The Landsmen Page 19

  “As the wheel must be round, so must I be beautiful.”

  “And such a fragrance to you, Lenka.”

  “On my shelf are many bottles.”

  “You are sweet without bottles.”

  “Then I please you?”

  “You are the daughter of my soul.”

  “But look at my body, Father. Is it not beautiful?”

  “Forgive me, Lenka.”

  “And smell me. Not sweet?”

  “I made you a whore.”

  “Silly Father. You should see me in Riga.”

  “Then you were yes-in-Riga?”

  “All the time. It’s nothing like Proflm’s, no peasants in stinking blouses. One officer or merchant a night, ten rubles; anything unpleasant extra. Ask for the Queen of Sport Street and they’ll bring you to me. For freeing me, Father, a blessing on you.”

  “Don’t make such jokes, daughter.”

  “Let me make you wider and longer with pleasure. Be the master of my body, Father. Die like a king.”

  “Dear One Above,” I cried, “cut me and then burn me.”

  “But first you must be pleased. Well, now.” She brazened herself then to me. “Be a merchant, an officer, a Squire, Father. Just once.”

  I turned away.

  “I am ugly to you,” she accused. “A beauty from Profim’s you’d rather take, a Varya, but not your own daughter.”

  “Stop your knives, Lenka. It’s my end now.”

  My daughter said, “You despised me. Even before the Squire. Even before. Go to Varya. Make with her. Die with her.”

  A wind blew. When again I looked for Lenka she was not there.

  I began to moan and cry, “Varya, help me. Varya, I’m dying. Come here, Varya.”

  With these fine chops I came to the close of my human condition. Hearing my cries for Varya the attending Burial Brotherhood put their confused heads together. “How bring a woman of filth here?” Yeersel wondered.

  “All the same,” Berel said, “how deny a last earthly wish? How let him remember us in The World Above with such salt?”

  “These things are not new,” Laib-Shmul said. “Didn’t my own father-may-he-rest call for a plate of pig the day he died?”

  “Why your father-may-he-rest wanted to eat pig on his deathbed is clear,” Reb Maisha said. “Your father did many sins, but as he lay to die he remembered he had never eaten pig. He knew the Smiting Angel would read the list of his sins . . . ten smites for this, twelve smites for that ... a long list. So he ate pig, knowing that when the Angel would call out his smites for eating pig it would be the last of them. But this is not the same.”

  Yeersel guessed, “Wait. Maisha told of Varya and Laib. Perhaps it’s from that corner.”

  “Why look further?” Laib-Shmul pressed. “The man dies away. Who will go to Profim’s and bring her?”

  “Not a man,” Reb Maisha said. “Let it be Tzippe-Sora.”

  The rest tells itself quickly. They brought Varya; Tzippe-Sora stood holding a candle over my bed. I heard her crackly voice. “She is here, Nochim. The woman.”

  “I can’t see her. Give her a candle. You go away.”

  I next saw a nose and a mouth, her eyes and a fringe of hair; all else dark. “Alone, alone we must be,” I whispered.

  “Alone,” she whispered fearfully. “Why am I here?”

  “Varya, you must go far away.”

  “But I did nothing to the boy!”

  “You must go and it will be good for you there.”

  “I only showed him to play the fiddle,” she sobbed. “Please don't curse me ... it was the fiddle, only the fiddle.”

  “If you do as I say,” I whispered, “I can only bless you. I beg you, woman, go to Riga, to Sport Street in Riga, and ask for the ‘Queen’ there. They will take you to my daughter, Lenka, and tell her this . . . I wanted her with me always. I dreamed and sorrowed and regretted. Tell her these things, in Sport Street, Riga . . . she’s the ‘Queen.’ ”

  “I did not harm the boy, you hear?”

  “To Riga?”

  “Do you hear?”

  “Say to her only that you come from Nochim, her father. You will be treated like a queen yourself. Your hand. Give. Don’t fear.”

  The fingers, cold, small. Lenka, Lenka . . . “Now . . . Call them

  • » in.

  The fingers still in my hand . . . Yeersel, Berel, Laib-Shmul, Reb Maisha . . . the Burial Brotherhood about me; and the final prayer, to Varya’s gasps.

