The Fixer (24 page)

Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Fixer

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“Why would we want you to die? We want you sentenced to a severe life imprisonment as a lesson for all to see of Jewish perfidy.”

“I won’t eat what you give me. You can shoot me but I won’t eat.”

“If you expect to eat, eat what you get. If not you’ll starve.”

For the next five days Yakov starved. He exchanged the sickness of poisoning for the sickness of starving. He lay on the mattress, sleeping fitfully. Zhitnyak threatened him with a whipping but nothing came of it. On the sixth day the warden returned to the cell, his cross-eye watering and face flushed. “I command you to eat.”

“Only out of the common pot,” Yakov said weakly. “What the other prisoners eat I will eat. Let me go to the kitchen and take my gruel and soup out of the common pot.”

“It cannot be allowed,” said the warden. “You mustn’t leave your cell. You are under strict confinement. Other prisoners are not allowed to look at you. It’s all in the regulations.”

“They can turn their heads while I draw my rations.”

“No,” said the warden. But after Yakov had fasted another day he consented. Twice a day the fixer, accompanied by Zhitnyak holding his drawn pistol, went to the prison kitchen in the west wing. Yakov drew his bread rations in the morning and filled his bowl from the common pot as the prisoners working in the kitchen momentarily faced the wall. He did not fill the bowl too full because if he did Zhitnyak poured some of it back.

He returned to half starvation.

He begged for something to do. His hands ached of emptiness, but he got nothing. The fixer offered to repair furniture, build tables, chairs, other pieces they might need—all he asked for was a few boards and his sack of tools. He missed his crosscut saw with the taped handle, his small German plane, the hammer and tri-square. He could still feel each tool with his fingers and remembered how each worked. The sharp saw could rip through a six-inch board in ten seconds. He liked the touch and smell of wood shavings. There were times he heard in his thoughts the two-toned buzz of the crosscut and the responsible knock of the hammer. He remembered things he had built with his tools, and sometimes in his thoughts he built them again. If he had the tools—if not his own, any tools—and some pieces of wood, he might earn himself a few kopeks to buy underdrawers, a wool vest, a warm pair of socks—other things he needed. If he earned a little money he secretly hoped he might pay someone to smuggle out a letter; or if not a letter then a message to Aaron Latke. But the tools and wood were refused him, and he cracked his knuckles constantly to do something with his hands.

He asked for a newspaper, a book of some sort, anything he could read to forget the tedium. Zhitnyak said the Deputy Warden had told him reading matter was forbidden to prisoners who had violated the regulations. So were paper and pencil. “If you hadn’t written those sneaky letters you wrote, you wouldn’t be in strict confinement now.” “Where would I be then?” Yakov asked. “Better off. You might still be in the common cell.” “Do you know when my indictment is supposed to come?” “No, and neither does anybody else, so don’t ask me.” Once Yakov said, “Why did you try to poison me, Zhitnyak, what did I do to you?” “Nobody said there was poison in that food,” the guard said uneasily. “All they told me was to give it to you.” Later he said, “It wasn’t my fault. Nobody wanted to hurt you. The Deputy Warden thought you might confess faster if you got sick. The warden gave him a tongue lashing.” The next morning Zhitnyak brought the prisoner a birch twig broom. “If you want to have it here, then keep your mouth shut from now on. The Deputy Warden says he’s fed up of you talking to me. I’m not supposed to listen any more.”

The broom was a stick with a bunch of thin birch twigs tied to it with cord. Yakov used it to sweep the cell every morning, working not too hard at first because he still felt weak from his sickness; yet he needed exercise to keep his strength up. He had again asked to be let out in the yard once in a while but, as he expected, the request was denied. Every day he thoroughly swept the stone floor, the wet parts and the dry. He swept in the corners of the cell, lifted his mattress and swept under that. He swept in the crevices between stones and once uncovered a centipede. He saw it escape under the door and the thought of that gave him a headache. He also used the broom handle to beat the mattress, its covering threadbare and split on both sides, the discolored straw visible so that he stopped beating it lest it fall apart. And when he beat it the mattress gave off a stench. Yakov patted it with his hands each morning as though to freshen it.

