Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [58]
2
He feared the prison would go badly for him and it went badly at once. It’s my luck, he thought bitterly. What do they say?—”If I dealt in candles the sun wouldn’t set.” Instead, I’m” Yakov Fixer and it sets each hour on the stroke. I’m the kind of man who finds it perilous to be alive. One thing I must learn is to say less—much less, or I’ll ruin myself. As it is I’m already ruined.
The Kiev Prison, also in the Lukianovsky, was a high-walled old gray fortress-like building with a large interior muddy yard, strewn on the iron gate side with junk piles—a broken wagon, rotting mattresses, blackened boards, barrels of rubbish, rock and sandpiles where prisoners sometimes worked with cement. A clear area between the administrative offices on the west and the main cell block was the promenade grounds. Yakov and his guards had got to the prison on a trolley, a ride of several versts from the District Courthouse where he had been in jail until then. At the prison the fixer was greeted by the cross-eyed warden, “Hello, blood-drinker, welcome to the Promised Land.” The Deputy Warden, a lean, narrow-faced man with depthless eyes and a four-fingered right hand, said, “Here we’ll feed you flour and blood till you shit matzos.” The sub-officials and clerks rushed out of their offices to see the Jew, but Warden Grizitskoy, a man of sixty-five, with a limp yellowish gray beard, a khaki uniform with gold epaulets, and a visored cap, shoved open a door and led the fixer into an inner office, where he sat down at his desk.
“I don’t want your kind here,” he said, “but I have no choice in the matter. I’m the Tsar’s servant and follow his orders faithfully. You are the lowest of Jewish scum —I’ve read of your deeds—but nevertheless a charge of his Imperial Majesty Nicholas the Second. So here you’ll stay till they tell me otherwise. You’d better behave yourself. Follow the rules and regulations and do as you’re told. Quickly does it. Under no circumstances are you to attempt to communicate with any person outside this prison unless I authorize it. If you make trouble you will be shot in your tracks. Understood?”
“How long must I stay here?” Yakov managed to ask. “I mean considering I haven’t yet been tried.”
“As long as the proper authorities deem necessary. Now keep your questions to yourself and go along with the sergeant. He will tell you what to do.”
The sergeant, a man with drooping mustaches, led the fixer down the corridor past some dingy offices from whose doorways the clerks were staring out, to a long room with a counter and several benches where he was ordered to undress. Yakov changed into a sack-like white jacket, smelling of human sweat, and a pair of shapeless linen trousers. He was handed a shirt without buttons and a worn greatcoat that had once been brown and was now gray, to sleep in or under at night. As he was pulling off his boots to change into a pair of stiff prison shoes, a wave of oppressive darkness swept over him. Though he felt like fainting he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
“Sit down in that chair for your haircut,” the sergeant ordered.
Yakov sat down in a straightback chair, but as the prison barber was about to crop his hair with a pair of large clippers, the sergeant, checking his official paper, stopped him.
“Never mind that. The orders say let him keep his head of hair.”
“It’s always like that,” said the barber, incensed. “These pricks are born with privileges.”
“Cut it off!” shouted Yakov, “cut off my hair!”
“Silence!” ordered the sergeant. “Learn to follow orders! Move on!”
He unlocked a metal door with a large key and followed the fixer down a dimly lit dank corridor to a large crowded cell with a barred grating on one side, and a wall on the other containing two high small dirty windows through which little light penetrated. A smelly urinal, no more than an open drain, ran along the rear wall of the cell.
“It’s the thirty-day cell,” said the sergeant. “You stay here for a month and either you go on trial or they transfer you elsewhere.”
“Where