The Landsmen Read online

  I couldn’t stand Rochel’s yells and Berel couldn’t either; he kicked stones with the back of his boot; not caring if my goose was cooked the minute I opened my mouth, I cried, “I’ll show you, I’ll find it.”

  This I did. Yeersel could hardly believe his eyes. He took it in his hands, touched the strings. “You play on this?”

  “A little.”

  “Show me.”

  I took it from him and fumbled my way through one of my two songs. “And that’s the whole thing?” he asked.

  “It comes with words too,” I said.

  “Let me hear.”

  Perhaps because it was the first song I learned, I sang him about the fellow giving her a shawl for her head in return for half of her bed, believing as Uncle Mottel had explained that she had given him only a kiss. When I finished Yeersel murmured, “You speak a nice little Russian,” and in one move of his arm he took the mandolin and threw it to the ground, smashing it with several stamps of his feet.

  “You broke it!”

  “Worry better what your father will do to you,” he answered.

  “It was broken but I got it fixed and it could play,” I sobbed. “Uncle Mottel fixed it and you broke it and now I’ll never, never — ”

  “Mottel?”

  Ay, it slipped out. And Yeersel in a wink lost all his anger. “So that’s how the snake sneaked in,” he murmured. “With such songs to a boy.” He gave a great sigh, then squatted so that our eyes faced each other. “Uncle Mottel is your comrade, Laib? A fixer for you of mandolins, a teacher to play with girls?”

  “Only songs, only the mandolin, the truth,” I cried. “Please . . . please . . . don’t tell my father!”

  “Hear me, Laib,” he said. He took my hands and spoke in such a tone that I knew he was sorry for hitting Rochel, and now quite worried about me. “How can’t I tell your father that one of his two eyes, his youngest son, makes himself a comrade to a bit of flesh that isn’t Jew or gentile, a friend to nothing, the enemy of everything? How shouldn’t a father be told, Laib, that his son is the pal of a zero with hands and feet, with stones in his heart, an animal, a hopeless wanderer in the forest of the world who eats anything, sleeps everywhere, and breathes out poison? Is this a proper comrade, Laib, a piece of wood, a club in the gentile’s hand that hits us, that takes our blood?”

  “No,” I said with a quiver of terror.

  Tears appeared in the lids of his eyes. “Better I shouldn’t have a tongue in my head than say it . . . but that’s how it lays, that’s what we are cursed with.”

  “Don’t tell my father,” I whispered.

  “But with Mottel you’re finished?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you, a dog or a Jewish boy?”

  “A Jewish boy,” I sobbed.

  “The truth spoken?”

  “Yes!”

  His face fell heavy on mine and his beard felt like a blanket as he kissed me. “Then I won’t say to your father. But with Mottels and mandolins you’re finished?”

  “Don’t tell my father.”

  “And we have a covenant?”

  “Yes!”

  “You give your hand?”

  We walked back to our side of the village, hand in hand. I began to feel saved from a terrible danger. What the ex-danger exactly was I couldn’t have said but it had to do with triflings on a mandolin and the sweetness of a girl. One had led to the other, and both were sins to be put at Uncle Mottel’s head. Right was right. Everybody in the world excepting Uncle Mottel couldn’t be wrong. Yeersel’s hand lay soft and warm over mine.

  In this way I was kept from him, cheated out of many times of closeness, and thus the State’s invisible policemen followed me in my goings about Golinsk until the accident four years later, when I was eleven, when my father and mother died.

  That same spring Shim started going with my father on the roads. The rubles they brought home were as few as always but with them now came something new — my father’s proud stories of how neatly Shim laid out goods and packed them up again; how quickly he threaded a needle and built fast fires to warm the pressing iron; how well behaved he was in strange houses so that even gentiles noticed and remarked; how every night he washed not only his feet but his shirt; and how in the mornings no matter where they slept, in a barn or on a

  floor or in a field, Shim would rise before my father and have the pan of clear cold water ready to pass over their hands before morning prayers. It was a comfort not to have to pray alone in places far from other Jews, but with a grown son.

