The Fixer (27 page)

  “The warden said you would give me the indictment.”

  Grubeshov uneasily studied the top sheet of the paper, then put it down. “The indictment requires the signature of the Investigating Magistrate. He is away on official business and has not yet returned to his office. In the meantime I want to know what your response is to my more than reasonable proposal?”

  “I have enough to confess but not that crime.”

  “Ach, you are a stupid Jew.”

  Yakov readily agreed.

  “If you have hopes of the sympathy and perhaps assistance of Magistrate Bibikov, you had better give them up. He has been replaced by another.”

  The fixer clamped his teeth tight to keep from going into shudders again.

  “Where is Mr. Bibikov?”

  Grubeshov spoke restlessly. “He was arrested for peculating from official funds. While awaiting trial, overwhelmed by his disgrace, he committed suicide.”

  The fixer shut his eyes.

  When he opened them he said, “Could I speak to his assistant, Mr. Ivan Semyonovitch?”

  “Ivan Semyonovitch Kuzminsky,” said the Prosecuting Attorney coldly, “was taken into custody at the Agricultural Fair last September. He did not remove his hat when the band played ‘God Save the Tsar.’ If my memory is correct he was sentenced to a year in the Petropa-velsky Fortress.”

  The fixer gasped silently.

  “Do you get the point?” Grubeshov’s face was taut, sweaty.

  “I am innocent,” the fixer shouted hoarsely.

  “No Jew is innocent, least of all a ritual assassin. Furthermore, it is known you are an agent of the Jewish Kahal, the secret Jewish internationl government which is engaged in a subterranean conspiracy with the World Zionist Organization, the Alliance of Herzl, and the Russian Freemasons. We also have reason to believe that your masters are dickering with the British to help you overthrow the legitimate Russian government and make yourselves rulers of our land and people. We are not exactly naïve. We know your purposes. We have read the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ and the ‘Communist Manifesto,’ and fully understand your revolutionary intentions!”

  “I am not a revolutionist. I am an inexperienced man. Who knows about such things? I am a fixer.”

  “You can deny it all you want, we know the truth,” Grubeshov shouted. “The Jews dominate the world and we feel ourselves under their yoke. I personally consider myself under the power of the Jews; under the power of Jewish thought, under the power of the Jewish press. To speak against the crimes of the Jews means to evoke the charge that one is either a Black Hundred, an obscurantist, or a reactionary. I am none of these things. I am a Russian patriot! I love the Russian Tsar!”

  Yakov stared miserably at the indictment papers.

  Grubeshov grabbed them and locked them in the drawer.

  “If you come to your senses, let me know through the warden. Until then you will continue to give off your stink in prison.”

  Before Yakov was permitted to leave the office, the Prosecuting Attorney, his face darkened by blood, reading from his notebook, asked the prisoner if he was related to Baal Shem Tov or Rabbi Zalman Schneur of Ladi, and whether there had ever been a shochet in his family. To each question Yakov, shivering uncontrollably, replied no, and Grubeshov painstakingly recorded his answers.

  9

  He sat in his prison clothes in the dark cell, his beard tormented, eyes red, head burning, the acid cold cracking his bones. The snow hissed on the window. The wind seeping through the split glass sank on him like an evil bird, gnawing his head and hands. He ran in the cell, his breath visible, beating his chest, waving his arms, slapping blue hands together, crying anguish. He sighed, he wailed, called to the sky for help, until Zhit-nyak, one nervous eye at the spy hole, ordered him to shut up. When the guard lit the evening fire the fixer sat at the smoky stove with its door open, the collar of his greatcoat raised above his ears, the light of the flames heatless on his face. Except for the glowing, crackling, moaning fire the cell was black, dank, heavy with wet stink. He could smell the rotten odor of himself in the enduring stench of all the prisoners who had lived and died in this miserable cell.

  The fixer shivered for hours, plunged in the deepest gloom. Who would believe it? The Tsar himself knew of him. The Tsar was convinced of his guilt. The Tsar wanted him convicted and punished. Yakov saw himself locked in combat with the Russian Emperor. They wrestled, beard to beard, in the dark until Nicholas proclaimed himself an angel of God and ascended into the sky.

