Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [4]
“The truth of it is I’m a man full of wants I’ll never satisfy, at least not here. It’s time to get out and take a chance. Change your place change your luck, people say.”
“Since the last year or so, Yakov, you’re a different man. What wants are so important?”
“Those that can’t sleep and keep me awake for company. I’ve told you what wants: a full stomach now and then. A job that pays rubles, not noodles. Even some education if I can get it, and I don’t mean workmen studying Torah after hours. I’ve had my share of that. What I want to know is what’s going on in the world.”
“That’s all in the Torah, there’s no end to it. Stay away from the wrong books, Yakov, the impure.”
“There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.”
Shmuel unstuck his hat and wiped his brow with his handkerchief.
“Yakov, if you want to go to foreign parts, Turks or no Turks, why not to Palestine where a Jew can see Jewish trees and mountains, and breathe the Jewish air? If I had half a chance there’s where I’d go.”
“All I’ve had in this miserable town is a beggarly existence. Now I’ll try Kiev. If I can live there decently that’s what I’ll do. If not, I’ll make sacrifices, save up, and head for Amsterdam for a boat to America. To sum it up, I have little but I have plans.”
“Plans or none you’re looking for trouble.”
“I’ve never had to look,” said the fixer. “Well, Shmuel, good luck to you. The morning’s gone so I’d better go.”
He climbed up onto the wagon and reached for the reins.
“I’ll ride with you as far as the windmills.” Shmuel got up on the seat on the other side.
Yakov touched the nag with a birch switch the old man kept in the holder, a hole bored into the edge of the seat, but the horse, after an initial startled gallop, stopped short and stood motionless in the road.
“Personally I never use it,” the peddler remarked. “It’s there as a warning. If he dawdles I remind him it’s there. He seems to like to hear me talk about it.”
“If that’s the case I’m better off walking.”
“Patience.” Shmuel smacked his lips. “Gidap, beauty —he’s very vain. Whenever you can afford it, Yakov, feed him oats. Too much grass and he’s prone to gas.”
“If he’s prone to gas let him fart.” He flicked the reins.
Yakov didn’t look back. The nag moved along a crooked road between black plowed fields with dark round haystacks piled up here and there, the peasant’s church visible on the left in the distance; then slowly up the narrow stony cemetery road, a few thin yellow willows amidst the graves, and around a low tombstone-covered hill where Yakov’s parents, a man and woman in their early twenties, lay buried. He had considered a visit to their weed-strewn graves but hadn’t the heart at the last minute. The past was a wound in the head. He thought of Raisl and felt depressed.
The fixer snapped the rod against the nag’s ribs but got no increase of motion.
“I’ll get to Kiev by Hanukkah.”
“If you don’t get there it’s because God wills it. You won’t miss a thing.”
A shnorrer in rags called to the fixer from beside a tilted tombstone. “Hey, there, Yakov, it’s Friday. How about a two-kopek piece for a Sabbath blessing? Charity saves from death.”
“Death is the last of my worries.”
“Lend me a kopek or two, Yakov,” said Shmuel.
“A kopek I haven’t earned today.”
The shnorrer, a man with ugly feet, called him goy, his mouth twisted, eyes lit in anger.
Yakov spat in the road.
Shmuel said a prayer to ward off evil.
The nag began to trot, drawing the rickety wagon with its swinging bucket banging the axle past the cemetery hill, down the winding road. They drove by the poorhouse, a shabby structure with an addition for orphans, which Yakov averted his eyes from, then clop-clopped