  While traveling my father used to try to be near a substantial Jewish community for the Sabbath, and always asked the beadle or one of the respected landsmen to give Shim a reading of the Law when the Ark would be opened and the Scrolls unfolded. My father would describe the goodness of Shim's reading of the Law, the clear seriousness of his inflections, and the sober, pleased comments of the congregation afterwards. Then one day towards the end of the summer my father showed us the rough stitchings of a half-finished jacket Shim had cut out by himself for a tinsmith in Kapula. “About Shim I have no worry,” he said in a quiet mixture of pride and relief. “Already he knows how not-to-sew, and from that to knowing how yes-to-sew isn't far.”

  “Wait, in another few years you’ll have a second pride,” my mother said with a nod at me.

  “With two extra needles working, and with a horse and wagon to carry enough goods about,” my father said between blowings on the hot beet soup he used to love, “I could fall into a few good things.”

  The road from Pukop was full of young officers many nights that August. They would ride into Golinsk in open carriages, their dress uniforms looking brand-new in the twilight, sitting behind and below the drivers two and three to a carriage, smoking small cigars and raising their caps to the indifferent peasants standing and admiring the way their fine horses made the sharp uphill turn to the Squire's. Where the Squire found enough girls for these parties no one ever guessed, but whenever he ran short of the unmarried daughters of the district semi-gentry, he sent his steward to Minsk. Vassily Buzarov would return with girls and their mothers or at least women they called their mothers. These same girls attended all the officers’ parties the Squire gave, regiment by regiment.

  The heat kept me from falling asleep. From my window I could see lanterns dipping in long sways over the broad lawns just be-

  low the Squire’s house. Each time a band from a different regiment would play the marches and polkas and attempt the lighter airs. Once in a while there would be a solo, a trumpet or a piano, usually; but the time somebody played a violin is what made itself into an importance for me. It was a tiny faraway sound, this fiddle in the muggy night. I crept out of bed and sat on our cracked doorstep, listening, not knowing what the fiddler was playing or how he felt about it but receiving it as a sound of beautiful secret crying. It was only a restaurantish czardas, but I didn’t know that. Something in it was for me and I grew cool listening. The slow roll of the beginning strains, the explosion of wildness in the middle that still stayed sad, then the comeback to the original beginning . . . the sound of these things threw a thrill that lasted for I don’t know how many minutes after it was over. “I’m different,” I kept saying to myself over and over. “I’m different.”

  I remembered my mandolin; what a silly thing to call worth playing! From now on it had to be a fiddle to play, and take people and turn their feelings inside out, the birth of the only wish for power I ever needed. Sitting on the doorstep with nothing on but my short summer drawers, I pushed my toes into the dust and played a love with the night. The hut was no more for me, not really; I must not fear to feel new things, even though I was just another Jewish boy expected to obey all the laws of the State, written, unwritten, and not yet passed; I must not take my given rank of a pimple on the complexion of the world. This was for others now; the sound of a nighttime fiddle had told me I was different and I believed it. “You’re different, you’re different,” i
t told me. It was the seed of my rebellion and everything good that ever happened to me grew out of this, that never washed away.

  Long after the fiddling stopped it pulled me like a magnet. I mustn’t go back into the hut right away but first do something a little bit different, not for its own sake but for a sign to myself that what the hut stood for was now to my back. I walked down the dark lane to the highroad and sat on a cool stone, looking at the Squire’s lanterns way

  Laib

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  up the hill, waiting for the fiddler to play again and not caring if he didn’t.

  The first thing that danced into my head when I opened my eyes in the morning was “Nochim.” Nochim peddled butter and cheeses but he had some kind of an old fiddle which he played in taverns all around the district whenever he had no butter or cheese to sell. He couldn’t exactly play it but he could make it chirp enough to justify his begging and sometimes he used to throw it into his handcart on top of his butter and cheeses and try to make the peasants’ children remember him for a jolly fellow and thus improve his standing with his poverty-stricken customers.

  I threw myself into my shirt and pants as my mother still slept, and ran to Nochim’s. The sun was still down but the air stood heavy with scent, everything so green and thick, even the tall weeds part of the richness. I hoped to catch Nochim before he went to morning prayers. Maybe he would lend me the fiddle or better still agree to sell it. Where the money would come from was something else.

