mattresses airing and rags of clothing drying, above a courtyard crowded with wooden workshops where everyone was busy but no one earned much of anything. They stayed alive. The fixer wanted better, at least better than he had had, too much of nothing. For a while, during the cold rains of late autumn, he confined himself to the Jewish section, but after the first snowfall in the city—about a month after he had arrived—he began to edge out again, looking for work. With his tool sack slung over his shoulder he trudged from street to street through the Podol and Plossky, the flat commercial districts reaching to the river, and went up the hills into neighborhoods forbidden to Jews to work in. He sought, he continued to say to himself, opportunities, though in seeking them he sometimes felt like a spy behind enemy lines. The Jewish quarter, unchanged in ages, swarmed and smelled. Its worldly goods was spiritual goods; all that was lacking was prosperity. The fixer, having left the shtetl, resented the lack. He had tried working for a brushmaker, a man with a foaming beard who had promised to teach him the business. The wages were soup. So he had gone back to being a fixer and it came also to nothing, sometimes soup. If a window was broken they stuffed it with rags and said a blessing. He offered to replace it for a pittance, and when he had done the work they gave him thanks, blessings, a plate of noodle soup. He lived frugally in a low-ceilinged cubicle, in a printer’s assistant’s flat—Aaron Latke’s, sleeping on a bench covered with a burlap sack; the flat was crowded with children and smelly feather beds, and the fixer, as he parted with kopeks and earned none, grew increasingly anxious. He must go where he could make a living or change his craft, maybe both. Among the goyim his luck might be better, it couldn’t be worse. Besides, what choice has a man who doesn’t know what his choices are? He meant in the world. So he walked out of the ghetto when no one was looking. In the snow he felt anonymous, in a sense unseen in his Russian cap and coat— any unemployed worker. Russians passed him without looking at him and he passed them. Having been told he did not look Jewish he now believed it. Yakov trudged in the snow up the hill to the Kreshchatik, the broad main street, trying kiosks, shops, public buildings, but finding little to do, a few odd jobs, payment in greenish coppers. At night in his cubicle, a glass of hot tea cupped in his reddened hands, when he thought of returning to the shtetl he thought of death.
Latke, when the fixer said this aloud, looked at him in popeyed horror. He was a man with arthritic hands and eight half-starving children. The pain hindered his work but not his labor.
“For God’s sake, patience,” he said. “You’re not without brains and that’s the beginning of luck. Afterwards, as they say, your ox will calve.”
“To have luck you need it. I’ve had little luck.”
“You’ve just come green from the country, so at least be patient till you know where you are.”
So the fixer went looking for luck.
One desperate evening, the gas lamps casting a greenish glow on the snow, Yakov, trudging at twilight in the Plossky District, came upon a man lying with his face in the trodden snow. He hesitated a minute before turning him over, afraid to be involved in trouble. The man was a fattish, bald-headed Russian of about sixty-five, his fur cap in the snow, his heavy face splotched a whitish red and blue, snow on his mustache. He was breathing and reeked of drink. The fixer at once noticed the black and white button pinned to his coat, the two-headed eagle of the Black Hundreds. Let him shift for himself, he thought. Frightened, he ran to the corner, then ran back. Grabbing the anti-Semite under the arms he began to drag him to the doorway of the house in front of which he had fallen, when he heard a cry down the street. A girl wearing a green shawl over a green dress was running crookedly towards them. At first he thought she was a crippled child but then saw she was a young woman with a crippled leg.
She knelt,