “Who said you’re a person?”

  “You’re making a joke,” I said.

  “Yes, what else, it’s another joke. Ay, Sergeant Polmonov, such a funny fellow ... I was a green one, a recruit. Polmonov comes to me in the barracks one time and says, ‘Hey, soldier, I heard good news about you.’ Well, they all made a circle around me to hear. ‘Do you realize,’ Polmonov asks me, ‘that you are related to a very great man?’ I said no. ‘Indeed you are,” Polmonov says. ‘You are related to a great German genius of music, Franz Schubert.’ ”

  “Are we?”

  “No, but I was as green as you. I believed him. The fellow swore Schubert was my landsman, wrote all kinds of songs, even one about Christ’s mother.”

  “A Jew?”

  He laughed once more. Wrapped around the inside of it lay a leading secret of his character which I didn’t fish out until many years later. Once I noticed myself laughing, in a certain way, harsh and not harsh. In that second it jumped into my mind — this was how Uncle Mottel used to laugh — not only against his enemy but against himself for being fool enough to think his enemy was only another man, nothing

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  more.

  “It goes without saying that they hit me.” He threw me one of his grizzly smiles.

  That afternoon a string broke towards the middle and couldn’t be fixed; he said he would send away for a whole set.

  Then it got too much into the winter for me to make excuses for sneaking away on Saturday afternoons. Once I saw Uncle Mottel in the middle of the street with his coat open to the bitter wind, so drunk he could hardly walk. I started running, hoping he wouldn’t see me. “Hey!” he called with a big roar that made me stop and turn around. “They didn’t come yet, they didn’t come yet,” he shouted with big waves of his arms. I kept my secret the winter through, even forgetting about it much of the time. The ice finally started to melt. We began to see the color of the ground again. In the mornings on the way to Reb Maisha’s learning-table Shim and I would notice how less frosty the beads on the trees were getting, how more like wood the bare branches were. Everything was with a drip-drip-drip into the afternoon; horses appeared on the roads without blankets; the market square became busier a little earlier each day. The winter was saying good-by.

  Peasants sat in their yards in the afternoon, sewing and strapping and nailing together bits of harness that had lain broken through the winter. Axes were being sharpened; Tzippe-Sora’s chickens began getting themselves chased through the mud by the bigger boys; my father started mentioning the possibilities of an early start on the roads

  (“Listen, Leah, maybe it’s true about Yitzel from Shnavka making the wedding for his Yalka before the Passover; if I gave a jump over there perhaps Thursday, it could be I’d find a week’s sewing for the wedding, between the two families.”); but the surest signs that winter was disappearing fast were to be seen in the yard of Hertz the grease-maker, blackened barrels and tin drums arriving and being dumped all over; in the visits of Gershon the shoemaker, with pencil in hand, to find out who might be ordering new shoes for the Passover; and most of all in the longer synagogue meetings of the landsmen on Saturday nights, when they went back to their yearly debates on whether or not to try to hire an ordained rabbi out of the Minsk rabbinical academy.

  As soon as the days became mild enough, I went to Uncle Mottel for my mandolin. I said thank you and ran. My father was on the roads, almost a week gone. Shim and my mother bent themselves in some field of the Squire’s, plowing and sowing with other families. Life was all spread out again and I headed for the woods. I heard a sound of something running behind me, something making loud swishes in the dead leaves on the ground. The back of my neck felt like a piece of cold marble. Thoughts of mad dogs prowling and wolves still hungry from the winter made me ready as I turned around for the sight of fur and the spring of paws and the teeth in the open mouth.

  “Where did you get it?” she cried, running up, pointing at the mandolin. It was Rochel, Yeersel’s daughter, three years older than I.

  “What are you doing by yourself in the woods?” I said sternly. “Don’t you know it’s dangerous?”

  “See?” she said, swinging a kerchief full of acorns under my nose. She put her arm out to touch the mandolin, a strong little arm. Her hair was jet black as it would remain until the day she died. “Let me hold it — where did you get it?” she demanded, yellow fires dancing in her brown eyes. I pushed her away, angry and worried. “You and your acorns!” I muttered.

  “It’s beautiful, Laib,” she said, making a grab for it. I dropped the mandolin behind me and took hold of her wrists. “Hear me, Rochel,”

  I threatened, “don’t tell anybody or I’ll ... or I’ll . . . never mind, you’ll see!”

  “You little pimple!” she answered, twisting her wrists free.

  “Shut up!”

  I slapped the kerchief full of acorns out of her hand and threw myself at her. We fell and rolled in the leaves. I was angry; she would tell about the mandolin, who fixed it would come out, the punishments would be the worst . . . but my anger became something else. Nothing was more important than the unexpected sweetness of Rochel. When she saw I wasn’t fighting any more, she started to get up and I tried to hold her. She pulled her hand free and gave me a hard blow on my face with her strong little bundle of fingers. My nose felt all squashed. “That is what you get for being a bull,” she cried as I hid my face in the leaves.

  She picked up the mandolin and gave it a plunk. I turned over and spoke.

  “This has to be a secret, Rochel.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “You’ll let me play it a little, Laib?”

  “No.”

  “Selfish pig,” she cried out, throwing it over my head into some thick brambles. She started running but I caught up to her and gave her a good slap and again we were fighting, and again, you see
, the physical experience became everything. “Stop your tricks,” she said, spitting at my face as I held her arms behind her.

  Without warning a strong sudden pull on the back of my shirt, like the hand of God, lifted me to my feet in one moment. When I looked up I saw Yeersel, her father, with a piece of my shirt in his hand, and Berel the watercarrier running to us from a wagon on the other side of the gully.

  “She started,” I said, beginning to cry.

  “So?” Yeersel pulled her up and shook her by the shoulders until Berel-the-Ox stopped him with a short push. Yeersel raised his hand to

  108 The Landsmen

  me but Berel said, “Worry about your own, let his father worry about him.”

  Berel crooked his finger my way and I went and stood next to him. Then Rochel began crying. “He wouldn’t let me play his mandolin, he wouldn’t!”

  “That’s why we were fighting,” I blurted.

  “So?” Yeersel said more quietly. “Sh,” he told Rochel, “and stand still.” He looked at her and then he looked at me.

  “Nothing is disturbed,” Berel remarked in his quiet way, as though speaking from afar.

  “Show me the mandolin,” Yeersel said to Rochel.

  “He wouldn’t let me play it, that’s why,” Rochel said, accusingly.

  “What mandolin ? Laib . . . how does a boy like you come to mandolins?”

  “I got it from a peasant.”

  “What peasant? Don’t look down.”

  “It was a secret. . . .”

  “A fine secret, a mandolin in the woods.” His horror rose to whip him. “You’re here and he’s here and the woods are; here. . . . Ay, it’s a secret, yes. But not a mandolin-secret, a different secret entirely!”

  He began with his hands on Rochel, weeping. Berel went to stop him but he yelled for Berel to worry about his own, and kept holding Rochel with one hand, hitting her behind with his palm. “Mandolins!” he yelled. “Here,” between his teeth. “Lies? Here! . . . Mandolin stories, here again! . . . Tricks with boys? Here!”