The Fixer (32 page)

  He walks away and then returns to say that his son Trofim has murdered an old man while robbing a house in the Podol. “That’s what it comes to, you see.”

  After a long silence he says, “I had trouble enough with my daughter, who got herself pregnant by a man of my age, a goddamn drunk, but no sooner do I get her married off to someone,” Kogin says through the spy hole, “than the boy takes to robbing a house, a thing that never entered his mind before. He stole from me but never from anybody else until this night he went into a house by the Dnieper, and while he was in there, killed the old man who lived in it. He was a harmless old man, and anyone in his right mind could see from the outside of the house that there wasn’t likely to be anything of any value in it, not a thing. He knew it, but in that case why did he do it, Yakov Bok? Was there anything on his mind but to pay me back with worries for the years of love I gave him? When the old man caught him in his house he grabbed Trofim’s coat and hung onto it, and he, in fright, he says, beat the old man on the head with his fists until he let go, but by that time it was too late—the old man had had some kind of stroke and died. That was the end of him. Trofim came in, as you might say, to partake of his hospitality, and he stayed on there to light the funeral candles and maybe say a prayer over the remains. He returned to the house that morning as I was taking my boots off after a night’s work and told me what he had done. So I put my boots on again, and we went together to the District Police and there inscribed him for murder. A few months ago he was tried in court and sentenced to the highest penalty, twenty years at forced labor in Siberia. He’s on his way there now. They started out across the Nicholas Bridge on a freezing day in December, and God only knows where they are now in all this snow and wind. Just imagine, twenty years—it’s a lifetime.”

  “It’s only twenty years,” says Yakov.

  “I won’t see him, if we both live that long, till he’s fifty-two, which is the age I am now.”

  The guard’s low voice rumbles in the cell so he goes on in a thick whisper.

  “I asked him why he had done that thing, and he said he had no particular reason. Can you imagine a more ridiculous statement, Bok? He came to the end I had predicted for him, all of a father’s love gone for nothing. That’s how it goes. You plan one thing and get another. Life plays no favorites and what’s the use of hoping for it? The children were ruined by their mother, a woman of unsettled character and lax ways. My son was always hard to control because of her ways with him, and I thought for a time he would murder one of us in spite of all the love I had for him, but it turned out that he murdered somebody else.”

  Kogin sighs, pauses a minute, and asks Yakov if he wants a cigarette.

  Yakov says no. He breathes deeply so the guard can hear the whine in his chest. A cigarette would make him sick.

  “But if you open the stocks for a minute,” he says, “it would ease my stiff legs.”

  Kogin says he can’t do that. He stands silently at the spy hole for a few minutes, then whispers heavily, “Don’t think I am not aware of your misfortunes, Bok, because I am. It’s a terrible thing to see a man in chains, whoever he is, and have to lock his feet in stocks every night, but to be frank with you I don’t allow myself to dwell on it much. I try not to think of you there in chains all day long. The nerves can take just so much, and I already have all the worry I can stand. I think you know what I mean by that.”

  Yakov says he does.

  “You’re sure about a cigarette? It’s a small infraction of the rules. Some of the guards sell them to prisoners here, and if you ask me the warden knows it. But if I opened your stocks I could get myself shot.”

  After a while Yakov thinks the guard has gone away but he hasn’t.

  “Do you still have the gospels in there?” Kogin asks.

  “No, they’re gone.”

  “What about the sayings you used to say by memory? Why don’t you say any of them any more?”

  “I’ve forgotten them.”

  “This is one I remember,” says the guard. “ ‘But he who endures to the end will be saved.’ It’s either from Matthew or Luke, one or the other.”

  Yakov is moved so deeply he laughs.

  The guard walks away. Tonight he is restless and in a half hour returns to the cell door, holding a lamp to the hole, peering above it to see what he can see. The light falls on the fixer’s imprisoned feet, waking him again. Kogin is about to say something but doesn’t. The light goes out. Yakov moves restlessly, lying awake listening to the guard walking back and forth in the corridor as though he were walking to Siberia along with his son. The prisoner listens until exhaustion overtakes him, then goes on with the dream he was having.

  He locates the black carriage once again, only it is a rickety wagon coming from the provinces, carrying a coffin made of weatherbeaten pine boards. For me or who else? he thinks. Afraid to name names he struggles to wake up and instead finds himself in an empty room standing by a small black coffin, like a trunk locked with chains.

  It’s Zhenia’s coffin, he thinks. Marfa Golov has sent it to me as a present. But when he unlocks the rusty chains and raises the coffin lid, there lies Shmuel, his father-in-law, with a prayer shawl covering his head, a purple hole in his forehead and one eye still wet with blood.

