The Fixer (37 page)

  Yakov said he wanted to live.

  “Please,” said Ostrovsky.

  4

  He was not, on his return to the cell, locked in chains. They had been torn out of the wall and the holes cemented. The fixer, all but weightless, sat on the edge of the wooden bed, his head in rarefied air, his body roaring with excitement. He listened to the noise for half an hour before he knew he was listening to his swarming clanking thoughts. Shmuel was dead, let him rest in peace. He had deserved better than he had got. A lawyer, Ostrovsky, had been to see him. He had spoken of the trial; there was a chance. Another lawyer, a reformed Ukrainian anti-Semite, would defend him in court before a prejudiced judge and ignorant jury. But that was all in the future, when, nobody could say. Now he was at least no longer anonymous to all but his prosecutors and jailers. He was not unknown. There had blown up from somewhere a public opinion. Not every Russian believed him guilty. The fog was thinning a little. Newspapers were printing articles casting doubt on the accusation. Some lawyers were openly blaming Marfa Golov. A doctors’ society had protested his imprisonment. He had become—who would have thought it?—a public person. Yakov laughed and wept a little. It was fantastic to believe. He tried to be hopeful but was immersed in fears of all there was still to live through.

  “Why me?” he asked himself for the ten thousandth time. Why did it have to happen to a poor, half-ignorant fixer? Who needed this kind of education? Education he would have been satisfied to get from books. Each time he answered his question he answered it differently. He saw it as part personal fate—his various shortcomings and mistakes—but also as force of circumstance, though how you separated one from the other—if one really could—was beyond him. Who, for instance,
had
to go find Nikolai Maximovitch lying drunk in the snow and drag him home to start off an endless series of miserable events? Was that the word of God, inexorable Necessity? Go find your fate—try first the fat Russian with his face in the snow. Go be kind to an anti-Semite and suffer for it. And from him to his daughter with the crippled leg was only one crippled step, and then another into the brickyard. And a crippled hop into prison. If he had stayed in the shtetl it would never have happened. At least not this. Something else would have happened, better not think what.

  Once you leave you’re out in the open; it rains and snows. It snows history, which means what happens to somebody starts in a web of events outside the personal. It starts of course before he gets there. We’re all in history, that’s sure, but some are more than others, Jews more than some. If it snows not everybody is out in it getting wet. He had been doused. He had to his painful surprise, stepped into history more deeply than others— it had worked out so. Why he would never know. Because he had taken to reading Spinoza? An idea makes you adventurous? Maybe, who knows? Anyway, if he hadn’t been Yakov Bok, a born Jew, he would not have been, to start with, an outlaw in the Lukianovsky when they were looking for one; he would never have been arrested. They might still be looking. It was, you could say, history’s doing, it was full of all sorts of barriers and limitations, as though certain doors had been boarded up in a house and to get out you had to jump out of a window. If you jumped you might land on your head. In history, thicker at times than at others, too much happens. Ostrovsky had explained this to him. If conditions were ripe whatever was likely to happen was waiting for you to come along so it could happen. With less history around you might walk by or through it: it looked like rain but the sun was shining. In the snow he had once come upon Nikolai Maximovitch Lebedev wearing his Black Hundreds button. Nobody lived in Eden any more.

  Yet though his young mother and father had remained all their poor lives in the shtetl, the historical evil had galloped in to murder them there. So the “open,” he thought, was anywhere. In or out, it was history that counted—the world’s bad memory. It remembered the wrong things. So for a Jew it was the same wherever he went, he carried a remembered pack on his back—a condition of servitude, diminished opportunity, vulnerability. No, there was no need to go to Kiev, or Moscow, or any place else. You could stay in the shtetl and trade in air or beans, dance at weddings or funerals, spend your life in the synagogue, die in bed and pretend you had died in peace, but a Jew wasn’t free. Because the government destroyed his freedom by reducing his worth. Therefore wherever he was or went and whatever happened was perilous. A door swung open at his approach. A hand reached forth and plucked him in by his Jewish beard—Yakov Bok, a freethinking Jew in a brick factory in Kiev, yet any Jew, any plausible Jew—to be the Tsar’s adversary and victim; chosen to murder the corpse His Majesty had furnished free; to be imprisoned, starved, degraded, chained like an animal to a wall although he was innocent. Why? because no Jew was innocent in a corrupt state, the most visible sign of its corruption its fear and hatred of those it persecuted. Ostrovsky had reminded him that there was much more wrong with Russia than its anti-Semitism. Those who persecute the innocent were themselves never free. Instead of satisfying him this thought filled him with rage.

