The Fixer (19 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Fixer
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In the luminous dark the ghost of Bibikov appeared wearing a large white hat. He had no glasses pinched to his nose, they were gone, and he rubbed the bridge in embarrassment.
“A terrible thing has happened, Yakov Shepsovitch. These men are without morality. I fear they will kill you, too.”
“No, no,” cried Yakov. “I don't believe in superstition.”
The Investigating Magistrate lit a rose-papered cigarette and sat silent; then tried to say something and began to fade. He slowly disappeared in the dark, his white self dimming, as though evening had come and
then night; and the soft glow of the cigarette diminished until it was out. All that remained was the dark memory of him hanging from the window, his bulbous eyes staring at his smashed glasses on the floor.
All night the fixer sat huddled in the corner of the cell, filled with the dread of dying. If he slept a minute his sleep was steeped in the taste, smell, horror of dying. He lay motionless in a graveyard, rigid, terrified. In the black sky were black stars. If he stirred he would topple into an open grave, amid the rotting dead, their dead flesh and putrefying bones. But more than death he feared torture. He feared being torn and broken before he died. He saw them dragging into the cell terrible instruments, monstrous wooden machines that racked and crushed the body; they hung his remains from a window bar. At dawn, when the dirty eye staring through the hole in the door touched him, he woke from shadowy sleep begging for his life. As the door creaked open he cried out; but the guards did not strangle him. One of them, with his foot, shoved in a bowl of gruel without a cockroach in it.
All day the fixer walked in his cell, sometimes he ran, five steps, three, five, three, breaking the circuit to hurl himself against the wall, or smash his fists against the metal door with prolonged cries of grief. He mourned Bibikov with great sorrow, great bitterness. For weeks he had lived with this potential savior in his thoughts, this just and gentle man; depended on him somehow to free him from prison, the trap laid for him, from the crime itself, the horrifying accusation. His only peace had come from these thoughts, that a good man was assisting him, and because of him, when the trial came, he would be judged not guilty. He had pictured himself freed, hurrying back to the shtetl, or running off to America if he could raise the funds. But now these hopes and expectations, these reveries on which he had lived, were gone,
snatched from him without warning. Who would help him now, what could he hope for? Where Bibikov had lived in his mind was a hopeless hole. Who would now expose the murderess, Marfa Golov, and her accomplices, and proclaim his innocence to the newspapers? Suppose she left Kiev, fled to another city—or country—would they ever lay eyes on her again? How would the world ever learn about the injustice that had been committed against an innocent man? Who could help him if no one but his jailers knew where he was? For aught he meant to anyone, Yakov Bok did not exist. If they had no plans to kill him outright, then they would kill him slowly by burying him alive in prison forever.
“Mama-Papa,” he cried out, “save me! Shmuel, Raisl —anybody—save me! Somebody save me!” He walked in circles, forgetting he was walking, inventing fantastic plans to escape, each making his heart ache because each was impossible. He walked all day and into the night, until his shoes fell apart, and then walked in his bare feet on the lacerating floor. He walked in almost liquid heat with nowhere to go but his circular entrapment, striking himself on his journey—his chest, face, head, tearing his flesh, lamenting his life.
His crooked feet hurt unbearably. Yakov lay down in exhaustion on the floor. Torture by his own instrument —pain of body on deep depression. His pulpy feet, the soles covered with live scabs and red pussing sores, were like bags blown up about to burst. Then the ankles disappeared as the swelling moved up his legs. The fixer lay on his back, breathing badly, noisily. At least if it were cooler. How long can I stand this? His feet felt as though they were bound in chains and laid on fire. Both legs bulged to the knees. He lay on his back wishing for death. A cold eye stared at him. Ultimately he placed it at the peephole, an eye gazing at his suppurating feet, but the one who looked had nothing to say; and said nothing.
“Help my poor feet,” Yakov cried out, “it's a terrible pain.” Whoever he was, if he heard, said nothing. Then the eye in the hole was gone. The fixer, feverishly shivering, his clothes wet, moaned through another night of pain. In the morning a key turned in the door and Warden Grizitskoy entered. Thinking of Bibikov, Yakov shrank from him. But the cross-eyed warden looked real and even human, and what he had seen in the next cell, dreamlike, unreal; he was at times not sure he had seen it. He didn't dare ask about the Investigating Magistrate. If they knew he knew they might kill him at once.
