The Fixer (28 page)

  Then the fixer spoke in an anxious whisper. “Listen, Kogin, could I ask you for a small favor? It isn’t much of one. I would like a piece of paper and a pencil stub to write a few words to an acquaintance of mine. Could you lend them to me?”

  “You better go fuck yourself, Bok,” said Kogin. “I’m onto your Jew tricks.”

  He took the candle, blew it out, and did not again come to hear the verses of the gospels.

  2

  Sometimes he caught the scent of spring through the broken window when a breeze that had passed through the flowering bushes and trees left him with a remembrance of green things growing on earth, and his heart ached beyond belief.

  One late afternoon in May, or possibly June, after the fixer had been imprisoned more than a year, a priest in gray vestments and a black hat appeared in the dark cell, a pale-faced young man with stringy hair, wet lips, and haunted, dark eyes.

  Yakov, thinking himself hallucinated, retreated to the wall.

  “Who are you? Where do you come from?”

  “Your guard opened the door for me,” said the priest, nodding, blinking. He coughed, a complex fit it took him a while to get through. “I’ve been ill,” he said, “and once as I lay in bed in a fever I had an extraordinary vision of a man suffering in this prison. Who can it be? I thought, and at once it came to me, it must be the Jew who was arrested for killing the Christian child. I was covered with perspiration and cried out, ‘Heavenly Father, I thank you for this sign, for I understand you wish me to be of service to the imprisoned Jew.’ When I had recovered from my illness, I wrote at once to your warden asking him to permit me to see you. At first it seemed impossible, but after I had prayed and fasted, it was finally arranged with the Metropolitan’s assistance.”

  Seeing the ragged, bearded fixer in the gloom, standing with his back to the sweating wall, the priest fell to his knees.

  “Dear Lord,” he prayed, “forgive this poor Hebrew for his sins, and let him forgive us for sinning against him. ‘For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses.’ “

  “I forgive no one.”

  Approaching the prisoner on his knees, the priest tried to kiss his hand but the fixer snatched it away and retreated into the shadows of the cell.

  Groaning, the priest rose, breathing heavily.

  “I beg you to listen to me, Yakov Shepsovitch Bok,” he wheezed. “I am told by the guard Zhitnyak that you religiously read the gospels. And the guard Kogin says that you have memorized many passages of the words of the true Christ. This is an excellent sign, for if you embrace Christ, you will have truly repented. He will save you from damnation. And if you are converted to the Orthodox faith, your captors will be compelled to reconsider their accusations and ultimately to release you as one of our brothers. Believe me, there is none so dear in the eyes of God as a Jew who admits he is in error and comes willingly to the true faith. If you agree I will begin to instruct you in the Orthodox dogma. The warden has given his permission. He is a broad-minded man.”

  The fixer stood mute.

  “Are you there?” said the priest, peering into the shadows. “Where are you?” he called, blinking uneasily. He coughed with a heavy rasp.

  Yakov stood in the dim light, motionless at the table, the prayer shawl covering his head, the phylactery for the arm bound to his brow.

  The priest, coughing thickly, his handkerchief held to his mouth, retreated to the metal door and banged on it with his fist. It was quickly opened and he hurried out.

  “You’ll get yours,” said Zhitnyak to the fixer, from the hall.

  Afterwards a lamp was brought into the cell and Yakov was stripped of his clothes and searched for the fourth time that day. The Deputy Warden, in a foul mood, kicked at the mattress and found the New Testament in the straw.

  “Where the hell did you get this?”

  “Somebody must’ve slipped it to him in the kitchen,” said Zhitnyak.

  The Deputy Warden floored the fixer with a blow.

  He confiscated the phylacteries and Zhitnyak’s New Testament but returned in the morning and flung at Yakov a handful of pages that flew all over the cell. They were pages from the Old Testament in Hebrew, and Yakov collected them and patiently put them together. Half the book was missing and some of the pages were covered with muddy brown stains that looked like dry blood.