As much as he could he tried to arrange things so as to break the monotony of long stretches of time. When the bell rang in the corridor at 5 A.M. he arose in the cold dark, quickly cleaned the ashes out of the stove with his hand, raising dust he could smell, sweeping the small pile of ashes into a box they had given him for the purpose. Then he filled the stove with kindling, dry twigs, and some larger pieces of wood and waited for Zhitnyak, sometimes Kogin, to come in and light it. Formerly, the guard lit the stove when he brought in the prisoner’s breakfast, and now that Yakov went to the kitchen for it, he lit the fire after the fixer returned with his food. Twice a day Yakov was permitted to go to the kitchen, not willing, when the warden suggested it, to give up the privilege of leaving the cell for a few minutes, although the warden gave his personal assurance that the food would be “perfectly healthful” if it were once again brought from the kitchen by the prisoners who delivered it to the guards.

“You have nothing to fear from us, Bok,” he said. “I can assure you that the Prosecuting Attorney is most eager, as are all the other officials, to bring you to trial. No one would want to kill you off. We have other plans.”

“When will my trial be?”

“I can’t say,” said Warden Grizitskoy. “They’re still collecting evidence. It takes time.”

“Then if you don’t mind I’d rather keep on going to the kitchen.”

As long as I can, he thought. I’ve paid for the privilege. He thought they were letting him continue to go only because they knew he knew they had tried to poison him.

After that the number of searches of Yakov’s person was increased to three a day. His heart raced after these experiences, hatred thickened in it, and it took him a while to calm down. Sometimes after a search, to get the vile taste of it out of him, he swept the cell a second and third time. Or he collected the ashes out of the pit and had the wood ready for lighting long before Zhitnyak came in to take him to the kitchen to draw his supper rations. Though the stove was smoky the fixer ate near it, and after he had drunk the last of his tea, he threw in another stick or two of wood and lay down on the mattress with a sigh, hoping he could fall asleep before the stove went out and the cell became freezing. Sometimes the drinking water was ice in the morning and he had to melt it.

Passing water was another way to pass time. He urinated often, listening to the noise as the water rose in the tin can. Sometimes he held his water until it came forth with such heat and force his teeth hurt. When the can was collected was another momentary diversion. And every second day one of the guards filled the jug of water from which he drank and washed. There were no towels and he dried his hands on his ragged coat, or at the stove, rubbing them till they were dry. Fetyukov had given him a broken comb with which the fixer combed his hair and beard. Twice, thus far, he had been allowed into the bathhouse in the presence of a guard, when none of the other prisoners was there, and was permitted to wash his naked body with tepid water from a wooden bucket. He was worried to see how thin he had become. They would not touch his hair but once when his head was very lousy, the prison barber doused it with kerosene and let him comb the dead lice out with a fine comb. His beard went uncut though nobody objected that he kept it combed. Occasionally when Yakov complained that his nails were too long, Zhitnyak cut them for him. He would not allow the fixer to hold the scissors. Afterwards the guard collected the nail parings and put them into an oilskin pouch.

“What’s that for?” asked Yakov.

“For an analysis they want to make,” said the guard.

One morning something new appeared in Yakov’s cell. An old prayer shawl and a pair of phylacteries had been left there after he had gone to the kitchen for his food. He examined the phylacteries, then put them aside, but he wore the prayer shawl under his greatcoat to help keep him warm. He was wearing a heavier prison suit than the one he had first got, though much used by other prisoners in the past and already falling apart. He also had a small cap with ear flaps that did not fit him, which he wore with the flaps down. The seams of his greatcoat had split in places. Zhitnyak loaned him a darning needle and some thread to sew them with; and Yakov received a blow in the face from the guard when he told him, afterwards, that he had lost the needle. He really hadn’t; he had hidden it inside the stove. But the coat seams opened again and there was no thread. His wooden clogs had been taken from him and he now wore bast shoes without laces; he was not allowed to have a belt. When Yakov put the prayer shawl on, Zhitnyak watched through the spy hole, often looking in unexpectedly as though hoping to catch the fixer at prayer. He never did.

