The Fixer (6 page)

  Gentlemen called on her of course, Zina went on, but unfortunately not always the most sensitive or worthy, a situation more than one of her friends had to put up with. Sensitive, dependable men were rare, although such persons could be found in all classes, not necessarily gentry.

  He listened with one ear, aware that her glance traced his every move. Why does she bother? he asked himself. What can she see in a man like me whose advantages are all disadvantages if I have it right? I have little wit in Russian, it’s a heavy language for me. And if I said “Jew” aloud she’d run in six directions. Yet she often entered his thoughts. He had been a long time without a woman and wondered what it would be like to be in bed with her. He had never had a Russian woman, though Haskel Dembo had slept with a peasant girl and said it was the same as with any Jewess. The crippled leg, Yakov thought, would not bother him.

  He finished papering the fourth room that night and except for the woodwork the job was done. Two days later when it was all but finished, Nikolai Maximovitch unsteadily ascended the stairs to inspect the flat. He went from room to room, running his fingers over the wallpaper, looking up at the ceilings.

  “Outstanding,” he said. “Quite outstanding. An honest and attractive piece of work, Yakov Ivanovitch. I congratulate you.”

  Later he said as though in afterthought, “You must excuse me for asking, but what are your political predilections? Surely you’re not a Socialist? I ask in the strictest confidence without attempting to pry, and not in the least accusatorily. I ask, in a word, because I am interested in your future.”

  “I am not a political person,” Yakov answered. “The world’s full of it but it’s not for me. Politics is not in my nature.”

  “Very good, indeed. Neither am I, and much better off in the bargain if anyone should ask. Yakov Ivanovitch, don’t think I will soon forget the quality of your craftsmanship. If you should care to go on working for me, though in another, and may I say, advanced capacity, I would be more than happy to employ you. The truth of the matter is that I am the owner of a small brickworks nearby, although in a contiguous district. I inherited it from my elder brother, a lifelong bachelor who went to his final reward half a year ago after suffering from an incurable disease. I tried to sell the factory but the offers were so disgraceful that, although I have little heart or, at this time of my life, head for business, I have kept it going, although, I confess, barely profitably. My foreman Proshko is in charge, an excellent technical person who is otherwise an ignorant man, and confidentially, the drivers who work under him have not been accounting for every brick that leaves the yard. I would like you to go in as a sort of overseer to handle accounts and, on the whole, look after my interests. My brother was involved in every phase of the operations, but I have little patience with bricks.”

  Yakov, though he had listened with excitement to the proposition, confessed he was without experience in business. “I know nothing about bookkeeping.”

  “Common sense is what’s needed in business once honesty is assured,” said Nikolai Maximovitch. “What there is to learn you will learn as you go along. I usually visit for an hour one or two mornings a week, and what you don’t know I’ll try to help you with, though I frankly confess my knowledge is limited. There’s no need to protest, Yakov Ivanovitch. My daughter, whose judgment in these matters I respect, has the highest opinion of your merit, and you may believe me, I thoroughly share it. She considers you a man of sobriety and sound sense, and I am confident that after you have mastered the fundamentals you will do a responsible and effective job. During the period of your—ah—apprenticeship I will pay you forty-five rubles monthly. I hope that’s satisfactory. But there is another advantage for you that I should mention, frankly one that will work to our mutual benefit. My brother converted part of a loft over the brickyard stable into a warm and comfortable room, and you may live there without payment of rent if you accept my offer.”

  The forty-five rubles astounded and tempted the fixer.

  “What is it an overseer does? Excuse the question, but I’m not a man of the world.”

