The Fixer (7 page)

  “But surely you know this is the safest time?” Zina said. “And there’s no inconvenience to speak of, the flow stops the minute we begin.”

  “Excuse me, some can but I can’t.”

  He was thinking of his wife’s modesty during her period and until she had been to the baths, but could not say that to Zina.

  “Excuse me, I’d better be going.”

  “I’m a lonely woman, Yakov Ivanovitch,” she cried, “have mercy a little!” but he was already dressing and soon left.

  3

  One night in the dead of winter, in the cold thick dark at 4 A.M., after the drivers Serdiuk and Richter had come for two teams of horses—leaving six horses in the stalls— and he had heard them clomp out of the stable and clack dully across the snow-covered cobblestones, Yakov, who had been two days in the brickyard, got quickly out of bed, lit a short candle and hurriedly dressed. He sneaked down the outer stairs from his room above the stable and went along the fence of palings, past the squat brickkilns to the cooling shed. Motionless in the wet cold, he watched the drivers and their helpers, in steaming sheepskins, the horses’ flanks steaming, loading the straw-covered long wagon-trucks with large heavy yellow bricks. The work progressed slowly, helper tossing a brick to helper, who tossed it to the driver on the wagon, who laid it in place. After what seemed to him an endless time standing in the dark, blowing on his hands and trying soundlessly to stamp the cold out of his boots, Yakov had counted three hundred and forty bricks loaded into one wagon, and four hundred and three into another. Three other wagons at the shed went unused. But in the morning when Proshko, the foreman, presented him with the voucher in the stuffy low-ceilinged shack where Yakov sat at a table stacked with ledgers and bundles of useless papers from the past, the badly written numbers scrawled on a torn piece of wrapping paper came to a total of six hundred ten bricks, instead of seven hundred forty-three, and the fixer ground his teeth in anger at the cold-blooded nerve of the thievery.

  Though Yakov was desperately eager for work, he had reluctantly accepted Nikolai Maximovitch’s offer, at the last minute almost in panic trying to back out when he learned that the Lukianovsky, where the brickyard was located—near a cemetery, with a few houses and trees scattered around and beyond it, more heavily on the far-off side about half a tombstoned verst away—and where he was expected to live, was a district forbidden to Jews to reside in. He had then told the owner of the brickworks that he would not take the job because he had many doubts he could do the work as it should be done. But Nikolai Maximovitch, advising him not to be hasty, had pooh-poohed his doubts.

  “Nonsense, you will do better than you suppose. You must learn to have confidence in your natural abilities, Yakov Ivanovitch. Just follow my late brother’s method with the ledger—old-fashioned but accurate—and you will master the system as you go along.” Yet puzzled somewhat, he raised his offer by three rubles a month, and Yakov trying every way to convince himself to take the job, then suggested it would be more convenient for him if he could go on living in the Podol—he never said where in the district—and come to work very early each morning. It wasn’t too far a walk from where he lived. The electric trolley, which stopped close by the brickyard, did not run after dark.

  “Unfortunately you won’t be of much use to me living in the Podol,” said Nikolai Maximovitch. They were talking in the brickyard on a cloudy end-of-January day —a pall of black smoke hung over the kilns—and Nikolai Maximovitch still wore his Black Hundreds button on his coat, which Yakov, when speaking to him—he saw himself unable to detach his eye if once he stared at it— had to ignore or look around, for the button loomed large and unsettling.

  “It is not what goes on here during the workday that worries me so much,” the anti-Semite said, “although I assure you that worries me too; but I am deeply concerned with what happens in the early morning hours when the wagons are being loaded for the first deliveries. Daylight is too strong for a thief. It’s in the dark when the ghosts are flying and good people are lying abed that he does his dirty work. My late-lamented brother, who had little respect for sleep—one must respect it or it will not respect him—was here at 3 A.M. in every weather to oversee each and every wagonload. I am not asking you to do the same, Yakov Ivanovitch. That sort of dedication to a business enterprise is fanatic and in his case led, I am convinced, to my brother’s early death.” Nikolai Maximovitch crossed himself with eyes shut. “But if you were to look in on them in the early morning hours, and also unexpectedly during other loadings, counting off aloud a close estimate of the number of bricks in the trucks, it might tempt them not to overdo it. I expect some thievery—humans are humans—but of necessity there has to be a limit. It would be impossible for me to get a reasonably just price for this factory if it should go bankrupt.”