“What tricks are you up to now?” the warden demanded.
“Please,” Yakov said, “my feet are infected from the nails in my shoes. I need a doctor.”
“There are no doctors for the likes of you.”
The fixer wearily shut his eyes.
The warden left. In the afternoon he returned with an aid from the prison infirmary.
“He's poisoned his feet,” said the aid.
“Is it serious?” said the warden, “or will it go away by itself?”
“Both feet are full of pus. It might become gangrene.”
“It would serve the bastard right,” said the warden.
“All right,” he said to Yakov, “go down to the infirmary. I'd let you rot here but I don't want the cell to stink any more than it does, or it will get infected from your germs. Move quickly now.”
“How can I walk?” said Yakov. “Could Fetyukov or somebody help me?”
“Perfect company for a fellow murderer,” said the warden. “Fetyukov is no longer present. He was shot for disobeying orders and resisting a guard.”
“Shot?” said the stunned fixer.
“For insubordination. He insulted a guard. Let that be a lesson to you. Now move along quickly.”
“I can't walk. How can I go if I can't walk?”
“If you can't walk, crawl. The devil take you.”
Like a dog, thought Yakov. On his hands and knees he moved out into the corridor, then painfully toward the door leading to the stairs. Though he crawled slowly the pressure hurt his knees and he could not keep his battered feet from scraping the floor. But he forced himself not to cry out. The warden and infirmary aid had left, and a guard with a shotgun followed the fixer as he moved toward the concrete door. Going down the steep wooden steps, he had the weight of his body on his trembling arms, his feet bumping each step, and he more than once almost fell headlong down the stairs. When he paused, the guard prodded him with the butt of his gun. By the time Yakov reached the bottom of the stairs both his hands were scraped raw, and both knees bled. His back was black with sweat and the veins bulged on his neck as he crawled forward along the corridor and out the prison door into the yard.
The infirmary was in the administration section, on the other side of the quadrangle from the prison cells. It was the time of the ten-minute afternoon promenade, and the prisoners opened their double files for the fixer as they watched him haltingly crawling across the dirt yard.
“Five kopeks on the Zhid mule,” shouted the clubfoot. A prisoner in a torn greatcoat turned and struck him across the mouth. A guard beat the prisoner.
If I live will I make it? Yakov, nauseated, was close to fainting. Halfway across the yard his trembling arms gave out and he collapsed. Several prisoners broke from their lines, but the guard with the whip shouted it was forbidden. The sentries patrolling the yard pointed their rifles at the prisoners and they returned to the lines, but not the slop-pail man, the one with the cracked eyeglasses. He fished some burlap rags from a
garbage pile in the corner of the yard and ran towards Yakov. Hurriedly he wound the rags around the fixer's hands and knees. The guard cursed but looked on. When the rags were tied he prodded Yakov with his foot.
The fixer got up on his raw hands and bleeding knees and went on, blindly crawling across the yard. He climbed up the stone steps into the infirmary.
The surgeon, a bald-headed man in a soiled white linen coat that smelled of carbolic acid and tobacco, inspected Yakov's feet, smeared them with a thick yellow acrid salve out of a can, and after bandaging both feet with dirty bandages and swabbing his hands and knees with alcohol, ordered the fixer into bed. This was the first bed he had been in since his arrest. He slept for a day and a half. When he awoke, the surgeon, smoking a cigar, unwound the bandages and operated on his feet. He cut into the pussing sores with a scalpel, without anesthetic. The prisoner, biting his lips to be silent, cried out at each cut.
“This is good for you, Bok,” said the surgeon. “Now you know how poor Zhenia felt when you were stabbing him and draining his blood, all for the sake of your Jewish religion.”
