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Bibikov watched the dancing rag, absently polishing his glasses; Ivan Semyonovitch stared at it in fascination.

“I will describe it to you,” said the Prosecuting Attorney. “It is part of a peasant’s blouse similar to the one you are presently affecting. Was this rag, by some chance, formerly a possession of yours?”

“I don’t know,” said Yakov wearily.

“I advise you to think more carefully, Yakov Bok. If you’ve eaten no garlic your breath won’t stink.”

“Yes, your honor,” Yakov said desperately, “it’s mine more or less, although that’s nothing to worry about. The old man I mentioned to you was hit on the head by a rock, and I used part of an old shirt I was no longer wearing—it fell apart on my back—to wipe the blood away. That’s God’s own truth and all there is to it, I swear.”

“So you admit it’s bloodstained,” shouted the Prosecuting Attorney.

Yakov felt his tongue turn to dust.

“Did you ever chase any children in the brickworks yard in the vicinity of the kilns, in particular a twelve-year lad by the name of Zhenia Golov?”

The fixer was unable to reply.

Grubeshov, after glancing at Bibikov, smiled broadly as he mincingly asked the fixer, “Tell me Yankel Jew, why are you trembling?”

3

Why does a man tremble?

When he was locked in the cell again there were three filthy straw pallets on the floor. One was his—what a misery that he could think of it as his; and two new prisoners were lying on the others. One was a hairy man in rags, the other a living skeleton. Both stank across the room, of dirt and poverty. Though neither paid any attention to him, the ragged one blinking at the wall, the other snoring, the fixer kept to the far corner of the cell. He felt abandoned, lost to the world.

“What will happen to me now?” he asked himself. And if it happens bad who will ever know? I might as well be dead. Recalling his father-in-law and wife, he could conjure neither of them close. Especially the wife. He thought of his father and mother, young people in their weedy graves, and their fate gave him no comfort. His frustrated innocence outraged him. He was unjustly accused, helpless, unable to offer proof or be believed. What horror would they accuse him of next? “If they knew me could they say such things?” He tried to comprehend what was happening and explain it to himself. After all, he was a rational being, and a man must try to reason. Yet the more he reasoned the less he understood. The familiar had become evil. What happened next was weighted with peril. That he was a Jew, willing or unwilling, was not enough to explain his fate. Remembering his life filled him with hatred for the way things went and were going. I’m a fixer but all my life I’ve broken more than I fix. What would they accuse him of next? How could a man defend himself against such terrible hints, insinuations, accusations, if no one was willing to believe him? Panic gnawed him. He was full of desperate thoughts of what to do next—somehow to sneak out of the cell and seek in the ghetto for the old man to tell the Russians that he had been hit on the head by a rock and Yakov had wiped away the blood?

The fixer goes from house to house, knocking on each thin door and asking for the tzadik but nobody knows him; then in the last house they know him, a saintly man, but he had long ago gone away. The fixer hurriedly travels on the train to Minsk and after months of desperate searching meets the old man, the moon on his rabbinic hat, coming home one evening from the synagogue.

“Please, you must go back to Kiev with me and prove my innocence. Tell the officials I didn’t do what they say I did.”

But the old tzadik does not recognize the fixer. He looks at him long but shakes his head. The wound on his temple has healed and he cannot now recall the night Yakov says he had spent with him in the room above the stable.

When the fixer remembered where he was he tore at his hands with his nails, and he tore at his face.

The snorer awoke with a gasp. “Akimytch,” he