Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [126]
“What else can frighten me?”
“If you feel bad think of Dreyfus. He went through the same thing with the script in French. We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.”
“I’ve thought of him. It doesn’t help.”
“He was in prison many years, much longer than you.”
“So far.”
Ostrovsky, nodding absently as he gazed at the door, softened his whisper. “We also have an affidavit from Sofya Shiskovsky. One night she went into the toilet in Marfa’s house to relieve herself, and there in the bathtub lay the naked corpse covered with wounds. So she screamed and ran out of the house. Marfa, who had gone for a minute upstairs to get a letter to prove a lie, ran after her and caught her in the street. That one—a madwoman of the First Guild—threatened to murder the whole Shiskovsky family if they breathed a word to anybody. They were afraid for Vasya, so they packed the furniture and moved out. When we finally located them, in a log hut in a back street in Moscow, she threatened to kill herself if we interfered with her, but with luck we got at least a short affidavit. She wouldn’t let us question Vasya but we will try to have them both in court when the trial starts, if they aren’t by that time in Asia. So this is another reason why the prosecution drags its feet: they can’t prove a ritual murder but they won’t stop trying, and the longer they take the more dangerous the situation becomes. It’s dangerous because it’s irrational, complex, secret. And it grows more dangerous as they get more desperate.”
“Then what will I do?” said Yakov in despair. “How much more can I stand if I’m already half dead?”
“Patience, calm, calm, calm,” Ostrovsky counseled, clasping his hands and squeezing. Then he looked at the fixer in a new light and struck his head with his palm.
“For God’s sake, why are we standing yet? Come sit down. Forgive me, I’m blind in both eyes.”
They sat then on a narrow bench in the far corner of the room away from the door, the lawyer still whispering. “Your case is tied up with the frustrations of recent Russian history. The Russo-Japanese War, I don’t have to tell you, was a terrible disaster but it brought on the Revolution of 1905, which was coming anyway. ‘War,’ as Marx says, ‘is the locomotive of history.’ This was good for Russia but bad for the Jews. The government, as usual, blamed us for their troubles and not more than one day after the Tsar’s concessions pogroms started simultaneously in three hundred towns. Of course you know this, what Jew doesn’t?”
“Tell me anyway, what harm can it do?”
“The Tsar was frightened by the rising agitation—strikes, riots, assassinations. The country was paralyzed. After the Winter Palace massacre he reluctantly gave out a ukase promising the basic freedoms. He granted a Constitution, the Imperial Duma was established, and for a short time it looked—for Russia, you understand— like the beginning of a liberal period. The Jews cried hurray for the Tsar and wished him luck. Imagine, in the first Duma we had twelve deputies! Right away they brought up the question of equal rights for all and the abolition of the Pale of Settlement. Like a new world, no?”
“Yes, but go on.”
“I’ll go on but what can I say? In a sick country every step to health is an insult to those who live on its sickness. The imperial absolutists, the rightist elements, warned the Tsar his crown was slipping. He was already regretting the concessions and began to try to cancel them. In other words, for ten minutes he put on the lights and what he saw frightened him so much, since then he has been putting them out one by one so nobody