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By Root 3185 0

of the Jews. But with the book there his boredom grew deeper and his curiosity stronger. At last he opened it and began to read. He sat at the table reading through the darkness on the page, though not for long periods because he found it hard to concentrate. Yet the story of Jesus fascinated him and he read it in the four gospels. He was a strange Jew, humorless and fanatic, but the fixer liked the teachings and read with pleasure of the healing of lame, blind, and of the epileptics who fell into fire and water. He enjoyed the loaves and fishes and the raising of the dead. In the end he was deeply moved when he read how they spat on him and beat him with sticks; and how he hung on the cross at night. Jesus cried out help to God but God gave no help. There was a man crying out in anguish in the dark, but God was on the other side of his mountain. He heard but he had heard everything. What was there to hear that he hadn’t heard before? Christ died and they took him down. The fixer wiped his eyes. Afterwards he thought if that’s how it happened and it’s part of the Christian religion, and they believe it, how can they keep me in prison, knowing I am innocent? Why don’t they have pity and let me go?

Though his memory gave him trouble he tried to learn by heart some of the verses he liked in the gospels. It was a way to keep his mind occupied and his memory alert. Then he would recite to himself what he had learned. One day he began to say verses aloud through the peephole. Zhitnyak, sitting in his chair in the corridor, hacking at a stick with his knife, heard the fixer recite the Beatitudes, listened to the end, then told him to shut his mouth. When Yakov could not sleep at night; or when he had slept a little and was waked by some dream or noise, he passed part of his waking time reciting in the cell, and Kogin as usual kept his ear to the spy hole, breathing audibly. One night, the guard, lately morose with worry, remarked through the door in his deep voice, “How is it that a Jew who killed a Christian child goes around reciting the words of Christ?”

“I never even touched that boy,” said the fixer.

“Everybody says you did. They say you had a secret dispensation from a rabbi to go ahead and do it and your conscience wouldn’t hurt you. I’ve heard it said you were a hardworking man, Yakov Bok, but you still could have committed the crime because in your thinking it was no crime to murder a Christian. All that blood and matzo business is an old part of your religion. I’ve heard about it ever since I was a small boy.”

“In the Old Testament we’re not allowed to eat blood. It’s forbidden,” said Yakov. “But what about these words: ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you have no life in you; he who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood, abides in Me, and I in him.’ “

“Ah, that’s a different load of fish altogether,” said Kogin. “It means the bread and wine and not the real flesh and blood. Besides, how do you know those words that you just said? When the Devil teaches scripture to a Jew they both get it wrong.”

“Blood is blood. I said it the way it was written.”

“How do you know it?”

“I read it in the Gospel of John.”

“What’s a Jew doing reading the gospels?”

“I read them to find out what a Christian is.”

“A Christian is a man who loves Christ.”

“How can anyone love Christ and keep an innocent man suffering in prison?”

“There is no innocent Christ-killer,” Kogin said, shutting the disk over the spy hole.

But the next night as the rain droned steadily in the prison yard and drops of water dripped from the ceiling, the guard came to hear what else Yakov had memorized.

“I haven’t been in a church in years,” Kogin said. “I’m not much of a body for incense and priests but I like to hear the words of Christ.”

“ ‘Which of you convicts me of sin?’ “ said Yakov. “ ‘If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?’