The Fixer (34 page)

  Raisl stared at him mutely.

  The guard came over with his rifle. “Nobody’s supposed to be talking Yiddish here,” he said. “You’re supposed to be talking Russian. This prison is a Russian institution.”

  “It takes longer in Russian,” she said. “I speak very slowly in Russian.”

  “Hurry up with the paper you’re supposed to give him.”

  “The paper has to be explained. There are advantages but there are also disadvantages. I have to tell him what the Prosecuting Attorney said.”

  “Then tell him, for Christ’s sake, and be done with it.”

  Taking a small key out of his pants pocket, he unlocked a small wire door in the grating.

  “Don’t try to pass anything but the paper he has to sign or it’ll go hard on you both. I’ve got my eyes wide open.”

  Raisl unclasped a grayed cloth handbag and took out a folded envelope.

  “This is the paper I promised I would give you,” she said in Russian to Yakov. “The Prosecuting Attorney says it’s your last chance.”

  “So that’s why you came,” he said in vehement Yiddish, “to get me to confess lies I’ve resisted for two years. To betray me again.”

  “It was the only way I could get in,” Raisl said. “But it’s not why I came, I came to cry.” She gasped a little. Her mouth fell open, the lips contorted; she wept. Tears flowed through her fingers as she pressed them to her eyes. Her shoulders shook.

  He felt, as he watched her, the weight of the blood in his heart.

  The guard rolled another cigarette, lit it, and smoked slowly.

  This is where we left off, thought Yakov. The last time I saw her she was crying like this, and here she is still crying. In the meantime I’ve been two years in prison without cause, in solitary confinement, and chains. I’ve suffered freezing cold, filth, lice, the degradation of those searches, and she’s still crying.

  “What are you crying for?” he asked.

  “For you, for me, for the world.”

  She was as she wept, a frail woman, lanky, small-breasted, worn and sad. Who would have thought so frail? As she wept she moved him. He had learned about tears.

  “What’s there to do here but think, so I’ve thought,” Yakov said after a while. “I’ve thought about our life from beginning to end and I can’t blame you for more than I blame myself. If you give little you get less, though of some things I got more than I deserved. Also, it takes me a long time to learn. Some people have to make the same mistake seven times before they know they’ve made it. That’s my type and I’m sorry. I’m also sorry I stopped sleeping with you. I was out to stab myself, so I stabbed you. Who else was so close to me? Still I’ve suffered in this prison and I’m not the same man I once was. What more can I say, Raisl? If I had my life to live over, you’d have less to cry about, so stop crying.”

  “Yakov,” she said, when she had wiped her eyes with her fingers, “I brought this confession paper here so they would let me talk to you, not because I want you to sign it. I don’t. Still, if you wanted to what could I say? Should I say stay in prison? What I also came to tell you is maybe not such good news. I came to say I’ve given birth to a child. After I ran away I found out I was pregnant. I was ashamed and frightened, but at the same time I was happy I was no longer barren and could have a baby.”

  There’s no bottom to my bitterness, he thought.

  He nailed at the wooden walls of the pen with both fists. The guard sternly ordered him to stop, so he beat himself instead, his face and head. She looked on with shut eyes.

  Afterwards, when it was over, except what was left of his anguish, he said, “So if you weren’t barren, what was the matter?”

  She looked away, then at him. “Who knows? Some women conceive late. With conception you need luck.”

  Luck I was short of, he thought, so I blamed her.

  “Boy or girl?” Yakov asked.

  She smiled at her hands. “A boy, Chaiml, after my grandfather.”

  “How old now?”

  “Almost a year and a half.”

  “It couldn’t be mine?”

  “How could it be?”

  “Too bad,” he sighed. “Where is he now?”

  “With Papa. That’s why I went back, I couldn’t take care of him alone any more. Ah, Yakov, it’s not all raisins and almonds. I’ve gone back to the shtetl but they blame me for your fate. I tried to take up my little dairy business but I might just as well be selling pork. The rabbi calls me to my face, pariah. The child will think his name is bastard.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “Yakov,” she said, “I’m sorry for what you’re suffering. When I heard it was you I tore my hair; but I figured you’d also be sorry for me. Please, it might make things easier if you wouldn’t mind saying you are my son’s father. Still, if you can’t you can’t. I don’t want to add to your burdens.”

  “Who’s the father, some goy I’ll bet.”

