Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [103]
The fixer crouched in a dark place trying to hold his mind together with a piece of string so he wouldn’t confess. But it exploded into a fountain of rotting fruit, one-eyed herrings, birds of Paradise. It exploded into a million stinking words but when he confessed he confessed in Yiddish so the goyim couldn’t understand. In Hebrew he recited the Psalms. In Russian he was silent. He slept in fear and waked in fright. In dreams he heard the voices of screaming children. Dressed in a long caftan and round fur hat he hid behind trees, and when a Christian child approached, compulsively chased him. One small-faced boy, a consumptive type, ran from him frantically, his eyes rolling in fright.
“Stop, I love you,” the fixer called to him, but the child never looked back.
“Once is enough, Yakov Bok.”
Nicholas II appeared, in the white uniform of an admiral of the Russian Navy.
“Little Father,” said the fixer on both knees, “you’ll never meet a more patriotic Jew, Tears fill my eyes when I see the flag. Also I’m not interested in politics, I want to make a living. Those accusations are all wrong or you’ve got the wrong man. Live and let live, if you don’t mind me saying so. It’s a short life when you think of it.”
“My dear fellow,” said the blue-eyed, pale-faced Tsar in a gentle voice, “don’t envy me my throne. Uneasy lies the et cetera. The Zhidy would do well to understand and stop complaining in a whining tongue. The simple fact is there are too many Jews—my how you procreate! Why should Russia be burdened with teeming millions of you? You yourselves are to blame for your troubles, and the pogroms of 1905-6 outside the Pale of Settlement, mind you, were proof positive, if proof is needed, that you aren’t staying where you were put. The ingestion of this tribe has poisoned Russia. Who ever wanted it? Our revered ancestor Peter the Great, when asked to admit them into Russia, said, ‘They are rogues and cheats. I am trying to eradicate evil, not increase it.’ Our revered ancestor, the Tsarina Elizabeth Petrovna, said, ‘From the enemies of Christ I wish neither gain nor profit.’ Hordes of Jews were expelled from one or another part of the Motherland in 1727, 1739, 1742, but still they crawled back and we have been unable to de-louse ourselves of them. The worst of it happened, our greatest error, when Catherine the Great took over half of Poland and inherited the whole filthy lot, a million poisoners of wells, spies against us all, cowardly traitors. I always said it was the Poles’ plot to ruin Russia.”
“Have mercy on me, your Majesty. So far as I’m concerned, I am an innocent man. What have I seen of the world? Please have mercy.”
“The Tsar’s heart is in God’s hands.” He stepped into his white sailboat and sailed away on the Black Sea.
Nikolai Maximovitch had lost weight, the girl limped badly and would not look at the fixer. Proshko, Serdiuk and Richter came in on three skittish horses whose droppings were full of oats he longed to get at. Father Anas-tasy sought to convert him to Roman Catholicism. Marfa Golov, wept dry-eyed and haggard, offered him a bribe to testify against himself; and the Deputy Warden, in the uniform of a naval officer, for personal reasons insisted on continuing the searches. The guards promised the fixer anything if he would open up and name names, and Yakov said he might for a heated cell in wintertime, a daily bowl of noodles and cheese, and a firm clean hair mattress.
Shots were fired.
He passed through time he had no memory of and one day awoke to find himself in the same cell, not a new one with six doors and windows he had dreamed of. It was still hot but he couldn’t be sure it was the same summer. The cell seemed the same,