  “A good morning,” I cried excitedly to Nochim’s worried-looking wife, Pesha, as I met her taking a water bucket from Berel on his rounds. “Let me help a bit?”

  Pesha said nothing as I followed her inside. “I want Nochim, Pesha.”

  She pointed to the curtain in the corner. “He sleeps.” She turned to the door, shouting, “Children!”

  Sholem and Marya were walking in from the woods carrying sticks and dragging a piece of dead birch. Without thinking I drew the curtain and shook Nochim awake. “Hah? Hn?” he grunted in surprise, whining through his nose which had been smashed in an accideat and put back into something like an ordinary nose but not quite.

  “Nochim,” I said. But he pushed me away, sighing like a horse. “Please, Nochim, about your fiddle, a question only — ”

  “Away now,” he moaned.

  “Live only to a hundred and twenty years, Nochim,” I pleaded, “but tell me if one can buy your fiddle.”

  “Who’s buying fiddles?” Pesha demanded, behind me.

  “I.”

  “What with, your boils?’'

  “I’ll bring the money, I’ll bring it!”

  “When it’s in your pocket well talk,” she said shortly, dropping the bucket of water to the floor with an extra-hard bang. Again I turned to Nochim, who sat up moaning. His shoulders shook, his eyes as red almost as his nose. “Nochim . . . live only to be a hundred and twenty — ”

  “Don’t do me such favors,” he sputtered, his morning catarrh beginning to rumble over his moaning. “Only somebody bring me a pot of water, wet water.”

  “Water I’ll give him!” Pesha cried. “A salty ocean!”

  Nochim demanded, “I knew I was coming in the middle of one of their wedding weeks? I could help if they saw the fiddle in the cart and told me to bumble on it a little? And when a customer and a gentile offers me whiskey, I’m to refuse? You imagine I enjoy throwing myself between them like a nail on a hammer?”

  They flew at each other until Nochim roused himself into a fit of hard coughing that made him go outside. “Pesha, dear,” I said politely, as she sat with Sholem and Marya eating pieces of hard bread, slowly and with gall, “I’ll pick in the fields like ten people. Sell me the fiddle.”

  “Such a sin against your father and mother I’d never do. Nochim’s fiddle plays joys, you think?”

  “Tell me at least where to buy one.”

  “All the fiddles you want, Laib, you’ll find in a little store on the corner of Hell and Damnation Street.” Sholem and Marya giggled at Pesha’s wit; it showed she was getting out of her bad mood. “A good thank-you,” I told the woman, starting to leave, my head working on the next step.

  Pesha took hold of my arm. “Hear me. A fiddler, a musician, is a person on the world like cockroaches are raisins. And a Jewish fiddler scrapes more than the bow ... his nose across behinds . . . before they let him bring his nose home. Remember.”

  Outside I found Nochim leaning on his hands against a tree, his head down, his moans raising themselves to louder sounds.

  “Nochim, excuse me . .

  “Forgiven, forgiven,” he muttered.

  “I mean excuse me for annoying you now . . .”

  “We’ll talk later, go away,” he gasped, bending himself forward in a spasm of retching. “Ay, herring,” he groaned, straightening himself up. “They don’t make herring the right way, the peasants.” His mind took hold of this particular thought. “You see, they don’t bother to soak it in water first, and in my stomach when too much salt mixes with too much whiskey, it turns me into a bomb without gunpowder, completely. . . .”

  “It goes without saying,” I replied quickly, seeing he was about to go off my subject. “What I’d like to be sure of, Nochim, is will you let me play a little, sometimes?”

  “Play, play,” he muttered, “go play now, right away.”

  “On the fiddle? Where is it?” I cried.

  “What fiddle, when fiddle?” he grumbled. A new retching grabbed him and as he bent over, he made backward pushes with his hand for me to go away. “What do you think a fiddle is for, pleasure ? It’s not a toy, it’s a thing for business,” he said with a last retch. “Business.”

  “Where did you get yours?”

  “The fiddle?”

  “Where?”

  “Minsk,” he said, leaning against the tree and sighing. “In a pawnshop . . . nine rubles . . .”

