Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [13]
“I ought to have gone for him,” she said to Yakov, cracking her knuckles against her breast. “This is the second time this month he’s fallen in the street. When he drinks in the tavern it becomes an impossible situation. Kindly help me get him home, sir. We live only a few doors from here.”
“Take his legs,” said Yakov.
With the girl’s help he half carried, half dragged the fat Russian up the street to the three-story yellow brick house with a wrought-iron awning above the door. The girl called the porter, and he and the fixer, she hobbling up after them, carried her father up the stairs into a large-roomed, well-furnished flat on the first floor. They laid him on a leather couch near the tile stove in the bedroom. A Pekinese began to yelp, then growled at the fixer. The girl picked the dog up, deposited it in another room, and at once returned. The dog barked shrilly through the door.
As the porter removed the man’s wet shoes he stirred and groaned.
“With God’s help,” he muttered.
“Papa,” said his daughter, “we owe thanks to this good man for assisting you after your accident. He found you face down in the snow. If not for him you would have smothered.”
Her father opened his humid eyes. “Glory be to God.” He crossed himself and began quietly to cry. She crossed herself and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
As she was unbuttoning her father’s overcoat, Yakov, after staying for a last deep breath of the warmth, left the flat and went down the stairs, relieved to be out.
The girl called to him in a tight high voice from the top of the stairs and quickly hobbled down after him, holding to the banister. Her face was sharp, her green eyes searching, hungry. She seemed about twenty-five, slightly built, her torso long, with thick honey-colored hair that she wore loose around the shoulders. She wasn’t pretty but she wasn’t plain, and although he was sorry for her crippled leg he felt for her a strange momentary revulsion.
She asked him who he was, not quite looking at him, her eyes lowered, then shifting to a direct glance. She stared at the sack of tools on his shoulder.
He told her little: he was a stranger, recently from the provinces. It occurred to him then to remove his cap.
“Please come back tomorrow,” she said. “Papa says he would like to thank you when he is in a better frame of mind, but I will tell you frankly you may expect something more than mere thanks. My father is Nikolai Maximovitch Lebedev—semi-retired—he was already retired but had to take over his brother’s business affairs at his death—and I am Zinaida Nikolaevna. Please call on us in the morning when Papa is himself. He’s usually at his best then, though never at his very best since my poor mother’s death.”
Yakov, without giving his name, said he would return in the morning and left.
Back in his cubicle in Aaron Latke’s flat, he wondered what was “more than mere thanks.” Obviously the girl meant some sort of reward, possibly a ruble or two, and with luck, five. But he had doubts whether to go back there. Should he take a reward from a self-advertised Jew hater? He hadn’t for a minute been comfortable in his presence, or the girl’s. Then either better not go, or tell the old man who he was indebted to and leave. But that wasn’t what he wanted to do. Yakov sweated in his thoughts, the drunkard’s two-headed eagle staring him in both eyes. He slept badly and woke with a new thought. Why not a ruble or two if it kept a Jew alive? What better service from an anti-Semite? He recalled a Russian saying: “A fearful wolf should stay out of the forest,” but decided to go anyway, take a chance, or how would he know what went on in the world?
So he returned to the house in the Plossky without his bag of tools, though he could not dress up, nor did he want to. Zinaida Nikolaevna, wearing an embroidered peasant blouse and skirt, with two green ribbons plaited into her hair and some strings of yellow glass beads at her throat, led him to her