Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [78]
Zhitnyak was the more talkative of the two, though he said little enough. Kogin at first did not speak to the fixer, but once after he had been drinking he complained that his son had come to nothing. “He does no steady work,” the guard said in his deep voice. “When will he get himself a job? I’ve waited thirty years for him to become a man and I’m still waiting. ‘Wait,’ I tell myself, ‘he will change. He will become a man,’ but he never does. He even steals from me and I am his father. My wife says it’s my fault for not hitting him when he was a child and up to bad tricks, but that’s not my nature. I had enough of that from my own father, may he rot in his grave. What’s more, the daughter doesn’t behave well either, but I won’t go into that. The son will one day end up in prison the same as you, and it will serve him right. That’s all that comes from a father’s love.”
In October Yakov had begged the guards to light the brick stove in the cell, but the Deputy Warden at first refused to spare the wood. Then one day in November Zhitnyak opened the door and two close-cropped prisoners, who sneaked looks at Yakov, brought the fixer a small load of wood tied in bundles. He had had a cold and asthma, and maybe one of the guards had reported it to the warden, who perhaps felt he had to keep the prisoner alive. The warden, as Yakov saw him, was not a vicious man. He was at best a disciplinarian, at worst, stupid. The Deputy Warden was something else. The fixer shuddered at the man’s depthless eyes, narrow face, and four-fingered hand. Whatever he looked at he seemed to gnaw a little. His small mouth was crafty and hiddenly hungry. His boots stank of dog turd or whatever he used to polish them with. The guards wore guns in their holsters, but the Deputy Warden had a large gun on each hip. He had taken his time giving his permission for Yakov to have wood. The fixer disliked and feared him more than anyone in the prison.
The tall upright yellow brick stove leaked smoke at the top through a cracked brick, but Yakov preferred the smoke to the cold. He asked for the stove to be lit in the early morning, to get the frost off the wall although a small puddle formed on the floor when the cell warmed up; and he asked for a lit stove before supper so that he could eat in comfort. If the cell was too cold he could not taste the few bits of cabbage in his soup. If the cell was warm he tasted each morsel. To save wood he let the stove go out in the late morning. Afterwards, with his fingers he scraped the cold ashes out of the pit under the grate, put in a little kindling and some pieces of wood, then before supper, Zhitnyak came in to relight it. He did not seem to mind doing that, though he would sometimes curse as he was doing it. Yakov’s hair was still not cropped but once was clipped a little by the prison barber; he was not permitted to shave, and his beard was growing long.
“That’s to keep you looking more like a Jew,” Zhitnyak said through the peephole. “They say the warden is going to make you wear a Zhid caftan and a rabbi’s round hat, and they’re going to twist earlocks out of your hair over your ears so you’ll look kosher. That’s what the Deputy Warden said they’ll do.”
The prisoners in the other solitary cells down the hall were served their meager food by other prisoners who were not allowed to serve the Jew. In Yakov’s case they had to give the food to Zhitnyak, or Kogin, and he handed it to the fixer. This annoyed Zhitnyak, and sometimes when he brought Yakov’s gruel or cabbage soup and bread, he said, “Here’s your bowl of Christ’s blood, drink hearty, mate.” To enter the cell, the guard on duty, sometimes backed up by another guard in the hall holding a shotgun, more often alone, unlocked the six three-ringed bolts that had been attached on the door the day Yakov had been put into this cell. Hearing the six bolts being snapped back one by one, four