Authors: Bernard Malamud

The Fixer (21 page)

BOOK: The Fixer

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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 falseâ
hood.
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:
They ask me things that I know not.”

“For I have heard the whispering of many,
Terror on every side;
While they took counsel together against me,
They devised to take away my life.”

“Arise, O Lord; O God, lift up Thy hand;
Forget not the humble.”

“Break Thou the arm of the wicked.”

“Thou shalt make them as a fiery furnace in the time of Thine anger.”

“He bowed the heavens also, and came down;
And thick darkness was under His feet.”

“And He sent out His arrows, and scattered them;
And He shot forth lightnings, and discomfited them.”
“I have pursued my enemies, and overtaken them;
Neither did I turn back till they were consumed.”

He thought of himself pursuing his enemies with God at his side, but when he looked at God all he saw or heard was a loud Ha Ha. It was his own imprisoned laughter.

I scratch at memory. I think of Raisl. I'm in prison so what difference does it make? The first time I saw her she was riding in her father's rickety wagon, drawn by the bony nag of late memory. She sat with the sick mother amid their few shreds of household goods. Shmuel was on the seat talking to himself, or the horse's tail, or God; he went where the nag pulled, but wherever he went he was going backward. They were coming from some place, where I don't know. Where can you come from in the Pale that's so different from where you're going? Everywhere he tried to make a better living, and everywhere he couldn't so he tried some place else. He came to our town, and the mother, fed up with adventure, died on the spot. After that her grave kept him in one place. Also from such a hard-luck father what kind of daughter could you expect, so I stayed away from her. Naturally I stayed away for the months I was in the army, but I also stayed away from her when I got back, though not for long. (She would have done me a favor to have got married while I was gone.) Anyway, she was a pretty girl, intelligent and dissatisfied, with even then a sad face. At least the right eye was sad; the left was neutral, it reflected me. I saw her many times in the market before I got up the nerve to talk to her. She scared me, I wasn't sure I had what she wanted. I was afraid she would rub my nose in my future. Anyway I saw the
other young men looking at her and I looked too. She was a thin lanky girl with small breasts. I remember her dark hair in braids, deep eyes, and a long neck. She wore in the morning what she had washed out at night; sometimes the clothes were damp. The father wanted her to work as a servant girl but she wouldn't. She bought a few eggs from a peasant woman and set up a little stall in the market. Whenever I could I bought an egg from her. She lived with Shmuel in a hut off the road near the bathhouse stream. When I came for a visit they seemed glad to see me, especially the father. He was looking for a husband for her and a dowry didn't exist. If it existed it was a cherry pit. But he knew my type, that I wouldn't ask questions and he wouldn't mention it.

We walked together in the woods by the water, she and I. I showed her my tools and once cut down a small tree with my saw. I fixed up their hut a little, made a bench, a cupboard, and a few shelves out of some boards I was saving. If there was a little chicken to eat I came also on Friday nights. Raisl blessed the candles and served the food, it was very nice. We liked each other but both had doubts. I think she thought, He won't move, he isn't ambitious, he'll stay here forever. What kind of future is that? I thought to myself, She's a complicated girl and won't be easy to satisfy. What she wants she'll drive me wild to get. Still, I liked to be with her. One day in the woods we became man and wife. She said no but took a chance. Later it bothered her. She was afraid for her child once she had one, that it would be born crippled or with seven fingers. “Don't be superstitious,” I said. “If you want to be free, first be free in your mind.” Instead she began to cry. After a while I said, “All right, you've cried enough, so before it happens again let's get married. I need a wife and you need a husband.” At this her eyes got big and once again were full of tears. She didn't answer me. “Why don't you
talk?” I said. “Say yes or no.” “Why don't you say love?” she said. “Who talks about love in the shtetl?” I asked her. “What are we, millionaires?” I didn't say so but it's a word that makes me nervous. What does a man like me know about love? “If you don't love me I can't marry you,” she answered me. But by then the father had his nose in my ear. “She's a doll, a marvelous girl, you can't go wrong. She'll work hard and both together you'll make a living.” So I said love and she said yes. Maybe my poor future looked better than her own.