  “What pawnshop, Nochim?”

  “Who knows ? Let me see . . . his name I think was Bencha-Chaim. Any Minsker can show you the place.”

  “A thank-you!”

  Nine rubles, Minsk, Bencha-Chaim. Good. All the heavy picking would be started soon. I’d go to Reb Maisha with excuses and then pick all day; I’d even put my hands on stuff to peddle at the Pukop Fair . . . even if it had to come all the way from China, I’d get a fiddle.

  I ran back to our hut. Seeing me come in my mother turned from the stove with a look of pleasure on her face. “Grabbed yourself a little air? Come drink tea, then see if there’s a letter. Something tells me they’re coming home this week.”

  I sat down to my tea and bread. My mother picked up her wood basket and headed for the brush outside in her bare feet, her ankles showing under her skirt as she swung the basket in her hands. Many times in America I used to play stage shows with ballerina types on the bill but I never saw a pair of better-looking ankles than my mother’s that morning. They meant I was still young, I had many years to get my own fiddle and play it — not a Nochim-fiddle but the real thing coming out of it, such as had come out of the faraway the night before, adding itself to me and changing me.

  To find out how to play such fiddle would take time, but I had it.

  From the Friday several quick weeks later when Yeersel brought them home and laid them on the bed everything sewed itself with a different stitch and by spring of ’86 the cloth of the day had a different rub under the thumb. My uncle Mottel had been put in jail, they said it would be for four months, out of his fight with the postman, Dimitri, just before the Day of Atonement. No one questioned why, being too glad to have him where he was, and none doubted that he might never again be let out, for it would be like him to continue in prison where he began with Dimitri. Such was our estimate of his violent nature; but much later it occurred to me that in all the relieved comments about him, Maisha kept stone silent.

  We soon grew used to living with Reb Maisha. During the week somebody would always come and do a little cooking for us and on the Sabbat
h night we would eat either with Tzippe-Sora or in Yeersel’s. As Yeersel’s apprentice Shim did well from the beginning. It lay in his nature to get things done; he especially wanted to show Yeersel the good of his father through his own. Shim could hardly wait to be thought of as a full man. Rochel wasn’t yet fifteen but between them an understanding was building. Why this was so they couldn’t have

  explained but it was obvious. Golinsker girls didn’t “meet” boys but grew up with them; when it came time, couples would pair off and such was the style of romance in Golinsk. In America I met an actress and married her after preludes of flowers and private conversations in cafes and even dancing on the tables with her. But the net result turned out the same as any marriage in Golinsk.

  In the first months of my orphaning it appeared to the landsmen that I had become Reb Maisha’s mainstay, which was taken to be an extra-fine thing since I would be confirmed as a son of Israel on my next birthday, my twelfth, a year younger than the usual due to my having lost my parents — the ancient customs holding that an orphan rightfully requires and deserves Jewish manhood a year sooner than the luckier boys.

  I ran errands, scrubbed the synagogue floor, kept the prayer books and praying shawls in order on the shelf under the lectern, cut and stacked firewood, carried away ashes, and sat listening patiently to Reb Maisha’s semiofficial remarks (“The Tsar sits on his throne day and night. Why does the Tsar sit on his throne day and night? Because he is afraid the country will forget he is the Tsar. The Tsar is the Tsar, yet he can’t even go to the toilet when anybody is looking!”), but when I wanted time for myself I had only to say, “Reb Maisha, today I’ll leave the learning-table a little early. I want to study my speech.” This formal sermon from the pulpit on my confirmation day, composed, conducted, and arranged by Reb Maisha, was to be a triumphant sign to the landsmen of the spiritual job done on me (Reb Maisha gave all his students their confirmation speeches, but mine was with special cherries on the top). Reb Maisha wanted to believe that he could plant a little of himself in me. Therefore he went deeper with my speech than with what he gave other boys. Of course he didn’t leave out the regular, looked-for expressions such as, “On this day when I enter the world as a man fully understanding for the first time the meaning of my Jewish soul, I open my heart to my father” (how Reb Maisha used to drill me on the exact right way to say, “May-he-rest-in-peace,” so it would come out sad but not like a