The Fixer (18 page)

  “Listen, little brother,” the other prisoner began, “I am Fetyukov. The prisoners have sent me to talk to you.”

  “If you’re worried that I’m a stool pigeon,” Yakov said hastily, “you’ve got the wrong worry. I’m here like everybody else, waiting for my trial. I haven’t asked for any privileges, not that they would give me any. I’m not even getting a bread ration. As for my hair, I told the barber to go ahead and cut it off but the sergeant said not to, though don’t ask me why.”

  “What are you accused of?”

  The fixer touched his lips with a dry tongue. “Whatever they’ve accused me of I didn’t do. I give you my word. It’s too complicated to go into without turning it into a wearying tale, something I don’t understand myself.”

  “I’m a murderer,” said Fetyukov. “I stabbed a stranger at the inn in my village. He provoked me so I stabbed him twice, once in the chest, and when he was falling, once in the back. That was the end of him. I had had more than a drop or two, but when they told me what I had done I was greatly surprised. I’m a peaceful man, I never make trouble if you don’t provoke me. Who would’ve thought I could murder anybody? If you had told me any such thing I would have laughed at you to your face.”

  The fixer, staring at the murderer, edged sideways along the wall. At the same time he saw two other prisoners sneaking up on him, one from either side. As he cried out, Fetyukov reached behind him whipping a short heavy stick out of his trousers. He struck Yakov a hard blow on the head. The fixer went down on one knee, holding both hands over his pain-wracked, bloody head, then fell over.

  He awoke, lying on the clammy wooden platform. His head ached sickeningly and a searing pain throbbed on the left side of his skull. His fingers sought out the wet swollen cut on his scalp. Blood dripped from it. He was anguished. Would he be beaten every time he was moved to another cell and met other prisoners? The fixer dizzily sat up, blood trickling down his face.

  “Wipe it off,” advised an old man with cracked eyeglasses, peering down at him. It was the slop-pail man who took care of the excrement buckets, brought in drinking water, and occasionally swept the wet floor. “Use the water bucket by the door.”

  “Why do you hit a man who has done nothing to you? What have I done to you?”

  “Listen, matey,” the old man whispered, “wash the blood off before the guard comes or the men will kill you.”

  “Let them kill me,” he shouted.

  “I told you he’s a shitnose squealer,” the clubfoot said from the other side of the cell. “Finish him off, Fetyu-kov.”

  A nervous murmur rose among the prisoners.

  Two guards came running in the corridor, one carrying a shotgun. They peered through the grating.

  “What’s going on here? Cut out the noise, you pigs, or you’ll live on half rations for a week.”

  The other guard stared through the barred grating into the gloomy cell.

  “Where’s the Jew?” he called.

  There was dead silence. The prisoners looked among themselves; some glanced furtively at Yakov.

  After a while Yakov said he was there. A low murmur came from the prisoners. The guard pointed a shotgun at them and the murmur ceased.

  “Where?” said the guard. “I can’t see you.”

  “Here,” said Yakov. “There’s nothing to see.”

  “The sergeant wrote your name on the bread list. You’ll get your six ounces tonight.”

  “In the meantime you can dream of matzos,” said the guard with the gun. “Also the blood of Christian martyrs, if you know what I mean.”

  When the guards left the prisoners talked excitedly among themselves. Yakov felt renewed fright.

  Fetyukov, the murderer, approached again. The fixer rose tensely, his hand clawing the wall.

  “Are you the Jew they say has murdered a Russian lad?”

  “They lie,” Yakov said hoarsely, “I’m innocent.”

  The mutterings of the prisoners filled the cell. One of them shouted, “Jew bastard!”

  “That’s not why I hit you,” said Fetyukov. “Your head wasn’t shaved and we thought you were a spy. We did it to see if you would report us to the guard. If you had done that it would have finished you off. The clubfoot would have knifed you. We are going on trial and don’t want anybody testifying what he has heard in this cell. I didn’t know you were a Jew. But if I had I wouldn’t have hit you. When I was a boy I was apprenticed to a Jew blacksmith. He wouldn’t have done what they say you did. If he drank blood he would have vomited it up. And he wouldn’t have harmed a Christian child. I’m sorry I hit you, it was a mistake.”

