Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [77]
In the fall the weather was bad, rainy and cold, and Yakov could see his breath in the cell. The asthma was not bothersome until he caught a cold, then it came on again, usually badly. Some mornings the outer wall of the cell, fronting the prison yard, was covered with lacy areas of frost. The inside walls, a foot thick, of brick, broken stone and cement, were scabby and cracked. After a heavy rain the greater part of the stone-paved floor was moist with seepage from the earth. Part of the ceiling above the window dripped. On fair days the small barred window, about a meter above the fixer’s head, though dirty, let in light. The light was dim and on rainy days disappeared in the dark. After supper Yakov was given a small smelly kerosene lamp without its glass chimney, that burned until morning and was then removed. But one night the lamp was not given to him because, the Deputy Warden said, kerosene cost money. The fixer asked for a candle instead, and the Deputy Warden said he would see about that, but the fixer never got the candle. The cell was pitch black all night. I’ll get the candle when I get the indictment, Yakov thought.
When the wind was strong on the outside, cold air floated through the cracked window into the cell. Yakov offered to fix it if they would let him have a little putty and a ladder, but no one was interested. The cell was cold but at least he had a mattress, a thin lumpy straw pallet whose last occupant—Zhitnyak, the small-eyed, black-fingered day guard, told him—had died of jail fever. The fixer kept the mattress on the dry part of the floor. There were bedbugs in it but he managed to beat out and kill some. His back ached after he had slept on it, and the straw in the sacking stank of mold, but it was better than sleeping on the stone floor. In November they gave him a ragged blanket. He also had a three-legged stool in the cell and a greasy small wooden table, one leg shorter than the other three. He had a jug of water in one corner of the cell; and in the opposite corner he kept the smelly can he urinated and defecated in, when there was something to defecate. Once a day he was allowed to empty the slop can into one of the barrels that were trundled past the cells by another prisoner, who wasn’t allowed to speak to the fixer and whom Yakov was forbidden to address. He could tell from where the trundle stopped in the corridor that the cells on both sides of him were empty. It was a solitary solitary.
The bolted cell door was made of three sheets of iron, once painted black but now largely rusted; it had a peephole at eye level covered by a metal disk that the guard slipped aside to look in. Once every hour or so during the day a single eye roamed the cell. Zhitnyak was usually there in the daytime and Kogin at night; some days their times overlapped, and occasionally they exchanged shifts. When Yakov secretly pushed aside the disk and looked through the peephole, he could see Zhitnyak sitting in a large chair against the wall, hacking with his pocket knife at a stick, looking at pictures in a magazine, or dozing. He was a heavy-shouldered man with hairy nostrils and blackened stubby fingers, as though he had once worked with grease or lampblack that he had never got off. When he stepped into the cell he smelled of sweat and cabbage. Zhitnyak had a pockmarked face and an impatient manner. He was surly and unpredictable and sometimes struck the fixer.
Kogin, the night guard, was a tall man with a gaunt face and watery eyes, worn with worry. He spoke in a deep voice that seemed to rise from the ground. Even his whisper was low and heavy. Often he paced the corridor as if he were the prisoner; Yakov could hear his boots going back and forth on the concrete floor. At night Kogin opened the spy hole and listened to the fixer’s asthmatic breathing and when he talked or shouted in his sleep. Yakov knew he was there, because when his nightmares or sleep-shouting woke him, he saw the dim light from the hall through the hole, and he saw the