  “If it makes you feel better he was a Jew, a musician. He came, he went, I forgot him. He fathered the child but he’s not his father. Whoever acts the father is the father. My father’s the father but he’s only two steps from death’s door. One knock and I’m twice widowed.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Diabetes, though he drags himself around. He worries about you, he worries about me and the child. He wakes up cursing himself for not having been born rich. He prays every time he thinks of it. I take care of him the best I can. He sleeps on a bag of rags pushed to the wall. He needs food, rest, medicine. The little we get comes from charity. One or two of the rich send their servants over with this or that, but when they see me they hold their noses.”

  “Has he talked to anybody about me?”

  “To everybody. He runs everywhere, sick as he is.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They tear their hair. They beat their chests. They thank God it wasn’t them. Some collect money. Some say they will make protests. Some are afraid to do anything because it may annoy the Christians and make things worse. Some are pessimistic but a few have hope. Still, there’s more going on than I know.”

  “If it doesn’t go faster I won’t be here to find out what.”

  “Don’t say that, Yakov. I went myself to see some lawyers in Kiev. Two of them swear they will help you but nobody can move without an indictment.”

  “So I’ll wait,” said Yakov. Before her eyes he shrank in size.

  “I’ve brought you some haleh and cheese and an apple in a little pack,” Raisl said, “but they made me leave it at the warden’s office. Don’t forget to ask for it. It’s goat’s cheese but I don’t think you’ll notice.”

  “Thanks,” said Yakov wearily. He said, after a sigh, “Listen, Raisl, I’ll write you a paper that the child’s mine.”

  Her eyes glistened. “God will bless you.”

  “Never mind God. Have you got a piece of paper, I’ll write something down. Show it to the rabbi’s father, the old melamed. He knows my handwriting and he’s a kinder man than his son.”

  “I have paper and pencil,” she whispered nervously, “but I’m afraid to give them to you with this guard in the room. They warned me not to hand you anything but the confession and to take nothing but that from you or they would arrest me for attempting to help you escape.”

  The guard was restless and again came forward. “There’s nothing more to talk about. Either sign the paper or go back to your cell.”

  “Have you got a pencil?” the fixer asked.

  The guard took a fat fountain pen from his tunic pocket, and gave it to him through the opening in the grating.

  He stayed to watch but Yakov waited until he had withdrawn.

  “Give me the confession,” he said to Raisl in Russian.

  Raisl handed him the envelope. Yakov removed the paper, unfolded it, and read: “I, Yakov Bok, confess that I witnessed the murder of Zhenia Golov, the son of Marfa Golov, by my Jewish compatriots. They killed him on the night of March 20, 1911, upstairs in the stable in the brickyard belonging to Nikolai Maximo-vitch Lebedev, merchant of the Lukianovsky District.”

  Under that a heavy line was drawn on which to sign his name.

  Yakov placed the paper on the shelf before him and wrote in Russian on the line for his name: “Every word is a lie.”

  On the envelope, pausing between words to remember the letters for the next, he wrote in Yiddish, “I declare myself to be the father of Chaim, the infant son of my wife, Raisl Bok. He was conceived before she left me. Please help the mother and child, and for this, amid all my troubles, I’ll be grateful. Yakov Bok.”

  She told him the date and he wrote it down, “February 27, 1913.” Yakov passed it to her through the opening in the grating.

  Raisl slipped the envelope into her coat sleeve and handed the guard the confession paper. He folded it at once, and thrust it into his tunic pocket. After examining the contents of Raisl’s handbag and tapping her coat pockets he told her to go.

  “Yakov,” she wept, “come home.”