  “Worldliness is vanity, it doesn’t appeal to me. The overseer manages the business end of the enterprise. We manufacture about two thousand bricks daily—many fewer than we used to—a thousand or so more during the building season, not quite so many this time of the year; and it has been fewer lately although we have a contract with the Kiev Municipal Council for several thousands of bricks. The Tsar himself has given orders for civic improvements to be made before the Romanov Jubilee, and the Municipality is tearing up wooden walks and laying down entire streets of brick sidewalk, though this is done of course when the weather permits, not in the winter snow. And we also hold a small contract for bricks for the restoration of certain fortifications above the Dnieper. Yes, I would expect you to keep track of orders received and, to be sure, of the exact number of bricks manufactured as well as those carted out. These figures you will get from Proshko, but there are ways of checking. You will also send out statements requesting payment and enter payments received in the ledger. Once or twice weekly you will turn over bank drafts and other monies to me, and in the meantime keep them safe in the strongbox. Proshko will of course retain the responsibilities of the technical foreman, and I will tell him I expect him to place all orders for supplies through you. You will also make out the wages inventory and pay the workers at the end of the month.”

  Though beset by self-doubt and every kind of fear, Yakov was thinking this might be his important chance. A few months’ experience at this kind of work and other opportunities might open up for him. “I’ll think it over carefully,” he said, but before Nikolai Maximovitch had descended the stairs, he had accepted.

  The landlord returned with a vodka bottle to wet the bargain. Yakov had two drinks and his uneasiness wore off. He was preparing himself for a better future, he told himself. He slept for a while on the floor and later finished the last of the woodwork, once more uneasy.

  It was nightfall. After he had swept and cleaned up, soaked the paintbrushes in turpentine, and washed, he heard Zina limping up the stairs. She was wearing a dress of blue silk, her hair up and encircled with a white ribbon, her cheeks and lips delicately rouged. She invited Yakov to eat with her again. “In celebration of the completion of your fine work, and most of all, to your future relationship with Papa, though he has already retired and we shall be alone.”

  He had the old excuses, was even a little irritated by the invitation and wanted to escape, but she would not hear of it. “Come, Yakov Ivanovitch, there’s more to life than work.”

  It was news to him. Still, he thought, the job’s done here and this is the last I’ll see of her. So what’s wrong with farewell?

  On the kitchen table Zina had laid out a feast, even some food he had never seen before. There were stuffed cucumbers, raw Danube herring, fat sausages, pickled sturgeon with mushrooms, assorted meats, wine, cakes and cherry brandy. The fixer, overwhelmed by the spread, felt at first self-conscious. If you’ve had nothing you’re afraid of too much. But he swept that aside and ate hungrily those things he had eaten before. He sucked the red wine through delicious chunks of white bread.

  Zina, open and happy, and looking more attractive than he had ever seen, picked here and there at sweet and spicy things and filled her wineglass often. Her sharp face was flushed, she talked about herself and laughed at nothing at all. Although he tried to think of her as possibly a friend she remained strange to him. He was strange to himself. Once, staring at the white tablecloth, he thought of Raisl but put her out of his mind. He finished the meal—he had never in his life eaten so much —with two glasses of brandy, and only then began to enjoy the “party.”

  When she cleared the table Zina’s breath was heavy. She brought out a guitar, plucked it, and in a high thin voice sang, “Ech, my pack is heavy.” It was a sad song and filled him with mild melancholy. He had thought of getting up to leave, but the kitchen was warm and it was pleasant to sit there listening to the guitar. Then she sang, “Come on, come on, my darling angel, come and dance with me.” When she put down her guitar, Zina looked at him in a way she never had before. Yakov understood at once where they were. Excitement and foreboding flowed into one feeling. No, he thought, it’s a Russian woman. If she slept with me and found out who I was she’d cut her throat. Then he thought, it’s not always so, there are some who wouldn’t mind. For himself he was willing to experience what there was to experience. But let her lead.

  “Yakov Ivanovitch,” Zina said, pouring herself another glassful of wine which she at once drank down, “do you believe in romantic love? I ask because I think you guard yourself against it.”

  “Whether I do or don’t it doesn’t come easily to me.”

  “I heartily agree that it oughtn’t to come too easily,” Zina said, “but it seems to me that those who are serious about life—perhaps too serious—are slow to respond to certain changes in the climate of feeling. What I mean to say, Yakov Ivanovitch, is that it’s possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.”

  “It’s possible,” he said.