  “It was a mistake,” said the clubfoot.

  Yakov went unsteadily to the water bucket. The bucket stank but he sank to his knees and poured some water over his head.

  After that the prisoners lost interest in him and turned to other things. Some of them went to sleep on the platform and some played cards.

  That night Fetyukov woke the fixer and gave him a piece of sausage he had saved from a package his sister had sent him. Yakov gobbled it up. The murderer also handed him a wet rag to press down the swollen cut on his head.

  “Tell the truth,” he whispered, “did you kill that lad? Maybe you did it for a different reason? You might have been drunk.”

  “For no other reason,” Yakov said. “And I wasn’t drunk. It never happened, I’m innocent.”

  “I wish I were innocent,” sighed Fetyukov. “It was a terrible thing I did. The man was a stranger to me. One must protect strangers, it says so in the Book. I had had a drop, you understand, and the next thing I knew I grabbed up a knife and he was dead at my feet. God, who gives us life, lets it hang by a thread. One blow and it’s torn away. Don’t ask me why unless the devil is the stronger. If I could give that man his life again I would. I would say take your life and don’t come near me again. I don’t know why I did it but I don’t want to be a murderer. Things are bad enough as they are, who needs worse? Now they’ll pack me off to a prison camp in Siberia and if I live out my term I’ll have to stay there the rest of my days.

  “Little brother,” he said to Yakov, making the sign oi the cross over him, “don’t lose hope. The stones of the bridge may crumble but the truth will come out.”

  “And till then,” sighed the fixer, “what of my wasted youth?”

  4

  His youth dribbled away.

  He had been imprisoned almost three months, three times longer than Bibikov had predicted and God only knew when it would end. Yakov nearly went mad trying to figure out what was happening to him. What was a poor harmless fixer doing in prison? What had he done to deserve this terrible incarceration, no end in sight? Hadn’t he had more than his share of misery in a less than just world? He tried desperately to put together a comprehensible sequence of events that had led inevitably from his departure from the shtetl to a prison cell in Kiev; but to think of all these strange and unexpected experiences as meaningfully caused by related events confused him. True, the world was the kind of world it was. The rain put out fires and created floods. Yet too much had happened that didn’t make sense. He had committed a few errors and paid for them in more than kind. One dark night a thick black web had fallen on him because he was standing under it, and though he ran in every direction he could not extricate himself from its sticky coils. Who was the spider if it remained invisible? He sometimes thought God was punishing him for his unbelief. He was, after all, the jealous God. “Thou shalt worship no other Gods before me,” not even no Gods. He also blamed the goyim for their eternal hatred of Jews. Things go badly at a historical moment and go that way, God or no God, forever. Did it
have
to be so? And he continued to curse himself. It could have happened to a more dedicated Jew, but it had happened instead to a recent freethinker because he was Yakov Bok. He blamed his usual mistakes—he could not always tell those of the far-off past from those that had led directly to his arrest in the brickyard. Yet he knew there was something from the outside, a quality of fate that had stalked him all his life and threatened, if he wasn’t careful, his early extinction.

  He hungered to explain who he was, Yakov the fixer from a small town in the Pale, an orphan boy who had married Raisl Shmuel’s and had been deserted by her, a curse on her soul; who had been poor all his life, had grubbed for a living, and was poor in other ways too—if he was that one what was he doing in prison? Who were they punishing if his life was punishment? Why put a harmless man into a prison with thick stone walls? He thought of begging them to let him go simply because he was not a criminal—it was a known fact—they could ask in the shtetl. If any of the officials—Grubeshov, Bodyan-sky, the warden—had known him before, they would never have believed he could commit such a monstrous crime. Not such as he. If only his innocence were written on a sheet of paper, he could pull it out and say, “Read, it’s all here,” but since it was hidden in himself they would know it only if they sought it, and they were not seeking. How could anyone look twice at Marfa Golov, note her suspicious ways and those crazy cherries on her hat, and not suspect she knew more about the murder than she was willing to admit? And what had happened to the Investigating Magistrate whom he hadn’t seen now in more than a month? Was he still loyal to the law, or had he joined with the others in their vicious hunt for a guilty Jew? Or had he merely forgotten an expendable man?

