The Fixer (29 page)

  Yakov’s heart palpitated when he took the letter. “Who is it from?”

  “The Queen of Sheba,” said the guard. “Open and see.”

  The fixer waited until the guard had gone. He put the letter down on the table to get it out of his hand. He stared at it for five minutes. Could it be the indictment? Would they address it like that? Yakov clumsily ripped open the envelope, tearing it across, and found in it a sixteen-page letter written in Russian in a woman’s spidery handwriting. There were blots of ink on every page, many words misspelled, and some heavily crossed out and rewritten.

  “Sir,” it began, “I am the bereaved and unfortunate mother of the martyred Zhenia Golov, and I take my pen in my hand to beg you to do the right and decent thing. In God’s name give an ear to a mother’s pleas. I am worn out by the wicked insults and insinuations that have been wrongfully cast on myself by certain worthless people—including certain neighbors I have now cut myself off from, without any proof whatsoever.
On the contrary
with all the proof directed against you, and I beg you to clear the air up by a complete and candid confession. Although I admit your face, when I saw it in my household, didn’t look too Jewish, and maybe you really wouldn’t commit such a dreadful crime murdering a child and taking out his precious lifeblood if you hadn’t been egged on to do it by fanatical Jews—you know the kind I mean. Still you probably did it because they threatened you with death, although maybe you didn’t want to, I don’t know. But now I know for a certainty that it was these old Jews with long black coats and nasty beards that warned you you had to make the kill and they would hide my child’s corpse in the cave when you did. Just the same night before Zheniushka disappeared I dreamed of one of them carrying a satchel, with wild glaring eyes and bright red spots in his beard, and my former neighbor Sofya Shiskovsky told me she had dreamed the same dream that I had on the same night.

  “I am asking you to own up because the evidence is all against you. One thing you might not know is that after Zheniushka confided to me you had chased him with a knife in the cemetery, I had you followed by a gentleman friend of mine to find out what other criminal activities you were engaged in. It is a known fact that you were involved in certain illegal acts in secretly dealing with other Jews in the brickyard who pretended they were not Jews, and also in the cellar of the synagogue, where you all met in the Podol District. You smuggled, robbed, and traded in goods that didn’t belong to you. Zheniushka found out all about this and other of your illegalities, and that’s another reason why you bore him such a violent hatred, and why you had him in your mind as the victim as soon as you were chosen to find one and drain his blood for the Jewish Easter. You also acted as a fence for this gang of Jews who broke into the homes of the Gentry as well as in certain commercial stores, and houses in the Lipki District, where the aristocratic houses are, and took out all sorts of loot in money, furs and jewels, not to mention other precious objects of different kinds. Also you paid your gang only a part of the real price the goods were worth because as the saying is, each Jew cheats the other. Which is nothing new to anybody because the whole world knows they are born criminals. A Jew wanted to lend a friend of mine money to build a house, but she went to the priest for advice and he began to tremble and advised her to take nothing from a cursed Jew, in Christ’s name, because they will defraud and cheat you because it is their nature and they can’t do otherwise. This priest said their Jewish blood itches when they aren’t engaged in evil. If it weren’t for that maybe you would have resisted the murder of a saintly boy when they egged you to do it. And I suppose you know there have been attempts to bribe me not to testify against you when your trial comes. One fat Jew in silk clothes offered me the sum of 40,000 rubles to leave Russia and he would pay me the sum of another 10,000 rubles, on arriving in Austria, but even if he and your fellow Jews had offered me 400,000 rubles, I would still spit in their faces and say
absolutely no
because I prefer the honor of my good name to 400,000 rubles of Jewish blood money.

  “My gentleman friend also saw you spit on the ground one day when you walked around on the outside of St. Sophia’s Cathedral after spying out the school in the courtyard where Zhenia went. He saw you turn your head as though you might go blind if you didn’t, when you looked up on the golden crosses on top of the green domes, and you spat fast so no one should see you, but my friend saw you. I was also told you practice black magic religious ceremonies and certain cabalistic superstitions.

