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By Root 3161 0

I do it? He thought of a hunger strike but that would take too long, slowly starving. He had no belt but could tear up his clothes and the blanket, braid the strips together, and if he did not first freeze to death, hang himself from the window bars. But he couldn’t reach the window bars, and even if he found some way to get the rope behind them and down to him, hanging himself was not what he wanted. It would leave them out of it. He wanted them involved. He thought of Fetyukov shot by the guard. That’s how I have to do it. They want me to die but not directly by their hand. They’ll keep me in chains, making searches until my heart gives out. Then they can say I died of natural causes “while awaiting trial.” I’ll make it unnatural causes. I’ll make it by their hand. I’ll provoke them to kill me. He had made up his mind. He planned to do it during the sixth search of the next day, when they were at their most irritable, so they would react without thought, mechanically, instantly. He would refuse to undress, and when they ordered him to, he would spit into the Deputy Warden’s eye. If he were not at once shot he would try to wrestle a gun out of one of his holsters. By then Berezhinsky would have shot him through the head. It would be over in minutes, and the guard would later receive five or ten rubles for meritorious service. The Tsar would read about it in the St. Petersburg newspapers and at once sit down at his desk to write out a telegram to Grubeshov. “I heartily congratulate you for paying back in his own coin the Jewish murderer of Zhenia Golov. You will hear from me soon regarding advancement. Nicholas.” But then the officials would have to explain his death, and whatever they said, they could never say they had proved his guilt. Who would believe them? It might even create a tumult on the outside.

Let the Tsar jig on his polished floor. I shit my death on him.

2

It is late afternoon. The sun is sinking behind the cold treetops. A black carriage appears in the distance (coming from what city?) drawn by four black horses. He loses it amid traffic on the Kreshchatik, among other carriages, droshkies, trolleys, wagon-trucks, a few motorcars. The trees are now black. It is night again. Kogin is restlessly pacing back and forth in the corridor. He has often stood by Yakov’s cell door, the spy hole open, listening to his noisy wheezing, the guard’s breathing audible as he wets his pencil and writes in the notebook what Ya-kov cries out in his sleep. But tonight, a blizzarding night, the snow swirling thickly around the prison, after hours of walking back and forth past Yakov’s cell door, knowing the prisoner is awake, the guard stops and sighs through the spy hole, “Ah, Yakov Bok, don’t think you’re the only one with troubles. They’re piled on my head like snows on a mountain top.”

He walks away and then returns to say that his son Trofim has murdered an old man while robbing a house in the Podol. “That’s what it comes to, you see.”

After a long silence he says, “I had trouble enough with my daughter, who got herself pregnant by a man of my age, a goddamn drunk, but no sooner do I get her married off to someone,” Kogin says through the spy hole, “than the boy takes to robbing a house, a thing that never entered his mind before. He stole from me but never from anybody else until this night he went into a house by the Dnieper, and while he was in there, killed the old man who lived in it. He was a harmless old man, and anyone in his right mind could see from the outside of the house that there wasn’t likely to be anything of any value in it, not a thing. He knew it, but in that case why did he do it, Yakov Bok? Was there anything on his mind but to pay me back with worries for the years of love I gave him? When the old man caught him in his house he grabbed Trofim’s coat and hung onto it, and he, in fright, he says, beat the old man on the head with his fists until he let go, but by that time it was too late—the old man had had some kind of stroke and died. That was the end of him. Trofim came in, as you might