Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [43]
The other one snickered.
“Have you got a cigarette, Potseikin?” the former tailor asked the one on the other mattress. “A piece of butt?”
“Fuck yourself,” said the blinker, a man with bloodshot eyes.
“Have you got a cigarette?” Akimytch asked Yakov.
“My bag is empty,” said the fixer. He held it up.
“I’ll bet you don’t know why I’m here,” Akimytch said.
“No.”
“Neither do I. It’s mistaken identity with me. I never did what they say I did, may they choke to death on their mothers’ milk. They mistook me for an anarchist.”
He began to weep.
“I’m here because of a pack of pamphlets or whatever you call ‘em,” Potseikin said. “Some poor bastard, a man with wild eyes and a thick greatcoat says to me on Insti-tutsky Street, ‘Brother,’ he says, ‘I have to piss, so hold my bundle a minute, and when I come back here I’ll slip you a five-kopek piece, on my honor.’ What can you say to a man who has to piss? Could I say no to that? Then he might piss on me. So I held onto his bundle and in two minutes a pig-eyed detective comes running across the street and jabs a gun in my gut so hard it almost busts, and then he marches me off to the Secret Police without listening to a word I say. When we get there three big ones give me a going over with fat sticks till all my bones are cracked, and they show me where the pamphlets say to overthrow the Tsar. Who wants to overthrow the Tsar? Personally, I have only the highest regard for Nicholas the Second and the royal family, especially the young princesses and the poor sick boy, who I love as my own. But nobody believed me and that’s why I’m here. It’s all the fault of those bastard pamphlets.”
“It’s mistaken identity with me,” said Akimytch. “What’s it with you, pal?”
“The same,” said Yakov.
“What did they say you did?”
He thought he oughtn’t to tell them, but it came out quickly, in accusation of the accusers.
“They say I killed a boy—it’s a dirty lie.”
There was a deep silence in the cell. Now I’ve blundered, Yakov thought. He looked for the guard but he had gone for the soup pail.
The two on the straw pallets, their heads together, whispered in each other’s ears, first Akimytch whispering, then Potseikin.
“Did you?” Akimytch asked Yakov.
“No, of course not. Why would I kill an innocent child?”
They whispered once more and Potseikin said in a thick voice, “Tell us the truth, are you a Jew?”
“What difference would it make?” Yakov said, but when they were whispering again he was afraid.
“Don’t try anything or I’ll call the guard.”
The one in rags got up and approached the fixer, sneering. “So you’re the bastard Jew who killed the Christian boy and sucked the blood out of his bones? I saw it in the papers.”
“Leave me in peace,” Yakov said. “I’ve done nothing like that to anybody, not to speak of a twelve-year-old child. It’s not in my nature.”
“You’re a stinking Jew liar.”
“Think as you like but let me alone.”
“Who else \\vould do anything like that but a mother-fucking Zhid?”
Potseikin pounced on the fixer and with his rotten teeth tried to bite his neck. Yakov shoved him off but Akimytch, foul-breathed, was on his back beating the fixer’s head and face with his clammy bony hands.
“Christkiller!”
“Gevalt!” cried Yakov, flailing his arms. Though he whirled, ducked, and struck out with his fists, Potseikin hit him with a knee in the back as Akimytch struck him on the neck with both fists. The fixer went down, his mind darkened in pain. He lay motionless as they kicked him savagely, and felt as he passed out, a terrible rage.
Afterwards he woke on his mattress, and when he heard their snoring, retched. A rat scuttled across his genitals and he bolted up in horror. But there was a bit of horned moon at the small high barred window and he watched for a while in peace.
IV
The stable had burned to the ground in a matter of minutes, Proshko said, spitting at the fixer’s feet, and it wouldn’t surprise him if it were done with Jewish magic. He pointed to the blackened remains of the stalls