  “Thou who are the father of the fatherless and judge of the widow, protect my beloved kindred with whose soul my spirit is knit. Into thy hand I put my spirit. Amen, and amen.”

  Fathers of daughters, think of all the pens broken and bottles of ink consumed in the writing of matters that never happened, and remember a Squire’s conspiracy against my flesh. But not with pity. For such a trophy one does not strain from heaven.

  1Bevel

  (1846-1887)

  IN ow here it is, looking at it with a simple quick eye . . . OUR boys were being conscripted before their time against no enemy of theirs and it was either to accept it with gall, or give a try for a pushaway towards ships going over the sea.

  Now this is how I came to be Berel-the-Ox in Golinsk:

  Father was a butcher in Minsk, I was born there, every few years some kind of small plague would come there, and all of a sudden the officials would concern themselves about our health and charge into the ghetto with inspectors and in 1851 they inspected Father’s meat, of course burning his shop together with many others in defense of the general health and this public activity helped reduce the ghetto quite legally. And of course in their zeal they directed Father to leave Minsk.

  Now my father spoke of a dislike of all cities and ghettos, he did not go for Pinsk as the other banished but for a little village he had come from as a boy some forty miles to the east of Minsk, called Pukop. We had a cart in which I rode, I was five then, and with my father and mother we had Gershon and Bosha left, fifteen and seven then . . . Bosha was all right, Gershon had a weak chest and steady cough, in between them had been two other girls before me whom I knew only from remarks and little stories told about them when my father and mother lit the year-time memorial candles . . . and Mother would not allow Gershon to help pull the cart, she would beg him to stop it and ride with me. Gershon would sit backwards in the cart not to see how Father and Mother were pulling him and the moment he stopped coughing he would jump off and walk with

  our sister Bosha. Now Gershon lived to be fifty years old, sick every day but dying like a healthy person through the sickness of others.

  The first night towards Pukop we spent in a field, we woke and found Father straight on his back, giving shakes with his eyes closed, and we built a fire to put hot stones at his feet. He stopped shaking after an hour, his forehead changed to purple and then a gray and I began to chant, “Papa has it, we must burn him, Papa has it, we must burn him.” Mother began rolling herself on the ground with such a terror that it frightened brother Gershon into stopping my chant with a hard fist, it struck my ear with all his power, it felled me, it hurt with knives, I pressed it to the cool morning grass. Gershon went to help Mother, he picked her up, she quieted, they talked on a side . . . then he came to me and said to stop my crying. “. . . Because Mother says we should take the cart^up the road a way and wait for her.”

  Bosha and I did not like to leave her, we cried come-with-us, she said, “Don’t let Gershon pull,” and did not move a step to us. On the road we turned and looked at her, the way she waved good-by too quickly, the way she said “Go, go, go,” the way Gershon did not look at her twice at all; it made me ask Gershon after a few minutes of pulling the cart, “Gershon, who’ll bury Father?”

  “Mother.”

  Bosha said we should go back and help, Gershon said no, we pulled the cart a long time, the sun went lower and lower. I became frightened, we rested, Bosha and I kept asking Gershon when Mother would be coming. “When
she comes and not a minute sooner,” he said with a twist-away of his head, with his eyes wet, and Bosha said, “Gershon, do you think Mama caught it too?” and Gershon said, “If she didn’t, she’ll find us,” and I began to cry and that evening by the roadside it was Bosha cooking our potatoes, and Gershon putting on Father’s praying shawl. My hurt ear pained all the night and Gershon let himself make sounds of his grief when he thought Bosha and I were sleeping, and two days we walked the strange roads to-

  'Berel 169

  wards Pukop, eating all our potatoes and retching and gasping from the unripe fruit and berries we took on the way.

  We met no Jews and Bosha and I kept worrying Gershon why we met no Jews, and we passed around villages too close to be Pukop because we feared the gentiles would know about Minsk and put the plague on us and treat us as if we had it. And on the second day along the roads a peasant in a wagon came by us and asking no questions robbed us of the cart and we had no blankets or cooking pots. A thunderstorm gathered itself to break, frightening woods lay all around the road there, I thought I saw high fur running through the thicket across the way. And then the lightning pointed down close, thunder hammered my paining ear ... in the middle of the rain we saw a brown spot coming from down the road, a wagon, Gershon ran to it anyway, waving his hands. It stopped down from us too far for Bosha and I to hear anything but we saw joy when we saw Gershon jump on. Nearing us, Gershon shouting over the thunder, “A Jew, a Jew,” we also jumped to sit on planks laid over open barrels of wheel- grease sickening to smell, and as we rode Gershon sat up with the wagoner and acquainted him with our condition.