  “Shmuel, are you dead?” the fixer cries, and the old man, if not in peace, at least in repose, for once has nothing to say.

  The fixer awakens, grieving, his beard damp with salt tears.

  “Live, Shmuel,” he sighs, “live. Let me die for you.”

  Then he thinks in the dark, how can I die for him if I take my life? If I die I die to fuck them and end my suffering. As for Shmuel, he’s already out in the cold. He may even die for my death if they work up a pogrom in celebration of it. If so what do I get by dying, outside of release from pain? What have I earned if a single Jew dies because I did? Suffering I can gladly live without, I hate the taste of it, but if I must suffer let it be for something. Let it be for Shmuel.

  The next day he is searched six times in the bitterly cold cell, standing barefoot on the floor, each stone like a block of ice, as they poke their filthy fingers into his private parts. The sixth search, when he has planned to die, is the most dreadful of all. He struggles with himself to keep from leaping on the Deputy Warden, to murder him a little with his bare hands before he is shot to death.

  He tells himself he mustn’t die. Why should I take from myself what they are destroying me to take? Why should I help them kill me?

  Who, for instance, would know if he dies now? They’ll sweep his remains off the bloody floor and throw them into a wet hole. A year or two later they’d say he died attempting to escape. Who would question it after a year or two? It was a natural thing for prisoners to die in prison. They died like flies all over Russia. It was a vast country and there were many prisons. There were more prisoners than there were Jews. And what difference if the Jews said they didn’t believe he had died naturally? They would have other headaches then.

  Not that he is afraid to die because he is afraid of suicide, but because there is no way of keeping the consequences of his death to himself. To the goyim what one Jew is is what they all are. If the fixer stands accused of murdering one of their children, so does the rest of the tribe. Since the crucifixion the crime of the Christ-killer is the crime of all Jews. “His blood be on us and our children.”

  He pities their fate in history. After a short time of sunlight you awake in a black and bloody world. Overnight a madman is born who thinks Jewish blood is water. Overnight life becomes worthless. The innocent are born without innocence. The human body is worth less than its substance. A person is shit. Those Jews who escape with their lives live in memory’s eternal pain. So what can Yakov Bok do about it? All he can do is not make things worse. He’s half a Jew himself, yet enough of one to protect them. After all, he knows the people; and he believes in their right to be Jews and live in the world like men. He is against those who are against them. He will protect them to the extent that he can. This is his covenant with himself. If God’s not a man he has to be. Therefore he must endure to the trial and let them confirm his innocence by their lies. He has no future but to hold on, wait it out.

  He is enraged by what has happened—is happening to him—a whole society has set itself against Yakov Bok, a poor man with a few grains of education, but in any case innocent of the crime they accuse him of. What a strange and extraordinary thing for someone like himself, a fixer by trade, who had never in his life done a thing to them but live for a few months in a forbidden district, to have as his sworn and bitter enemies the Russian State, through its officials and Tsar, for no better reason than that he was born a Jew, therefore their appointed enemy, though the truth of it is he is in his heart no one’s enemy but his own.

  Where’s reason? Where’s justice? What does Spinoza say—that it’s the purpose of the state to preserve a man’s peace and security so he can do his day’s work. To help him live out his few poor years, against circumstance, sickness, the frights of the universe. So at least don’t make it any worse than it is. But the Russian State denies Yakov Bok the most elemental justice, and to show its fear and contempt of humankind, has chained him to the wall like an animal.

  “Dogs,” he cries out.

  He beats his chains against the wall, his neck cords thick. He is in a rage to be free, has at times glimmerings of hope, as though imagining creates it, thinks of it as close by, about to happen if he breathes right, or thinks the one right thought. Maybe a wall will collapse, or sunrise burn through it and make an opening as large as a man’s body. Or he will remember where he has hidden a book that will tell him how to walk with ease through a locked-and-twelve-times-bolted door.

  “I’ll live,” he shouts in his cell, “I’ll wait, I’ll come to my trial.”

  Berezhinsky opens the spy hole, inserts his rifle, and sights along the barrel at the fixer’s genitals.

  Yakov sits in the pit. An angelic voice, or so he thinks, calls his name, but he isn’t sure he has heard right; his hearing is dulled in the right ear since Berezhinsky hit him there. The sky rains and snows on him. Or it may be bits of wood or frozen time. He doesn’t reply. His hair is matted and long. His nails grow until they break. He has dysentery, dirties himself, stinks.

  Berezhinsky douses him with a bucket of cold water. “It’s no secret why Jews won’t eat pig. You’re blood brothers and both live on shit.”

