The Fixer (15 page)

  “It all depends on how sick they are, if you please, your honor. Whether it’s your son or mine, when you’re running a high fever and are nauseous besides, your thoughts aren’t always at their best. I worried about Zhenia and had terrible nightmares besides. I was afraid he was in some kind of horrible trouble, but I thought I dreamed that because I was feverish. And while I was so sick with the flu, so was my neighbor Sofya, and also Vasya. No one came to knock on my door, as usually happens two or three times during the day. And Yuri Shiskovsky, Sofya’s husband, is as likely to knock on a person’s door when you need him as Father Christmas. We don’t get along at all but that’s a story for a winter night. Anyway, if someone had come into my house during those five or six days I would have split both his ears crying out my fears for my poor child, but nobody ever did.”

  “Let her go on with the story,” Grubeshov said to Bi-bikov. “If necessary you can ask questions later.”

  The Investigating Magistrate nodded to his colleague. “I assure you it’s necessary enough, Vladislav Grigorie-vitch, but as you please, I’ll ask later. As for what else may be necessary, or even not so necessary, for instance this entire procedure during a time of investigation, I think we ought to discuss that too, at least in principle if for no other reason.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Grubeshov. “We’ll talk over everything tomorrow.”

  “Come now to the point of the matter, Marfa Vladimirovna,” he said. “Tell us what Zhenia and Vasya Shiskovsky told you about the Jew before the fatal incident.”

  Marfa had listened intently to the exchange between the men, alternating uneasiness with apparent boredom. When Bibikov was speaking she cast nervous glances around her but lowered her eyes if anyone looked at her.

  “Vasya also told me what I heard Zhenia say more than once—that they were afraid of the Jew in the brickyard.”

  “Go on, we’re listening.”

  “Zhenia told me that one day when he and Vasya were playing in the factory yard they saw two Jews—it was toward nightfall—sneak through the gate and go up the stairs where this one lived.”

  She glanced at the fixer, then averted her eyes. He was standing with his head bowed.

  “Excuse me for interrupting,” Bibikov said to the Prosecuting Attorney, “but I would like to understand how the boys identified the two men as Jews?”

  Colonel Bodyansky guffawed and Grubeshov smiled.

  “Easily, your honor,” Marfa said in excitement, “they were wearing Jewish clothes and had long rough beards, not nicely trimmed ones like some of the gentlemen here. Also the boys used to peek in the window and saw them praying. They wore black hats and robes. The boys were frightened and ran home here. I asked Vasya to stay for a cup of cocoa and slice of white bread with Zhenia, but he was scared sick and said he wanted to go home to his own house.”

  Grubeshov listened, standing with his thumbs locked behind him. “Please go on.”

  “I heard from the boys that this one here brought other Jews up in his stable. One was an old man with a black satchel that the Lord knows what they did with. Zhenia once told this one to his face that he would tell the foreman if he chased him again. ‘And if you do that I’ll kill you once and for all,’ said the Jew. One day Zhenia saw him running after another boy in the brickyard, a lad not eight years old from the neighborhood around here, Andriushka Khototov, whose father is a street sweeper. The boy luckily got out through the open gate, thank the Lord. Then the Jew saw my Zhenia and chased him, but my Zhenia climbed the fence and escaped that time, though he told me his heart hurt because he did not think he would get over the fence before the Jew grabbed him. One day, hiding by the kiln, Zhenia saw two of the Jews try to catch a Russian child and drag him into the stable. But the boy was a smart one and bit, clawed, and screamed so loud they got frightened and let him go. I warned Zhenia more than once not to go back there or he might get kidnapped and killed, and he promised me he wouldn’t. I think he didn’t for a time, then one night he came home frightened and feverish, and when I cried out, ‘Zhenia, what ails you, tell me quickly what happened?’ he said that the Jew had chased him with a long knife in the dark among the gravestones in the cemetery. I got down on my knees to him. ‘Zhenia Golov, in the name of the Holy Mother, promise me not to go near that evil Jew again. Don’t go in that brickyard.’ ‘Yes, dear Mamenka,’ he said, ‘I will promise.’ That’s what he said, but he went back in there again, anyway. Boys are boys, your honor, as you already know. God knows what draws them to danger, but if I had kept him under lock and key in this house as I sometimes did when he was a little boy he’d be alive today and not a corpse in his coffin.”

