Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [111]
“It’s only twenty years,” says Yakov.
“I won’t see him, if we both live that long, till he’s fifty-two, which is the age I am now.”
The guard’s low voice rumbles in the cell so he goes on in a thick whisper.
“I asked him why he had done that thing, and he said he had no particular reason. Can you imagine a more ridiculous statement, Bok? He came to the end I had predicted for him, all of a father’s love gone for nothing. That’s how it goes. You plan one thing and get another. Life plays no favorites and what’s the use of hoping for it? The children were ruined by their mother, a woman of unsettled character and lax ways. My son was always hard to control because of her ways with him, and I thought for a time he would murder one of us in spite of all the love I had for him, but it turned out that he murdered somebody else.”
Kogin sighs, pauses a minute, and asks Yakov if he wants a cigarette.
Yakov says no. He breathes deeply so the guard can hear the whine in his chest. A cigarette would make him sick.
“But if you open the stocks for a minute,” he says, “it would ease my stiff legs.”
Kogin says he can’t do that. He stands silently at the spy hole for a few minutes, then whispers heavily, “Don’t think I am not aware of your misfortunes, Bok, because I am. It’s a terrible thing to see a man in chains, whoever he is, and have to lock his feet in stocks every night, but to be frank with you I don’t allow myself to dwell on it much. I try not to think of you there in chains all day long. The nerves can take just so much, and I already have all the worry I can stand. I think you know what I mean by that.”
Yakov says he does.
“You’re sure about a cigarette? It’s a small infraction of the rules. Some of the guards sell them to prisoners here, and if you ask me the warden knows it. But if I opened your stocks I could get myself shot.”
After a while Yakov thinks the guard has gone away but he hasn’t.
“Do you still have the gospels in there?” Kogin asks.
“No, they’re gone.”
“What about the sayings you used to say by memory? Why don’t you say any of them any more?”
“I’ve forgotten them.”
“This is one I remember,” says the guard. “ ‘But he who endures to the end will be saved.’ It’s either from Matthew or Luke, one or the other.”
Yakov is moved so deeply he laughs.
The guard walks away. Tonight he is restless and in a half hour returns to the cell door, holding a lamp to the hole, peering above it to see what he can see. The light falls on the fixer’s imprisoned feet, waking him again. Kogin is about to say something but doesn’t. The light goes out. Yakov moves restlessly, lying awake listening to the guard walking back and forth in the corridor as though he were walking to Siberia along with his son. The prisoner listens until exhaustion overtakes him, then goes on with the dream he was having.
He locates the black carriage once again, only it is a rickety wagon coming from the provinces, carrying a coffin made of weatherbeaten pine boards. For me or who else? he thinks. Afraid to name names he struggles to wake up and instead finds himself in an empty room standing by a small black coffin, like a trunk locked with chains.
It’s Zhenia’s coffin, he thinks. Marfa Golov has sent it to me as a present. But when he unlocks the rusty chains and raises the coffin lid, there lies Shmuel, his father-in-law, with a prayer shawl covering his head, a purple