  It had happened—he was back to this again—because he was Yakov Bok and had an extraordinary amount to learn. He had learned, it wasn’t easy; the experience was his; it was worse than that, it was he. He was the experience. It also meant that now he was somebody else than he had been, who would have thought it? So I learned a little, he thought, I learned this but what good will it do me? Will it open the prison doors? Will it allow me to go out and take up my poor life again? Will it free me a little once I am free? Or have I only learned to know what my condition is—that the ocean is salty as you are drowning, and though you knew it you are drowned? Still, it was better than not knowing. A man had to learn, it was his nature.

  Being without chains goaded impatience, what could he do with himself? Time began to move again, like a locomotive with two cars, three cars, four cars, a cluster of days, then two weeks gone, and to his horror, another season. It was autumn and he trembled at the thought of winter. The cold thought hurt his head. Suslov-Smirnov, an excitable, loose-boned long man with thick-lensed eyeglasses on a thin nose, and a bushy head of blond hair, had come four times to ask questions and take voluminous notes on thin sheets of paper—Ostrovsky had been forbidden to return. The lawyer had embraced the prisoner and promised—”Although we are hindered by stupid officials dragging their feet”—to move with all possible dispatch. “But in the meantime you must be careful of every step you take. Walk, as they say, on eggs, Mr. Bok. On eggs.” He nodded, winked with both eyes, and pressed four fingers to his lips.

  “Do you know,” Yakov said, “that they killed Bibi-kov?”

  “We know,” whispered Suslov-Smirnov, looking around in fright, “but we can’t prove it. Say nothing or you’ll make your situation worse.”

  “I’ve already said it,” the fixer said, “to Grubeshov.”

  Suslov-Smirnov wrote it down quickly, then erased it and left. He said he would return but didn’t, and no one would tell the fixer why. Have I made still another mistake? Again the indictment withdrawn? Yakov slowly tore at his flesh with his nails. The rest of another month leaked by. He again kept count of the days with bits of paper torn from the toilet paper strips. He weighed, he thought, a ton, all grief. His little hope— the hope he had foolishly dared—flickered, waned, withered. His legs were swollen and his back teeth, loose. He was at the lowest ebb of his life when the warden appeared with an immaculate paper, saluted, and said his trial was about to begin.

  5

  All night the cell was crowded with prisoners who had lived and died there. They were broken-faced, greenish-gray men, with haunted eyes, scarred shaved heads and ragged bodies, crowding the cell. Many stared wordlessly at the fixer and he at them, their eyes lit with longing for life. If one disappeared two appeared in his place. So many prisoners, thought the prisoner, it’s a country of prisoners. They’ve freed the serfs, or so they say, but not the innocent prisoners. He beheld long lines of them, gaunt-eyed men with starved mouths, lines stretching through the thick walls to improverished cities, the vast empty steppe, great snowy virgin forests, to the shabby wooden work camps in Siberia. Trofim Kogin was among them. He had broken his leg and lay in the snow as the long lines slowly moved past him. He lay with his eyes shut and mouth twitching but did not call for help.

  “Help!” cried Yakov in the dark.

  This night before his trial, the fixer was oppressed by fear of death and though he was deathly sleepy he would not sleep. When his heavy eyes shut momentarily he saw someone standing over him with a knife raised to rip his throat. So the fixer forced himself to stay awake. He threw aside his blanket to make it too cold to sleep. Yakov pinched his arms and thighs. If anyone attempted to sneak into the cell he would shout when the door opened. To cry out was his only defense. It might scare the assassins if they thought any of the prisoners in the cells down the corridor would hear, and guess the Jew was being murdered. If they heard, after a while it would get to the outside that the officials had assassinated him rather than bring him to trial.