  She fervently crossed herself.

  “Marfa Vladimirovna, please tell us what else you were told by the two boys,” Grubeshov said to her.

  “I was told they had seen a bottle of blood on the Jew’s table.”

  The army general gasped and the officials looked at each other in horror. Yakov stared whitely at Marfa, his lips working in agitation. “There was no bottle of blood on my table,” he cried out. “If there was anything it was a jar of strawberry jam. Jam is not blood. Blood is not jam.”

  “Be quiet!” Grubeshov ordered. “We will inform you when it is your time to speak.”

  One of the gendarmes pointed his revolver at Yakov.

  “Put that foolish gun away,” Bibikov said. “The man is chained and manacled.”

  “Did you personally see ‘the bottle of blood’?” he asked Marfa.

  “No, but both of the boys did, and they told me about it. They could hardly talk. Their faces were green.”

  “Then why didn’t you report that to the police? It was your duty to, as well as the other incidents you just enumerated, as for instance the suspect chasing your son with a knife. That is a criminal act. This is a civilized society. Such things must be reported to the police.”

  She answered at once: “Because I’ve had my fill of the police, if you won’t mind me saying so, your honor, and with apologies to those of them present that never bothered me. I once complained to them that Yuri Shiskov-sky, for reasons that will be kept to myself, struck me on the head with a block of wood, and all morning they kept me in the police station answering personal questions while they filled out long forms, as if I myself were the criminal and not that madman who they let go, although I had a bloody gash in my scalp, and even an idiot would know who had hit who. I can’t afford to lose my time like that. I have to earn a living and that’s why I didn’t report what the boys told me.”

  “Which is understandable enough,” said Grubeshov —turning to the general, who nodded—”although I agree with the Investigating Magistrate that such things should be reported at once. Now finish your story, Marfa Vladimirovna.”

  “I have finished, there’s no more to tell.”

  “In that case,” said the Prosecuting Attorney, addressing the officials, “it’s best to move on.”

  He pulled a thin gold watch from his yellow waistcoat pocket and consulted it closely.

  “Vladislav Grigorievitch,” Bibikov said, “I must insist on my prerogative to question the witness.”

  Marfa’s intent gaze at him changed from fear to anger.

  “What have I done to you?” she cried out.

  “Neither of us has done anything to the other, that’s not the point. Marfa Golov, I would like to ask you a question or two. Please, Vladislav Grigorievitch, I insist. Unfortunately, I can’t go into certain things just now, but one or two questions I insist on asking and I would like them answered honestly and directly. Is it true, for instance, Marfa Golov, that you receive stolen goods from a gang of thieves, one of whom is or was your lover who often visits this house?”

  “You needn’t bother to answer that,” Grubeshov said, flushing. “It’s irrelevant to the matter at issue.”

  “I insist it is not so irrelevant, Vladislav Grigorievitch.”

  “No, I don’t receive such goods,” said Marfa, white-lipped, her eyes darkening. “That’s a filthy rumor spread by my enemies.”

  “Is that your response?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Very well, then. Is it true that a year ago last January you threw the contents of a phial of carbolic acid into the eyes of your lover and blinded him for life, a man whom you have since become reconciled with?”

  “Is he the one who reported me?” she asked, enraged.

  “Reported you?”

  “Told you these filthy lies?”

  “Boris Alexandrovitch, as your superior in rank, I forbid these questions,” Grubeshov said, irritated. “If you have anything of that nature to ask, please do so in my office tomorrow morning, though I personally don’t see how such irrelevancies can matter. They do not change the weight of the significant evidence. We must absolutely get on now. It’s Sunday and we all have obligations to our families.”

  “What is the ‘significant evidence’ you refer to?”

  “The evidence we have been engaged in collecting, including the evidence of history.”

  “History is not law.”

  “We will see about that.”

  “I must insist on a reply from Marfa Golov.”

  “I have no more to say than I’ve already said,” Marfa answered haughtily. “He used to beat me up and I defended myself. My legs and back were black and blue for months where he beat me, and once he smashed me in the eye so hard it ran pus for three weeks.”

  “Is it true that he also beat your son, once so severely that the boy lost consciousness?”

  “I forbid you to answer,” Grubeshov shouted.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Colonel Bodyansky said to Bibikov.

