Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [121]
One day, during Yakov’s third summer in prison, his manacles and shackles were unlocked. Immediately his heart beat heavily and when he touched it with his hand the hand beat like his heart. In an hour the warden, who had aged since the fixer had last seen him and walked with shorter steps, brought in a new indictment in a brown envelope, a sheaf of papers twice thicker than the last. The fixer took the papers and read them slowly and frantically, fearing he would never get to the end of them; but he had discovered at once what he had expected: that the blood murder charge had been violently revived. Now they are serious again, he thought. The reference to sexual experiences with the boy, and to activities with a gang of Jewish housebreakers and smugglers operating out of the cellar of the Kiev synagogue —all the insane lies from Marfa Golov’s letter—were omitted. Once again Yakov Bok was accused of murdering the innocent boy in order to drain his body of blood necessary for the baking of Passover matzos and cakes.
This was affirmed by Professor Manilius Zagreb, who with his distinguished colleague, the surgeon Dr. Sergei Bui, had twice performed the autopsy of Zhenia’s remains. Both categorically stated that the vicious wounds had been inflicted in prearranged clusters with a time interval between each cluster in order to prolong the torture and facilitate the bleeding. It was estimated that one litre of blood was collected from each set of wounds, and that a total of five litres of blood was collected in bottles. Such was also the conclusion of Father Anastasy, the well-known specialist in Jewish affairs, who had made a close study of the Talmud, his reasons given in minute detail for eight single-spaced pages. And it was also the conclusion of Yefim Balik, the Investigating Magistrate. He had carefully reviewed the entire evidence and agreed with its “direction and findings.”
How the bloodthirsty crime was committed was described in this indictment much as it had been by Gru-beshov at the cave, more than two years ago, “with careful note taken of the fanatic Hasidic tsadik, seen in the brickyard by the foreman Proshko; who had no doubt helped the accused drain the necessary blood from the boy’s still living body, and also assisted him in transporting the corpse to the cave where two horrified boys had found it.” And related evidence omitted from the previous indictment was included in this. It was stated that half a bag of matzo flour was “hidden away” in Yakov Bok’s stable room, together with certain hard pieces of already baked matzo no doubt containing the innocent blood, which both the Jews “in all probability” had eaten. And the usual bloodstained rag, “admitted by the accused to be a piece of his shirt” had been uncovered in the same room. According to the testimony of Vasya Shiskovsky, a bottle of bright-red blood was seen by him and Zhenia on a table in Bok’s stable room, but it had disappeared when the police searched for it. And a sack of carpenter’s tools containing bloodstained awls and knives had been found in the same room after the fixer’s arrest, “despite a plot later carried out by Jewish co-conspirators to destroy this and other significant evidence by burning down the brickyard stable, a plot which they ultimately achieved.”
Towards the end of this wearying, terrifying document a new subject was introduced, “the matter of Yakov Bok’s self-proclaimed atheism.” It was noted that although the accused, when first examined by the authorities, had confessed he was a Jew “by birth and nationality,” he had however claimed for himself “an atheistic status; to wit, that he was a freethinker and not a religious