Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [56]
The fixer forced himself to look. He gazed at the gleaming point of the awl, and beyond it, into the depths of the cave which he now saw clearly, everyone present, among them Marfa Golov, her head wrapped in a black shawl, her wet eyes reflecting the candle lights, wailing on her knees at the bier of her Zhenia, disinterred from his grave for the occasion, lying naked in death, the wounds of his gray shrunken pitiful body visible in the light of two long thickly dripping white candles burning at his large head and small feet.
Yakov hastily counted the wounds on the child’s bloated face, and cried out, “Fourteen!”
But the Prosecuting Attorney replied these were two magic groups of seven, and Father Anastasy, the stink of garlic rising from his head, fell on his knees and with a quiet moan began to pray.
V
The days were passing and the Russian officials were waiting impatiently for his menstrual period to begin. Grubeshov and the army general often consulted the calendar. If it didn’t start soon they threatened to pump blood out of his penis with a machine they had for that purpose. The machine was a pump made of iron with a red indicator to show how much blood was being drained out. The danger of it was that it didn’t always work right and sometimes sucked every drop of blood out of the body. It was used exclusively on Jews; only their penises fitted it.
In the morning the guards came into the cell and awakened him roughly. He was searched carefully and ordered to dress. Yakov was manacled and chained, then marched up two flights of stairs—he had hoped to Bibikov’s office but it was to the Prosecuting Attorney’s across the hall. In the anteroom, on a bench against the wall in the rear two men in threadbare suits looked up furtively at the prisoner, then lowered their eyes. They are spies, he thought. Grubeshov’s office was a large high-ceilinged room with a long ikon of a crucified blue-haloed Christ on the wall behind the prosecutor’s desk, where he sat reading legal documents and referring to open law books. The fixer was ordered to sit in a chair facing Grubeshov, and the guards lined up behind him.
The day was uncomfortably warm, the windows shut against the heat. The prosecutor wore a light greenish suit with the same soiled yellow vest and black bow tie. His sidewhiskers were brushed, and he mopped his moist face and palms and wiped the back of his heavy neck with a large handkerchief. Yakov, disturbed by his bad dream of that morning, and almost unable to look at the Prosecuting Attorney since his performance at the cave, felt he was suffocating.
“I have decided to send you to the preliminary confinement cell in the Kiev Prison to await your trial,” Grubeshov said, blowing his nose and cleaning it slowly. “It is, of course, not easy to predict when it will begin, so I thought I would inquire whether you had become more cooperative? Since you have had time to reflect on your situation, perhaps you are now willing to tell the truth. What do you say? Further resistance will gain you only headaches. Cooperation will perhaps ease your situation.”
“What else is there to say, your honor?” the fixer sighed sadly. “I’ve looked in my small bag of words and I have nothing more to say except that I’m innocent. There’s no evidence against me, because I didn’t do what you say I did.”
“That’s too bad. Your role in this murder was known to us before you were arrested. You were the only Jew living in the district, with the exceptions of Mandel-baum and Litvinov, Merchants of the First Guild, who weren’t in Russia during the time of the commission of the crime, perhaps on purpose. We suspected a Jew at once because a Russian couldn’t possibly commit that kind of crime. He might cut a man’s throat in a fight, or suddenly kill a person with two or three heavy blows, but no Russian would maliciously torture an innocent child by inflicting forty-seven deadly wounds on his body.”
“Neither would I,” said the fixer. “It’s not in my nature, whatever else is.”