Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [47]
“It’s surely the one,” Marfa gasped.
“Which one is that?” Bibikov asked, snapping on his silver-rimmed pince-nez and staring at her.
“The Jew Zhenia told me about, who had chased him with a long knife.”
“Note the identification,” said Grubeshov to Ivan Semyonovitch. The assistant hadn’t his notebook with him, but he mentioned it to one of the policemen, who wrote it down.
There was a green mildewed stone well in the yard and Bibikov peered down it but could see nothing.
He dropped a small stone down the well and after a while there was a splash. The officials looked at one another but the Investigating Magistrate walked away.
“The room’s upstairs, your honor,” Marfa said to the Prosecuting Attorney. “It’s small as you’ll see, but Zhenia was small himself for a lad his age. That’s not from me, you’ll notice, because I don’t lack size, but from his cowardly father who deserted us.” She smiled nervously.
Marfa led them in and hurried upstairs to show the officials where the poor child had slept. They wiped their feet on a muddy rag at the door and went up in small hushed groups to stare into the dark tiny cubicle between a large untidy bedroom with a two-pillowed brass bed, and a room with a locked door Marfa said was a storeroom.
“What can a widow do with so many bedrooms? Generally I store things. When my aunt died she left me her furniture although I have enough of my own.”
Yakov was ordered to go up after the others had seen the boy’s room. He wanted not to go but knew that if he said so they would drag him up. He went slowly up the stairs in his clanking leg chains that rubbed his ankles sore, followed by three booted gendarmes who waited for him on the landing with drawn pistols. Marfa, Father Anastasy, Grubeshov, Ivan Semyonovitch and Colonel Bodyanksy were in the corridor as the Jew glanced furtively into the boy’s room. They watched him intently, Grubeshov’s lips pursed. The fixer had wanted to look calmly and with dignity but had been unable to. It was as though he expected a wild animal in the room to spring out at him. He glanced fearfully into the tiny cubicle with torn wallpaper and unmade cot, the crumpled bedsheet gray, soiled, the faded blanket torn. Though the room and cot were strange to him, Yakov had a momentary hallucinatory thought he had seen them before. He then recalled his cubicle in the printer’s flat in the Podol. This was what he remembered but he worried they thought he was thinking of something that would surely convict him were it known what.
“My darling Zhenechka hoped to be a priest,” Marfa whispered loudly to Father Anastasy, dabbing at her reddened eyes with a scented handkerchief. “He was a religious child and worshipped God.”
“It was reported to me that he was being prepared for the seminary,” said the priest. “One of the monks told me he was a dear boy, in some respects a saintly boy. I understand he had already had a mystical experience. I was also told he loved our priestly vestments and hoped some day to wear them. His death is God’s loss.”
Marfa wept miserably. Ivan Semyonovitch’s eyes clouded and he turned away and wiped them on his coat sleeve. Yakov felt like crying but couldn’t.
Then Father Anastasy came down and Bibikov went up the stairs, squeezing past the gendarmes. He glanced casually into Zhenia