The Landsmen Read online

  Colonel had to spend each year and what he spent, we knew that to defy him was to throw away our sons. For this crazy power over our sons, for this alone we feared him more than we hated him. In his presence we tore the hats from our heads and had he asked it we gladly would have washed his feet and drunk the water. To obey the Squire in all things was of course no guarantee that our sons would be spared, but many of them were. My own Daneel, my eldest, I had early trained to be an efficient wagon-man; at the age of twelve he could take a horse and wagon cleanly through the smallest trail in the darkest night, to load contraband noiselessly, to hide it perfectly, and to sell it at the best price. Buzarov had commended him to the Squire, and when his name had turned up on the ’83 list handed over by Colonel Yakol, the Squire had drawn his pen through it. For this I and other Jewish fathers served him well. Not only did we haul and hide and sell his contraband for him, turning over the exact sums down to the last kopeck, but we plowed and sowed and cultivated and harvested for him; and when we busied ourselves pursuing our bread, we sent the wives and children into his fields.

  The Squire liked himself on a horse. He took steady gallops across his land. When he happened to pass any of our young girls working in the fields, he liked to slow up sometimes and tease the girls with his riding crop. “I’ll bet you have a pretty little crack down there/’ he used often to say, giggling. The girls would burst into tears of fright, or run away, and then the Squire would enlarge the game, chasing them on his big gray horse, Commander, until they fell to the ground. In this way the Squire studied their temperaments. Then during the winter that followed when the weathers prevented regular excursions to his favorite fun-houses in Minsk and Pinsk, and after he had returned from his gala expeditions to Petersburg or once Paris, he would become depressed by the local prostitutes and remember the girls he had seen in the fields, our girls, our young hard Jewish plums, the summer girls he had chased on his horse; and he would give thought to those who had tried to joke about his sportsman’s chasing game, of the ones who understood the value of a smile and an angry shake of

  the bosom. He would send for Buzarov and sit down with him to study the possibilities. Drinking brandy and nibbling on nuts, Buzarov would pinpoint the likeliest candidates for the exercise of the Squire’s sexual play.

  “This must be the one who smiled when you flicked her,” Buzarov might say, lifting his glass to savor the cognac Konayev stocked by the case. “Dark eyes and a mouth like a curving Japanese bridge, you say? Ah, of course . . . she’s Nochim’s middle daughter . . . good, good . . . he has a son of fifteen, Nochim. . . .”

  And of course the attractive older sister of a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy was the ideal thing. How could a good sister be unwilling to take the trinkets Buzarov would bring as a token of the Squire’s friendliness to the family ? And, it followed, how could the girl refuse to thank the Squire personally for the boon to the family ? Anything less than complete humility in the entire affair was to invite serious consequences.

  On the two or three times a winter that Buzarov would come over to our side of the village with gifts from the Squire to one of our daughters, we knew exactly what had to be done. Somebody would immediately be sent to Yushin, the druggist, for a bottle of stomach oil. The neighbor would bring the oil to the girl’s house, and she would have it poured into her. Shortly then she would become deathly sick, during which time the father and Buzarov would sit down to methods of conciliation. These usually amounted to two things, the bribing of Buzarov personally with cash and promises of future personal services, and a pledge of added assistance to the Squire in any way he wished it. With a perfectly straight face Vassily Buzarov would march back to the Squire and report that the girl he wanted now had consumption, or had already been spoiled by the peasants, or had begun to grow a mustache in addition to having gone all scaly and having a running nose. Thus Buzarov would play upon the Squire’s easily mobilized disgust, running him through his entire repertory of effete renunciations which the Squire persuaded himself were the evidences of a fundamentally aristocratic temperament.

  Yet I heard of many cases that had gone the other way, with the

  Squire’s father, and I myself saw how it turned out with Lenka, Nochim’s eldest, and my Squire. The girl of sixteen, charmed by Buzarov’s presentations, had got the idea of being herself able to outwit the Squire and still gain protection for her family. Her father Nochim had well earned his reputation for being a seriously airy fool, and Lenka’s desire to do something for her nearest family had at least a logical foundation, if not a sensible direction. But her daring profited her nothing. She came down the hill to find her clothes on the step and the door shut to her. We did not judge Nochim to be a good husband nor more than an erratic father, but when she came home with pierced ears and swinging a bagful of walnuts, he flew into a rage, rode her halfway to Svutz, forced her out of the wagon in the middle of the night, and then turned around for home where he started a long fast. We were criticized in Pukop for this, and in Svutz we were laughed at for not having made a good thing out of the Squire’s fancy for Lenka. Later that year we received news of her; Lenka had stabbed a sergeant-major in Riga. Nochim refused to believe it. “To begin with,” he would say out loud, “what was she doing in Riga? And how could she ever stab anyone, much less a sergeant-major? Why, the girl used to get sick every time she tried to clean a chicken!”