After we were married, all she talked about was we must get out of Russia, including the father, because things were getting worse, not better. Worse for us and worse for the Russians. “Let's sell everything and leave while we can.” I answered her, “Even if we sell everything we'll have nothing. Believe me, there's no shortage of places to go to in this wide world, but first I'll work hard and we'll save a few rubles, and in that case who knows where we'll get to. Maybe it'll take a year or two and then we'll leave.” She looked at me with a tight face. “After another year you'll never go; you're afraid to leave.” Maybe she was right but I said, “Your father changed places every time he breathed and all he's collected is air. I'll stay in one place and build up a little capital, and then I'll think of leaving.” That wasn't strictly the truth. I was in no hurry to run to another country. Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It's a strange world, why make it stranger? When I was in the Tsar's army I was less afraid of the world but once I got home again enough was enough. In other words, in those days to make me move, somebody had to push. So she pushed. But we didn't get along so badly until another year or two went by and we still had no capital, and we had no children. Raisl was depressed and either said nothing, or
wept, and never left off complaining. Our hut was divided into two small rooms. At night she stayed in bed while I sat in the kitchen. It was at this time that I began to read more. I picked up books here and there, a few I stole, and read by the lamp. Many times after I read I slept on the kitchen bench. When I was reading Spinoza I stayed up night after night. I was by now excited by ideas and I tried to collect a few of my own. It was the beginning of a different Yakov. I thought of things I had never thought of before, and then when I began to read a little history and also a pamphlet about Nicholas I, the Tsar's father, I said to myself, “She's right, we ought to get out of here and the sooner the better.”

But without a living where can you go? We went nowhere. By now it was coming to six years that we were married and still had no children. I said nothing but I was, in my heart, a disappointed man. Who could I look in the face? In her heart Raisl was frantic. She blamed it on her sins. Maybe on my sins. She was running again, in her big wig, to the rabbis, who had never helped her, if not in our town, then in the others. She tried magic and she tried spells. She recited verses from the Scriptures and drank potions squeezed out of parts of fish and hares. I don't believe in this kind of business. Anyway, as one might expect, nothing happened. “Why has God cursed me?” she cried. “What God?” I said. She was a desperate woman. “Will I be just like my father, will I always have
nothing?
Will I have less than my father?” By this time I was worn out living in a storm. She ran this way and that, she wept, she cursed her life. I said less and read more though the books didn't bring me a kopek unless I sold them. I thought I would take her to a big doctor in Kiev, but who would pay for it? So nothing happened. She stayed barren and I stayed poor. Every day she begged me to leave so our luck would change. “Leave,” I said, “on whose wings?” Then I said, “Like
your father's luck changed.” So she looked at me with hatred. I began to stay away from the house. When I came in at night I slept in the kitchen. The next thing I knew they were talking about her in the taverns. Then one day she was gone. I opened the door and the house was empty. At first I cursed her like somebody in the Bible curses his whorish wife. “May she keep her miscarrying womb and dry breasts.” But now I look at it like this: She had tied herself to the wrong future.

You wait. You wait in minutes of hope and days of hopelessness. Sometimes you just wait, there's no greater insult. You sink into your thoughts and try to blot out the prison cell. If you're lucky it dissolves and you spend a half hour out in the open, beyond the doors and walls and the hatred of yourself. If you're not lucky your thoughts can poison you. If you're lucky and get out to the shtetl you might call on a friend, or if he's out, sit alone on a bench in front of his hut. You can smell the grass and the flowers and look at the girls, if one or two happen to be passing by along the road. You can also do a day's work if there's work to do. Today there's a little carpentering job. You work up a sweat sawing wood apart and hammering it together. When it's time to eat you open your food parcelânot bad. The thing about food is to have a little when you want it. A hard-boiled egg with a pinch of salt is delicious. Also some sour cream with a cut-up potato. If you dip bread into fresh milk and suck before swallowing, it tastes like a feast. And hot tea with lemon and a lump of sugar. In the evening you go across the wet grass to the edge of the wood. You stare at the moon in the milky sky. You breathe in the fresh air. An ambition teases you, there's still the future. After all, you're alive and free. Even if you're not
so free, you think you are. The worst thing about such thoughts is when they leave you and you're back in the cell. The cell is your woods and sky.

