The Fixer (13 page)

  The fixer goes from house to house, knocking on each thin door and asking for the tzadik but nobody knows him; then in the last house they know him, a saintly man, but he had long ago gone away. The fixer hurriedly travels on the train to Minsk and after months of desperate searching meets the old man, the moon on his rabbinic hat, coming home one evening from the synagogue.

  “Please, you must go back to Kiev with me and prove my innocence. Tell the officials I didn’t do what they say I did.”

  But the old tzadik does not recognize the fixer. He looks at him long but shakes his head. The wound on his temple has healed and he cannot now recall the night Yakov says he had spent with him in the room above the stable.

  When the fixer remembered where he was he tore at his hands with his nails, and he tore at his face.

  The snorer awoke with a gasp. “Akimytch,” he cried out. “Formerly a tailor. I am innocent,” he whimpered. “Don’t beat me.”

  The other one snickered.

  “Have you got a cigarette, Potseikin?” the former tailor asked the one on the other mattress. “A piece of butt?”

  “Fuck yourself,” said the blinker, a man with bloodshot eyes.

  “Have you got a cigarette?” Akimytch asked Yakov.

  “My bag is empty,” said the fixer. He held it up.

  “I’ll bet you don’t know why I’m here,” Akimytch said.

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. It’s mistaken identity with me. I never did what they say I did, may they choke to death on their mothers’ milk. They mistook me for an anarchist.”

  He began to weep.

  “I’m here because of a pack of pamphlets or whatever you call ‘em,” Potseikin said. “Some poor bastard, a man with wild eyes and a thick greatcoat says to me on Insti-tutsky Street, ‘Brother,’ he says, ‘I have to piss, so hold my bundle a minute, and when I come back here I’ll slip you a five-kopek piece, on my honor.’ What can you say to a man who has to piss? Could I say no to that? Then he might piss on me. So I held onto his bundle and in two minutes a pig-eyed detective comes running across the street and jabs a gun in my gut so hard it almost busts, and then he marches me off to the Secret Police without listening to a word I say. When we get there three big ones give me a going over with fat sticks till all my bones are cracked, and they show me where the pamphlets say to overthrow the Tsar. Who wants to overthrow the Tsar? Personally, I have only the highest regard for Nicholas the Second and the royal family, especially the young princesses and the poor sick boy, who I love as my own. But nobody believed me and that’s why I’m here. It’s all the fault of those bastard pamphlets.”

  “It’s mistaken identity with me,” said Akimytch. “What’s it with you, pal?”

  “The same,” said Yakov.

  “What did they say you did?”

  He thought he oughtn’t to tell them, but it came out quickly, in accusation of the accusers.

  “They say I killed a boy—it’s a dirty lie.”

  There was a deep silence in the cell. Now I’ve blundered, Yakov thought. He looked for the guard but he had gone for the soup pail.

  The two on the straw pallets, their heads together, whispered in each other’s ears, first Akimytch whispering, then Potseikin.

  “Did you?” Akimytch asked Yakov.

  “No, of course not. Why would I kill an innocent child?”

  They whispered once more and Potseikin said in a thick voice, “Tell us the truth, are you a Jew?”

  “What difference would it make?” Yakov said, but when they were whispering again he was afraid.

  “Don’t try anything or I’ll call the guard.”

  The one in rags got up and approached the fixer, sneering. “So you’re the bastard Jew who killed the Christian boy and sucked the blood out of his bones? I saw it in the papers.”

  “Leave me in peace,” Yakov said. “I’ve done nothing like that to anybody, not to speak of a twelve-year-old child. It’s not in my nature.”

  “You’re a stinking Jew liar.”

  “Think as you like but let me alone.”

  “Who else \\vould do anything like that but a mother-fucking Zhid?”

  Potseikin pounced on the fixer and with his rotten teeth tried to bite his neck. Yakov shoved him off but Akimytch, foul-breathed, was on his back beating the fixer’s head and face with his clammy bony hands.

  “Christkiller!”

  “Gevalt!” cried Yakov, flailing his arms. Though he whirled, ducked, and struck out with his fists, Potseikin hit him with a knee in the back as Akimytch struck him on the neck with both fists. The fixer went down, his mind darkened in pain. He lay motionless as they kicked him savagely, and felt as he passed out, a terrible rage.

