Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [93]
When he opened them he said, “Could I speak to his assistant, Mr. Ivan Semyonovitch?”
“Ivan Semyonovitch Kuzminsky,” said the Prosecuting Attorney coldly, “was taken into custody at the Agricultural Fair last September. He did not remove his hat when the band played ‘God Save the Tsar.’ If my memory is correct he was sentenced to a year in the Petropa-velsky Fortress.”
The fixer gasped silently.
“Do you get the point?” Grubeshov’s face was taut, sweaty.
“I am innocent,” the fixer shouted hoarsely.
“No Jew is innocent, least of all a ritual assassin. Furthermore, it is known you are an agent of the Jewish Kahal, the secret Jewish internationl government which is engaged in a subterranean conspiracy with the World Zionist Organization, the Alliance of Herzl, and the Russian Freemasons. We also have reason to believe that your masters are dickering with the British to help you overthrow the legitimate Russian government and make yourselves rulers of our land and people. We are not exactly naïve. We know your purposes. We have read the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ and the ‘Communist Manifesto,’ and fully understand your revolutionary intentions!”
“I am not a revolutionist. I am an inexperienced man. Who knows about such things? I am a fixer.”
“You can deny it all you want, we know the truth,” Grubeshov shouted. “The Jews dominate the world and we feel ourselves under their yoke. I personally consider myself under the power of the Jews; under the power of Jewish thought, under the power of the Jewish press. To speak against the crimes of the Jews means to evoke the charge that one is either a Black Hundred, an obscurantist, or a reactionary. I am none of these things. I am a Russian patriot! I love the Russian Tsar!”
Yakov stared miserably at the indictment papers.
Grubeshov grabbed them and locked them in the drawer.
“If you come to your senses, let me know through the warden. Until then you will continue to give off your stink in prison.”
Before Yakov was permitted to leave the office, the Prosecuting Attorney, his face darkened by blood, reading from his notebook, asked the prisoner if he was related to Baal Shem Tov or Rabbi Zalman Schneur of Ladi, and whether there had ever been a shochet in his family. To each question Yakov, shivering uncontrollably, replied no, and Grubeshov painstakingly recorded his answers.
9
He sat in his prison clothes in the dark cell, his beard tormented, eyes red, head burning, the acid cold cracking his bones. The snow hissed on the window. The wind seeping through the split glass sank on him like an evil bird, gnawing his head and hands. He ran in the cell, his breath visible, beating his chest, waving his arms, slapping blue hands together, crying anguish. He sighed, he wailed, called to the sky for help, until Zhit-nyak, one nervous eye at the spy hole, ordered him to shut up. When the guard lit the evening fire the fixer sat at the smoky stove with its door open, the collar of his greatcoat raised above his ears, the light of the flames heatless on his face. Except for the glowing, crackling, moaning fire the cell was black, dank, heavy with wet stink. He could smell the rotten odor of himself in the enduring stench of all the prisoners who had lived and died in this miserable cell.
The fixer shivered for hours, plunged in the deepest gloom. Who would believe it? The Tsar himself knew of him. The Tsar was convinced of his guilt. The Tsar wanted him convicted and punished. Yakov saw himself locked in combat with the Russian Emperor. They wrestled, beard to beard, in the dark until Nicholas proclaimed himself an angel of God and ascended into the sky.
“It’s all a fantasy,” the fixer muttered. “He doesn’t need me and I don’t need him. Why don’t they let me alone? What have I truly done to them?”
His fate nauseated him. Escaping from the Pale he had at once been entrapped in prison. From birth a black horse had followed him, a Jewish nightmare. What was being a Jew but an everlasting curse? He was sick of their history, destiny, blood guilt.
VII