  “Do you love me—just a little, Yakov Ivanovitch?” she asked quickly. “I’ve sometimes noticed you looking at me as though you might. For instance, you smiled at me quite delightfully a few minutes ago, and it warmed my heart. I dare ask because you yourself are very modest and tend to be conscious—overconscious, I would say—that we are from different classes, though I believe much alike as people.”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t say I love you.”

  Zina flushed. Her eyelids fluttered. After a long minute she sighed and said in a smaller voice, “Very well, then, do you like me at all?”

  “Yes, you have been kind to me.”

  “And I like you too, indeed I do. I think you are serious and a well-informed person.”

  “No, I am half an ignoramus.”

  She poured herself some cherry brandy, sipped from the glass and put it down.

  “Oh, Yakov Ivanovitch, please for a moment let up on your seriousness and kiss me. I dare you to kiss me.”

  They got up and kissed. She groped for him, her body clinging tightly to his. He felt for an instant an anguished pity for her.

  “Shall we stay here longer?” she whispered, breathing heavily, “or would you care to visit my room? You’ve seen Papa’s but not mine.”

  She looked him full in the face, her green eyes lit dark, her body hot, still clinging. She seemed to him an older woman, possibly twenty-eight or nine, someone used to looking out for herself.

  “Whatever you say.”

  “What do
you
say, Yakov Ivanovitch?”

  “Zinaida Nikolaevna,” he said, “excuse me for asking you this question but I don’t want to make a serious mistake. I’ve made my share of them—every kind you can think of—but there are some I don’t want to make again. If you are innocent,” he said awkwardly, “it would be better not to go any further. I say this out of respect for you.”

  Zina reddened, then shrugged and said frankly, “I’m as innocent as most, no more nor less. There’s nothing to worry about in that regard.” Then she laughed selfconsciously and said, “I see you’re an old-fashioned person and I like that, although your question to me was hardly discreet.”

  “If one why not another? What about your father? What I mean to ask is, is it likely he might find out if we go to your room?”

  “He never has,” she said. He was momentarily surprised at her answer and then accepted it without another question. Why wrestle with a fact?

  They went silently along the corridor, Zina hobbling, Yakov tiptoeing behind her, to her perfumed bedroom. The Pekinese, lying on the bed, looked at the fixer and yawned. Zina picked it up and went again down the hall to lock it in the kitchen.

  Her room was full of knickknacks on numerous small tables, and pictures of kerchiefed girls on the wall. Peacock feathers stuck out from behind the frame of a mirror. In the corner of the room hung an ikon of the Holy Mother with a small red oil lamp lighted before it.

  Should I stay or should I go? Yakov thought. On the one hand it’s been a long season without rain. A man is not a man for nothing. What do the Hasidim say? “Hide not from thine own flesh.” On the other hand what does this mean to me? At my age it’s nothing new. It means nothing.

  When she returned he was sitting on the bed. He had taken off his shirt and undershirt.

  Yakov watched uneasily as Zina, after removing her shoes, knelt at the ikon, crossed herself, and for a moment prayed.

  “Are you a believer?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I wish you were, Yakov Ivanovitch,” she sighed.

  Then she rose and asked him to undress in the lavatory while she got ready in the bedroom.

  It’s her leg, he thought. She’ll be under covers when I come in. Better that way.

  He removed his clothes in the lavatory. His hands still stank of paint and turpentine, and he soaped them twice with her pink bar of perfumed soap. He smelled them again but now they stank of the perfume. If there’s a mistake to make I’ll make it, he thought.

  Seeing himself naked in the mirror he was at first uneasy, then sickened by what he was about to do.

  Things are bad enough, so why make them worse? This isn’t for me, I’m not the type, and the sooner I tell her the better. He went into the bedroom, carrying his clothes.

  Zina had braided her hair. She stood naked, her bosom full, sponging herself from a white bowl, in the gaslight. He saw a dribble of bright blood run down her crippled leg and said, stupefied. “But you are unclean!”

  “Yakov!—You startled me.” She covered herself with the wet cloth. “I thought you would wait till I called you.”

  “I didn’t know your condition. Excuse me, I had no idea. You didn’t mention it, though I realize it’s personal.”