  The wind wailed mutely in the prison yard. His heart was like a rusted chain, his muscles taut, as though each had been bound with wire. Even in the cold air he sweated. Amid the darkly luminous prisoners he saw spies waiting to kill him. One was the gray-haired warden with a gleaming two-headed ax. He tried to hide his crossed eye behind his hand but it shone like a jewel through his fingers. The Deputy Warden, his fly open, held a black bullwhip behind his back. And though the Tsar wore a white mask over his face and a black on the back of his head, Yakov recognized him standing in the far corner of the cell, dropping green drops into a glass of hot milk.

  “It will make you sleep, Yakov Shepsovitch.”

  “After you, Your Majesty.”

  The Tsar faded in the dark. The spies disappeared but the lines of prisoners were endless.

  What’s next, the fixer thought, and when will it happen? Will the trial begin, or will they call it off at the last minute? Suppose they withdraw the Act of Indictment in the morning, hoping I collapse or go insane before they give me another. Many men have lived in prison longer and some under worse conditions, but if I have to live another year in this cell I would rather die. Then the sad-eyed prisoners who crowded the cell began to disappear. First those who were standing around the wooden bed, then those squeezed together in the center, then those at the walls, and finally the long lines of sunken-faced men, moaning women, and ghostly children with glazed eyes in purple sockets, extending through the prison walls into the snowy distance.

  “Are you Jews or Russians?” the fixer asked them.

  “We are Russian prisoners.”

  “You look like Jews,” he said.

  Yakov fell asleep. Knowing he had, he frantically strove to awake, hearing himself sob as he slept, but it was growing lighter in the cell and he soon saw Bibikov sitting at a table in his white summer suit, stirring a spoonful of strawberry jelly in his tea.

  “This would hardly be the time for them to kill you, Yakov Shepsovitch,” he said. “Anyone would know it was a put-up job, and it would arouse an outcry. What you must watch out for is the sudden and unexpected peril, the apparently accidental. So sleep now, without fear for your life, and if you should ever manage to get out of prison, keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others.”

  “Your honor,” said Yakov, “I’ve had an extraordinary insight.”

  “You don’t say? What is it?”

  “Something in myself has changed. I’m not the same man I was. I fear less and hate more.”

  Before daylight Zhenia came to him with his punctured face and bleeding chest and begged for the return of his life. Yakov laid both hands on the boy and tried to raise him from the dead but it wouldn’t work.

  In the morning the fixer was still alive. He had wakened in astonishment, his mood mixed, anticipation with depression. It was the end of October, two and a half years after his arrest in Nikolai Maximovitch’s brickyard. Kogin told him the date when he came in with the prisoner’s breakfast. This morning the gruel was boiled rice in hot milk, eight ounces of black bread, a yellow piece of butter, and an enamel pot of sweet-smelling tea, with a chunk of lemon and two lumps of sugar. There was also a cucumber and a small onion to chew on to strengthen his teeth and reduce the swelling of his legs. Kogin wasn’t feeling well. His hands trembled when he put down the food. He looked flushed and said he wanted to get home to bed but the warden had ordered him to stay on till the prisoner had left for the courthouse.

  “Full security regulations, the warden said.”

  Yakov did not touch the food.

  “You’d better eat it,” Kogin said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Eat anyway, it’ll be a long day in court.”

  “I’m too nervous. If I ate now I’d vomit.”

  Berezhinsky entered the cell. He seemed uneasy, not knowing whether to smile or mourn. He smiled uneasily.

  “Well, your day has come. Here’s the trial now.”

  “What about my clothes?” Yakov asked. “Will I have to wear the prison ones or can I have my own?”

  He wondered whether they were going to hand him a silken caftan and a round Hasidic fur hat.

  “You’ll find out about that,” said Berezhinsky.

  Both guards accompanied the prisoner to the bathhouse. He undressed and was allowed to soap and wash himself from a bucket of warm water. The warmth of the water brought secret tears to his eyes. He washed slowly with handfuls of water from the bucket. He washed the smells and dirt away.

  Yakov was given a comb and carefully combed his long hair and beard, but then the prison barber appeared and said he must shave his head.

  “No,” the fixer shouted. “Why should I look like a prisoner now when I didn’t before?”