Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [45]
“On one look I knew he was a Jew, even though he was faking that he was a Russian. It’s easy enough to tell an onion from a radish if you’re not color blind.” Proshko laughed a little from the chest. “Yakov Ivano-vitch Dologushev, he called himself, but I knew from the sound of it on his tongue that the name didn’t fit him. A name belongs to you as your birthright, but it hung on him like a suit of stolen clothes. I felt in my blood he was a Jew the same way as you feel in the dark the presence of a ghost. Wait up, little brother, I thought to myself, something smells fishy here. Maybe it’s his natural smell, or the way he talks Russian, or maybe it’s the flatfooted way he runs when he chases young boys, but when I looked with both of my eyes open I saw what I already knew—he was a Zhid and no two ways about it. You can’t make a gentleman out of a toad, as the saying goes, and a bom Jew can’t hide the Zhid in his face. This is a foxy bastard, I thought to myself, and he thinks he’s got it hidden because he wears a belted sheepskin coat and has shaved off his Jewish whiskers and curls, and maybe it’ll be a little slow smoking him out of his hole now that he’s fooled Nikolai Maximovitch, but smoke him out I will, and with God’s help it’s what I did.”
“Tell the details,” said Grubeshov.
“It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes after I first saw him that I went back to the office shack and asked him for his papers so as to hand them over to the District Police, and right off he showed me who he was. He lied that he had given them to the boss and he had registered them with the police. If a man talks crooked, I thought to myself, he’s crooked elsewhere, and I’ll watch out to see where else. I didn’t have long to wait. Once when he was nosing around the kilns for purposes of his own, I sneaked into the shack and checked up on his figures in the books. He was crooked in his accounts and every day entered smaller amounts than he should so he could keep some rubles for himself—not so many, a Jew is cunning—maybe three or four or five a day that Nikolai Maximovitch had no suspicions of, and he saved himself a nice little pile in a tin can in his room.”
“You’re a liar,” Yakov said, trembling, “you’re the thief and you’re putting it on me. You and your drivers stole thousands of bricks from Nikolai Maximovitch, and you hated me for watching you so you couldn’t steal more.”
Nobody was listening.
“What did he do with the rubles you say he stole?” Bibikov asked the foreman. “There were about ninety in the tin can, if I remember correctly. If he was stealing four rubles a day, let us say, he should have had many more.”
“Who knows what a Jew does with money. I’ve heard it said they take it to bed with them and give it a fuck once in a while. I bet he gave most of it to the Zhidy synagogue in the Podol. They have plenty of uses for a Russian ruble.”
“The Secret Police confiscated altogether one hundred and five rubles,” Grubeshov announced after conferring with Colonel Bodyansky. “Keep your mouth shut,” he said to Yakov. “Answer when you’re spoken to.”
“What’s more,” Proshko went on, “he sneaked other Jews into the brickyard, and one was one of those Hasids with a round hat, or whatever you call them, who prayed up there in the stable with this one here. The other one came when they thought nobody was around to watch them. They both tied horns on their heads and prayed to the Jewish God. I watched them through the window and saw them praying and eating matzos. I figured they baked some in the stove up there and I was right, there was half a sack of flour hidden under the bed that the police got. I kept track of them because I had my own suspicions, like I told you. I saw this one here sneaking around like a ghost at night, his face white and eyes strange, looking for something, and I also saw him chasing the boys that I told you about. I was worried he would do them some kind of harm, little knowing how right I was. One day two or three school kids came in the yard with their book satchels. I saw him chase them but they got away