  
IX

  He was chained to the wall again. Things went badly. Better not have been unchained, the getting back was so bad. He beat the clanking chains against the wall until it was scarred white where he stood. They let him beat the wall. Otherwise he slept. But for the searches he would have slept through the day. He slept the sleep of the dead with his feet in stocks. He slept through the end of winter and into spring. Kogin said it was April. Two years. The searches went on except when he was sick with dysentery. The Deputy Warden did not come near him then, though Berezhinsky sometimes searched him alone. Once after the fixer was sick the cell was hosed down and a fire started in the stove. An old pink-faced man came into the cell dressed in winter clothes. He wore a black cape and black gaiters and grasped a gnarled cane. Berezhinsky followed him in, carrying a slender chair with a delicate back, and the old man sat in it erectly, several feet from the fixer, holding the cane with gray-mittened hands. His watery eyes wandered. He told Yakov he was a former jurist of high repute, and that he came with good news. An excitement so thick it felt like sickness surged through the fixer. He asked what good news. The former jurist said this was the year of the three-hundredth anniversary of the rule of the House of Romanov and that the Tsar, in celebration, would issue a ukase amnestying certain classes of criminals. Yakov’s name would be listed among them. He was to be pardoned and permitted to return to his village. The old man’s face flushed with pleasure. The prisoner clung to the wall, too burdened to speak. Then he asked, Pardoned as a criminal or pardoned as innocent? The former jurist testily said what difference did it make so long as he was let out of prison. It was impossible to erase the sins of the past, but it was not impossible for a humane ruler, a Christian gentleman, to forgive an evil act. The old man sneezed without snuff and peered at his silver watch. Yakov said he wanted a fair trial, not a pardon. If they ordered him to leave the prison without a trial they would have to shoot him first. Don’t be foolish, said the former jurist, how can you go on suffering like this, caked in filth? The fixer moved his chains restlessly. I have no choice, he said. I have just offered you one. That’s not choice, said Yakov. The former jurist tried to convince the prisoner, then gave up in irritation. It’s easier to reason with a peasant. He rose and shook his cane at the fixer. How can we help you, he shouted, if you are so pigheaded? Berezhinsky, who had been listening at the spy hole, opened the door and the old man left the cell. The guard came in for the chair but before taking it, he let Yakov urinate in the can, then dumped the contents on his head. The fixer was left in chains that night. He thought that whenever he had been through the worst, there was always worse.

  One day, during Yakov’s third summer in prison, his manacles and shackles were unlocked. Immediately his heart beat heavily and when he touched it with his hand the hand beat like his heart. In an hour the warden, who had aged since the fixer had last seen him and walked with shorter steps, brought in a new indictment in a brown envelope, a sheaf of papers twice thicker than the last. The fixer took the papers and read them slowly and frantically, fearing he would never get to the end of them; but he had discovered at once what he had expected: that the blood murder charge had been violently revived. Now they are serious again, he thought. The reference to sexual experiences with the boy, and to activities with a gang of Jewish housebreakers and smugglers operating out of the cellar of the Kiev synagogue —all the insane lies from Marfa Golov’s letter—were omitted. Once again Yakov Bok was accused of murdering the innocent boy in order to drain his body of blood necessary for the baking of Passover matzos and cakes.

  This was affirmed by Professor Manilius Zagreb, who with his distinguished colleague, the surgeon Dr. Sergei Bui, had twice performed the autopsy of Zhenia’s remains. Both categorically stated that the vicious wounds had been inflicted in prearranged clusters with a time interval between each cluster in order to prolong the torture and facilitate the bleeding. It was estimated that one litre of blood was collected from each set of wounds, and that a total of five litres of blood was collected in bottles. Such was also the conclusion of Father Anastasy, the well-known specialist in Jewish affairs, who had made a close study of the Talmud, his reasons given in minute detail for eight single-spaced pages. And it was also the conclusion of Yefim Balik, the Investigating Magistrate. He had carefully reviewed the entire evidence and agreed with its “direction and findings.”

  How the bloodthirsty crime was committed was described in this indictment much as it had been by Gru-beshov at the cave, more than two years ago, “with careful note taken of the fanatic Hasidic tsadik, seen in the brickyard by the foreman Proshko; who had no doubt helped the accused drain the necessary blood from the boy’s still living body, and also assisted him in transporting the corpse to the cave where two horrified boys had found it.” And related evidence omitted from the previous indictment was included in this. It was stated that half a bag of matzo flour was “hidden away” in Yakov Bok’s stable room, together with certain hard pieces of already baked matzo no doubt containing the innocent blood, which both the Jews “in all probability” had eaten. And the usual bloodstained rag, “admitted by the accused to be a piece of his shirt” had been uncovered in the same room. According to the testimony of Vasya Shiskovsky, a bottle of bright-red blood was seen by him and Zhenia on a table in Bok’s stable room, but it had disappeared when the police searched for it. And a sack of carpenter’s tools containing bloodstained awls and knives had been found in the same room after the fixer’s arrest, “despite a plot later carried out by Jewish co-conspirators to destroy this and other significant evidence by burning down the brickyard stable, a plot which they ultimately achieved.”