  Afterwards he woke on his mattress, and when he heard their snoring, retched. A rat scuttled across his genitals and he bolted up in horror. But there was a bit of horned moon at the small high barred window and he watched for a while in peace.

  
IV

  The stable had burned to the ground in a matter of minutes, Proshko said, spitting at the fixer’s feet, and it wouldn’t surprise him if it were done with Jewish magic. He pointed to the blackened remains of the stalls where four maddened, rearing, trumpeting horses had died, and a crisscross pile of burnt and broken planks and timbers had fallen from the roof.

  The mustached and bearded officials in the brickyard, some uniformed and booted, a few carrying umbrellas although it was no longer raining, and the Secret Police gendarmes, plainclothes detectives, and Kiev City Police —among them also an Imperial Army general with two rows of gold buttons and one of medals across his chest—looked on in silence as the foreman spoke. Grubeshov, in English bowler, mud-spattered gaiters, and rain cape, flushed at Proshko’s testimony, whispered in Colonel Bodyansky’s lowered ear, clutching his hand tightly, and the colonel earnestly whispered something in return as Yakov licked his dry lips. Bibikov, with small, yellow-muddy, ankle-length shoes, his winter scarf and large hat, standing behind two tight-faced Black Hundreds representatives wearing their accusatory buttons, chainsmoked cigarettes from a box he amiably offered around. Nearby, the pimply Ivan Semyonovitch accompanied an oldish priest of the Orthodox Church, Father Anastasy, a “specialist,” Yakov had heard it whispered, “of the Jewish religion”; he was a round-shouldered man with a streaked beard, thin hands, and restless dark eyes, dressed in flowing vestments and round pot-hat which he pressed down with his palm when the wind blew. What he was expected to add to the miserable state of Yakov’s affairs the fixer didn’t know and was afraid to guess. Manacled, his legs chained, nervously exhausted, his body in flight though he tried with ten fingers to hold onto his mind, he stood with five armed guards at his back, apart from the rest. Though almost a month had gone by since his arrest he could still only half believe this had happened to him, someone who did not recognize himself in the dream he was dreaming; and listened stunned to Proshko, as though the accusation of the monstrous crime were both true and an irrelevancy, as though it had happened to someone he didn’t know very well, in truth a stranger, although he clearly remembered fearing that something like this might happen to him.

  Otherwise the brickyard was deserted on a gray and green overcast Sunday afternoon in what had been a cold May. None of the workers was around except for the drivers Richter and Serdiuk, who listened without speaking and occasionally spat, the Ukrainian holding his cap in his large red hand, ill at ease, the German staring darkly at the former overseer. Nikolai Maximovitch had been expected but Yakov knew it was too late in the day for him to leave the house sober. After a morning fog had thinned and lifted, it began to rain heavily; and it poured again in the afternoon. The horses drawing the half dozen carriages that had left at intervals from the District Courthouse in the Plossky, and met first in the brickyard, had splashed through puddles, and the motorcar carrying Yakov, Colonel Bodyansky and the gendarmes, had got stuck in the mud on a road in the Lukianovsky, drawing several people, and irritating the Prosecuting Attorney, who made it known to the chauffeur that he didn’t want “the matter getting out.” Not very much about the fixer had appeared in the newspapers. All they seemed to know was that a Jew from the Podol had been arrested “as a suspicious person,” but not who or why. Grubeshov had promised more information at a later date in order not, presently, to impede the investigation. Bibikov, before they left the courthouse, had managed to convey this to Yakov, but not much else.

  “Start from the beginning,” Grubeshov said to Proshko, dressed in his Sunday thick-trousered suit with short jacket. “—I want to hear your earliest suspicions.”

  The Prosecuting Attorney had planned this re-enactment, he had told the accused, “to let you know the inescapable logic of our case against you so that you may act accordingly and for your own benefit.”

  “But how for my benefit?”

  “It will become clear to you.”

  The foreman blew his nose, wiped it in two strokes and thrust the handkerchief into his pants pocket.