  “Also, don’t think I don’t know the sordid part of the story. Zhenia told me about the times you enticed him to come to your room in the stable and there with the promise of bonbons and sweets you got him to open the buttons of his pants and with your hand caused him intense excitement. There were other lewd things you performed which I can’t even write because I get very faint. He told me that after you did those awful things you were afraid he would tell me and I would denounce you to the police, so you used to give him ten kopeks not to say anything to anybody. He never did at the time this all happened, although once he told me about what went on up there, because he was worried and frightened, but I haven’t breathed a word of it to anyone, not even to my closest neighbors because I was ashamed to say anything, and also because your crime of murder is enough to answer for, and you will probably suffer the tortures of the cursed for that alone. Yet I will honestly and frankly tell you that if people go on making suspicious and vile remarks about me behind my back, I will tell all the facts of the case whether I blush or not to the Prosecuting Attorney who is first of all a gentleman. I will also tell everybody the sordid things you did to my child.

  “I will petition the Tsar to defend my good name. Besides losing my child I have led an irreproachable life of toil. I have been an honest person and a pure woman. I have been the best of mothers even though I was a working woman with no time to herself and two people to support. Those who say I didn’t weep for my poor boy at his funeral are saying a filthy lie and I will some day sue someone for libel and character assassination. I looked after my Zhenia as though he were a prince. I attended to his clothes and all of his other needs. I cooked special dishes that he liked most of all, all sorts of pastries and expensive treats. I was a mother and also a father to him since his own weakling of a father deserted me. I helped him with his lessons where I could and encouraged him and said yes when he wanted to be a priest. He was already in a preparatory church school to prepare for the priesthood when he was murdered. He felt to me the way I felt to him—he loved me passionately. Rest assured of that. Mamashka, he said, I only love you. Please, Zheniushka, I begged him, stay away from those evil Jews. To my sorrow he did not follow his mother’s advice. You are my son’s murderer. I urge you as the martyred mother of a martyred child to confess
the whole truth
at once and clear the evil out of the air so that we can breathe again. If you do, at least you won’t have to suffer so much in the afterworld.

  “Marfa Vladimirovna Golov”

  The excitement of receiving the letter had increased in the reading and Yakov’s head throbbed at the questions that ran through his mind. Was the trial she had mentioned already on its way or only assumed to be by her? Probably assumed, yet how could he be sure? Anyway the indictment would still have to come, and where was the indictment? What had caused her to write the letter? What were the “wicked insults and insinuations,” and the “suspicious and vile remarks” she referred to? And who was making them? Could it be she was being investigated, yet by whom if not Bibikov? Certainly not Grubeshov, yet why had he let the letter, mad as it was, go through to him? Had she written it with his help? Was it to demonstrate the quality of the witness, to show Yakov what he was up against and thus again to warn or threaten him? To say we assure you she will say these things and more you can never guess, and she will convince a jury of people like her, so why not confess now? They were multiplying the accusations and disgusting motives, and would not rest until they had trapped him like a fly in a gluepot; therefore he had better confess before other means of escape were impossible.

  Whatever her reason for sending it the letter seemed close to a confession by her, maybe a sign something else was going on. Would he ever know what? The fixer felt his heartbeat in his ears. He looked around for a place to hide the letter, hoping to pass it on to the lawyer, if he ever had one. But the next morning after he had finished eating, the letter was missing from his coat pocket and he suspected he had been doped, or they had got it some other way, possibly while he was being searched. Anyway the letter was gone.

  “Can’t I send her an answer?” he asked the Deputy Warden before the next search, and the Deputy Warden said he could if he was willing to admit the wrongs he had done.

  That night the fixer saw Marfa, a tallish, scrawny-necked woman with a figure something like Raisl’s, enter the cell and without so much as a word begin to undress—the white hat with cherries, the red rose scarf, green skirt, flowery blouse, cotton petticoat, pointed button shoes, red garters, black stockings and soiled frilly drawers. Lying naked on the fixer’s mattress, her legs spread apart, she promised many goyish delights if he would confess to the priest at the peephole.

