The Fixer (4 page)

  He stared at Yakov with the bloody eye. The fixer’s foot itched but he didn’t touch it.

  Let him talk, he thought, yet he shivered.

  “Day after day they crap up the Motherland,” the boatman went on monotonously, “and the only way to save ourselves is to wipe them out. I don’t mean kill a Zhid now and then with a blow of the fist or kick in the head, but wipe them all out, which we’ve sometimes tried but never done as it should be done. I say we ought to call our menfolk together, armed with guns, knives, pitchforks, clubs—anything that will kill a Jew— and when the church bells begin to ring we move on the Zhidy quarter, which you can tell by the stink, routing them out of wherever they’re hiding—in attics, cellars, or ratholes—bashing in their brains, stabbing their herring-filled guts, shooting off their snotty noses, no exception made for young or old, because if you spare any they breed like rats and then the job’s to do all over again.

  “And then when we’ve slaughtered the whole cursed tribe of them—and the same is done in every province throughout Russia, wherever we can smoke them out—though we’ve got most of them nice and bunched up in the Pale—we’ll pile up the corpses and soak them with benzine and light fires that people will enjoy all over the world. Then when that’s done we hose the stinking ashes away and divide the rubles and jewels and silver and furs and all the other loot they stole, or give it back to the poor who it rightfully belongs to anyway. You can take my word—the time’s not far off when everything I say, we will do, because our Lord, who they crucified, wants his rightful revenge.”

  He dropped an oar and crossed himself.

  Yakov fought an impulse to do the same. His bag of prayer things fell with a plop into the Dnieper and sank like lead.

  
II

  Where do you go if you had been nowhere? He hid at first in the Jewish quarter, emerging stealthily from time to time to see what there was to see in the world, exploring, trying the firmness of the earth. Kiev, “the Jerusalem of Russia,” still awed and disquieted him. He had been there for a few hot summer days after being conscripted into the army, and now, again, he saw it with half the self—the other half worried about his worries. Still, as he wandered from street to street, the colors were light and pretty. A golden haze hung in the air in the late afternoons. The busy avenues were full of people, among them Ukrainian peasants in their native dress, gypsies, soldiers, priests. At night the white gas globes glowed in the streets and there were thick mists on the river. Kiev stood on three hills, and he remembered his first trembling sight of the city from the Nicholas Bridge—dotted with white houses with green roofs, churches and monasteries, their gold and silver domes floating above the green foliage. He wasn’t without an eye for a pretty scene, though that added nothing to his living. Still, a man was more than a workhorse, or so they said.

  The other way, across the glassy brown river—the way he had come on a dying horse—the steppe stretched out into the vast green distance. Only thirty versts and the shtetl was invisible, gone—poof!—lost, maybe expired. Though he felt homesick he knew he would never return, yet what would it come to? More than once Raisl had accused him of being afraid to leave and maybe it was true but at last it wasn’t. So I left, he thought, what good will it do me? Was she back? he wondered. He cursed her when he thought of her.

  He went where he had not been before, speaking in Russian to anyone who spoke to him—testing himself, he explained it to himself. Why should a man be afraid of the world? Because he was, if for no other reason. Numb with fear that he would be recognized as a Jew and ordered out, he stealthily watched from the gallery of a church as the peasants, some with knapsacks on their backs, knelt and prayed at the altar before a tall gold crucifix and a jeweled ikon of the Madonna, as the priest, a huge man in rich thick vestments, chanted the Orthodox service. The fixer had the shivers as he looked, and the strange odor of incense increased his nervousness. He almost rose out of his boots as he was touched on the arm and saw at his side a black-bearded hunchback who pointed to the peasants below smacking their heads against the flagstone floor and kissing it passionately. “Go thou and do likewise! Eat salted bread and listen to the truth!” The fixer quickly left.

  Stupefied that he dared the adventure, he afterwards descended to the Lavra catacombs—under the old monastery on the Pechersky hill overlooking the Dnieper— amid a group of frightened, pasty-faced peasants holding lit candles. They moved in a loose line along low, damp-smelling passages, where through barred windows he caught glimpses of the saints of the Orthodox Church lying in open coffins, covered with shabby cloths of red and gold. Small red lamps glowed in the walls under their ikons. In a candle-lit cell, as the line moved on, a monk with rattail hair to his shoulders held out a relic of “the hand of St. Andrew” for the faithful to kiss, and each knelt to touch the parchmented hand to his lips. But though Yakov had considered a quick kiss of the bony fingers, when his time came to kneel, he blew out his candle and groped his way on in the dark.

