Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [46]
Yakov groaned.
“That’s why I kept my eye on him and when I couldn’t I told the drivers to watch him.”
“That’s so.” Serdiuk, still smelling of horse, nodded, and Richter said yes.
“I saw them praying with their little black hats on, and I spied on them when they were baking those matzos. Then when the boy was murdered and they found him in the cave with all those wounds the morning it was snowing—when the snow came again in April —I saw this one take the other Jew with the round hat down the stairs and they left the brickyard in a hurry. I went up there, walking right in their footsteps in the snow so he wouldn’t see I had been there, and that was the day I found pieces of matzos they had baked, half a bag of flour under the bed, his sack of tools, and that bloody rag I told you about. The devil scatters his dung wherever he goes.
“After that he wanted to set the stable on fire to burn the evidence but he saw I had my eye on him. When I met him in the brickyard the blood ran out of his face and he couldn’t raise his eyes at me. That was after they had killed the kid. After the funeral I went to the police, and in a week they came and arrested him. They took the matzos away and the other things that I told you about, but I went up there with Serdiuk and Richter here, to tear up the floorboards—some had certain dark stains on them that we wanted to show the police. Just then we see an old graybeard Jew run out of the stable, and the next thing the place was up in roaring flames, and the whole stable burned down in less than five minutes, so it was just by luck we saved any of the horses. We saved six and lost four. If the fire had been an ordinary kind we would’ve saved the whole ten, but being as it was, there was something that made it burn as if the wind was caught in it, and it cried out like people were dying and ghosts were going to meet them. They had said some magic words from a Zhidy book, I’ll swear to God, and upstairs where this one here had lived before they arrested him, the flames turned an oily green such as I never saw before, and then yellow, and then almost black, and they burned twice as fast as the fire in the stalls even though the loft was full of hay. In the stalls the fire burned orange and red, and it was slower, more like an ordinary fire, so we got six horses out of the burning stalls and lost the other four.”
Richter swore every word was true and Serdiuk crossed himself twice.
2
Father Anastasy stiffly embraced Marfa Golov, the haggard mother of the martyred boy, a tallish, scrawny-necked woman with red-rimmed, wet, flecked gray eyes, and dark skin drawn tautly over her face, who tried to curtsy and collapsed in the priest’s arms.
“Forgive us our transgressions, Father,” she wept.
“You must forgive us, my child,” said the priest, in a nasal voice. “The world has sinned against you. In par-ticular, those who sin against our Lord.”
He crossed himself, his hand like a bird, and so did some of the officials.
Marfa Golov, when Yakov first saw her waiting for the officials to arrive, was standing, with a thick-shawled neighbor who quickly ran off when the carriages appeared, on the sagging steps of a two-story wooden house with a peaked corrugated tin roof. The house overlooked a low-walled cemetery, and in the distance the brickyard, which Bibikov stopped to stare at, its chimneys smokeless on Sunday. It was a boxlike house that had once been painted white but was now weathered gray and peeling. The grassless front yard, muddy from the rain, was surrounded by a high unpainted fence, held together horizontally on the street side by long uneven darkly weathered boards. The road in front of the house where the carriages and motorcar waited was pitted and muddy, and the carriages