  “How do they steal?” the fixer had asked.

  “I suspect the drivers under Proshko’s supervision or connivance. They take out more than they account for.”

  “Then why don’t you give him the boot?”

  “More easily said than done, my dear boy. If I did I would have to shut down the plant. He is an excellent technical man—one of the best, my brother used to say. I confess it is not my purpose to catch him thieving. As a religious person I want to keep him from it. And wouldn’t you say it was the more sensible as well as charitable thing? No, let’s arrange it as I say. Take the room above the stable, Yakov Ivanovitch. It’s yours without a single kopek of rent.”

  Since he had not mentioned the fixer’s papers—neither the passport necessary for new employment, nor the residence certificate he would need, Yakov uneasily took the chance and accepted the job. He had for a fleeting minute again considered saying he was a Jew—just quietly informing Nikolai Maximovitch: “Well, you ought to know what the situation is. You say you like me; you know I’m an honest worker and don’t waste the boss’s time, then maybe it won’t surprise you to hear I was born Jewish and for that reason can’t live in this district.” But that was of course impossible. Even supposing —a fantastic suppose—that Nikolai Maximovitch, two-headed eagle button and all, overlooked the confession in his own interests, still the Lukianovsky was not for Jews, with certain unusual exceptions, and if a poor fixer were exposed as one living there he would be in serious trouble. It was all too complicated. For the first week Yakov was daily on the verge of leaving, escaping from the place, but he stayed on because he had heard from Aaron Latke that counterfeit papers of various kinds were available to prospective buyers at a certain printing establishment in the Podol, for not too large a sum, and though the thought of acquiring such papers gave him severe sweats, he decided he ought to keep it in mind.

  When Proshko brought in the voucher the morning after Yakov had spied on the drivers loading the wagons, though the fixer’s heart beat loudly when he saw the false figure on the paper, he informed the foreman that Nikolai Maximovitch had told him to be present at night when the wagons were loaded, and since it was his responsibility, he would be there from now on. Proshko, a burly, thick-eared man with a rough beard, who wore high rubber boots muddy with yellow clay and a long dirty leather apron, gazed at the fixer with intense small eyes.

  “What do you think goes on in the wagons at night? Are the drivers on their knees fucking their mothers?”

  “What goes on goes on,” said Yakov nervously, “but the number of bricks that you loaded last night and this figure on your paper don’t agree, if you’ll excuse me for saying so.”

  He then wished he had said it differently, though how was it possible to say it differently to a thief?

  “How would you know how many bricks were loaded?”

  “I stood near the shed last night, counting them, according to Nikolai Maximovitch’s direction. In other words, I did as he told me.” His voice was thick with emotion, as though the bricks belonged to him, although the strange thing was they belonged to an anti-Semitic Russian.

  “Then you counted wrong,” Proshko said, “this is the number we loaded.” He tapped a thick finger on the paper on the table. “Listen, my friend, when a dog puts his nose into shit, he gets it dirty. You have a long nose, Dologushev. If you don’t believe me look in a mirror. A man with a nose like that ought to be careful where he puts it.”

  He left the shack but returned in the afternoon. “What about your papers,” he said, “have you registered them yet? If not, hand them over here and I’ll have them stamped by the District Police.”

  “I’m obliged to you,” Yakov said, “but that’s already been seen to and done. Nikolai Maximovitch took care of it. You don’t have to trouble yourself.”

  “Tell me, Dologushev,” said Proshko, “why is it you talk Russian like a Turk?”

  “And what if I am a Turk?” The fixer smiled crookedly.

  “He who runs too fast raises the wind against him.” Lifting his leg Proshko farted.

  Afterwards Yakov felt too uneasy to eat supper. I’m the wrong man to be a policeman, he thought. It’s a job for a goy.

  Yet he did what he was asked to. He appeared in the shed every morning in the 4 A.M. cold and counted the bricks in the wagons. And when he looked out the shack window and saw them loading up during the daylight hours, he went outside to watch. He did it openly, preventing the thieves from their thievery. When Yakov appeared at the shed, no one spoke but the drivers sometimes stopped their work to stare at him.

