Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [94]
He waits.
The snow turned to rain.
Nothing happened.
Nothing but the long winter; not the indictment.
He felt the change of weather in his head. Spring came but stayed outside the bars. Through the window he heard the shrilling of swallows.
The seasons came faster than the indictment. The indictment was very slow. The thought that it might sometime come made it so slow.
In the spring it rained heavily. He listened to the sound of the rain and liked the thought of the outside wet, but he didn’t like the inside wet. Water seeped through the wall on the prison yard side. Lines of wet formed on the cement between the exposed bricks. From an eroded part of the ceiling above the window, water dripped after the rain had stopped. After the rain there was always a puddle on the floor. Sometimes the dripping went on for days. He awakened at night listening to it. Sometimes it stopped for a few minutes and he slept. When the dripping began again he awoke.
I used to sleep through thunder.
He was so nervous, irritable, so oppressed by imprisonment he feared for his sanity. What will I confess to them if I go mad? Each day’s oppressive boredom terrified him. The boredom and the nervousness made him think he might go insane.
One day, out of hunger for something to do, for a word to read, he cracked open one of the phylacteries that had been left in the cell. Holding it by the thongs he hit the box against the wall till it burst with a puff of dust. The inside of the phylactery box smelled of old parchment and leather, yet there was a curious human odor to it. It smelled a little like the sweat of the body. The fixer held the broken phylactery to his nose and greedily sucked in the smell. The small black box was divided into four compartments, each containing a tightly rolled little scroll, two with verses from Exodus and two from Deuteronomy. Yakov puzzled out the script, remembering the words faster than he could read. The bondage in Egypt was over, and in one scroll Moses proclaimed the celebration of Passover. Another scroll was the Sh’ma Yisroël. Another enumerated the rewards for loving and serving God and the punishment for not: the loss of heaven, rain, and the fruit of that rain; even life. In each of the four scrolls the people were commanded to obey God and teach his words. “Therefore you shall lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be frontlets between your eyes.” The sign was the phylactery and it was the phylactery that Yakov had broken. He read the scrolls with excitement and sadness and hid them deep in the mattress straw. But one day Zhitnyak, his eye roving at the peephole, caught the fixer absorbed in reading them. He entered the cell and forced him to give them up. The appearance of the four scrolls puzzled the guard, although Yakov showed him the broken phylactery; and Zhitnyak turned them over to the Deputy Warden, who was greatly excited to have this “new evidence.”
A few weeks later, Zhitnyak, while in the cell, sneaked the fixer a small green paper-covered New Testament in Russian. The pages were worn and soiled with use. “It’s from my old woman,” Zhitnyak whispered. “She said to give it to you so you could repent for the wrong you did. Besides, you’re always complaining you have nothing to read. Take it but don’t tell anyone who gave it to you or I will break your ass. If they ask you say that one of the prisoners in the kitchen slipped it in your pocket without you knowing it, or maybe one of those who empty the shit cans.”
“But why the New Testament, why not the Old?” Yakov said.
“The Old won’t do you any good at all,” Zhitnyak said. “It’s long been used out and full of old graybeard Jews crawling around from one mess to the other. Also there’s a lot of fucking in the Old Testament, so how is that religious? If you want to read the true word of God, read the gospels. My old woman told me to tell you that.”
Yakov would at first not open the book, having from childhood feared Jesus Christ, as stranger, apostate, mysterious enemy