The Fixer (21 page)

  Yakov wrung his hands. “If so what am I to do, your honor? Will I be abandoned to die in this prison?”

  “Who has abandoned you?” the Investigating Magistrate asked, looking at him gently.

  “Not you, of course, and I thank what little luck I have for that. But if Mr. Grubeshov has no use for your evidence I might rot here for years. After all, how long are our lives? Couldn’t you put out an indictment of some small sort against me so that I could at least see a lawyer?”

  “No, that wouldn’t work at all. Murder is what I would be compelled to charge you with. I’m afraid to start off that way. Your lawyer will appear in due course. But at present no lawyer can do as much for you as I, Yakov Shepsovitch. And when the time comes that he can, I’ll see to it that you have a good one. I already have in mind someone who is a vigorous and courageous man of the most excellent reputation. I will sound him out in the near future, and I am sure he will agree to represent you.”

  The fixer thanked him.

  Bibikov, after looking at his watch, suddenly rose. “Yakov Shepsovitch, what more can I tell you? Take heart in the truth and endure your trials. Sustain yourself in your innocence.”

  “It’s not so easy, your honor. I’m not suited for this kind of life. I find it hard to imitate a dog. That’s not exactly what I mean but turned around a bit it is. What I mean is that I’m sick of prison, also I’m not a brave man. To tell the truth I have terrible fears that never leave me, day or night.”

  “No one says it’s easy. Still, you are not alone.”

  “In my cell I’m alone. In my thoughts I’m alone. I don’t want to sound bitter to you because I’m thankful for your help—”

  “My dear friend,” said Bibikov gravely, “your bitterness doesn’t offend me. My worry is not to fail you.”

  “Why should you fail me?” the fixer said, anxiously rising.

  “Who can say?” Bibikov put on his limp hat. “Partly it is our situation in this unfortunate country that causes me doubt. Russia is such a complex, long-suffering, ignorant, torn and helpless nation. In one sense we are all prisoners here.” He paused, combed his beard with his fingers, then said, “There is so much to be done that demands the full capacities of our hearts and souls, but, truly, where shall we begin? Perhaps I will begin with you? Keep in mind, Yakov Shepsovitch, that if your life is without value, so is mine. If the law does not protect you, it will not, in the end, protect me. Therefore I dare not fail you, and that is what causes me anxiety—that I must not fail you. Now permit me to say good night. Let us both somehow try to sleep and perhaps tomorrow will be better. Thank God for tomorrow.”

  Yakov seized his hand to press to his lips but Bibikov had gone.

  6

  A prisoner, an anguished and desperate man, was locked in the next cell. The minute in, he began to pound with his shoe, or both shoes, against the wall. The noise came through distantly and Yakov pounded back with his shoe. But when the man shouted he could somehow be heard, though not his words. They shouted to each other at various times of the day and night as loudly as they could—it sounded to the fixer as though someone was trying to tell him a heartbreaking tale, and he wanted with all his heart to hear and then tell his own; but the man’s shouts, cries, questions, were muffled, indistinguishable. So were his, the fixer knew.

  The isolation cells were rectangular cubicles, the walls of brick and cement, the outer wall containing a single three-barred window a half meter above the prisoner’s head. The door was made of solid iron with a peephole at eye level, through which the guard, when he was there, peered; and though Yakov could understand what was yelled at him from the corridor, when either prisoner shouted at the other through the spy hole, neither could understand. The openings were small, and reverberations in the corridor muffled the words and turned them into noise.

  Once a guard with a dark face and stupid eyes, appearing in the cell block, heard them shouting to each other and cursed them both. He ordered the other prisoner to shut up or he would beat his head to a pulp, and to Yakov he said, “No more noise out of you or I’ll shoot your Jew cock off.” When he was gone both men resumed beating on the wall. The guard came once a day with a bowl of watery, insect-ridden soup, and a slice of stale black bread; he also checked the cells at unpredictable intervals. Yakov would be sleeping on the floor, or pacing back and forth the meager distance of the cell; or sitting with his back to the wall, his knees drawn up, lost in despondent thought, when he became aware of a malevolent eye staring at him, which was at once withdrawn. From the number of doors opening in the morning when the guard and his assistant delivered the food, the fixer knew there were only two prisoners in that wing of cells. The other prisoner was on his left, and on the right the guards retreated fifty steps to another door which they opened with a key, then shut with a terrible thump and locked from the other side. Sometimes in the early morning hours, when the huge prison was steeped in darkness and silence although hundreds of men, more likely thousands, dreamed, moaned, snored and farted in their sleep, the prisoner in the next cell woke and began beating on the wall between them. He did this in quick bursts of sound, then slowly, as though he xvere trying to teach the fixer a code, and though Yakov counted the beats and tried to translate them into letters of the Russian alphabet, the words he put together made no sense and he cursed himself for his stupidity. He banged but what did it mean? Sometimes they uselessly banged on the wall at the same time.