  “On one look I knew he was a Jew, even though he was faking that he was a Russian. It’s easy enough to tell an onion from a radish if you’re not color blind.” Proshko laughed a little from the chest. “Yakov Ivano-vitch Dologushev, he called himself, but I knew from the sound of it on his tongue that the name didn’t fit him. A name belongs to you as your birthright, but it hung on him like a suit of stolen clothes. I felt in my blood he was a Jew the same way as you feel in the dark the presence of a ghost. Wait up, little brother, I thought to myself, something smells fishy here. Maybe it’s his natural smell, or the way he talks Russian, or maybe it’s the flatfooted way he runs when he chases young boys, but when I looked with both of my eyes open I saw what I already knew—he was a Zhid and no two ways about it. You can’t make a gentleman out of a toad, as the saying goes, and a bom Jew can’t hide the Zhid in his face. This is a foxy bastard, I thought to myself, and he thinks he’s got it hidden because he wears a belted sheepskin coat and has shaved off his Jewish whiskers and curls, and maybe it’ll be a little slow smoking him out of his hole now that he’s fooled Nikolai Maximovitch, but smoke him out I will, and with God’s help it’s what I did.”

  “Tell the details,” said Grubeshov.

  “It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes after I first saw him that I went back to the office shack and asked him for his papers so as to hand them over to the District Police, and right off he showed me who he was. He lied that he had given them to the boss and he had registered them with the police. If a man talks crooked, I thought to myself, he’s crooked elsewhere, and I’ll watch out to see where else. I didn’t have long to wait. Once when he was nosing around the kilns for purposes of his own, I sneaked into the shack and checked up on his figures in the books. He was crooked in his accounts and every day entered smaller amounts than he should so he could keep some rubles for himself—not so many, a Jew is cunning—maybe three or four or five a day that Nikolai Maximovitch had no suspicions of, and he saved himself a nice little pile in a tin can in his room.”

  “You’re a liar,” Yakov said, trembling, “you’re the thief and you’re putting it on me. You and your drivers stole thousands of bricks from Nikolai Maximovitch, and you hated me for watching you so you couldn’t steal more.”

  Nobody was listening.

  “What did he do with the rubles you say he stole?” Bibikov asked the foreman. “There were about ninety in the tin can, if I remember correctly. If he was stealing four rubles a day, let us say, he should have had many more.”

  “Who knows what a Jew does with money. I’ve heard it said they take it to bed with them and give it a fuck once in a while. I bet he gave most of it to the Zhidy synagogue in the Podol. They have plenty of uses for a Russian ruble.”

  “The Secret Police confiscated altogether one hundred and five rubles,” Grubeshov announced after conferring with Colonel Bodyansky. “Keep your mouth shut,” he said to Yakov. “Answer when you’re spoken to.”

  “What’s more,” Proshko went on, “he sneaked other Jews into the brickyard, and one was one of those Hasids with a round hat, or whatever you call them, who prayed up there in the stable with this one here. The other one came when they thought nobody was around to watch them. They both tied horns on their heads and prayed to the Jewish God. I watched them through the window and saw them praying and eating matzos. I figured they baked some in the stove up there and I was right, there was half a sack of flour hidden under the bed that the police got. I kept track of them because I had my own suspicions, like I told you. I saw this one here sneaking around like a ghost at night, his face white and eyes strange, looking for something, and I also saw him chasing the boys that I told you about. I was worried he would do them some kind of harm, little knowing how right I was. One day two or three school kids came in the yard with their book satchels. I saw him chase them but they got away over the fence. Once I asked him, ‘Yakov Ivanovitch, why did you chase those young school kids, they are good boys and all they want to do is to see how we make brick,’ but he answered me, ‘If they are so innocent Jesus Christ will protect them.’ He thought Proshko wouldn’t know what he meant by that but I did.”

  Yakov groaned.

  “That’s why I kept my eye on him and when I couldn’t I told the drivers to watch him.”

  “That’s so.” Serdiuk, still smelling of horse, nodded, and Richter said yes.

  “I saw them praying with their little black hats on, and I spied on them when they were baking those matzos. Then when the boy was murdered and they found him in the cave with all those wounds the morning it was snowing—when the snow came again in April —I saw this one take the other Jew with the round hat down the stairs and they left the brickyard in a hurry. I went up there, walking right in their footsteps in the snow so he wouldn’t see I had been there, and that was the day I found pieces of matzos they had baked, half a bag of flour under the bed, his sack of tools, and that bloody rag I told you about. The devil scatters his dung wherever he goes.