Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [102]
“Can’t I send her an answer?” he asked the Deputy Warden before the next search, and the Deputy Warden said he could if he was willing to admit the wrongs he had done.
That night the fixer saw Marfa, a tallish, scrawny-necked woman with a figure something like Raisl’s, enter the cell and without so much as a word begin to undress—the white hat with cherries, the red rose scarf, green skirt, flowery blouse, cotton petticoat, pointed button shoes, red garters, black stockings and soiled frilly drawers. Lying naked on the fixer’s mattress, her legs spread apart, she promised many goyish delights if he would confess to the priest at the peephole.
5
One night he awoke hearing someone singing in the cell and when he listened with his whole being the song was in a boy’s high sweet voice. Yakov got up to see where the singing was coming from. The child’s pale, shrunken, bony face, corroded copper and black, shone from a pit in the corner of the cell. He was dead yet sang how he had been murdered by a black-bearded Jew. He had gone on an errand for his mother and was on his way home through the Jewish section when this hairy, bent-back rabbi caught up with him and offered him a lozenge. The instant the boy put the candy into his mouth he fell to the ground. The Jew lifted him onto his shoulder and hurried to the brickworks. There the boy was laid on the stable floor, tied up, and stabbed until the blood spouted from the orifices of his body. Yakov listened to the end of the song and cried, “Again! Sing it again!” Again he heard the same sweet song the dead child was singing in his grave.
Afterwards the boy, appearing to him naked, his stigmata brightly bleeding, begged, “Please give me back my clothes.”
They’re trying to unhinge me, the fixer thought, and then they’ll say I went mad because I committed the crime. He feared what he might confess if he went crazy; his suffering to defend his innocence would come to nothing as he babbled his guilt and the blood guilt of those who had put him up to it. He strove with himself, struggled, shouted at him to hold tight to sanity, to keep in the dark unsettled center of the mind a candle burning.
A bloody horse with frantic eyes appeared: Shmuel’s nag.
“Murderer!” the horse neighed. “Horsekiller! Childkiller! You deserve what you get!”
He beat the nag’s head with a log.
Yakov slept often during the day but badly. Sleep left him limp, depressed. He was being watched by many eyes through the spy hole for the minute he went mad. The air throbbed with voices from afar. There was a plot afoot to save him. He had visions of being rescued by the International Jewish Army. They were laying seige to the outer walls. Among the familiar faces he recognized Berele Margolis, Leib Rosenbach, Dudye Bont, Itzik Shulman, Kalman Kohler, Shloime Pincus, Yose-Moishe Magadov, Pinye Apfelbaum, and Benya Merpetz, all from the orphans’ home, although it seemed to him they were long since gone, some dead, some fled—he should have gone with them.
“Wait,” he shouted. “Wait.”
Then the streets around the prison were noisy, the crowds roaring, chanting, wailing; animals mooing, clucking, grunting. Everyone ran in several directions, feathers floating in the air, gevalt they were killing the Jews! A horde of thick-booted, baggy-trousered, sword-swinging Cossacks were galloping in on small ferocious ponies. In the yard the double-eagle banners were unfurled and fluttered in the wind. Nicholas the Second drove in in a coach drawn by six white horses, saluting from both sides the hundreds of Black Hundreds aching to get at the prisoner and hammer nails into his head. Yakov hid in his cell with chest pains and heartburn. The guards were planning to murder him with rat poison. He