  5

  One night he awoke hearing someone singing in the cell and when he listened with his whole being the song was in a boy’s high sweet voice. Yakov got up to see where the singing was coming from. The child’s pale, shrunken, bony face, corroded copper and black, shone from a pit in the corner of the cell. He was dead yet sang how he had been murdered by a black-bearded Jew. He had gone on an errand for his mother and was on his way home through the Jewish section when this hairy, bent-back rabbi caught up with him and offered him a lozenge. The instant the boy put the candy into his mouth he fell to the ground. The Jew lifted him onto his shoulder and hurried to the brickworks. There the boy was laid on the stable floor, tied up, and stabbed until the blood spouted from the orifices of his body. Yakov listened to the end of the song and cried, “Again! Sing it again!” Again he heard the same sweet song the dead child was singing in his grave.

  Afterwards the boy, appearing to him naked, his stigmata brightly bleeding, begged, “Please give me back my clothes.”

  They’re trying to unhinge me, the fixer thought, and then they’ll say I went mad because I committed the crime. He feared what he might confess if he went crazy; his suffering to defend his innocence would come to nothing as he babbled his guilt and the blood guilt of those who had put him up to it. He strove with himself, struggled, shouted at him to hold tight to sanity, to keep in the dark unsettled center of the mind a candle burning.

  A bloody horse with frantic eyes appeared: Shmuel’s nag.

  “Murderer!” the horse neighed. “Horsekiller! Childkiller! You deserve what you get!”

  He beat the nag’s head with a log.

  Yakov slept often during the day but badly. Sleep left him limp, depressed. He was being watched by many eyes through the spy hole for the minute he went mad. The air throbbed with voices from afar. There was a plot afoot to save him. He had visions of being rescued by the International Jewish Army. They were laying seige to the outer walls. Among the familiar faces he recognized Berele Margolis, Leib Rosenbach, Dudye Bont, Itzik Shulman, Kalman Kohler, Shloime Pincus, Yose-Moishe Magadov, Pinye Apfelbaum, and Benya Merpetz, all from the orphans’ home, although it seemed to him they were long since gone, some dead, some fled—he should have gone with them.

  “Wait,” he shouted. “Wait.”

  Then the streets around the prison were noisy, the crowds roaring, chanting, wailing; animals mooing, clucking, grunting. Everyone ran in several directions, feathers floating in the air,
gevalt
they were killing the Jews! A horde of thick-booted, baggy-trousered, sword-swinging Cossacks were galloping in on small ferocious ponies. In the yard the double-eagle banners were unfurled and fluttered in the wind. Nicholas the Second drove in in a coach drawn by six white horses, saluting from both sides the hundreds of Black Hundreds aching to get at the prisoner and hammer nails into his head. Yakov hid in his cell with chest pains and heartburn. The guards were planning to murder him with rat poison. He planned to murder them first. A Zhid shits on Zhitnyak. Kog on Kogin. He barricaded the door with the table and stool, then smashed them against the wall. While they were battering the door down to get at him he sat cross-legged on the floor, mixing blood with unleavened flour. He kicked savagely as the guards lugged him through the corridor, raining blows on his head.

  The fixer crouched in a dark place trying to hold his mind together with a piece of string so he wouldn’t confess. But it exploded into a fountain of rotting fruit, one-eyed herrings, birds of Paradise. It exploded into a million stinking words but when he confessed he confessed in Yiddish so the goyim couldn’t understand. In Hebrew he recited the Psalms. In Russian he was silent. He slept in fear and waked in fright. In dreams he heard the voices of screaming children. Dressed in a long caftan and round fur hat he hid behind trees, and when a Christian child approached, compulsively chased him. One small-faced boy, a consumptive type, ran from him frantically, his eyes rolling in fright.

  “Stop, I love you,” the fixer called to him, but the child never looked back.

  “Once is enough, Yakov Bok.”

  Nicholas II appeared, in the white uniform of an admiral of the Russian Navy.

  “Little Father,” said the fixer on both knees, “you’ll never meet a more patriotic Jew, Tears fill my eyes when I see the flag. Also I’m not interested in politics, I want to make a living. Those accusations are all wrong or you’ve got the wrong man. Live and let live, if you don’t mind me saying so. It’s a short life when you think of it.”