Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [52]
“What is the ‘significant evidence’ you refer to?”
“The evidence we have been engaged in collecting, including the evidence of history.”
“History is not law.”
“We will see about that.”
“I must insist on a reply from Marfa Golov.”
“I have no more to say than I’ve already said,” Marfa answered haughtily. “He used to beat me up and I defended myself. My legs and back were black and blue for months where he beat me, and once he smashed me in the eye so hard it ran pus for three weeks.”
“Is it true that he also beat your son, once so severely that the boy lost consciousness?”
“I forbid you to answer,” Grubeshov shouted.
“Don’t be a fool,” Colonel Bodyansky said to Bibikov.
“The Jew killed my child,” Marfa cried out. “Somebody ought to scratch his eyes.” She ran to the window and called out of the open vent to the gravestones in the cemetery, “Zhenia, my baby, come homel Come home to your mother!”
She wept heartbrokenly.
She’s insane, thought Yakov. So is her hat with the cherries.
“See how he glares at me like a starving wolf from the forest,” Marfa, turning to the fixer, shouted. “Make him stop!”
There was a stir among the officials. Two of the gendarmes pinned the prisoner by his arms.
Marfa, glaring at him, attempted then to remove her hat. Her eyelids fluttered, and moaning she sank to the floor. The hat rolled off her head, but before fainting she gazed loosely around to see where it was. Father Anastasy and Colonel Bodyansky bent to assist her.
When Marfa recovered only the police and gendarmes were in the room with her and the prisoner. Bibikov, to Yakov’s misery, had left first, and he saw him, through the window, walk down the muddy road and get into a carriage alone. The dead boy’s mother asked for her hat, blew on it, and put it carefully away in a sideboard drawer.
She covered her head with a coarse black shawl.
3
Grubeshov, in his bowler and wet rain cape, hovered over Father Anastasy with a large black umbrella as the wet-lipped priest, standing on a low flat rock, his voice rising and falling sometimes out of context with what he was saying, nasally recited the blood guilt of the Jewish Nation.
The group of officials and police had abandoned the carriages and motorcar at the bottom of an inclined street paved with rocks, lined on one side by a row of blackened shanties from which people stared at them out of windows and doorways, but no one came out to watch. A flock of pigeons rose in the street and two small white dogs, barking shrilly, darted into the houses as the crowd of officials approached. On foot they climbed first up the steps of a terraced hill from which the winding Dnieper was visible in the distance, then descended into a muddy ravine, and along it to the bottom of an almost perpendicular rocky hill with some caves in its face, in one of which the body of Zhenia Golov had been found. This cave, minutely described in the newspapers Yakov had read on the day of the discovery of the boy’s body, one of those cut into the hill by religious hermits centuries ago, was about fifteen feet up its face. To get up into it one climbed the rough steps that had been hewn into the rocky hill. On top of it was a sparse birchwood grove with thin-trunked white trees full of chirping swallows, and beyond that lay a flat section of the outskirts of the city consisting of scattered houses and empty lots, about two versts from Nikolai Maximovitch’s brick factory.
“There is from here an almost straight road from the brick factory where Zhenia was presumed to be killed,” Grubeshov said.
“But, permit me, Vladislav Grigorievitch, to draw your attention to the fact that the road from Marfa Golov’s house is just as straight and a little shorter,” said Bibikov.
“In any case,” the Prosecuting Attorney answered, “the most important evidence will be the testimony of the experts.”
The priest, a long-haired, large-nosed man whose breath smelled of garlic, was standing under Grubeshov’s umbrella before a loose semicircle of listeners but the Prosecuting