Yakov counted. He counted time though he tried not to. Counting presupposed an end to counting, at least for a man who used only small numbers. How many times had he counted up to a hundred in his life? Who could count forever?âit piled time on. The fixer had torn some splinters off sticks of firewood. The long splinters were months, the short, days. A day was a bad enough burden of time but within the day even minutes could do damage as they piled up. When one had north-ing to do the worst thing to have was an endless supply of minutes. It was like pouring nothing into a million little bottles.

At five in the morning the day began and never ended. In the early evening dark he was already lying on his mattress trying to sleep. Sometimes he tried all night. During the day there were the regular checks through the spy hole, and three depressing searches of his body. There was cleaning out ashes, and making and lighting the stove. There was the sweeping of the cell to do, urinating in the can, walking back and forth until one began to count; or sitting at the table with nothing to do. There was the going for, and eating of, his meager meals. There was trying to remember and trying to forget. There was the counting of each day; there was reciting the psalm he had put together. He also watched the light and dark change. The morning dark was different from the night dark. The morning dark had a little freshness, a little anticipation in it, though what he anticipated he could not say. The night dark was heavy with thickened and compounded shadows. In the morning the shadows unfurled until only one was left, that which lingered in the cell all day. It was gone for a minute near eleven he guessed, when a beam of sunlight, on
days the sun appeared, touched the corroded inner wall a foot above his mattress, a beam of golden light gone in a few minutes. Once he kissed it on the wall. Once he licked it with his tongue. After the sun had gone, light from the window descended more darkly. When he stole a newspaper strip to read, the darkness was on the paper. It was night at half past three in the afternoon in December. Yakov put wood in the stove and Zhitnyak, after they had gone for the night rations, lit it. He ate in the dark or by the light through the stove door left ajar. There was still no lamp, no candle. The fixer set a small splinter aside to mark the lost day and crawled onto his mattress.

The long splinters were months. He figured it was January. Zhitnyak wouldn't tell him, nor would Kogin. They said they were forbidden to answer such questions. He had been arrested in the brickyard in mid-April and had served in the District Courthouse jail for two months. He figured he had been in this prison another seven months, a total of nine, if not more. It would soon âsoon?âbe a full year of prison. He did not, could not, think past a year. He could not foresee any future in the future. When he thought about the future all he thought about was the indictment. He imagined the warden snapping back the six bolts and bringing in the indictment in a thick brown envelope. But in this thought, after the warden had left, the indictment had still not come and he was still counting time. How long would he wait? He waited with months, days, minutes on his heavy head, and with the repetitive cycles of light and dark piled on top of the long and short pieces of time. He waited with boredom sticking its fingers down his throat. He waited for an unknown time, a time different from all the time on his head. It was unending waiting for something that might never happen. In the winter, time fell like hissing snow through the crack in
the barred window, and never stopped snowing. He stood in it as it piled up around him and there was no end to drowning.

One wintry day, sickened of time, he tore off his clothes. The rags fell apart in his hands.

“Bastards!” he shouted through the peephole at the guards, prison officials, Grubeshov, and the Black Hundreds. “Anti-Semites! murderers!”

They let him stay naked. Zhitnyak would not light the stove. The fixer's body turned blue as he walked frantically in the freezing cell. He shivered on the mattress, shook, with the prayer shawl and ragged blanket wrapped around him.

“By morning,” the Deputy Warden said when he came in with the guard for the last search of the day, “you won't need clothes. You'll be frozen stiff. Spread your filthy ass.”

But the warden entered before nightfall and said it was indecent to have a naked Jew parading around in the cell. “You could have been shot for less than this.”

He flung at Yakov another threadbare suit of prison clothes, and another ragged greatcoat. Zhitnyak then lit the stove, but it took the fixer a week to get the ice out of his spine, and the cold hurt worse than before.

Then he began to wait again.

He waits.

BOOK: The Fixer

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