Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [88]
Yakov counted. He counted time though he tried not to. Counting presupposed an end to counting, at least for a man who used only small numbers. How many times had he counted up to a hundred in his life? Who could count forever?—it piled time on. The fixer had torn some splinters off sticks of firewood. The long splinters were months, the short, days. A day was a bad enough burden of time but within the day even minutes could do damage as they piled up. When one had nothing to do the worst thing to have was an endless supply of minutes. It was like pouring nothing into a million little bottles.
At five in the morning the day began and never ended. In the early evening dark he was already lying on his mattress trying to sleep. Sometimes he tried all night. During the day there were the regular checks through the spy hole, and three depressing searches of his body. There was cleaning out ashes, and making and lighting the stove. There was the sweeping of the cell to do, urinating in the can, walking back and forth until one began to count; or sitting at the table with nothing to do. There was the going for, and eating of, his meager meals. There was trying to remember and trying to forget. There was the counting of each day; there was reciting the psalm he had put together. He also watched the light and dark change. The morning dark was different from the night dark. The morning dark had a little freshness, a little anticipation in it, though what he anticipated he could not say. The night dark was heavy with thickened and compounded shadows. In the morning the shadows unfurled until only one was left, that which lingered in the cell all day. It was gone for a minute near eleven he guessed, when a beam of sunlight, on days the sun appeared, touched the corroded inner wall a foot above his mattress, a beam of golden light gone in a few minutes. Once he kissed it on the wall. Once he licked it with his tongue. After the sun had gone, light from the window descended more darkly. When he stole a newspaper strip to read, the darkness was on the paper. It was night at half past three in the afternoon in December. Yakov put wood in the stove and Zhitnyak, after they had gone for the night rations, lit it. He ate in the dark or by the light through the stove door left ajar. There was still no lamp, no candle. The fixer set a small splinter aside to mark the lost day and crawled onto his mattress.
The long splinters were months. He figured it was January. Zhitnyak wouldn’t tell him, nor would Kogin. They said they were forbidden to answer such questions. He had been arrested in the brickyard in mid-April and had served in the District Courthouse jail for two months. He figured he had been in this prison another seven months, a total of nine, if not more. It would soon —soon?—be a full year of prison. He did not, could not. think past a year. He could not foresee any future in the future. When he thought about the future all he thought about was the indictment. He imagined the warden snapping back the six bolts and bringing in the indictment in a thick brown envelope. But in this thought, after the warden had left, the indictment had still not come and he was still counting time. How long would he wait? He waited with months, days, minutes on his heavy head, and with the repetitive cycles of light and dark piled on top of the long and short pieces of time. He waited with boredom sticking its fingers down his throat. He waited for an unknown time, a time different from all the time on his head. It was unending waiting for something that might never happen. In the winter, time fell like hissing snow through the crack in the barred window, and never stopped snowing. He stood in it as it piled up around him and there was no end to drowning.
One wintry day, sickened