Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [89]
“Bastards!” he shouted through the peephole at the guards, prison officials, Grubeshov, and the Black Hundreds. “Anti-Semites! murderers!”
They let him stay naked. Zhitnyak would not light the stove. The fixer’s body turned blue as he walked frantically in the freezing cell. He shivered on the mattress, shook, with the prayer shawl and ragged blanket wrapped around him.
“By morning,” the Deputy Warden said when he came in with the guard for the last search of the day, “you won’t need clothes. You’ll be frozen stiff. Spread your filthy ass.”
But the warden entered before nightfall and said it was indecent to have a naked Jew parading around in the cell. “You could have been shot for less than this.”
He flung at Yakov another threadbare suit of prison clothes, and another ragged greatcoat. Zhitnyak then lit the stove, but it took the fixer a week to get the ice out of his spine, and the cold hurt worse than before.
Then he began to wait again.
He waits.
8
The warden, in full uniform, delivered a message from Prosecuting Attorney Grubeshov to Yakov in his solitary cell.
“You’re to get dressed in your street clothes and go to the Plossky Courthouse. Your indictment is ready.”
The fixer, stunned, shut his eyes. When he opened them the warden was still there.
“How shall I go, your honor?” His voice broke.
“A detective will accompany you. Since it’s a short distance you can go by streetcar. You will be allowed out for no more than an hour and a half. That is the time the Prosecuting Attorney requisitioned you for.”
“Must my legs be chained again?”
The warden scratched in his beard. “No, but you’ll be handcuffed and there’ll be strict orders to shoot you dead if you try anything in the least irregular. Furthermore, two Secret Police officers will be following you and the detective in case any of your cohorts attempt to communicate with you.”
In half an hour Yakov was outside the prison, waiting with the detective for a trolley. Though the day was dreary and cold, the streets white in every direction, the leafless trees black against the frozen sky, everywhere he looked brought tears to the fixer’s eyes. It seemed to him he was seeing for the first time how the world was knit together.
On the trolley he watched the shops and passers-by in the street as though he were in a foreign country. How moving it was that a peasant entered a store. The detective sat next to him, one hand in his overcoat pocket. He was a heavy-bellied man with eyeglasses and a gray fur cap, who sat silent. All the way to the courthouse the fixer worried what the indictment would say. Would it accuse him simply of murder, or of murder “for ritual purposes”? The evidence was non-existent, “circumstantial” at best, but he feared their ingenuity. When the purpose was frame-up, the evidence could be arranged. Yet whatever the indictment said, the important thing to him now was getting it so that he could talk to a lawyer. Once he had done that maybe they would not keep him in solitary confinement. Even if they put him in with a murderer it would be better than being so desperately alone. The lawyer would tell everyone who he was. He would say, “This is a decent man, he could never have killed a child.” The fixer worried about getting the proper lawyer, wondering who Bibikov had had in mind, “a vigorous and courageous man of excellent reputation.” Would Ivan Semyonovitch know, if he were permitted to ask him? Was the lawyer a Russian or a Jew? Which was best? And how would he pay him? Could a lawyer advise him if he had no money to give him? And even if he had a good lawyer, would he be able to defend him if Bibikov’s files had fallen into the hands of the Black Hundreds?
Despite these worries, and though he was tightly handcuffed, a prisoner out of jail for a few minutes, Yakov enjoyed the trolley ride. The people around him and the movement of the car created an illusion of freedom.
At the next stop two men boarded the streetcar, and passing the fixer, saw his manacled hands.