Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [118]
She cracked her white knuckles against her chest. “Yakov, I didn’t come here to fight about the past. Forgive me, forgive the past.”
“Why did you come?”
“Papa said he saw you in prison, it’s all he talks about. I went back to the shtetl last November. I was first in Kharkov, then in Moscow, but couldn’t get along any more, so I had to go back. When I found out you were in Kiev Prison I came to see you but they wouldn’t let me in. Then I went to the Prosecuting Attorney and showed him the papers that I was your wife. He said I couldn’t see you except under the most extraordinary circumstances, and I said the circumstances were extraordinary enough when an innocent man is kept in prison. I went to see him at least five times and finally he said he would let me in if I brought you a paper to sign. He told me to urge you to sign it.”
“A black year on his papers to sign. A black year on you for bringing it.”
“Yakov, if you sign you can go free tomorrow. It’s at least something to think about.”
“I’ve thought,” he shouted. “It’s nothing to think about. I’m innocent.”
Raisl stared at him mutely.
The guard came over with his rifle. “Nobody’s supposed to be talking Yiddish here,” he said. “You’re supposed to be talking Russian. This prison is a Russian institution.”
“It takes longer in Russian,” she said. “I speak very slowly in Russian.”
“Hurry up with the paper you’re supposed to give him.”
“The paper has to be explained. There are advantages but there are also disadvantages. I have to tell him what the Prosecuting Attorney said.”
“Then tell him, for Christ’s sake, and be done with it.”
Taking a small key out of his pants pocket, he unlocked a small wire door in the grating.
“Don’t try to pass anything but the paper he has to sign or it’ll go hard on you both. I’ve got my eyes wide open.”
Raisl unclasped a grayed cloth handbag and took out a folded envelope.
“This is the paper I promised I would give you,” she said in Russian to Yakov. “The Prosecuting Attorney says it’s your last chance.”
“So that’s why you came,” he said in vehement Yiddish, “to get me to confess lies I’ve resisted for two years. To betray me again.”
“It was the only way I could get in,” Raisl said. “But it’s not why I came, I came to cry.” She gasped a little. Her mouth fell open, the lips contorted; she wept. Tears flowed through her fingers as she pressed them to her eyes. Her shoulders shook.
He felt, as he watched her, the weight of the blood in his heart.
The guard rolled another cigarette, lit it, and smoked slowly.
This is where we left off, thought Yakov. The last time I saw her she was crying like this, and here she is still crying. In the meantime I’ve been two years in prison without cause, in solitary confinement, and chains. I’ve suffered freezing cold, filth, lice, the degradation of those searches, and she’s still crying.
“What are you crying for?” he asked.
“For you, for me, for the world.”
She was as she wept, a frail woman, lanky, small-breasted, worn and sad. Who would have thought so frail? As she wept she moved him. He had learned about tears.
“What’s there to do here but think, so I’ve thought,” Yakov said after a while. “I’ve thought about our life from beginning to end and I can’t blame you for more than I blame myself. If you give little you get less, though of some things I got more than I deserved. Also, it takes me a long time to learn. Some people have to make the same mistake seven times before they know they’ve made it. That’s my type and I’m sorry. I’m also sorry I stopped sleeping with you. I was out to stab myself, so I stabbed you. Who else was so close to me? Still I’ve suffered in this prison and I’m not the same man I once was. What more can I say, Raisl? If I had my life to live over, you’d have less to cry about, so stop crying.”
“Yakov,” she said, when she had wiped her eyes with her fingers, “I brought this confession paper here so they would let me talk to you, not because I want you to sign it. I don’t. Still, if you wanted to what could I say? Should I say stay in prison? What I also came