  He sits on the grass under a leafy tree. The fields are full of flowers. He talks to himself not to forget. Some things he remembers astonish him. Are they memories or thoughts of things he had hoped to do? He is shrouded in thick clouds of yellow fog. Sometimes in painful stretches of light. Memories thin out and fall away. Events of the past he has difficulty recalling. He remembers having gone mad once. Where do you look if you lose your mind? That’s the end of it. He would, in his mind, be forever locked in prison, no longer knowing why or what he is locked in. Locked in his final fate, the last unknowing.

  “Die,” says Berezhinsky. “For Christ’s sake, die.”

  He dies. He dies.

  Kogin says he has received a letter that his son is dead. He has drowned himself in a river in Irkutsk on the way to Novorosiisk.

  3

  “Remove your cap,” said the warden, standing in his cell.

  He removed his cap, and the warden handed him a sheaf of papers.

  “It’s your indictment, Bok, but that doesn’t mean your trial is necessarily on its way.”

  Afterwards, crouched on his stool in chains, Yakov very slowly read the papers. His heart raced as he read but the mind ran ahead of the heart; this Jew they were talking about had committed a terrible crime and then stepped into a trap, and at once the prisoner saw him dead and buried in a thin grave. Sometimes the words on the paper grew blurred and disappeared under water. When they rose to the surface he read them one by one, saying each aloud. After reading three pages he hadn’t the strength to concentrate longer. The papers weighed like oakwood and he had to put them down. Soon, though the barred window was still lit, it was too dark to read. At night he awoke famished to devour the words. He thought of begging Kogin for a candle but had visions of the paper catching fire and burning. So he waited for morning, once dreaming he was trying to read the indictment but the language was Turkish. Then he awoke and frantically felt for the papers. They were in his greatcoat pocket. He waited impatiently for daylight. In the morning, when there was enough light the fixer avidly read through the whole document. It seemed to him that the story had changed from how he read it yesterday, but then he realized it had changed from how he knew it as he had pieced it together from the questions he had been asked, and the accusations that had been made. The crime was the same but there were details that he had not heard before, some fantastic ones; and some of the old ones had been altered and a new mystery created. Yakov read, straining to find a combination of facts that would make them, by virtue of this arrangement, truer than they were when he first heard them; or as though, if he comprehended them in some way others did not, he would at once establish his innocence. And once he established it they would have to release him from his chains and open the prison doors.

  This “Court Indictment,” typed on long sheets of blue paper, retold the murder of Zhenia Golov, much as Yakov knew it, but now the number of wounds was unaccountably forty-five, “3 groups of 13, plus 2 additional groups of 3.” There were wounds, the paper said, on the boy’s chest, throat, face, and skull—”around the ears”; and the autopsy performed by Professor M. Zagreb of the Medical Faculty of Kiev University, indicated that all the wounds had been inflicted on the body when the boy’s heart was still strong. “But those in the principal veins of the neck had been inflicted when the heart was weakening.”

  On the day the boy was found murdered in the cave, his mother, when she heard the news, fainted. This had been noted on the police record of the case. Then came some details Yakov read quickly but had to go back and read slowly. The collapse of Marfa Golov, the indictment said, “was noted here with particular interest” because it was later observed that she was composed at the funeral and did not weep at her son’s burial, although others, “mere strangers,” had wept without restraint. Some “well-meaning spectators” and others “perhaps not so well-meaning,” were disturbed by this, and “foolish rumors” began at once to circulate “concerning the possible involvement of this good woman, through a former and seriously incapacitated friend, in the murder of her own child.” Because of this baseless rumor, but in the interests of arriving at the truth, she was arrested and thoroughly investigated by the police. They searched her house more than once and found “nothing in the least incriminating.” Thus, after days of painstaking investigation she was released with the apologies of the police and other officials. The Chief of Police concluded that the rumors previously referred to were false and unfounded, “probably the invention of the enemies of Marfa Golov, or possibly of certain sinister forces,” for Marfa Golov was a devoted mother, “blameless of any crime against her child.” Such suspicion was contemptible. Her composed behavior at her son’s funeral was the “behavior of a dignified person in control of her sentiments although involved in a profound personal loss.” For “not all who are sad, weep” and “guilt is not a matter of facial expression but of evidence.” “How much this unfortunate woman had mourned and endured
prior
to the child’s funeral no one had inquired.” However, witnesses had testified that Marfa Golov had been a more than ordinarily conscientious mother, and a “hardworking virtuous woman of unstained character, who without any assistance to speak of, had provided for her child since the desertion and death of the irresponsible father.” It was therefore concluded that the attempts to destroy her reputation were “the work of unknown subversive alien groups” for the purpose of “concealing the guilt of one of its members, the true murderer of Zhenia Golov, the jack-of-all-trades, Yakov Bok.”