  3

  The birch twig broom came apart. He had used it for months and the twigs had worn out on the stone floor. Some had snapped off in the sweeping and he was given nothing to replace them with. Then the frayed cord that bound the twigs wore away and that was the end of the broom. Zhitnyak would not supply twigs or a new cord. Yakov had asked for them, but he took the broomstick away instead.

  “That’s so you won’t hurt yourself, Bok, or try any more of your dirty tricks on anybody else. Some say you clubbed the poor boy unconscious before you stuck him with your knife.”

  The fixer talked less with the guards, it was less wearying; they said little to him, once in a while a gruff command, or a curse if he was slow. Without the broom his thin routine began to collapse. He tried to hang on to it but now there was no stove to make or tend, or wait to be lit, and he was no longer permitted to go to the kitchen to get his rations. The food was brought to him in the cell, as it had been before. They said he had stolen things from the kitchen. The New Testament Bible, for instance. And a knife had been “found” during an inspection of his cell. That ended the excursions he had looked forward to, sometimes with excited eagerness, twice a day. “It’s only right,” said the warden. “We can’t have a Jew going around flouting the rules. There have been mutterings among some of the other prisoners.” What was left of the routine was to be waked by the prison bell in the morning, to eat meagerly not once but twice a day, and three times each day to be searched to desperation.

  He had stopped keeping track of time with the long and short splinters. Beyond a year he couldn’t go. Time was summer now, when the hot cell stank heavily and the walls sweated. There were mosquitoes, and bugs hitting the walls. Yet, better summer; he feared another winter. And if there was a spring after the winter it would mean two years in prison. And after that? Time blew like a steppe wind into an empty future. There was no end, no event, indictment, trial. The waiting withered him. He was worn thin by the struggle to wait, by the knowledge of his innocence against the fact of his imprisonment; that nothing had been done in a whole year to free him. He was stricken to be so absolutely alone. Oppressed by the heat, eaten by damp cold, eroded by the expectation of an indictment that never came, were his gray bones visible through his skin? His nerves were threads stretched to the instant before snapping. He cried out of the deepest part of him, a narrow pit, but no one appeared or answered, or looked at him or spoke to him, neither friend nor stranger. Nothing changed but his age. If he were tried, convicted, and sentenced to Siberia, that at least would be something to do. He combed his hair and beard until the teeth of the comb fell out. No one would give him another although he begged, wheedled; so he combed with his fingers. He picked his nose obsessively. His flesh, containing girls who had never become women, tempted him, but that upset his stomach. He tried unsuccessfully to keep himself clean.

  Yakov read the Old Testament through the stained and muddied pages, chapter by fragmentary chapter. He read each squat letter with care, although often the words were incomprehensible to him. He had forgotten many he once knew, but in the reading and rereading some came back; some were lost forever. The passages he could not understand and the missing pages of the book did not bother him; he knew the sense of the story. What wasn’t there he guessed at, or afterwards recalled. At first he read only for a few minutes at a time. The light was bad. His eyes watered and head swam. Then he read longer and faster, gripped by the narrative of the joyous and frenzied Hebrews, doing business, fighting wars, sinning and worshipping—whatever they were doing always engaged in talk with the huffing-puffing God who tried to sound, maybe out of envy, like a human being.