  The wagoner was Naftoli-Dovid in his good years, later my father- in-law, and he said to Gershon many times as we rode, “Your father- may-he-rest should have done like the others running from Minsk . . . nothing’s here this way, Pinsk is better.”

  “He wanted no more cities,” Gershon told him, “and my brother coughs.”

  “He’ll cough anywhere, right?” said Naftoli-Dovid, slapping the reins with the wet on him, “Look at me, the old Squire hears of cheap wheel-grease in Bobroisk, does he send a friend where a plague is said to be? Certainly ... his old friend Naftoli-Dovid, his loyal helper in all times . . . gladly going to Bobroisk where they’re killing livestock on suspicion of plague there ... so for the old Squire wheel-grease comes cheap, a blessing on friendly Naftoli-Dovid, his useful Jew . . . well . . . make way, Ocean,” Naftoli-Dovid laughed, shaking the rain out of his beard, “crap is swimming.”

  After the rain I shivered with chills, my ear ached, Gershon laid me on the planks and held my head. The smell of the wheel-grease went to Bosha’s stomach, the wagon swayed over rougher roads, she sickened, and with one thing and another we were brought into Golinsk where Yeersel’s father of great respect, Daneel-ben-Boruch, said we should be kept. My shrieks of pain made Daneel-ben-Boruch probe my ear with his longest tailor’s needle, and the pain soon stopped but brought spells of dizziness and in three weeks the ear went deaf. Meanwhile Gershon was put next to Yeersel’s uncle Lazer to be a shoemaker with the old man whose hands were trembling his living away. Bosha learned to run happily down the lanes of the Jewish side like the other children and we accustomed ourselves to our corner of Daneel-ben-Boruch’s hut, sleeping under the same cover with Yeersel.

  The hearing of my other ear also decreased and mothers comforted me, often showing envy. “Just think, Berel, they’ll never want you for the army.”

  At the age of nine I became both all-deaf and an uncle, Gershon having married Tzippe-Sora’s Faiga; and four years later Yeersel married Bosha. They had always leaned to each other, to marry early was a common thing, Bosha was new blood, the landsmen feared too much intermarriage . . . meanwhile Daneel-ben-Boruch ate something and died, I became confirmed and was made the watercarrier, a labor that least needed ears, and when Yeersel and Bosha had their first, Daneel, I helped build them their own hut and remained wifeless with them until sixteen when I took Hannah of Naftoli-Dovid’s childless bunch, living in Yeersel’s hut, the two families, another seven years. Half the day the whole year around I carried waterbuckets yoked to my shoulders (they widened me out and gave me a broad trunk), from the stream to the huts a quarter of a mile away, the Squire forbidding us a well as was his right as landowner. The other part of the day I either fished for the market or helped my father-in- law dig clay or sell kvas in the market. Hearing nothing I had little to say. I felt blessed in my quiet, seeing what turmoils came from

  all the tongues around me; whatever turned out to be God’s plan for Berel-the-watercarrier, I would accept.

  In the second year of my marriage, 1864, they sent a bad recruiting officer during a big snow one afternoon. With two soldiers he visited every hut, every Jewish male from twelve to thirty he marched down to the highroad where he made us into a line and spoke to us holding a pistol in his hand. Only Jews this time, no gentiles, the other peasants of the village standing to the performance and well satisfied to be shown as more free than we, especially since three years before they had been freed officially by a big decree posted on the porch of the village hall which in the end came down to their being permitted, if they liked, to go starve elsewhere. Now this recruiting officer ordered us to take off our coats and shirts in the bitter cold and my brother Gershon’s Faiga could not stand to see him bending in half from his coughing. So she went to Gershon and gave him her shawl, a soldier pushed her away; Mottel who stood next to her picked her up, and the soldier took it as a right to push his rifle butt against Mottel’s bared chest. Just sixteen and tall, Mottel gave a spring under the soldier’s thrust and sent him to the ground, which made the recruiting officer go to Mottel and hit him on an eye with the barrel of his pistol. Since I stood near where Mottel lay the recruiting officer began to open an angry mouth to me, his face getting quite red the more I shook my head and pointed to my ears. In a rage he put the pistol to one ear and pulled the trigger, I heard something like a wetness rushing, and that day they took Hertz, Laib-Shmul, three of Lipka’s and Yeersel into their army.

