Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [129]
Yakov said he wanted to live.
“Please,” said Ostrovsky.
4
He was not, on his return to the cell, locked in chains. They had been torn out of the wall and the holes cemented. The fixer, all but weightless, sat on the edge of the wooden bed, his head in rarefied air, his body roaring with excitement. He listened to the noise for half an hour before he knew he was listening to his swarming clanking thoughts. Shmuel was dead, let him rest in peace. He had deserved better than he had got. A lawyer, Ostrovsky, had been to see him. He had spoken of the trial; there was a chance. Another lawyer, a reformed Ukrainian anti-Semite, would defend him in court before a prejudiced judge and ignorant jury. But that was all in the future, when, nobody could say. Now he was at least no longer anonymous to all but his prosecutors and jailers. He was not unknown. There had blown up from somewhere a public opinion. Not every Russian believed him guilty. The fog was thinning a little. Newspapers were printing articles casting doubt on the accusation. Some lawyers were openly blaming Marfa Golov. A doctors’ society had protested his imprisonment. He had become—who would have thought it?—a public person. Yakov laughed and wept a little. It was fantastic to believe. He tried to be hopeful but was immersed in fears of all there was still to live through.
“Why me?” he asked himself for the ten thousandth time. Why did it have to happen to a poor, half-ignorant fixer? Who needed this kind of education? Education he would have been satisfied to get from books. Each time he answered his question he answered it differently. He saw it as part personal fate—his various shortcomings and mistakes—but also as force of circumstance, though how you separated one from the other—if one really could—was beyond him. Who, for instance, had to go find Nikolai Maximovitch lying drunk in the snow and drag him home to start off an endless series of miserable events? Was that the word of God, inexorable Necessity? Go find your fate—try first the fat Russian with his face in the snow. Go be kind to an anti-Semite and suffer for it. And from him to his daughter with the crippled leg was only one crippled step, and then another into the brickyard. And a crippled hop into prison. If he had stayed in the shtetl it would never have happened. At least not this. Something else would have happened, better not think what.
Once you leave you’re out in the open; it rains and snows. It snows history, which means what happens to somebody starts in a web of events outside the personal. It starts of course before he gets there. We’re all in history, that’s sure, but some are more than others, Jews more than some. If it snows not everybody is out in it getting wet. He had been doused. He had to his painful surprise, stepped into history more deeply than others— it had worked out so. Why he would never know. Because he had taken to reading Spinoza? An idea makes you adventurous? Maybe, who knows? Anyway, if he hadn’t been Yakov Bok, a born Jew, he would not have been, to start with, an outlaw in the Lukianovsky when they were looking for one; he would never have been arrested. They might still be looking. It was, you could say, history’s doing, it was full of all sorts of barriers and limitations, as though certain doors had been boarded up in a house and to get out you had to jump out of a window. If you jumped you might land on your head. In history, thicker at times than at others, too much happens. Ostrovsky had explained this to him. If conditions were ripe whatever was likely to happen was waiting for you to come along so it could happen. With less history around you might walk by or through it: it looked like rain but the sun was shining. In the snow he had once come upon Nikolai Maximovitch Lebedev wearing his Black Hundreds button. Nobody lived in Eden any more.
Yet though his young mother and father had