That night as he lay in bed in the infirmary Yakov had trouble breathing. Though he took in great gulping hot breaths through his mouth, the air seemed thin and insufficient. He did not at first fear asthma because he had often had trouble breathing under stress yet had not been seriously sick for years. But then the air turned heavy and stale. It was like trying to breathe metal. His chest heaved. His lungs weighed like rock, his breathing turned heavily raspy and he felt sick. The fixer clawed the mattress. “Please, who needs more? I have enough.” He sat up, gasping for help but none came. Yakov got out of bed, his bandaged feet oozing blood, and tottered to the barred window. He lay under it, wheezing as he
fought to draw into his lungs a few drops of air. In the midst of his exertions he fell into an exhausted and perilous half-sleep, dreaming he was expiring in a windowless cell, seeing in his drowning dreams the miserable orphans' home, a crumbling tilted shack he had spent his childhood in; Raisl running from him in terror as though he had threatened her with a meat cleaver; and his imprisonment for a lifetime in Siberia for the murder of a boy whose suffering dead face haunted him still. He dreamed he had come upon him in the woods, a child carrying his schoolbooks, and had grabbed and choked him unconscious on impulse; then with Proshko's help, as the boy lay on the ground still twitching, he stabbed him thirteen times in the chest and drained five litres of his bright blood, a magnificent liquid. All night Grubeshov, standing with both yellow gaitered feet on Yakov's chest, harangued the victim in a thick-voiced tirade, and though the fixer frantically implored Bibikov's help, the Investigating Magistrate, at his desk in another room, would or could not be disturbed.
The warden assigned him to a new cell, a large dampish one on the ground floor of the solitary block of the south building of the prison, to the right of the administrative section and infirmary.
“It's just to keep you closer to my eye,” he said. “There's talk you might try to escape with the assistance of your Jewish cohorts, which I strongly warn you against, because if you attempt it you're sure to get shot.”
He pointed to the notice on the wall:
Obey all rules and regulations without question
.
If the prisoner is insubordinate or insulting to a guard or
prison
official
, or he attempts in
any, way
to breach the security of this
prison,
he will be
executed
on the spot.
“Furthermore,” said the old warden, “the guard receives a monetary commendation for defending the regulations, so watch yourself. A smart dog recognizes the whip and avoids the lash.”
He helped himself to a pinch of snuff and sneezed twice.
Yakov asked if he could have another prisoner, some decent person, for company. “It's hard to live without another soul to talk to, your honor. How is one to ease his heart a little?”
“That's the least of my worries,” said the warden.
“Then could I have some kind of an animal to keep, either a cat or maybe a bird?”
“A cat out of your rations?—you'd both starve. Either he'd eat you or you'd eat him. Anyway, this is a prison for criminals, and not a tea parlor or clubhouse. You're not here for comforts or coddling but for strict punishment for the mean murder you committed against a harmless child. Only you Jew prisoners have the nerve to make such requests. I've had enough of it.”
In the fall the weather was bad, rainy and cold, and Yakov could see his breath in the cell. The asthma was not bothersome until he caught a cold, then it came on again, usually badly. Some mornings the outer wall of the cell, fronting the prison yard, was covered with lacy areas of frost. The inside walls, a foot thick, of brick, broken stone and cement, were scabby and cracked. After a heavy rain the greater part of the stone-paved floor was moist with seepage from the earth. Part of the ceiling above the window dripped. On fair days the small barred window, about a meter above the fixer's head, though dirty, let in light. The light was dim and on rainy days disappeared in the dark. After supper Yakov was given a small smelly kerosene lamp without
its glass chimney, that burned until morning and was then removed. But one night the lamp was not given to him because, the Deputy Warden said, kerosene cost money. The fixer asked for a candle instead, and the Deputy Warden said he would see about that, but the fixer never got the candle. The cell was pitch black all night. I'll get the candle when I get the indictment, Yakov thought.
When the wind was strong on the outside, cold air floated through the cracked window into the cell. Yakov offered to fix it if they would let him have a little putty and a ladder, but no one was interested. The cell was cold but at least he had a mattress, a thin lumpy straw pallet whose last occupant—Zhitnyak, the small-eyed, black-fingered day guard, told him—had died of jail fever. The fixer kept the mattress on the dry part of the floor. There were bedbugs in it but he managed to beat out and kill some. His back ached after he had slept on it, and the straw in the sacking stank of mold, but it was better than sleeping on the stone floor. In November they gave him a ragged blanket. He also had a three-legged stool in the cell and a greasy small wooden table, one leg shorter than the other three. He had a jug of water in one corner of the cell; and in the opposite corner he kept the smelly can he urinated and defecated in, when there was something to defecate. Once a day he was allowed to empty the slop can into one of the barrels that were trundled past the cells by another prisoner, who wasn't allowed to speak to the fixer and whom Yakov was forbidden to address. He could tell from where the trundle stopped in the corridor that the cells on both sides of him were empty. It was a solitary solitary.
