Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [1]
After he had sipped through half his glass of tea, Shmuel, sighing, said, “Nobody has to be a Prophet to know you’re blaming me for my daughter Raisl.” He spoke in sadness, wearing a hard hat he had found in a barrel in a neighboring town. When he sweated it stuck to his head, but being a religious man he didn’t mind. Otherwise he had on a patched and padded caftan from which his skinny hands hung out. And very roomy shoes, not boots, which he ran in, and around in.
“Who said anything? You’re blaming yourself for having brought up a whore.”
Shmuel, without a word, pulled out a soiled blue handkerchief and wept.
“So why, if you’ll excuse me, did you stop sleeping with her for months? Is that a way to treat a wife?”
“It was more like weeks but how long can a man sleep with a barren woman? I got tired of trying.”
“Why didn’t you go to the rabbi when I begged you?”
“Let him stay out of my business and I’ll stay out of his. All in all he’s an ignorant man.”
“Charity you were always short of,” the peddler said.
Yakov rose, enraged. “Don’t talk to me about charity. What have I had all my life? What have I got to give away? I was practically born an orphan—my mother dead ten minutes later, and you know what happened to my poor father. If somebody said Kaddish for them it wasn’t me till years later. If they were waiting outside the gates of heaven it was a long cold wait, if they’re not still waiting. Throughout my miserable childhood I lived in a stinking orphans’ home, barely existing. In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams. Torah I had little of and Talmud less, though I learned Hebrew because I’ve got an ear for language. Anyway, I knew the Psalms. They taught me a trade and apprenticed me five minutes after age ten—not that I regret it. So I work—let’s call it work—with my hands, and some call me “common” but the truth of it is few people know who is really common. As for those that look like they got class, take another look. Viskover, the Nogid, is in my eyes a common man. All he’s got is rubles and when he opens his mouth you can hear them clink. On my own I studied different subjects, and even before I was taken into the army I taught myself a decent Russian, much better than we pick up from the peasants. What little I know I learned on my own—some history and geography, a little science, arithmetic, and a book or two of Spinoza’s. Not much but better than nothing.”
“Though most is treyf I give you credit—” said Shmuel.
“Let me finish. I’ve had to dig with my fingernails for a living. What can anybody do without capital? What they can do I can do but it’s not much. I fix what’s broken—except in the heart. In this shtetl everything is falling apart—who bothers with leaks in his roof if he’s peeking through the cracks to spy on God? And who can pay to have it fixed let’s say he wants it, which he doesn’t. If he does, half the time I work for nothing. If I’m lucky, a dish of noodles. Opportunity here is born dead. I’m frankly in a foul mood.”
“Opportunity you don’t have to tell me about—”
“They conscripted me for the Russo-Japanese War but it was over before I got in. Thank God. When I got sick they booted me out. An asthmatic Jew wasn’t worth the trouble. Thank God. When I got back I scraped again with my broken nails. After a long run-around which started when I met her, I married your daughter, who couldn’t get pregnant in five and a halt years. She bore me no children so who could I look in the eye? And now she runs off with some stranger she met at the inn—a goy I’m positive. So that’s enough— who needs more? I don’t want people pitying me or wondering what I did to be so cursed. I did nothing. It was a gift. I’m innocent.