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By Root 3165 0

remained all their poor lives in the shtetl, the historical evil had galloped in to murder them there. So the “open,” he thought, was anywhere. In or out, it was history that counted—the world’s bad memory. It remembered the wrong things. So for a Jew it was the same wherever he went, he carried a remembered pack on his back—a condition of servitude, diminished opportunity, vulnerability. No, there was no need to go to Kiev, or Moscow, or any place else. You could stay in the shtetl and trade in air or beans, dance at weddings or funerals, spend your life in the synagogue, die in bed and pretend you had died in peace, but a Jew wasn’t free. Because the government destroyed his freedom by reducing his worth. Therefore wherever he was or went and whatever happened was perilous. A door swung open at his approach. A hand reached forth and plucked him in by his Jewish beard—Yakov Bok, a freethinking Jew in a brick factory in Kiev, yet any Jew, any plausible Jew—to be the Tsar’s adversary and victim; chosen to murder the corpse His Majesty had furnished free; to be imprisoned, starved, degraded, chained like an animal to a wall although he was innocent. Why? because no Jew was innocent in a corrupt state, the most visible sign of its corruption its fear and hatred of those it persecuted. Ostrovsky had reminded him that there was much more wrong with Russia than its anti-Semitism. Those who persecute the innocent were themselves never free. Instead of satisfying him this thought filled him with rage.

It had happened—he was back to this again—because he was Yakov Bok and had an extraordinary amount to learn. He had learned, it wasn’t easy; the experience was his; it was worse than that, it was he. He was the experience. It also meant that now he was somebody else than he had been, who would have thought it? So I learned a little, he thought, I learned this but what good will it do me? Will it open the prison doors? Will it allow me to go out and take up my poor life again? Will it free me a little once I am free? Or have I only learned to know what my condition is—that the ocean is salty as you are drowning, and though you knew it you are drowned? Still, it was better than not knowing. A man had to learn, it was his nature.

Being without chains goaded impatience, what could he do with himself? Time began to move again, like a locomotive with two cars, three cars, four cars, a cluster of days, then two weeks gone, and to his horror, another season. It was autumn and he trembled at the thought of winter. The cold thought hurt his head. Suslov-Smirnov, an excitable, loose-boned long man with thick-lensed eyeglasses on a thin nose, and a bushy head of blond hair, had come four times to ask questions and take voluminous notes on thin sheets of paper—Ostrovsky had been forbidden to return. The lawyer had embraced the prisoner and promised—”Although we are hindered by stupid officials dragging their feet”—to move with all possible dispatch. “But in the meantime you must be careful of every step you take. Walk, as they say, on eggs, Mr. Bok. On eggs.” He nodded, winked with both eyes, and pressed four fingers to his lips.

“Do you know,” Yakov said, “that they killed Bibi-kov?”

“We know,” whispered Suslov-Smirnov, looking around in fright, “but we can’t prove it. Say nothing or you’ll make your situation worse.”

“I’ve already said it,” the fixer said, “to Grubeshov.”

Suslov-Smirnov wrote it down quickly, then erased it and left. He said he would return but didn’t, and no one would tell the fixer why. Have I made still another mistake? Again the indictment withdrawn? Yakov slowly tore at his flesh with his nails. The rest of another month leaked by. He again kept count of the days with bits of paper torn from the toilet paper strips. He weighed, he thought, a ton, all grief. His little hope— the hope he had foolishly dared—flickered, waned, withered. His legs were swollen and his back teeth, loose. He was at the lowest ebb of his life when the warden appeared with an immaculate paper, saluted, and said his trial was about to begin.