  During Yakov’s first days in the courthouse jail the accusation had seemed to him almost an irrelevancy, nothing much to do with his life or deeds. But after the visit to the cave he had stopped thinking of relevancy, truth, or even proof. There was no “reason,” there was only their plot against a Jew, any Jew; he was the accidental choice for the sacrifice. He would be tried because the accusation had been made, there didn’t have to be another reason. Being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors. Accident and history had involved Yakov Bok as he had never dreamed he could be involved. The involvement was, in a way of speaking, impersonal, but the effect, his misery and suffering, were not. The suffering was personal, painful, and possibly endless.

  He felt entrapped, abandoned, helpless. He had disappeared from the world and nobody he could call friend knew it. Nobody. The fixer berated himself for not having listened to Shmuel’s advice and staying where he belonged. He had got himself in a terrible mess, for what? Opportunity? An opportunity to destroy himself. He had fished for a herring and had been snatched by a shark. It wasn’t hard to guess which of them would eat meat. And though he had now, at last, a little understanding of what was going on, or thought he had, he could of course still not resign himself to what had happened. In a philosophical moment he cursed history, anti-Semitism, fate, and even, occasionally, the Jews. “Who will help me?” he cried out in his sleep, but the other prisoners had their own anguish, their own bad dreams.

  One night a new guest was let into the cell, a fattish heavy-faced young man with a blondish beard and small hands and feet, who wore his own clothes. At first his manner was morose and he returned furtive glances to anyone who looked in his direction. Yakov observed him from the distance. The young man was the only fat one in a cellful of skinny prisoners. He had money, bribed the guards for favors, lived well on packages from the outside—two large ones in a week—and wasn’t stingy with food or cigarettes. “Here, boys, eat hearty,” and he would hand out whatever there was to spare, yet keep himself well supplied. He even passed around green bottles of mineral water. He seemed to know how to get along, and some of the prisoners played cards with him. The clubfoot offered to be his personal servant but he waved him away. At the same time he was a worried man, muttered to himself, shook his head in disagreement, and sometimes tore at his round wrists with dirty fingernails. One by one he pulled off the buttons of his shirt. Yakov, though wanting to talk to the man, skirted him in the beginning, possibly because he didn’t know what to say to people with money, partly because the man obviously didn’t want to be bothered, and partly for reasons he could not explain to himself. The new prisoner dispensed his favors with pretended cordiality, his eyes unable to conceal the fact that he was not a cordial man, and then withdrew. He sat alone often, muttering. Yakov sensed this one was aware of him. They both minded their business and looked each other over. One morning, after the promenade in the prison yard, they began to talk in a corner of the cell.

  “You’re a Jew?” said the fat young man, in Yiddish.

  Yakov admitted it.

  “I, too.”

  “I thought so,” said the fixer.

  “If you thought so why didn’t you come over?”

  “I thought I’d wait a little.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Yakov Bok the fixer.”

  “Gronfein, Gregor. Shalom. What are you in here for?”

  “They say I killed a Christian child.” He still couldn’t say it keeping his voice steady.

  Gronfein looked at him in astonishment.

  “So you’re the one? My God, why didn’t you tell me right away? I’m happy to be in the same cell with you.”

  “Why should you be happy?”

  “I heard they had accused somebody of killing the Russian boy they found in the cave. Of course the whole thing is a manufactured fake, but there’s a rumor running around in the Podol that a Jew was arrested, though nobody has seen you or knows who. Whoever he is he’s a martyr for us all. Is it really you?”

  “It’s me, I wish it wasn’t.”

  “I had my doubts that such a person exists.”

  “Only that and no more,” the fixer sighed. “My worst enemies should exist like this.”

  “Don’t grieve,” said Gronfein. “God will help.”

  “He will or he won’t as it suits him, but if he doesn’t I hope somebody else will soon, or they might as well put me in the ground and cover me up with earth and grass.”

  “Patience,” Gronfein said absently. “Patience. If there’s not one way, there’s another.”

  “Another what?”

  “As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.”