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By Root 3127 0

and Kievskaya Mysl carried a picture of him, Zhenia Golov, and Yakov recognized the pimply-faced boy he had chased out of the yard with his friend. One newspaper said the boy had been dead for a week, the other said two. When the Police Inspector had examined his swollen face and shrunken mutilated body, he had counted thirty-seven wounds made by a thin pointed instrument. The boy, according to Professor Y. A. Cherpunov of the Kiev Anatomical Institute, had been stabbed to death and bled white, “possibly for religious purposes.” Marfa Vladimirovna Golov, the bereaved mother, a widow, had claimed the body of her son. There was a picture of her in both newspapers, pressing the boy’s poor head to her grief-stricken bosom, crying desolately, “Tell me, Zheniushka, who did this to my baby?”

That night the river overflowed its banks, flooding the lower reaches of the city. Two days later the boy was buried in the cemetery, a few short steps from his home. Yakov could see from the window of his stable the trees still powdered with April snow, and wandering amid them and the thin tombstones, the black crowd, among them some pilgrims with staves. When the coffin was lowered into the grave, hundreds of leaflets exploded into the air: WE ACCUSE THE JEWS. A week later the Kiev Union of Russian People, together with members of the Society of the Double-headed Eagle, placed a huge wooden cross on the grave of the boy—Yakov watching from afar—at the same time calling on all good Christians, according to the newspapers that night, to preach a new crusade against the Israelitic enemies. “They want nothing less than our lives and country! People of Russia! Have pity on your children! Avenge the unfortunate martyrs!” This is terrible, Yakov thought, they want to start a pogrom. In the brickyard Proshko sported a Black Hundreds button on his leather apron. Very early the next morning the fixer hurried to the printer’s for his counterfeit papers but when he arrived he found the place had burned down. He ran back to the stable and hastily counted his rubles to see if he had enough to get to Amsterdam and possibly New York. Wrapping up his few things, and slinging his bag of tools onto his shoulder, he was on his way down the stairs when a man who identified himself as Colonel I. P. Bodyansky, the red-mustached head of the Secret Police in Kiev, with several other officials, fifteen gendarmes wearing white looped cords across the breasts of their uniforms, a detachment of police, several plainclothes detectives, and two representatives of the Office of the Chief Prosecuting Attorney of the District Superior Court, about thirty in all, rushed up the stairs with drawn pistols and swords, confronting the fleeing Yakov.

“In the name of His Majesty Nicholas the Second,” said the red-headed colonel, “I arrest you. Resist and you are dead.”

The fixer readily confessed he was a Jew. Otherwise he was innocent.

III

In a long, high-ceilinged cell under the District Courthouse, a dismal faded stucco structure in the commercial section of the Plossky a few versts from the brickyard in the Lukianovsky, Yakov, in a state of unrelieved distress, could not blot out the sight of himself marching manacled between two tall columns of gendarmes on horses, their sabers drawn and spurs clinking as they hurried him along snowy streets tracked slushy by sledge runners.

He had begged the colonel to let him walk on the sidewalk to lessen his embarrassment, but was forced into the wet center of the street, and people on their way to work had stopped to watch. They gazed at first quietly, then in deep silence, broken by whispers, muttering and a few jeers. Most seemed to wonder what the parade was about, but then a uniformed schoolboy in a blue cap and silver-buttoned coat, poking his fingers up like horns over his head, danced in the snow behind the prisoner, chanting, “Zhid, Zhid,” and that awoke murmurs, hoots, mockery. A small crowd, including some women, began to follow them, jeering at the fixer, calling him dirty names, “murdering Jew.” He wanted to break