Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [21]
“No.”
“I wish you were, Yakov Ivanovitch,” she sighed.
Then she rose and asked him to undress in the lavatory while she got ready in the bedroom.
It’s her leg, he thought. She’ll be under covers when I come in. Better that way.
He removed his clothes in the lavatory. His hands still stank of paint and turpentine, and he soaped them twice with her pink bar of perfumed soap. He smelled them again but now they stank of the perfume. If there’s a mistake to make I’ll make it, he thought.
Seeing himself naked in the mirror he was at first uneasy, then sickened by what he was about to do.
Things are bad enough, so why make them worse? This isn’t for me, I’m not the type, and the sooner I tell her the better. He went into the bedroom, carrying his clothes.
Zina had braided her hair. She stood naked, her bosom full, sponging herself from a white bowl, in the gaslight. He saw a dribble of bright blood run down her crippled leg and said, stupefied. “But you are unclean!”
“Yakov!—You startled me.” She covered herself with the wet cloth. “I thought you would wait till I called you.”
“I didn’t know your condition. Excuse me, I had no idea. You didn’t mention it, though I realize it’s personal.”
“But surely you know this is the safest time?” Zina said. “And there’s no inconvenience to speak of, the flow stops the minute we begin.”
“Excuse me, some can but I can’t.”
He was thinking of his wife’s modesty during her period and until she had been to the baths, but could not say that to Zina.
“Excuse me, I’d better be going.”
“I’m a lonely woman, Yakov Ivanovitch,” she cried, “have mercy a little!” but he was already dressing and soon left.
3
One night in the dead of winter, in the cold thick dark at 4 A.M., after the drivers Serdiuk and Richter had come for two teams of horses—leaving six horses in the stalls— and he had heard them clomp out of the stable and clack dully across the snow-covered cobblestones, Yakov, who had been two days in the brickyard, got quickly out of bed, lit a short candle and hurriedly dressed. He sneaked down the outer stairs from his room above the stable and went along the fence of palings, past the squat brickkilns to the cooling shed. Motionless in the wet cold, he watched the drivers and their helpers, in steaming sheepskins, the horses’ flanks steaming, loading the straw-covered long wagon-trucks with large heavy yellow bricks. The work progressed slowly, helper tossing a brick to helper, who tossed it to the driver on the wagon, who laid it in place. After what seemed to him an endless time standing in the dark, blowing on his hands and trying soundlessly to stamp the cold out of his boots, Yakov had counted three hundred and forty bricks loaded into one wagon, and four hundred and three into another. Three other wagons at the shed went unused. But in the morning when Proshko, the foreman, presented him with the voucher in the stuffy low-ceilinged shack where Yakov sat at a table stacked with ledgers and bundles of useless papers from the past, the badly written numbers scrawled on a torn piece of wrapping paper came to a total of six hundred ten bricks, instead of seven hundred forty-three, and the fixer ground his teeth in anger at the cold-blooded nerve of the thievery.
Though Yakov was desperately eager for work, he had reluctantly accepted Nikolai Maximovitch’s offer, at the last minute almost in panic trying to back out when he learned that the Lukianovsky, where the brickyard was located—near a cemetery, with a few houses and trees scattered around and beyond it, more heavily on the far-off side about half a tombstoned verst away—and where he was expected to live, was a district forbidden to Jews to reside in. He had then told the owner of the brickworks that he would not take the job because he had many doubts he could do the work as it should be done. But Nikolai Maximovitch, advising him not to be hasty, had pooh-poohed his doubts.
“Nonsense, you will do better than you suppose. You must learn to have confidence in your natural abilities, Yakov Ivanovitch. Just