  God talks. He has chosen, he says, the Hebrews to preserve him. He covenants, therefore he is. He offers and Israel accepts, or when will history begin? Abraham, Moses, Noah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Ezra, even Job, make their personal covenant with the talking God. But Israel accepts the covenant in order to break it. That’s the mysterious purpose: they need the experience. So they worship false Gods; and this brings Yahweh up out of his golden throne with a flaming sword in both hands. When he talks loud history boils. Assyria, Babylonia, Greece, Rome, become the rod of his anger, the rod that breaks the heads of the Chosen People. Having betrayed the covenant with God they have to pay: war, destruction, death, exile—and they take what goes with it. Suffering, they say, awakens repentance, at least in those who can repent. Thus the people of the covenant wear out their sins against the Lord. He then forgives them and offers a new covenant. Why not? This is his nature, everything must begin again, don’t ask him why. Israel, changed yet unchanged, accepts the new covenant in order to break it by worshipping false gods so that they will ultimately suffer and repent, which they do endlessly. The purpose of the covenant, Yakov thinks, is to create human experience, although human experience baffles God. God is after all God; what he is is what he is: God. What does he know about such things? Has he ever worshipped God? Has he ever suffered? How much, after all, has he experienced? God envies the Jews: it’s a rich life. Maybe he would like to be human, it’s possible, nobody knows. That’s this God, Yahweh, the one who appears out of clouds, cyclones, burning bushes; talking. With Spinoza’s God it’s different. He is the eternal infinite idea of God as discovered in all of Nature. This one says nothing; either he can’t talk or has no need to. If you’re an idea what can you say? One has to find him in the machinations of his own mind. Spinoza had reasoned him out but Yakov Bok can’t. He is, after all, no philosopher. So he suffers without either the intellectual idea of God, or the God of the covenant; he had broken the phylactery. Nobody suffers for him and he suffers for no one except himself. The rod of God’s anger against the fixer is Nicholas II, the Russian Tsar. He punishes the suffering servant for being godless.

  It’s a hard life.

  Zhitnyak watched him as he read. “Rock back and forth like they do in the synagogue,” he said through the spy hole. The fixer rocked back and forth. The Deputy Warden was called to see. “What else would you expect?” he said as he spat.

  Sometimes Yakov lost sight of the words. They were black birds with white wings, white birds with black wings. He was falling in thoughtless thought, a stupefying whiteness. The fixer lost track of where he was, a forgetting so profound he ached on coming out of it. This occurred often now and went on for hours. Once he fell into this state in the morning, sitting at the table reading the Old Testament, and came back to the present in the late afternoon, standing naked in the cell, being searched by the Deputy Warden and Zhitnyak. And he sometimes walked across Russia without knowing it. It was hard on the feet and had to be controlled because he wore out the soles of his bast shoes and nobody wanted to give him another pair. He walked in his bare feet over a long rocky road and afterwards found both feet battered and blistered. He awoke to find himself walking and it frightened him when he recalled the pain of the surgeon’s scalpel. He willed himself to attention when he began to walk. He took a step or two on the long road and awoke in fright.

  Yakov reveried the past; the shtetl, the mistakes and failures of his life. One white-mooned night, after a bitter quarrel about something he couldn’t remember now, Raisl had left the hut and run in the dark to her father. The fixer, sitting alone, thinking over his bitterness and the falseness of his accusations, had thought of going after her but had gone to sleep instead. After all, he was dead tired doing nothing. The next year the accusation against her had come true, although it wasn’t true then. Who had made it come true? If he had run after her then, would he be sitting here now?

  He turned often to pages of Hosea and read with fascination the story of this man God had commanded to marry a harlot. The harlot, he had heard it said, was Israel, but the jealousy and anguish Hosea felt was that of a man whose wife had left his bed and board and gone whoring after strangers.

  “And let her put away her harlotries from her face,

  and her adulteries from between her breasts;

  Lest I strip her naked,

  And set her as in the day that she was born,

  And make her as the wilderness,

  And set her like dry land,

  And slay her with thirst.

  And I will not have compassion on her children;

  For they are the children of harlotry.

  For their mother hath played the harlot,

  She that conceived them hath done shamefully;

  For she said: ‘I will go after my lovers,

  That give me bread and my water.

  My wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink!’

  Therefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns,

  And I will make a wall against her,

  That she will not find her paths.

  And she shall run after her lovers,

  but she shall not overtake them,

  And she shall seek them, but shall not find them;

  Then shall she say: ‘I will go and return to my first husband:

  For then was it better with me than now.’ “

  4

  One morning Zhitnyak brought the prisoner a thick letter in a soiled white envelope with a long row of red stamps. The stamps were portraits of the Tsar in military tunic, wearing a medallion of the royal coat of arms, the double-headed eagle. The letter had been opened by the censor and resealed with a strip of gummed paper. It was addressed to “The Murderer of Zhenia Golov” and sent in care of the Prosecuting Attorney of the Superior Court, Plossky District, Kiev.