Yakov spent hours pacing in the cell. He walked to Siberia and back. Six or eight times a day he read the prison regulations. Sometimes he sat at the shaky table. He could eat at the table but there was nothing else to do at it that he could think of. If he only had some paper and pencil he might write something down. With a knife he could whittle a piece of firewood, but who would give him a knife? He blew on his hands constantly. He feared he might go crazy doing nothing. If only there were a book to read. He remembered how he had studied and written in his stable room in the brickyard, at the table he had built himself with his tools. Once, just after Zhitnyak had peeked in, the fixer quickly piled up the loose wood at the wall and climbed up on top of the pile to see if he could look out the window into the prison yard. He thought the prisoners might be there on their promenade. He wondered whether any of those he knew were still in prison, or had they got out. But he could not reach the window bars with his hands and all he saw out of it was a piece of leaden sky.

The newspaper strips he was given to clean himself with Zhitnyak forbade him to read though Yakov managed to read some of them anyway.

“It’s because you’re an enemy of the state,” the guard said through the peephole. “They’re not allowed to read anything.”

During the endless empty days, to forget his misery a little, the fixer tried to remember things he had read. He remembered incidents from Spinoza’s life: how the Jews had cursed him in the synagogue; how an assassin had tried to kill him in the street, for his ideas; how he lived and died in his tiny room, studying, writing, grinding lenses for a living until his lungs had turned to glass. He had died young, poor and persecuted, yet one of the freest of men. He was free in his thoughts, his understanding of Necessity, and in the construction of his philosophy. The fixer’s thoughts added nothing to his freedom; it was nil. He was imprisoned in a cell, and even in memory because so much that had happened to him during a life that had perhaps, at times, seemed free, now seemed designed to lead to this imprisonment. Necessity freed Spinoza and imprisoned Yakov. Spinoza thought himself into the universe but Yakov’s poor thoughts were inclosed in a cell.

Who am I to compare myself?

He tried to recall the biology he had studied, and reflected on as much of history as he could bring to mind. They say God appeared in history and used it for his purposes, but if that was so he had no pity for men. God cried mercy and smote his chest, but there was no mercy because there was no pity. Pity in lightning? You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention. And Yakov also recalled tales by Peretz, and some pieces he had read in the papers by Sholem Aleichem, and a few little stories he had read in Russian by Chekhov. He recalled things from the Scriptures, in particular, fragments of psalms he had read in Hebrew on old parchment. He could, in a sense, smell the Psalms as well as hear them. They were sung weekly in the synagogue to glorify God and protect the shtetl from harm, which they never did. Yakov had chanted them, or heard them chanted, many times, and now in a period of remembrance he uttered verses, stanzas that he did not think he knew. He could not recall a whole psalm, but from fragments he put together one that he recited aloud in the cell in order not to forget it, so that he could have it to say. In the morning he said it in Hebrew, and in the dark as he lay on his mattress, he tried to translate the verses into Russian. He knew Kogin listened when he said them aloud at night.

“Behold, he travaileth with iniquity;

Yea, he conceiveth mischief, and bringeth forth falsehood.

He hath digged a pit, and hollowed it,

And is fallen into the ditch which he made.”

“I am weary with my groaning;

Every night make I my bed to swim;

I melt away my couch with my tears.”

“For my days are consumed like smoke,

And my bones are burned as a hearth.

My heart is smitten like grass, and withered;

For I forget to eat my bread.”

“Unrighteous witnesses rise up;