  “The Jew killed my child,” Marfa cried out. “Somebody ought to scratch his eyes.” She ran to the window and called out of the open vent to the gravestones in the cemetery, “Zhenia, my baby, come homel Come home to your mother!”

  She wept heartbrokenly.

  She’s insane, thought Yakov. So is her hat with the cherries.

  “See how he glares at me like a starving wolf from the forest,” Marfa, turning to the fixer, shouted. “Make him stop!”

  There was a stir among the officials. Two of the gendarmes pinned the prisoner by his arms.

  Marfa, glaring at him, attempted then to remove her hat. Her eyelids fluttered, and moaning she sank to the floor. The hat rolled off her head, but before fainting she gazed loosely around to see where it was. Father Anastasy and Colonel Bodyansky bent to assist her.

  When Marfa recovered only the police and gendarmes were in the room with her and the prisoner. Bibikov, to Yakov’s misery, had left first, and he saw him, through the window, walk down the muddy road and get into a carriage alone. The dead boy’s mother asked for her hat, blew on it, and put it carefully away in a sideboard drawer.

  She covered her head with a coarse black shawl.

  3

  Grubeshov, in his bowler and wet rain cape, hovered over Father Anastasy with a large black umbrella as the wet-lipped priest, standing on a low flat rock, his voice rising and falling sometimes out of context with what he was saying, nasally recited the blood guilt of the Jewish Nation.

  The group of officials and police had abandoned the carriages and motorcar at the bottom of an inclined street paved with rocks, lined on one side by a row of blackened shanties from which people stared at them out of windows and doorways, but no one came out to watch. A flock of pigeons rose in the street and two small white dogs, barking shrilly, darted into the houses as the crowd of officials approached. On foot they climbed first up the steps of a terraced hill from which the winding Dnieper was visible in the distance, then descended into a muddy ravine, and along it to the bottom of an almost perpendicular rocky hill with some caves in its face, in one of which the body of Zhenia Golov had been found. This cave, minutely described in the newspapers Yakov had read on the day of the discovery of the boy’s body, one of those cut into the hill by religious hermits centuries ago, was about fifteen feet up its face. To get up into it one climbed the rough steps that had been hewn into the rocky hill. On top of it was a sparse birchwood grove with thin-trunked white trees full of chirping swallows, and beyond that lay a flat section of the outskirts of the city consisting of scattered houses and empty lots, about two versts from Nikolai Maximovitch’s brick factory.

  “There is from here an almost straight road from the brick factory where Zhenia was presumed to be killed,” Grubeshov said.

  “But, permit me, Vladislav Grigorievitch, to draw your attention to the fact that the road from Marfa Golov’s house is just as straight and a little shorter,” said Bibikov.

  “In any case,” the Prosecuting Attorney answered, “the most important evidence will be the testimony of the experts.”

  The priest, a long-haired, large-nosed man whose breath smelled of garlic, was standing under Grubeshov’s umbrella before a loose semicircle of listeners but the Prosecuting Attorney had Yakov brought up close, the officials giving way as he was pushed forward, his chains rattling, by his guards. Bibikov, standing in the rear, looked on, impassively smoking. It was still drizzling and the fixer had lost his cap, unsettling him further, more than he thought possible in his present condition. It’s only a cap, not my life; but the thought was a terrible one, because it was the first time he had admitted to himself he was afraid for his life. Fearing he was about to hear some secret fact that would absolutely condemn him once it was known, he stood inch-deep in the mud, breathing thickly, listening transfixed.

  “My dear children,” said the priest to the Russians, wringing his dry hands, “if the bowels of the earth were to open to reveal the population of human dead since the beginning of the world, you would be astonished to see how many innocent Christian children among them have been tortured to death by Christ-hating Jews. Throughout the ages, as described in their holy books and various commentaries, the voice of Semitic blood directs them to desecrations, unspeakable horrors—for example, the Talmud, which likens blood to water and milk, and preaches hatred of gentiles, who are characterized as being not human, no more than animals. ‘Thou shall not kill’ does not apply to us, for do not they also write in their books: ‘Murder the good among gentiles’? This, perfidy, too, is prescribed in their Kabbala, the book of Jewish magic and alchemy, wherein the name of Satan is invoked; hence there have been multitudes of slaughtered innocent children whose tears have not moved their murderers to mercy.”