The bolted cell door was made of three sheets of iron, once painted black but now largely rusted; it had a peephole at eye level covered by a metal disk that the
guard slipped aside to look in. Once every hour or so during the day a single eye roamed the cell. Zhitnyak was usually there in the daytime and Kogin at night; some days their times overlapped, and occasionally they exchanged shifts. When Yakov secretly pushed aside the disk and looked through the peephole, he could see Zhitnyak sitting in a large chair against the wall, hacking with his pocket knife at a stick, looking at pictures in a magazine, or dozing. He was a heavy-shouldered man with hairy nostrils and blackened stubby fingers, as though he had once worked with grease or lampblack that he had never got off. When he stepped into the cell he smelled of sweat and cabbage. Zhitnyak had a pock-marked face and an impatient manner. He was surly and unpredictable and sometimes struck the fixer.
Kogin, the night guard, was a tall man with a gaunt face and watery eyes, worn with worry. He spoke in a deep voice that seemed to rise from the ground. Even his whisper was low and heavy. Often he paced the corridor as if he were the prisoner; Yakov could hear his boots going back and forth on the concrete floor. At night Kogin opened the spy hole and listened to the fixer's asthmatic breathing and when he talked or shouted in his sleep. Yakov knew he was there, because when his nightmares or sleep-shouting woke him, he saw the dim light from the hall through the hole, and he saw the disk slowly moved back into place. Sometimes he woke up as Kogin was shining a torch through the peephole. Sometimes he could hear the guard's heavy breathing at the cell door.
Zhitnyak was the more talkative of the two, though he said little enough. Kogin at first did not speak to the fixer, but once after he had been drinking he complained that his son had come to nothing. “He does no steady work,” the guard said in his deep voice. “When
will he get himself a job? I've waited thirty years for him to become a man and I'm still waiting. ‘Wait,' I tell myself, ‘he will change. He will become a man,' but he never does. He even steals from me and I am his father. My wife says it's my fault for not hitting him when he was a child and up to bad tricks, but that's not my nature. I had enough of that from my own father, may he rot in his grave. What's more, the daughter doesn't behave well either, but I won't go into that. The son will one day end up in prison the same as you, and it will serve him right. That's all that comes from a father's love.”
In October Yakov had begged the guards to light the brick stove in the cell, but the Deputy Warden at first refused to spare the wood. Then one day in November Zhitnyak opened the door and two close-cropped prisoners, who sneaked looks at Yakov, brought the fixer a small load of wood tied in bundles. He had had a cold and asthma, and maybe one of the guards had reported it to the warden, who perhaps felt he had to keep the prisoner alive. The warden, as Yakov saw him, was not a vicious man. He was at best a disciplinarian, at worst, stupid. The Deputy Warden was something else. The fixer shuddered at the man's depthless eyes, narrow face, and four-fingered hand. Whatever he looked at he seemed to gnaw a little. His small mouth was crafty and hiddenly hungry. His boots stank of dog turd or whatever he used to polish them with. The guards wore guns in their holsters, but the Deputy Warden had a large gun on each hip. He had taken his time giving his permission for Yakov to have wood. The fixer disliked and feared him more than anyone in the prison.
The tall upright yellow brick stove leaked smoke at the top through a cracked brick, but Yakov preferred the smoke to the cold. He asked for the stove to be lit in the
early morning, to get the frost off the wall although a small puddle formed on the floor when the cell warmed up; and he asked for a lit stove before supper so that he could eat in comfort. If the cell was too cold he could not taste the few bits of cabbage in his soup. If the cell was warm he tasted each morsel. To save wood he let the stove go out in the late morning. Afterwards, with his fingers he scraped the cold ashes out of the pit under the grate, put in a little kindling and some pieces of wood, then before supper, Zhitnyak came in to relight it. He did not seem to mind doing that, though he would sometimes curse as he was doing it. Yakov's hair was still not cropped but once was clipped a little by the prison barber; he was not permitted to shave, and his beard was growing long.
