The Fixer (39 page)

  Yakov frantically ducked. If this is my death I’ve endured for nothing.

  “You might have waited a bit, Yakov Bok,” the chairman of the jury said. “None of us are gentry or educated folk, but neither are we without a bit of experience in the world. A man learns to recognize the truth even if he doesn’t always live by it. And there are times he does that if it suits his fancy. The officials may not want us to know what the truth is but it comes in, you might say, through the chinks in the walls. They may try to deceive us, as they do often enough, but we will sift the evidence and if the facts are not as they say, then let them look to their consciences.”

  “They have none.”

  “So much the worse for them, in that case. You aren’t born human for nothing, I say.”

  “I’m innocent,” said Yakov, “you can look at me and see. Look in my face and say whether a man like me, whatever else he might do, could kill a boy and drain the blood out of his body. If I have any humanity in my heart and you are men you must know it. Tell me do I look like a murderer?”

  The chairman was about to say but a violent explosion rocked the coach.

  Yakov waited for death. He wandered for a while in a cemetery reading the names on the tombstones. Then he ran from grave to grave, searching them frantically, one after another, but could not find his name. After a while he stopped looking. He had waited a long time but maybe he had longer to wait. If you were a certain type death stayed its distance. Your afflictions were from life —a poor living, mistakes with people, the blows of fate. You lived, you suffered, but you lived.

  He heard screams, shouts, commotion, the frightened whinnying of horses. The carriage rattled and seemed to leap up, then struck the ground and stopped dead, shuddering, but remained upright. The stench of gunpowder bored through his nostrils. A door lock snapped and the door fell ajar. He felt an overwhelming hunger to be back home, to see Raisl and set things straight, to decide what to do. “Raisl,” he said, “dress the boy and pack the few things we need, we’ll have to hide.” He was about to kick the door open but warned himself not to. Through the cracked right window he saw people on the run. A squad of Cossacks with lances raised galloped away from the carriage. A squad with uplifted sabers galloped towards it, risen in their saddles. The gray mare lay dead on the cobblestones. Three policemen were lifting the young Cossack rider. His foot had been torn off by the bomb. The boot had been blown away and his leg was shattered and bloody. As they carried him past the carriage his eyes opened and he looked in horror and anguish at Yakov as though to say, “What has my foot got to do with it?”

  The fixer shrank from the sight. The Cossack had fainted but his torn leg shook, spattering blood on the policemen. Then a Cossack colonel galloped up to the carriage, holding a sword aloft, shouting to the coachman, “Go on, go on!” He dismounted and tried to slam the door shut but it wouldn’t lock. “Go on, go on!” he shouted. The carriage rumbled on, the horses picked up speed and broke into a fast trot. The colonel, on a white horse, cantered along beside the coach in place of the wounded Cossack.

  Yakov sat in the gloomy coach overcome by hatred so intense his chest heaved as though the carriage were airless. He saw himself, after a while, sitting at a table somewhere, opposite the Tsar, a lit candle between them, in a cell or cellar, whatever it was. Nicholas the Second, of medium height, with frank blue eyes and neatly trimmed beard a little too large for his face, sat there naked, holding in his hand a small silver ikon of the Virgin Mary. Though distraught and pale, afflicted with a bad cough he had recently developed, he spoke in a gentle voice and with moving eloquence.

  “Though you have me at a disadvantage, Yakov Shepsovitch, I will speak the truth to you. It isn’t only that the Jews are freemasons and revolutionaries who make a shambles of our laws and demoralize our police by systematic bribery for social exemptions—I can forgive that a bit but not the other things, in particular the terrible crime you are accused of, which is so repellent to me personally. I refer to the draining of his lifeblood out of Zhenia Golov’s body. I don’t know whether you are aware that my own child, the Tsarevitch Alexis, is a haemophiliac? The newspapers, out of courtesy to the royal family, and the Tsarina in particular, do not, of course, mention it. We are fortunate in having four healthy daughters, the princesses Olga, the studious one; Taty-ana, the prettiest, and something of a coquette—I say this with amusement; Maria, shy and sweet-tempered; and Anastasya, the youngest and liveliest of them; but when after many prayers an heir to the throne was born at last—it pleased God to make this joy our greatest trial —his blood unfortunately was deficient in that substance which is necessary for coagulation and healing. A small cut, the most trivial, and he may bleed to death. We look after him, as you can expect, with the greatest care, on tenterhooks every minute because even a quite ordinary fall may mean extreme peril. Alexei’s veins are fragile, brittle, and in the slightest mishap internal bleeding causes him unbearable pain and torment. My dear wife and I—and I may add, the girls—live through death with this poor child. Permit me to ask, Yakov Shepsovitch, are you a father?”

