Fixer, The - Bernard Malamud [97]
The fixer stood mute.
“Are you there?” said the priest, peering into the shadows. “Where are you?” he called, blinking uneasily. He coughed with a heavy rasp.
Yakov stood in the dim light, motionless at the table, the prayer shawl covering his head, the phylactery for the arm bound to his brow.
The priest, coughing thickly, his handkerchief held to his mouth, retreated to the metal door and banged on it with his fist. It was quickly opened and he hurried out.
“You’ll get yours,” said Zhitnyak to the fixer, from the hall.
Afterwards a lamp was brought into the cell and Yakov was stripped of his clothes and searched for the fourth time that day. The Deputy Warden, in a foul mood, kicked at the mattress and found the New Testament in the straw.
“Where the hell did you get this?”
“Somebody must’ve slipped it to him in the kitchen,” said Zhitnyak.
The Deputy Warden floored the fixer with a blow.
He confiscated the phylacteries and Zhitnyak’s New Testament but returned in the morning and flung at Yakov a handful of pages that flew all over the cell. They were pages from the Old Testament in Hebrew, and Yakov collected them and patiently put them together. Half the book was missing and some of the pages were covered with muddy brown stains that looked like dry blood.
3
The birch twig broom came apart. He had used it for months and the twigs had worn out on the stone floor. Some had snapped off in the sweeping and he was given nothing to replace them with. Then the frayed cord that bound the twigs wore away and that was the end of the broom. Zhitnyak would not supply twigs or a new cord. Yakov had asked for them, but he took the broomstick away instead.
“That’s so you won’t hurt yourself, Bok, or try any more of your dirty tricks on anybody else. Some say you clubbed the poor boy unconscious before you stuck him with your knife.”
The fixer talked less with the guards, it was less wearying; they said little to him, once in a while a gruff command, or a curse if he was slow. Without the broom his thin routine began to collapse. He tried to hang on to it but now there was no stove to make or tend, or wait to be lit, and he was no longer permitted to go to the kitchen to get his rations. The food was brought to him in the cell, as it had been before. They said he had stolen things from the kitchen. The New Testament Bible, for instance. And a knife had been “found” during an inspection of his cell. That ended the excursions he had looked forward to, sometimes with excited eagerness, twice a day. “It’s only right,” said the warden. “We can’t have a Jew going around flouting the rules. There have been mutterings among some of the other prisoners.” What was left of the routine was to be waked by the prison bell in the morning, to eat meagerly not once but twice a day, and three times each day to be searched to desperation.
He had stopped keeping track of time with the long and short splinters. Beyond a year he couldn’t go. Time was summer now, when the hot cell stank heavily and the walls sweated. There were mosquitoes, and bugs hitting the walls. Yet, better summer; he feared another winter. And if there was a spring after the winter it would mean two years in prison. And after that? Time blew like a steppe wind into an empty future. There was no end, no event, indictment, trial. The waiting withered him. He was worn thin by the struggle to wait, by the knowledge of his innocence against the fact of his imprisonment; that nothing had been done in a whole year to free him. He was stricken to be so absolutely alone. Oppressed by the heat, eaten by damp cold, eroded by the expectation of an indictment that never came, were his gray bones visible through his skin? His nerves were threads stretched to the instant before