  Then a few days after they went, buzzings and ringings went off in my head when I stood praying in the synagogue or sat in the market and once for a joke I told Hannah, “Call into this ear,” and it sounded like something . . . and soon after during our Feast of Lights I could hear my own name through the ear the pistol shot had opened . . . and the time came when I could, if I wanted to, hear conversations. Now this was held up by Reb Maisha and all serious elders as a proof that The One Above worried for us, but it was

  only a short-quoted proof; for a greater miracle touched us a month later, when Yeersel came home with a genuine discharge paper.

  I had longed to hear my wife Hannah’s voice, to speak to my boys Ellya and Nasan, to experience full prayer; these joys were brought to me. Also with them the hack of boiling angers, the wail of haranguing melancholies now invaded my special calm. These sounds of mothers and fathers and children tearing and biting at each other through their ears made me wish often to be deaf again. I spoke of this to Yeersel one time we sat fishing together by the streamside. “There’s much to cherish,” he answered, “or why should we ever open our mouths?”

  I made no reply, remembering the worm who jumped into horseradish and thought it was pear preserves because he was used only to bitter tastes. With me it was otherwise. I cherished the sweet silence. The noise of people clashing held the useless violences of beasts — in this simplicity of mine I yearned for even a false calm; so when old Yessel-the-candlemaker died I managed ways of moving my family into the empty hut where at least within my own walls I established quiet, where no turmoils were permitted not even by visitors, where shouters and foot-pounders and long-winded criers were told to go outside, even my father-in-law, Naftoli-Dovid; and when our synagogue meetings turned into contests of insult, as often happened, I would leave. The stream helped me and the quarter mile from it to the huts that I walked thirty times a day and sixty before the Sabbath, the wat
erbuckets hanging from the yoke across my shoulders, the pipe never out of my mouth; and it would be into a hut with the buckets for the day and out quickly from the clamors and shrieks called conversation from one hut to the next — Berel-the-Ox became an accepted piece of the landscape. “What’s to be said,” they understood among themselves, “of one half-deaf to begin with, in whose own house to the bargain they walk with their mouths sewed up as if it costed a ruble a word in his presence? Not a bad one, Berel . . . but still an ox.”

  Stubbornly wherever I could, I set thickets of calm about me and

  watched them grow higher and wider each year until 1886, when the passing of Nochim placed an axe in my hand.

  The Saturday night Nochim went stayed hot for May. Only a splinter of moon showed; most of us lingered outside the bereaved hut. Some still inside were not finished with their consolations of Pesha and Sholem and Zagzaigel and Marya, or were adding their own embroideries to the remembrances of Nochim made by the ring of wives sitting with the suddenly important widow.

  Pipe in mouth, standing on a side, I was trying not to hear my father-in-law asking why everyone turned their faces away from him.

  In past years Naftoli-Dovid had been what we called a “person,” a granted member of the community, a husband and father of value. My father-in-law's lowering began with the death of his wife Masha. He tried to become a matchmaker, made enemies, became a claydig- ger and brandydrinker, looked without success for great money-making schemes and in time he developed the annoying skill of asking long chains of pointless questions in synagogue meetings.

  I moved away from him; the less he knew what had passed at evening prayers, the better. Naftoli-Dovid jumped in front of me and demanded to know where I was going. I took my pipe from my mouth and growled, “Home.” He understood I was not to be followed.

  Hannah had tea waiting. I sat down and lit my pipe. The boys came running in, Ellya twenty-two, Nasan eighteen, with a strong clatter of feet and both talking high at the same time. One look at them from me and Hannah said, “Time for tea, not talking.”