“That's to keep you looking more like a Jew,” Zhitnyak said through the peephole. “They say the warden is going to make you wear a Zhid caftan and a rabbi's round hat, and they're going to twist earlocks out of your hair over your ears so you'll look kosher. That's what the Deputy Warden said they'll do.”
The prisoners in the other solitary cells down the hall were served their meager food by other prisoners who were not allowed to serve the Jew. In Yakov's case they had to give the food to Zhitnyak, or Kogin, and he handed it to the fixer. This annoyed Zhitnyak, and sometimes when he brought Yakov's gruel or cabbage soup and bread, he said, “Here's your bowl of Christ's blood, drink hearty, mate.” To enter the cell, the guard on duty, sometimes backed up by another guard in the hall holding a shotgun, more often alone, unlocked the six three-ringed bolts that had been attached on the door the day Yakov had been put into this cell. Hearing the six bolts being snapped back one by one, four or five times a day, put the fixer on edge.
During the late autumn Yakov did not see the
warden, then one day he appeared in the cell “for purposes of official business.”
“They've found a fingerprint on Zheniushka's belt buckle so we'd better take yours.”
A detective appeared with an ink pad and paper and took Yakov's fingerprints.
A week later the warden entered the cell with a large pair of scissors.
“They've found some hairs on the boy's body, and we want to compare them with yours.”
Yakov uneasily gave him permission to cut his hair.
“You cut it,” said Warden Grizitskoy. “Cut off six or eight hairs and put them in this envelope.” He handed Yakov the scissors and envelope.
The fixer snipped off several of his hairs. “How do I know you won't take these hairs and put them on the boy's corpse and then say you found them there in the first place?”
“You are a suspicious type,” said the warden. “That's true of all your race.”
“Excuse me, but why should the warden of a prison look for evidence of a crime? Is he a policeman?”
“That's none of your damn business,” said the warden. “If you're so innocent let's have the proof of it.”
A louse fell into the envelope with the hairs but Yakov let it stay.
One morning the warden entered the cell with a pen, bottle of black ink, and several sheets of foolscap paper for some samples of Yakov's handwriting. He ordered him to write in Russian, “My name is Yakov Shepsovitch Bok. It is true that I am a Jew.”
Later the warden returned and asked the fixer to write the same words, lying on the floor. Then he had Zhitnyak hold the prisoner's legs as he stood on his head while writing his name.
“What's this for?” asked Yakov.
“To see if the change in position changes your writing any. We want all possible samples.”
And twice a day since he had been in this cell there were inspections of the fixer's body; “searches” they were called. The bolts of the door were shot back, and Zhitnyak and the Deputy Warden, with his smelly boots, came into the cell and ordered the fixer to undress. Yakov had to remove his clothes—the greatcoat, prison jacket, buttonless shirt, which were never washed though he had asked that he be allowed to wash them; and then he dropped his trousers and long drawers. He was allowed to keep on his threadbare undershirt, possibly so he wouldn't freeze to death. They also made him remove the torn socks and wooden clogs he had worn since the time the surgeon had lanced the sores on his feet, and to spread his toes apart so that Zhitnyak could inspect between them.
“Why do you do this?” Yakov had asked at the time of the first search.
“Shut your trap,” said Zhitnyak.
“It's to see you haven't hidden any kind of weapon up your ass or in your clothes,” said the Deputy Warden. “We have to protect you.”
“What weapons could I hide? Everything was taken from me.”
“You're a foxy sort but we've dealt with your kind before. You could be hiding small files, nails, pins, matches or such; or maybe even poison pills the Jews gave you to commit suicide with.”
“I have none of those things.”
“Spread your ass,” said the Deputy Warden.
Yakov had first to raise his arms and spread his legs. The Deputy Warden probed with his four fingers in Yakov's armpits and around his testicles. The fixer then had to open his mouth and raise his tongue; he stretched
both cheeks with his fingers as Zhitnyak peered into his mouth. At the end he had to bend over and pull apart his buttocks.
“Use more newspaper on your ass,” said Zhitnyak.
“To use you have to have.”

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