  “With all my heart.”

  “Then you can imagine our anguish,” sighed the sad-eyed Tsar.

  His hands trembled a little as he lit a green-papered Turkish cigarette from an enameled box on the table. He offered the box to Yakov but the fixer shook his head.

  “I never wanted the crown, it kept me from being my true self, but I was not permitted to refuse. To rule is to bear a heavy cross. I’ve made mistakes, but not, I assure you, out of malice to anyone. My nature is not resolute, not like my late father’s—we lived in terror of him—but what can a man do beyond the best he can? One is born as he is born and that’s all there is to it. I thank God for my good qualities. To tell you the truth, Yakov Shepsovitch, I don’t like to dwell on these things. But I am—I can truthfully say—a kind person and love my people. Though the Jews cause me a great deal of trouble, and we must sometimes suppress them to maintain order, believe me, I wish them well. As for you, if you permit me, I consider you a decent but mistaken man—I insist on honesty—and I must ask you to take note of my obligations and burdens. After all, it isn’t as though you yourself are unaware of what suffering is. Surely it has taught you the meaning of mercy?”

  He was coughing insistently now and his voice, when he finished, was unsteady.

  Yakov moved uneasily in his chair. “Excuse me, Your Majesty, but what suffering has taught me is the useless-ness of suffering, if you don’t mind me saying so. Anyway, there’s enough of that to live with naturally without piling a mountain of injustice on top. Rachmones, we say in Hebrew—mercy, one oughtn’t to forget it, but one must also think how oppressed, ignorant and miserable most of us are in this country, gentiles as well as Jews, under your government and ministers. What it amounts to, Little Father, is that whether you wanted it or not you had your chance; in fact many chances, but the best you could give us with all good intentions is the poorest and most reactionary state in Europe. In other words, you’ve made out of this country a valley of bones. You had your chances and pissed them away. There’s no argument against that. It’s not easy to twist events by the tail but you might have done something for a better life for us all—for the future of Russia, one might say, but you didn’t.”

  The Tsar rose, his phallus meager, coughing still, disturbed and angered. “I’m only one man though ruler yet you blame me for our whole history.”

  “For what you don’t know, Your Majesty, and what you haven’t learned. Your poor boy is a haemophiliac, something missing in the blood. In you, in spite of certain sentimental feelings, it is missing somewhere else— the sort of insight, you might call it, that creates in a man charity, respect for the most miserable. You say you are kind and prove it with pogroms.”

  “As for those,” said the Tsar, “don’t blame me. Water can’t be prevented from flowing. They are a genuine expression of the will of the people.”

  “Then in that case there’s no more to say.” On the table at the fixer’s hand lay a revolver. Yakov pushed a bullet into the rusty cylinder chamber.

  The Tsar sat down, watching without apparent emotion, though his face had grown white and his beard darker. “I am the victim, the sufferer for my poor people. What will be will be.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the candle saucer. The light flickered but burnt on.

  “Don’t expect me to beg.”

  “This is also for the prison, the poison, the six daily searches. It’s for Bibikov and Kogin and for a lot more that I won’t even mention.”

  Pointing the gun at the Tsar’s heart (though Bibikov, flailing his white arms, cried no no no no), Yakov pressed the trigger. Nicholas, in the act of crossing himself, overturned his chair, and fell, to his surprise, to the floor, the stain spreading on his breast.

  The horses clopped on over the cobblestones.

  As for history, Yakov thought, there are ways to reverse it. What the Tsar deserves is a bullet in the gut. Better him than us.

  The left rear wheel of the carriage seemed to be wobbling.

  One thing I’ve learned, he thought, there’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. You can’t be one without the other, that’s clear enough. You can’t sit still and see yourself destroyed.

  Afterwards he thought, Where there’s no fight for it there’s no freedom. What is it Spinoza says? If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it’s the lesser evil to destroy it. Death to the anti-Semites! Long live revolution! Long live liberty!

  The crowds lining both sides of the streets were dense again, packed tight between curb and housefront. There were faces at every window and people standing on rooftops along the way. Among those in the street were Jews of the Plossky District. Some, as the carriage clattered by and they glimpsed the fixer, were openly weeping, wringing their hands. One thinly bearded man clawed his face. One or two waved at Yakov. Some shouted his name.