  “It’s all a fantasy,” the fixer muttered. “He doesn’t need me and I don’t need him. Why don’t they let me alone? What have I truly done to them?”

  His fate nauseated him. Escaping from the Pale he had at once been entrapped in prison. From birth a black horse had followed him, a Jewish nightmare. What was being a Jew but an everlasting curse? He was sick of their history, destiny, blood guilt.

  
VII

  He waits.

  The snow turned to rain.

  Nothing happened.

  Nothing but the long winter; not the indictment.

  He felt the change of weather in his head. Spring came but stayed outside the bars. Through the window he heard the shrilling of swallows.

  The seasons came faster than the indictment. The indictment was very slow. The thought that it might sometime come made it so slow.

  In the spring it rained heavily. He listened to the sound of the rain and liked the thought of the outside wet, but he didn’t like the inside wet. Water seeped through the wall on the prison yard side. Lines of wet formed on the cement between the exposed bricks. From an eroded part of the ceiling above the window, water dripped after the rain had stopped. After the rain there was always a puddle on the floor. Sometimes the dripping went on for days. He awakened at night listening to it. Sometimes it stopped for a few minutes and he slept. When the dripping began again he awoke.

  I used to sleep through thunder.

  He was so nervous, irritable, so oppressed by imprisonment he feared for his sanity. What will I confess to them if I go mad? Each day’s oppressive boredom terrified him. The boredom and the nervousness made him think he might go insane.

  One day, out of hunger for something to do, for a word to read, he cracked open one of the phylacteries that had been left in the cell. Holding it by the thongs he hit the box against the wall till it burst with a puff of dust. The inside of the phylactery box smelled of old parchment and leather, yet there was a curious human odor to it. It smelled a little like the sweat of the body. The fixer held the broken phylactery to his nose and greedily sucked in the smell. The small black box was divided into four compartments, each containing a tightly rolled little scroll, two with verses from Exodus and two from Deuteronomy. Yakov puzzled out the script, remembering the words faster than he could read. The bondage in Egypt was over, and in one scroll Moses proclaimed the celebration of Passover. Another scroll was the Sh’ma Yisroël. Another enumerated the rewards for loving and serving God and the punishment for not: the loss of heaven, rain, and the fruit of that rain; even life. In each of the four scrolls the people were commanded to obey God and teach his words. “Therefore you shall lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be frontlets between your eyes.” The sign was the phylactery and it was the phylactery that Yakov had broken. He read the scrolls with excitement and sadness and hid them deep in the mattress straw. But one day Zhitnyak, his eye roving at the peephole, caught the fixer absorbed in reading them. He entered the cell and forced him to give them up. The appearance of the four scrolls puzzled the guard, although Yakov showed him the broken phylactery; and Zhitnyak turned them over to the Deputy Warden, who was greatly excited to have this “new evidence.”

  A few weeks later, Zhitnyak, while in the cell, sneaked the fixer a small green paper-covered New Testament in Russian. The pages were worn and soiled with use. “It’s from my old woman,” Zhitnyak whispered. “She said to give it to you so you could repent for the wrong you did. Besides, you’re always complaining you have nothing to read. Take it but don’t tell anyone who gave it to you or I will break your ass. If they ask you say that one of the prisoners in the kitchen slipped it in your pocket without you knowing it, or maybe one of those who empty the shit cans.”

  “But why the New Testament, why not the Old?” Yakov said.

  “The Old won’t do you any good at all,” Zhitnyak said. “It’s long been used out and full of old graybeard Jews crawling around from one mess to the other. Also there’s a lot of fucking in the Old Testament, so how is that religious? If you want to read the true word of God, read the gospels. My old woman told me to tell you that.”