  We understood, silently, that Nochim had acted correctly in putting Lenka out of our lives. Acts of surrender like hers endangered our survival. And another thing we understood, all, quite well, so well that we neither laughed nor cried over it; we knew that without us Golin- sker Jews the Squire would have slit his throat at the age of forty.

  Some considered Mottel-ben-Kalman even more dangerous to our community than the Squire. “From the Squire, after all, we know what to expect,” was how Laib-Shmul, the meat slaughterer, said it. “With the Squire you are always looking for the knife in his hand and you are ready to kneel or run at any minute. But with Mottel . . . who eats like a gentile and lives like a gentile and even thinks like a gentile, yet he’s a Jew too . . . from such a man who knows what to expect but troubles?”

  Mottel-ben-Kalman had long since earned our spitting scorn for

  having given up his everything, his Jewishness. Since returning from the army, not even once had he behaved like a Jew, not even during the High Holidays. He was mixed in with all the peasant riffraff; he lived in a room in one of the inns, worked in the smithy of Profim Alexi Buzarov, and carried forward a hoodlum’s comradeship with Profim’s brother Vassily, the Squire’s steward.

  His contempt for us was clear-cut and wordless. He neither came to the synagogue nor thought to fast on the Day of Atonement; he ate pig, drank anything, and smoked on the Sabbath; and during spring and fall maneuvers when the Pukop garrison would spill over into our village, he kept himself busy night after night, running soldiers into the town’s brothels in exchange for small favors on both sides.

  Still, some of us were sorry for him. Despite his terrible sins, Reb Maisha and I recognized his profound bitterness — a bitterness known, expressed, and in some way connected to us, a forlorn and sterile state made so because Mottel had been unable to water it with faith and transform it into its opposite. Mottel had shut himself out, had turned his back upon us. He could not say, with us, every morning, “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has given us the Law of truth, and hast planted everlasting life in our midst.”

  We had marked him an outcast, burdening our children with punishments whenever they ran into Profim’s smithy and talked to him. We accepted Mottel as a casualty in the running war being fought against us through the centuries. And to remind ourselves of this, we remembered to call Mottel to the altar on the High Holidays to read a piece of the Holy Law, even though we knew he was not there.

  For the Squire we felt a steady stew of fear, suspicion, and hatred. We wrapped this fear in bandages of philosophic
condemnations and epigrammatic demolishments; as Reb Maisha used to say, “The Squire, his tongue should fall out, is a fox who lives like a tiger and who will die like a dog.” But the scorn we held for Mottel pitched itself on a lower, more fundamental key, rarely stated and always felt, like a theme simmering in its variations, rising and falling. Many a time we would spit at the mention of Mottel’s name (as when he would

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  come to us talking for Vassily Buzarov and arrange the details of some risk we had to take for the Squire), but the rule for Mottel was bitter silence and pity for him.

  Mottel himself never seemed concerned about whether or not he was worth a spit. Perhaps he thought we had inner reasons to tolerate him; perhaps he believed that by helping us make ourselves useful to the Squire he was therefore prolonging the lives of our sons; or perhaps he held that we feared him. There were grounds for that. In my own case, being the first tailor of the village (Aaron, MottePs brother, was the other, and two so different brothers you never heard of), I was obliged to buy all my cloth and supplies from agents who paid the Squire fees to trade in the village. Sometimes on my sewing trips I would meet tradesmen who offered me goods and supplies at prices well below what I always paid but then I would have had to suspend buying from the agent authorized by the Squire. And doing this involved an unthinkable risk. By order of Selenkov we Jewish tradesmen had to submit monthly written reports of our business activity, listing all purchases, sales, and commissions; and this monthly revelation of how much could be mulcted from us became an irritating expense in itself; the form printed in Russian had to be filled out in Russian, so we were forced to hire someone to do it for us. The least hostile of Russian penmen in our village was Mottel, who had acquired some command of the language during his army service. And so we paid him thirty kopecks a month apiece to fill out our reports, hoping against hope that somewhere inside of him was left enough decency to write down what we told him to.

  Sometimes we would say, “Mottel, with everything you had to do in the army, where did you find time to learn Russian ?” He would scowl and say, “And if I told you, would you believe me?”

  One day Mottel said to me, “I cannot write your monthly report any more.”

  “And why not?”

  “How do I know you are not lying in what you say you bought and sold?”

  “And suppose I am? Where is that your risk?” I demanded.

  “I am ashamed of you,” he told me, grinning so widely that I could see all his brown teeth lying in the center of his beard. “After all I too am a Jew.”

  “To the Squire, yes. To us, no.”

  “And being a Jew,” he continued, delighting himself with his words, “you have more to lose by being dishonest with me. For is it not written that one Jew should not involve another Jew in his sins?”

  “I am honest in my reports,” I said, “only because he owns me more completely than he owns the gentiles. If he decides to hate one gentile, he has him killed. But should he decide to hate one Jew, he would try to have us all in the earth.”