  Outside there was a crowd of beggars, some of them armless and legless cripples from the late war. Three were blind. One rolled his eyes inward. One bulged his so that they looked like fish eyes. And one read sonorously “by divine inspiration” from a book of gospels which he held in his hands. He stared at Yakov and Yakov stared at him.

  2

  He lived in the heart of the Jewish quarter in the Podol District in a teeming tenement hung with mattresses airing and rags of clothing drying, above a courtyard crowded with wooden workshops where everyone was busy but no one earned much of anything. They stayed alive. The fixer wanted better, at least better than he had had, too much of nothing. For a while, during the cold rains of late autumn, he confined himself to the Jewish section, but after the first snowfall in the city—about a month after he had arrived—he began to edge out again, looking for work. With his tool sack slung over his shoulder he trudged from street to street through the Podol and Plossky, the flat commercial districts reaching to the river, and went up the hills into neighborhoods forbidden to Jews to work in. He sought, he continued to say to himself, opportunities, though in seeking them he sometimes felt like a spy behind enemy lines. The Jewish quarter, unchanged in ages, swarmed and smelled. Its worldly goods was spiritual goods; all that was lacking was prosperity. The fixer, having left the shtetl, resented the lack. He had tried working for a brushmaker, a man with a foaming beard who had promised to teach him the business. The wages were soup. So he had gone back to being a fixer and it came also to nothing, sometimes soup. If a window was broken they stuffed it with rags and said a blessing. He offered to replace it for a pittance, and when he had done the work they gave him thanks, blessings, a plate of noodle soup. He lived frugally in a low-ceilinged cubicle, in a printer’s assistant’s flat—Aaron Latke’s, sleeping on a bench covered with a burlap sack; the flat was crowded with children and smelly feather beds, and the fixer, as he parted with kopeks and earned none, grew increasingly anxious. He must go where he could make a living or change his craft, maybe both. Among the goyim his luck might be better, it couldn’t be worse. Besides, what choice has a man who doesn’t know what his choices are? He meant in the world. So he walked out of the ghetto when no one was looking. In the snow he felt anonymous, in a sense unseen in his Russian cap and coat— any unemployed worker. Russians passed him without looking at him and he passed them. Having been told he did not look Jewish he now believed it. Yakov trudged in the snow up the hill to the Kreshchatik, the broad main street, trying kiosks, shops, public buildings, but finding little to do, a few odd jobs, payment in greenish coppers. At night in his cubicle, a glass of hot tea cupped in his reddened hands, when he thought of returning to the shtetl he thought of death.

  Latke, when the fixer said this aloud, looked at him in popeyed horror. He was a man with arthritic hands and eight half-starving children. The pain hindered his work but not his labor.

  “For God’s sake, patience,” he said. “You’re not without brains and that’s the beginning of luck. Afterwards, as they say, your ox will calve.”

  “To have luck you need it. I’ve had little luck.”

  “You’ve just come green from the country, so at least be patient till you know where you are.”

  So the fixer went looking for luck.

  One desperate evening, the gas lamps casting a greenish glow on the snow, Yakov, trudging at twilight in the Plossky District, came upon a man lying with his face in the trodden snow. He hesitated a minute before turning him over, afraid to be involved in trouble. The man was a fattish, bald-headed Russian of about sixty-five, his fur cap in the snow, his heavy face splotched a whitish red and blue, snow on his mustache. He was breathing and reeked of drink. The fixer at once noticed the black and white button pinned to his coat, the two-headed eagle of the Black Hundreds. Let him shift for himself, he thought. Frightened, he ran to the corner, then ran back. Grabbing the anti-Semite under the arms he began to drag him to the doorway of the house in front of which he had fallen, when he heard a cry down the street. A girl wearing a green shawl over a green dress was running crookedly towards them. At first he thought she was a crippled child but then saw she was a young woman with a crippled leg.

  She knelt, brushed the snow from the fat man’s face, shook him and said breathlessly, “Papa, get up! Papa, this can’t go on.”