  Proshko no longer turned in vouchers each morning, so Yakov wrote his own. The bookkeeping was not so difficult as he had thought—he had caught on to the system, and besides there wasn’t that much business. Once a week Nikolai Maximovitch, more drearily melancholic, arrived by sledge for receipts to be deposited in his bank, and after a month Yakov received a long congratulatory letter from him. “Your work is diligent and effective, as I foresaw, and I shall continue to vest in you my utmost confidence. Zinaida Nikolaevna sends her regards. She too applauds your efforts.” But no one else did. Neither the drivers nor their helpers paid any attention to him, even when he tried to make conversation. Richter, the heavy-faced German, spat in the snow at his approach, and Serdiuk, a tall Ukrainian who smelled ol horse sweat and hay, watched him, breathing heavily. Proshko, passing the fixer in the yard, muttered, “Bastard stool pigeon!” Yakov pretended not to hear. If he heard “Jew” he would dive into the sky.

  Except for these he was on more or less decent terms with the other workers in the yard—he paid them on time, about fifty left from almost two hundred employed when the yard had turned out six or seven thousand bricks a day—and this was so despite the fact that Proshko was spreading nasty stories about him; one that Skobeliev, the yardkeeper, had told him was that the fixer had once done time as a convicted thief. But no one sought him out as friend or kept him company when the brickyard was closed, so he was mostly alone. After work Yakov stayed in his room. He read by lamplight— though Nikolai Maximovitch had promised to install an electric bulb—for hours each night. His reading in the past was what he had accidentally come across; he now read what he wanted to know. He continued to study Russian, wrote out long grammatical exercises and read them aloud. And he devoured two newspapers every day, though they often gave him the shivers, both things reported as fact, and things hinted at; for instance, Rasputin and the Empress, new plots of terrorists, threats of pogroms, and the possibility of a Balkan war. So much was new to him, how is one to know all he ought to know? He began then to haunt the bookshops in the Podol in his free time, searching for inexpensive books. He bought a
Life of Spinoza
to read during the lonely nights in his stable room. Was it possible to learn from another’s life? And Russian history fascinated him. He went through stacks of pamphlets on the shelves in the rear of the shops. He read some on serfdom, the Siberian penal system—a terrifying account he had found in a bushel the bookseller had winked at. He read about the revolt and destruction of the Decembrists, and a fascinating account of the Narodniki, idealists of the 1870’s who had devoted themselves to the peasants in an impulsive attempt to stir them to social revolution, were rebuffed by them, and turned from peasant-mysticism to terrorism. Yakov also read a short biography of Peter the Great, and after that a horrifying account of the bloody destruction of Novgorod by Ivan the Terrible. It had entered the madman’s head that the city intended treason to him, so he had ordered a wooden wall built around it to prevent escape. Then he marched in with his army, and after putting his subjects through the crudest tortures, daily slaughtered thousands of them. This went on in increasing savagery, the sound of horror rising to the sky as the wailing mothers watched their children being roasted alive and thrown to wild dogs. At the end of five weeks, sixty thousand people, maimed, torn, broken apart, lay dead in the foul-smelling streets as disease spread. Yakov was sickened. Like a pogrom— the very worst. The Russians make pogroms against the Russians—it went on throughout their history. What a sad country, he thought, amazed by what he had read, every possible combination of experiences, where black was white and black was black; and if the Russians, too, were massacred by their own rulers and died like flies, who were then the Chosen People? Fatigued by history, he went back to Spinoza, rereading chapters on biblical criticism, superstition, and miracles which he knew almost by heart. If there was a God, after reading Spinoza he had closed up his shop and become an idea.

  When he wasn’t reading, Yakov was composing little essays on a variety of subjects—”I am in history,” he wrote, “yet not in it. In a way of speaking I’m far out, it passes me by. Is this good, or is something lacking in my character? What a question! Of course lacking but what can I do about it? And besides is this really such a great worry? Best to stay where one is, unless he has something to give to history, like for instance Spinoza, as I read in his life. He understood history, and also because he had ideas to give it. Nobody can burn an idea even if they burn the man. On the other hand there was the activist Jan De Witt, Spinoza’s friend and benefactor, a good and great man who was torn to pieces by a Dutch mob when they got suspicious of him although he was innocent. Who needs such a fate?” Some of the little essays were criticisms of “Certain Conditions” as he had read about them in the newspapers. He read these over and burned them in the stove. He also burned the pamphlets he could not resell.