  To be imprisoned alone was the greatest desperation the fixer had known. He hadn’t the wit, he told himself, to be this much alone. When the guards came with his bread and soup on his twelfth morning of solitary confinement, Yakov begged for relief. He had learned his lesson and would uphold every regulation if they kindly returned him to the common cell, where there were, at least, other faces and some human activity. “If you will tell this to the warden I’ll thank you with my whole heart. It’s hard to live without a little conversation once in a while.” But neither of the guards answered a word. It wouldn’t have cost them a kopek to give his message to the warden, but they never did. Yakov sank into silence, sometimes imagining himself in the Podol, talking casually to someone. He would stand under a tree in the tenement courtyard with Aaron Latke and say how badly things were going. (How bad was bad if you were free?) Just a homey few words, better in Yiddish, but good enough in Russian. Or since freedom, at the moment, was out of the question, if he had his tools he could, after a morning’s work, break a small hole through the wall and talk with the other prisoner, maybe even see his face if he stepped back a little. They could tell each other the story of their lives and stretch it out for months, then start over again if necessary. But the other prisoner, either because he was disheartened or sick, had stopped beating on the wall, and neither of them shouted to the other.

  If he had forgotten the man he suddenly remembered him. One night a distant moaning broke into his sleep. He awoke and heard nothing. The fixer beat on the wall with his heavy shoe but there was no response. He dreamed he heard footsteps in the corridor, then a smothered cry awakened him again, terrified. Something’s wrong, he thought, I must hide. A cell door clanged and there were steps of more than one man in the corridor. Yakov waited tensely in the pitch gloom, about to cry out if his door moved, but the steps went past his cell. The heavy door at the end of the corridor thumped shut, a key turned in the lock, and that was the end of the noise. In the terrible silence that followed, he could not get back to sleep. He beat on the wall with both broken shoes, shouting until he was hoarse, but could rouse no response. The next morning he was not brought food. They are leaving me to die, he thought. But at noon, a drunken guard came in with his soup and bread, muttering to himself. He spilled half the soup over Yakov before the prisoner could grab the bowl.

  “Here he kills a Russian child and lords it over us,” the guard muttered, his breath thick with alcohol.

  When he had gone it came to the fixer, as he was very slowly chewing his black bread, that the guard had not locked and bolted the door. The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He got up in excitement, thrust two fingers through the peephole and almost fainted as the door slowly opened inward.

  Yakov was overwhelmed in confusion and fright. If I step out they’ll kill me for sure. Someone must be waiting on the outside. He peered through the hole but could see no one. Then he shut the door softly and waited.

  An hour, if not longer, went by. Again he opened the creaking door and this time quickly looked into the hall. To the right, at the end of the cell block the concrete door stood ajar. Had the drunken guard forgotten to lock that too? Yakov slunk along the corridor, stopped a few feet from the door and at once hurried back. Yet he did not go into his cell. Once more he approached the heavy door and was about to pull it open when it came to him thunderously that he was acting faster than he could think. So he ran back to his cell, entered, and slammed the door shut. There he waited, his flesh freezing, his heart a growing pain. No one came. But the fixer had thought it out and was certain the guard had left the door open on purpose. If he went through it and sneaked down the stairs, at the bottom another guard would confront him, the one with the stupid eyes. He would look at Yakov and slowly raise his pistol. In the prison log the warden would write: “The prisoner Yakov Bok shot in the stomach while attempting to escape.”

  But he slid out into the corridor again, his thoughts flooded with freedom, this time going the other way, astonished he hadn’t thought of that before. He looked cautiously to the left and right, then peered through the peephole into the other prisoner’s cell. A bearded man, swinging gently, hung from a leather belt tied to the middle bar of the open window, a fallen stool nearby. He was staring down where his pince-nez lay smashed on the floor under his small dangling feet.

  It took the fixer an age to admit it was Bibikov.

  
VI

  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.