Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [120]
“Have you got a pencil?” the fixer asked.
The guard took a fat fountain pen from his tunic pocket, and gave it to him through the opening in the grating.
He stayed to watch but Yakov waited until he had withdrawn.
“Give me the confession,” he said to Raisl in Russian.
Raisl handed him the envelope. Yakov removed the paper, unfolded it, and read: “I, Yakov Bok, confess that I witnessed the murder of Zhenia Golov, the son of Marfa Golov, by my Jewish compatriots. They killed him on the night of March 20, 1911, upstairs in the stable in the brickyard belonging to Nikolai Maximo-vitch Lebedev, merchant of the Lukianovsky District.”
Under that a heavy line was drawn on which to sign his name.
Yakov placed the paper on the shelf before him and wrote in Russian on the line for his name: “Every word is a lie.”
On the envelope, pausing between words to remember the letters for the next, he wrote in Yiddish, “I declare myself to be the father of Chaim, the infant son of my wife, Raisl Bok. He was conceived before she left me. Please help the mother and child, and for this, amid all my troubles, I’ll be grateful. Yakov Bok.”
She told him the date and he wrote it down, “February 27, 1913.” Yakov passed it to her through the opening in the grating.
Raisl slipped the envelope into her coat sleeve and handed the guard the confession paper. He folded it at once, and thrust it into his tunic pocket. After examining the contents of Raisl’s handbag and tapping her coat pockets he told her to go.
“Yakov,” she wept, “come home.”
IX
He was chained to the wall again. Things went badly. Better not have been unchained, the getting back was so bad. He beat the clanking chains against the wall until it was scarred white where he stood. They let him beat the wall. Otherwise he slept. But for the searches he would have slept through the day. He slept the sleep of the dead with his feet in stocks. He slept through the end of winter and into spring. Kogin said it was April. Two years. The searches went on except when he was sick with dysentery. The Deputy Warden did not come near him then, though Berezhinsky sometimes searched him alone. Once after the fixer was sick the cell was hosed down and a fire started in the stove. An old pink-faced man came into the cell dressed in winter clothes. He wore a black cape and black gaiters and grasped a gnarled cane. Berezhinsky followed him in, carrying a slender chair with a delicate back, and the old man sat in it erectly, several feet from the fixer, holding the cane with gray-mittened hands. His watery eyes wandered. He told Yakov he was a former jurist of high repute, and that he came with good news. An excitement so thick it felt like sickness surged through the fixer. He asked what good news. The former jurist said this was the year of the three-hundredth anniversary of the rule of the House of Romanov and that the Tsar, in celebration, would issue a ukase amnestying certain classes of criminals. Yakov’s name would be listed among them. He was to be pardoned and permitted to return to his village. The old man’s face flushed with pleasure. The prisoner clung to the wall, too burdened to speak. Then he asked, Pardoned as a criminal or pardoned as innocent? The former jurist testily said what difference did it make so long as he was let out of prison. It was impossible to erase the sins of the past, but it was not impossible for a humane ruler, a Christian gentleman, to forgive an evil act. The old man sneezed without snuff and peered at his silver watch. Yakov said he wanted a fair trial, not a pardon. If they ordered him to leave the prison without a trial they would have to shoot him first. Don’t be foolish, said the former jurist, how can you go on suffering like this, caked in filth? The fixer moved his chains restlessly. I have no choice, he said. I have just offered you one. That’s not choice, said Yakov. The former jurist tried to convince the prisoner, then gave up in irritation. It’s easier to reason with a peasant. He rose and shook his cane at the fixer.