Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [6]
“Thanks.” Yakov tossed the bag among his other things in the wagon.
“Yakov,” said Shmuel passionately, “don’t forget your God!”
“Who forgets who?” the fixer said angrily. “What do I get from him but a bang on the head and a stream of piss in my face. So what’s there to be worshipful about?”
“Don’t talk like a meshummed. Stay a Jew, Yakov, don’t give up our God.”
“A meshummed gives up one God for another. I don’t want either. We live in a world where the clock ticks fast while he’s on his timeless mountain staring in space. He doesn’t see us and he doesn’t care. Today I want my piece of bread, not in Paradise.”
“Listen to me, Yakov, take my advice. I’ve lived longer than you. There’s a shul in the Podol in Kiev. Go on Shabbos, you’ll feel better. ‘Blessed are they who put their trust in God.’ “
“Where I ought to go is to the Socialist Bund meetings, that’s where I should go, not in shul. But the truth of it is I dislike politics, though don’t ask me why. What good is it if you’re not an activist? I guess it’s my nature. I incline toward the philosophical although I don’t know much about anything.”
“Be careful,” Shmuel said, agitated, “we live in the middle of our enemies. The best way to take care is to stay under God’s protection. Remember, if He’s not perfect, neither are we.”
They embraced quickly and Shmuel got down from the wagon.
“Goodbye, sweetheart,” he called to the horse. “Goodbye, Yakov, I’ll think of you when I say the Eighteen Blessings. If you ever see Raisl, tell her her father is waiting.”
Shmuel trudged back towards the synagogue. When he was quite far away Yakov felt a pang for having forgotten to slip him a ruble or two.
“Get on now.” The nag flicked an ear, roused itself for a short trot, then slowed to a tired walk.
“It’ll be some trip,” the fixer thought.
The horse stopped abruptly as a field mouse skittered across the road.
“Gidap, goddamit”—but the nag wouldn’t move.
A peasant passed by with a long-horned bullock, prodding the animal with a stick.
“A horse understands a whip,” he said across the road in Russian.
Yakov belabored the beast with the birch rod until he drew blood. The nag whinnied but remained tightly immobile on the road. The peasant, after watching awhile, moved on.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” said the fixer to the horse, “we’ll never get to Kiev.”
He was at the point of despair when a brown dog rustling through a blanket of dead leaves under some trees came onto the road, yelping at the horse. The nag hurried forward, Yakov barely grabbing the reins. The dog chased them, barking sharply at the horse’s hooves, then at a turn in the road, disappeared. But the wagon rolled on, bucket rattling, its wheels wobbling, the nag trotting as fast as it could.
It clip-clopped along the hard dirt road, on one side of which flowed a mild stream below a sloping embankment; and on the other were the scattered log huts of a peasant village, their roofs covered with rotting straw. Despite poverty and the antics of too many pigs the huts looked better than the shtetl cottages. A bearded peasant chopped wood, a woman pumped water from the village well. They both stopped to stare at him. A verst from his town and he was a stranger in the world.
The horse trotted on, Yakov gazing at the fields, some plowed under, where oats, hay, sugar beets had grown, the haystacks standing dark against the woods. A crow flew slowly over the stubble of a wheatfield. The fixer found himself counting sheep and goats grazing in the communal meadows under lazy thick clouds. It had been a dank and dreary autumn, the dead leaves still hanging on half the trees in the woods around the fields. Last year at this time it had already snowed. Though as a rule he enjoyed the landscape, Yakov felt a weight on him. The buzz and sparkle of summer were gone. In the violet distance the steppe seemed melancholy, endless.
The cut on the horse’s flank, though encrusted, still oozed red droplets and drew