  “I ought to have gone for him,” she said to Yakov, cracking her knuckles against her breast. “This is the second time this month he’s fallen in the street. When he drinks in the tavern it becomes an impossible situation. Kindly help me get him home, sir. We live only a few doors from here.”

  “Take his legs,” said Yakov.

  With the girl’s help he half carried, half dragged the fat Russian up the street to the three-story yellow brick house with a wrought-iron awning above the door. The girl called the porter, and he and the fixer, she hobbling up after them, carried her father up the stairs into a large-roomed, well-furnished flat on the first floor. They laid him on a leather couch near the tile stove in the bedroom. A Pekinese began to yelp, then growled at the fixer. The girl picked the dog up, deposited it in another room, and at once returned. The dog barked shrilly through the door.

  As the porter removed the man’s wet shoes he stirred and groaned.

  “With God’s help,” he muttered.

  “Papa,” said his daughter, “we owe thanks to this good man for assisting you after your accident. He found you face down in the snow. If not for him you would have smothered.”

  Her father opened his humid eyes. “Glory be to God.” He crossed himself and began quietly to cry. She crossed herself and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  As she was unbuttoning her father’s overcoat, Yakov, after staying for a last deep breath of the warmth, left the flat and went down the stairs, relieved to be out.

  The girl called to him in a tight high voice from the top of the stairs and quickly hobbled down after him, holding to the banister. Her face was sharp, her green eyes searching, hungry. She seemed about twenty-five, slightly built, her torso long, with thick honey-colored hair that she wore loose around the shoulders. She wasn’t pretty but she wasn’t plain, and although he was sorry for her crippled leg he felt for her a strange momentary revulsion.

  She asked him who he was, not quite looking at him, her eyes lowered, then shifting to a direct glance. She stared at the sack of tools on his shoulder.

  He told her little: he was a stranger, recently from the provinces. It occurred to him then to remove his cap.

  “Please come back tomorrow,” she said. “Papa says he would like to thank you when he is in a better frame of mind, but I will tell you frankly you may expect something more than mere thanks. My father is Nikolai Maximovitch Lebedev—semi-retired—he was already retired but had to take over his brother’s business affairs at his death—and I am Zinaida Nikolaevna. Please call on us in the morning when Papa is himself. He’s usually at his best then, though never at his very best since my poor mother’s death.”

  Yakov, without giving his name, said he would return in the morning and left.

  Back in his cubicle in Aaron Latke’s flat, he wondered what was “more than mere thanks.” Obviously the girl meant some sort of reward, possibly a ruble or two, and with luck, five. But he had doubts whether to go back there. Should he take a reward from a self-advertised Jew hater? He hadn’t for a minute been comfortable in his presence, or the girl’s. Then either better not go, or tell the old man who he was indebted to and leave. But that wasn’t what he wanted to do. Yakov sweated in his thoughts, the drunkard’s two-headed eagle staring him in both eyes. He slept badly and woke with a new thought. Why not a ruble or two if it kept a Jew alive? What better service from an anti-Semite? He recalled a Russian saying: “A fearful wolf should stay out of the forest,” but decided to go anyway, take a chance, or how would he know what went on in the world?

  So he returned to the house in the Plossky without his bag of tools, though he could not dress up, nor did he want to. Zinaida Nikolaevna, wearing an embroidered peasant blouse and skirt, with two green ribbons plaited into her hair and some strings of yellow glass beads at her throat, led him to her father’s bedroom. Nikolai Maximovitch, in a loose wadded robe with a fur collar, sat at a table by a curtained window, a huge book open before him. On the wall behind hung a large chart in the form of a tree showing by way of white printed slots on its thickest black branches the descent of Nicholas II from Adam. A framed portrait of the Tsar sitting with the pale-faced Tsarevitch hung above that. The house was overheated. The little dog snarled at the fixer and had to be carried out of the room by the cook.

  Nikolai Maximovitch rose slowly, an old man with wrinkled, red-rimmed, wet melancholy eyes, and welcomed Yakov without embarrassment. The fixer, thinking of his Black Hundreds button felt for him contempt, and a portion of the same for himself. His throat tightened. Though he wasn’t trembling he felt he might be.