  Yakov would at first not open the book, having from childhood feared Jesus Christ, as stranger, apostate, mysterious enemy of the Jews. But with the book there his boredom grew deeper and his curiosity stronger. At last he opened it and began to read. He sat at the table reading through the darkness on the page, though not for long periods because he found it hard to concentrate. Yet the story of Jesus fascinated him and he read it in the four gospels. He was a strange Jew, humorless and fanatic, but the fixer liked the teachings and read with pleasure of the healing of lame, blind, and of the epileptics who fell into fire and water. He enjoyed the loaves and fishes and the raising of the dead. In the end he was deeply moved when he read how they spat on him and beat him with sticks; and how he hung on the cross at night. Jesus cried out help to God but God gave no help. There was a man crying out in anguish in the dark, but God was on the other side of his mountain. He heard but he had heard everything. What was there to hear that he hadn’t heard before? Christ died and they took him down. The fixer wiped his eyes. Afterwards he thought if that’s how it happened and it’s part of the Christian religion, and they believe it, how can they keep me in prison, knowing I am innocent? Why don’t they have pity and let me go?

  Though his memory gave him trouble he tried to learn by heart some of the verses he liked in the gospels. It was a way to keep his mind occupied and his memory alert. Then he would recite to himself what he had learned. One day he began to say verses aloud through the peephole. Zhitnyak, sitting in his chair in the corridor, hacking at a stick with his knife, heard the fixer recite the Beatitudes, listened to the end, then told him to shut his mouth. When Yakov could not sleep at night; or when he had slept a little and was waked by some dream or noise, he passed part of his waking time reciting in the cell, and Kogin as usual kept his ear to the spy hole, breathing audibly. One night, the guard, lately morose with worry, remarked through the door in his deep voice, “How is it that a Jew who killed a Christian child goes around reciting the words of Christ?”

  “I never even touched that boy,” said the fixer.

  “Everybody says you did. They say you had a secret dispensation from a rabbi to go ahead and do it and your conscience wouldn’t hurt you. I’ve heard it said you were a hardworking man, Yakov Bok, but you still could have committed the crime because in your thinking it was no crime to murder a Christian. All that blood and matzo business is an old part of your religion. I’ve heard about it ever since I was a small boy.”

  “In the Old Testament we’re not allowed to eat blood. It’s forbidden,” said Yakov. “But what about these words: ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you have no life in you; he who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood, abides in Me, and I in him.’ “

  “Ah, that’s a different load of fish altogether,” said Kogin. “It means the bread and wine and not the real flesh and blood. Besides, how do you know those words that you just said? When the Devil teaches scripture to a Jew they both get it wrong.”

  “Blood is blood. I said it the way it was written.”

  “How do you know it?”

  “I read it in the Gospel of John.”

  “What’s a Jew doing reading the gospels?”

  “I read them to find out what a Christian is.”

  “A Christian is a man who loves Christ.”

  “How can anyone love Christ and keep an innocent man suffering in prison?”

  “There is no innocent Christ-killer,” Kogin said, shutting the disk over the spy hole.

  But the next night as the rain droned steadily in the prison yard and drops of water dripped from the ceiling, the guard came to hear what else Yakov had memorized.

  “I haven’t been in a church in years,” Kogin said. “I’m not much of a body for incense and priests but I like to hear the words of Christ.”

  “ ‘Which of you convicts me of sin?’ “ said Yakov. “ ‘If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?’ “

  “Did he say that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on to another one.”

  “ ‘But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one dot of the law to become void.’ “

  “When you say the words they sound different than I remember them.”

  “They’re the same words.”

  “Go on to another one.”

  “ ‘Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged and the measure you give will be the measure you get.’ “

  “That’s enough,” said Kogin. “I’ve had enough.”

  But the next night he brought a candle stub and match.

  “Look, Yakov Bok, I know you’re hiding a book of the gospels in your cell. How did you get it?”

  Yakov said someone had slipped it into his pocket when he went to get his rations in the kitchen.

  “Well, maybe, and maybe not,” said Kogin, “but since you have the book in there you might as well read me something. I’m bored to my ass out here all alone night after night. What I really am is a family man.”

  Yakov lit the candle and read to Kogin through the hole in the door. He read him of the trial and suffering of Christ, as the yellow candle flame dipped and sputtered in the damp cell. When he came to where the soldiers pressed a crown of thorns on Jesus’ head, the guard sighed.