Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [25]
In February he went through a period of severe nervousness. He blamed it on his worries. He had visited the place where he could get counterfeit papers, had found they were not impossibly expensive although they were not inexpensive, and he was thinking of having a passport and residence certificate made out under his assumed name. When he awoke, hours before he had to, to check the number of bricks in the trucks his muscles were tight, his chest constricted, breathing sometimes painful, and he was uneasy when he dealt with Proshko. Even to ask him the most routine questions troubled the fixer. He was irritable all day and cursed himself for trifling mistakes in his accounts, a matter of a kopek or two. Once, at nightfall, he drove two boys out of the brickyard. He knew them as troublemakers, one a pale-faced pimply boy of about twelve, the other like a peasant with a head of hair like hay, about the same age. They came into the yard after school, in the late afternoon, and pitched balls of clay at each other, broke good bricks, and hooted at the horses in the stable. Yakov had warned them to stay out of the yard. This time he caught sight of them through the shack window. They had sneaked into the yard with their book satchels and threw rocks at the smoke curling up from the kilns. Then they hit the chimneys with pieces of brick. Yakov had rushed out of the shack, warning them to leave, but they wouldn’t move. He ran towards them to scare them. Seeing him coming, the boys hooted, touched their genitals, and clutching their satchels, sped past the supply sheds and scrambled up a pile of broken bricks at the fence. They tossed their book satchels over the fence and hopped over it.
“Little bastards!” Yakov shouted, shaking his fist.
Returning to the shack, he noticed Skobeliev watching him slyly. Then the yardkeeper hurried with his stick to light the gas lamps. After a while they glowed in the dusk like green candles.
Proshko, standing at the door of the cooling shed, had also been looking on. “You run like a ruptured pig, Dologushev.”
The next morning a police inspector visited the fixer to ask if anyone in the brick factory was suspected of political unreliability. The fixer said no one was. The official asked him a few more questions and left. Yakov was not able to concentrate on his reading that night.
Since he was sleeping badly he tried going to bed just after he had eaten. He fell asleep quickly enough but awoke before midnight, totally alert, with a sense of being imperiled. In the dark he feared calamities he only occasionally thought of during the day—the stable in flames, burning down with him in it, bound hand and foot unable to move; and the maddened horses destroying themselves. Or dying of consumption, or syphilis, coughing up or pissing blood. And he dreaded what worried him most—to be unmasked as a hidden Jew. “Gevalt!” he shouted, then listened in fright for sounds in the stable to tell him whether the drivers were there and had heard him cry out. Once he dreamed that Rich-ter, carrying a huge black bag on his back, was following him down the road by the graveyard. When the fixer turned to confront the German and asked him what he was carrying in the bag, the driver winked and said, “You.