  “A good answer,” Mottel replied. “The answer of a poor man who will always be poor.”

  He took the printed form then, and made out my report for me. He also took my thirty kopecks. I left him with anger in me against him, for I certainly knew he disbelieved the honesty of my statements in my report. I wanted to go back to him and say, “You think like a gentile. The first thought you have when you see a Jew is that the Jew is cheating. That the Jew wants only to get rich! But have you ever thought, Mottel, of what we would have to do to retain those riches? We would have to throw away the heart of our Jewishness! We would have to put the affairs of this world higher in our minds than our ultimate redemption in the kingdom of heaven!”

  Mottel would not have believed me. But I soon forgot the whole thing. I had been born to poverty, knew little else, like most Jews. We had our Law and our God, had gained and lost through the centuries in blood and money, and I really could not see how a Jew could retain his riches and still remain a Jew. Instinctively we in Golinsk smelled something fishy in the stories about great millionaires like the Rothschilds, whose existence we did not doubt but whose Jewishness we certainly did. Naftoli-Dovid, our nearest to a drunkard, once said something we all agreed was not in the least characteristic of him. “If Rothschild is as rich as they say,” Naftoli-Dovid remarked, “why

  doesn’t he send someone to Golinsk to see who is too poor to get himself wine and unleavened bread for the Passover ? Plain talk . . . Rothschild has forgotten he is a Jew and I am sorry for him. The only person to be pitied more than a rich Jew is a poor one!”

  Out of those few words of our village life in the Golinsk of 1885, you can see how our faith and our piety had to be our most precious possession. From our piety we wove ourselves mantles invisible to our enemies but quite simply warm and easily recognized Jew-by-Jew. Everything in our lives, everything we felt in our souls, told us our piety inevitably would lead us to the kingdom of heaven in The Other World, and so it became more than a clean dear joy to us. Through all the centuries of our history we held our piety to be the most important necessity of our lives on earth. But necessity and circumstance are twins, after all, and when we lived on the earth we never knew that when we saw one, like as not we were really looking at the other. Only after you die can you tell which is which; and then it’s only like a trick.

  Thus (Did I not begin by saying we Golinskers were long-winded?), I conclude my “hello.”

  Now, of the deaths of two landsmen, Aaron and Leah, man and wife, together. He was Mottel’s brother and the second tailor of the village. They died on a Friday in ’85 between New Year’s and the Day of Atonement.

  On the Monday morning before that bad Friday, in the first week of our New Year, Mottel sent a gentile boy to my hut. The boy said, “Mottel wants to see you at the smithy tonight at ten o’clock.”

  It was September. The grapes had been all in for over a week and doubtless the Squire had reduced much of it to juice and raw mash to be cooked into alcohol. The pressing and barreling was done in the open on his own grounds but the hauling away and the cooking and the selling of the illegal liquor was our job. I knew from experience that Mottel, acting for Buzarov, acting for the Squire, would sit me down when I came to the smithy and explain the who-when-and- what.

  Ordinarily I would have gone to the smithy as directed, but this happened to be a holy week, the week of the High Holidays — hardly a time to spoil by galloping down side roads in the middle of the night, holding tightly to the reins, praying nothing would happen to the horse or the barrels, and imagining the sounds of policemen’s swords clanking behind me, mixing with the angry words of the dried-up Dansonov, our provincial magistrate, leveling damning accusations from the height of his justice’s bench with his eyes rolling meanwhile like a hooked fish’s. Then again, what if the order came to haul the contraband on the Day of Atonement itself?

  So though my horse needed shoes I ignored the summons to the smithy. Let it wait, I told myself, until after the Day of Atonement; but on that Monday night my sleep was fitful, my head cracking with bothering ideas. What if Mottel told Buzarov I did not appear? And what if Buzarov told the Squire, and what if the Squire happened to be in a bad mood? And if the Squire suspected my absence was because I did not care to work for him during Holy Week, wouldn’t that possibly unleash his hatred for us at the most sacred time of the year? All that next day my eyes were as heavy as my heart. I could hardly see what I was sewing, and to make it all the more depressing, I happened to be sewing for a Svutzker. Even my horse, Gritka, could hardly drag himself along for need of two new front shoes, and there was no smithy in Svutz.

  I returned to Golinsk in time for evening prayers. Afterwards while we were still standing around together, Aaron came to me, the usual frown on his large tired face, his long chin seeming, as always, to point his little beard right through his chest. By the way he began with me I kn
ew he had something on his mind. He did not step up close to me and begin to talk in the ordinary Golinsker flow, but he stood off a bit and said only, “Yeersel . .

  “Well, then — what?”

  “I don’t like to drag favors out of you so soon in the New Year . .

  “To grant a favor is a blessing at any time of the year,” I said shortly, pulling my coat collar about my ears; it had become unseasonably