Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [5]
They rattled along a rutted dusty street with thatched cottages on one side, open weedy fields on the other. A big-wigged Jewess, sitting on her doorstep, plucked a bloody-necked hen between her knees, as she cursed out a peasant’s sow rooting in the remnants of her potato garden. A pool of blood in the ditch marked the passage of the ritual slaughterer. Farther on, a bearded black goat with a twisted horn, tethered to a post, baaed at the horse and charged, but the rope around his neck held and though the post toppled, the goat was thrown on its back. The doors of some of the cottages hung loose, and where there were steps they sagged. Fences buckled and were about to collapse without apparent notice or response, irritating the fixer, who liked things in place and functioning.
Tonight the white candles would gleam from the lit windows. For everybody else.
The horse zigzagged towards the marketplace, and now the quality of the houses improved, some large and attractive, with gardens full of flowers in the summertime.
“Leave it to the lousy rich,” the fixer muttered.
Shmuel had nothing to say. His mind, he had often said, had exhausted the subject. He did not envy the rich, all he wanted was to share a little of their wealth— enough to live on while he was working hard to earn a living.
The market, a large open square with wooden houses on two sides, some containing first-floor shops, was crowded with peasant carts laden with grains, vegetables, wood, hides and whatnot. Around the stalls and bins mostly women clustered, shopping for the Sabbath. Though the market was his usual hangout, the fixer waved to no one and no one waved to him.
I leave with no regret, he thought. I should have gone years ago.
“Who have you told?” Shmuel asked.
“Who’s there to tell? Practically nobody. It’s none of their business anyway. Frankly, my heart is heavy—I’ll tell the truth—but I’m sick of this place.”
He had said goodbye to his two cronies, Leibish Polikov and Haskel Dembo. The first had shrugged, the other wordlessly embraced him, and that was that. A butcher holding up by its thick yellow feet a squawking hen beating its wings saw the wagon go by and said something witty to his customers. One of these, a young woman who turned to look, called to Yakov, but by then the wagon was out of the marketplace, scattering some chickens nesting in the ruts of the road and a flock of jabbering ducks, as it clattered on.
They approached the domed synagogue with its iron weathercock, a pock-marked yellow-walled building with an oak door, for the time being resting in peace. It had been sacked more than once. The courtyard was empty except for a black-hatted Jew sitting on a bench reading a folded newspaper in the sunlight. Yakov had rarely been inside the synagogue in recent years yet he easily remembered the long high-ceilinged room with its brass chandeliers, oval stained windows, and the prayer stands with stools and wooden candleholders, where he had spent, for the most part wasted, so many hours.
“Gidap,” he said.
At the other side of the town—a shtetl was an island surrounded by Russia—as they came abreast a windmill, its patched fans turning in slow massive motion, the fixer jerked on the reins and the horse clopped to a stop.
“Here’s where we part,” he said to the peddler.
Shmuel drew out of his pocket an embroidered cloth bag.
“Don’t forget these,” he said embarrassed. “I found them in your drawer before we left.”
In the bag was another containing phylacteries. There was also a prayer shawl and a prayer book. Raisl, before