Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [131]
5
All night the cell was crowded with prisoners who had lived and died there. They were broken-faced, greenish-gray men, with haunted eyes, scarred shaved heads and ragged bodies, crowding the cell. Many stared wordlessly at the fixer and he at them, their eyes lit with longing for life. If one disappeared two appeared in his place. So many prisoners, thought the prisoner, it’s a country of prisoners. They’ve freed the serfs, or so they say, but not the innocent prisoners. He beheld long lines of them, gaunt-eyed men with starved mouths, lines stretching through the thick walls to improverished cities, the vast empty steppe, great snowy virgin forests, to the shabby wooden work camps in Siberia. Trofim Kogin was among them. He had broken his leg and lay in the snow as the long lines slowly moved past him. He lay with his eyes shut and mouth twitching but did not call for help.
“Help!” cried Yakov in the dark.
This night before his trial, the fixer was oppressed by fear of death and though he was deathly sleepy he would not sleep. When his heavy eyes shut momentarily he saw someone standing over him with a knife raised to rip his throat. So the fixer forced himself to stay awake. He threw aside his blanket to make it too cold to sleep. Yakov pinched his arms and thighs. If anyone attempted to sneak into the cell he would shout when the door opened. To cry out was his only defense. It might scare the assassins if they thought any of the prisoners in the cells down the corridor would hear, and guess the Jew was being murdered. If they heard, after a while it would get to the outside that the officials had assassinated him rather than bring him to trial.
The wind wailed mutely in the prison yard. His heart was like a rusted chain, his muscles taut, as though each had been bound with wire. Even in the cold air he sweated. Amid the darkly luminous prisoners he saw spies waiting to kill him. One was the gray-haired warden with a gleaming two-headed ax. He tried to hide his crossed eye behind his hand but it shone like a jewel through his fingers. The Deputy Warden, his fly open, held a black bullwhip behind his back. And though the Tsar wore a white mask over his face and a black on the back of his head, Yakov recognized him standing in the far corner of the cell, dropping green drops into a glass of hot milk.
“It will make you sleep, Yakov Shepsovitch.”
“After you, Your Majesty.”
The Tsar faded in the dark. The spies disappeared but the lines of prisoners were endless.
What’s next, the fixer thought, and when will it happen? Will the trial begin, or will they call it off at the last minute? Suppose they withdraw the Act of Indictment in the morning, hoping I collapse or go insane before they give me another. Many men have lived in prison longer and some under worse conditions, but if I have to live another year in this cell I would rather die. Then the sad-eyed prisoners who crowded the cell began to disappear. First those who were standing around the wooden bed, then those squeezed together in the center, then those at the walls, and finally the long lines of sunken-faced men, moaning women, and ghostly children with glazed eyes in purple sockets, extending through the prison walls into the snowy distance.
“Are you Jews or Russians?” the fixer asked them.
“We are Russian prisoners.”
“You look like Jews,” he said.
Yakov fell asleep. Knowing he had, he frantically strove to awake, hearing himself sob as he slept, but it was growing lighter in the cell and he soon saw Bibikov sitting at a table in his white summer suit, stirring a spoonful of strawberry jelly in his tea.
“This would hardly be the time for them to kill you, Yakov Shepsovitch,” he said. “Anyone would know it was a put-up job, and it would arouse an outcry. What you must watch out for is the sudden and unexpected peril, the apparently accidental. So sleep now, without fear for your life, and if you should ever manage to get out of prison, keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others.”
“Your honor,” said Yakov, “I’ve had an