Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [136]
Yakov frantically ducked. If this is my death I’ve endured for nothing.
“You might have waited a bit, Yakov Bok,” the chairman of the jury said. “None of us are gentry or educated folk, but neither are we without a bit of experience in the world. A man learns to recognize the truth even if he doesn’t always live by it. And there are times he does that if it suits his fancy. The officials may not want us to know what the truth is but it comes in, you might say, through the chinks in the walls. They may try to deceive us, as they do often enough, but we will sift the evidence and if the facts are not as they say, then let them look to their consciences.”
“They have none.”
“So much the worse for them, in that case. You aren’t born human for nothing, I say.”
“I’m innocent,” said Yakov, “you can look at me and see. Look in my face and say whether a man like me, whatever else he might do, could kill a boy and drain the blood out of his body. If I have any humanity in my heart and you are men you must know it. Tell me do I look like a murderer?”
The chairman was about to say but a violent explosion rocked the coach.
Yakov waited for death. He wandered for a while in a cemetery reading the names on the tombstones. Then he ran from grave to grave, searching them frantically, one after another, but could not find his name. After a while he stopped looking. He had waited a long time but maybe he had longer to wait. If you were a certain type death stayed its distance. Your afflictions were from life —a poor living, mistakes with people, the blows of fate. You lived, you suffered, but you lived.
He heard screams, shouts, commotion, the frightened whinnying of horses. The carriage rattled and seemed to leap up, then struck the ground and stopped dead, shuddering, but remained upright. The stench of gunpowder bored through his nostrils. A door lock snapped and the door fell ajar. He felt an overwhelming hunger to be back home, to see Raisl and set things straight, to decide what to do. “Raisl,” he said, “dress the boy and pack the few things we need, we’ll have to hide.” He was about to kick the door open but warned himself not to. Through the cracked right window he saw people on the run. A squad of Cossacks with lances raised galloped away from the carriage. A squad with uplifted sabers galloped towards it, risen in their saddles. The gray mare lay dead on the cobblestones. Three policemen were lifting the young Cossack rider. His foot had been torn off by the bomb. The boot had been blown away and his leg was shattered and bloody. As they carried him past the carriage his eyes opened and he looked in horror and anguish at Yakov as though to say, “What has my foot got to do with it?”
The fixer shrank from the sight. The Cossack had fainted but his torn leg shook, spattering blood on the policemen. Then a Cossack colonel galloped up to the carriage, holding a sword aloft, shouting to the coachman, “Go on, go on!” He dismounted and tried to slam the door shut but it wouldn’t lock. “Go on, go on!” he shouted. The carriage rumbled on, the horses picked up speed and broke into a fast trot. The colonel, on a white horse, cantered along beside the coach in place of the wounded Cossack.
Yakov sat in the gloomy coach overcome by hatred so intense his chest heaved as though the carriage were airless. He saw himself, after a while, sitting at a table somewhere, opposite the Tsar, a lit candle between them, in a cell or cellar, whatever it was. Nicholas the Second, of medium height, with frank blue eyes and neatly trimmed beard a little too large for his face, sat there naked, holding in his hand a small silver ikon of the Virgin Mary. Though distraught and pale, afflicted with a bad cough he had recently developed, he spoke in a gentle voice and with moving eloquence.
“Though you have me at a disadvantage, Yakov Shepsovitch, I will speak the truth to you. It isn’t only that the Jews are freemasons and revolutionaries who make a shambles of our laws and demoralize our police by systematic bribery for social exemptions—I can