Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [109]
“You cocksucker Zhid, I ought to make you lick it up off the floor.”
When Berezhinsky delivered the gruel, Yakov often begged him to remove the manacles for a few minutes while he ate, but the guard refused. Once after eating, while the guard was gone, Yakov turned sideways, used the spoon handle to dig a little at the cement around one of the bolts. But the guard saw this through the spy hole, entered the cell, and bloodied the prisoner’s mouth. After that Berezhinsky had the cell searched by a detail of five guards. Nothing was turned up at first, but they came again later in the week and found the blackened needle Yakov had long ago borrowed from Zhitnyak and carefully hidden in a crevice in the stove. To punish the fixer, his stool was removed for a week. He stood in chains all day and at night slept the sleep of the dead.
Thus the days went by. Each day went by alone. It crawled along like a dying thing. Sometimes, if he thought about it, three days went by, but the third was the same as the first. It was the first day because he could not say that three single days, counted, came to something they did not come to if they were not counted. One day crawled by. Then one day. Then one day. Never three. Nor five or seven. There was no such thing as a week if there was no end to his time in prison. If he were in Siberia serving twenty years at hard labor, a week might mean something. It would be twenty years less a week. But for a man who might be in prison for countless days, there were only first days following one another. The third was the first, the fourth was the first, the seventy-first was the first. The first day was the three thousandth.
Yakov thought how it used to be before he was chained to the wall. He remembered sweeping the floor with the birch broom. He remembered reading Zhitnyak’s gospels, and the Old Testament pages. He had saved and counted the wood splinters and kept track of the days and months when it seemed a sort of reward to add up time. He thought of the minutes of light on the scabby wall. He thought of the table he had once had to sit at reading before he smashed it in a fit of madness. He thought of being free to walk back and forth in the cell, or in circles, until he was too tired to think. He thought of being able to urinate without having to call the guard; and of only two searches a day instead of a terrifying six. He thought of lying down on the straw mattress any time he wanted to; but now he could not even lie down on the wooden bed except when they released him to. And he also thought of the time he was allowed to go to the kitchen to fill his bowl; and also of tending the stove in winter, and Zhitnyak, who was not too bad, coming in twice a day to light it. The guard had permitted him a good fire. He allowed Yakov to put in plenty of wood; then before leaving the cell he lit it with a match and watched until it really blazed. Yakov thought he would be glad if things went back to how they had once been. He wished he had enjoyed the bit of comfort, in a way of freedom, he had had then. In chains all that was left of freedom was life, just existence; but to exist without choice was the same as death.
He had secret, almost pleasurable thoughts of death, had had from the time he had stolen Zhitnyak’s needle. He had thought, if I want to die sometime I can use the needle to cut my veins. He could do it after Kogin left, and bleed all night. In the morning they would find a corpse. He had these thoughts more intensely now. After a while all he thought of was death. He was terribly weary, hungry to rid himself of the hard chains and the devilishly freezing cell. He hoped to die quickly, to end his suffering for once and all, to get rid of all he was and had been. His death would mean there was one last choice, there always is, and he had taken it. He had taken his fate in his hands. How will