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By Root 3222 0

peephole, an eye gazing at his suppurating feet, but the one who looked had nothing to say; and said nothing. “Help my poor feet,” Yakov cried out, “it’s a terrible pain.” Whoever he was, if he heard, said nothing. Then the eye in the hole was gone. The fixer, feverishly shivering, his clothes wet, moaned through another night of pain. In the morning a key turned in the door and Warden Grizitskoy entered. Thinking of Bibikov, Yakov shrank from him. But the cross-eyed warden looked real and even human, and what he had seen in the next cell, dreamlike, unreal; he was at times not sure he had seen it. He didn’t dare ask about the Investigating Magistrate. If they knew he knew they might kill him at once.

“What tricks are you up to now?” the warden demanded.

“Please,” Yakov said, “my feet are infected from the nails in my shoes. I need a doctor.”

“There are no doctors for the likes of you.”

The fixer wearily shut his eyes.

The warden left. In the afternoon he returned with an aid from the prison infirmary.

“He’s poisoned his feet,” said the aid.

“Is it serious?” said the warden, “or will it go away by itself?”

“Both feet are full of pus. It might become gangrene.”

“It would serve the bastard right,” said the warden.

“All right,” he said to Yakov, “go down to the infirmary. I’d let you rot here but I don’t want the cell to stink any more than it does, or it will get infected from your germs. Move quickly now.”

“How can I walk?” said Yakov. “Could Fetyukov or somebody help me?”

“Perfect company for a fellow murderer,” said the warden. “Fetyukov is no longer present. He was shot for disobeying orders and resisting a guard.”

“Shot?” said the stunned fixer.

“For insubordination. He insulted a guard. Let that be a lesson to you. Now move along quickly.”

“I can’t walk. How can I go if I can’t walk?”

“If you can’t walk, crawl. The devil take you.”

Like a dog, thought Yakov. On his hands and knees he moved out into the corridor, then painfully toward the door leading to the stairs. Though he crawled slowly the pressure hurt his knees and he could not keep his battered feet from scraping the floor. But he forced himself not to cry out. The warden and infirmary aid had left, and a guard with a shotgun followed the fixer as he moved toward the concrete door. Going down the steep wooden steps, he had the weight of his body on his trembling arms, his feet bumping each step, and he more than once almost fell headlong down the stairs. When he paused, the guard prodded him with the butt of his gun. By the time Yakov reached the bottom of the stairs both his hands were scraped raw, and both knees bled. His back was black with sweat and the veins bulged on his neck as he crawled forward along the corridor and out the prison door into the yard.

The infirmary was in the administration section, on the other side of the quadrangle from the prison cells. It was the time of the ten-minute afternoon promenade, and the prisoners opened their double files for the fixer as they watched him haltingly crawling across the dirt yard.

“Five kopeks on the Zhid mule,” shouted the club-foot. A prisoner in a torn greatcoat turned and struck him across the mouth. A guard beat the prisoner.

If I live will I make it? Yakov, nauseated, was close to fainting. Halfway across the yard his trembling arms gave out and he collapsed. Several prisoners broke from their lines, but the guard with the whip shouted it was forbidden. The sentries patrolling the yard pointed their rifles at the prisoners and they returned to the lines, but not the slop-pail man, the one with the cracked eyeglasses. He fished some burlap rags from a garbage pile in the corner of the yard and ran towards Yakov. Hurriedly he wound the rags around the fixer’s hands and knees. The guard cursed but looked on. When the rags were tied he prodded Yakov with his foot.

The fixer got up on his raw hands and bleeding knees and went on, blindly crawling across the yard. He climbed up the stone steps into the infirmary.

The surgeon, a bald-headed man in a soiled white linen coat that smelled