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By Root 3225 0

Yakov lost sight of the words. They were black birds with white wings, white birds with black wings. He was falling in thoughtless thought, a stupefying whiteness. The fixer lost track of where he was, a forgetting so profound he ached on coming out of it. This occurred often now and went on for hours. Once he fell into this state in the morning, sitting at the table reading the Old Testament, and came back to the present in the late afternoon, standing naked in the cell, being searched by the Deputy Warden and Zhitnyak. And he sometimes walked across Russia without knowing it. It was hard on the feet and had to be controlled because he wore out the soles of his bast shoes and nobody wanted to give him another pair. He walked in his bare feet over a long rocky road and afterwards found both feet battered and blistered. He awoke to find himself walking and it frightened him when he recalled the pain of the surgeon’s scalpel. He willed himself to attention when he began to walk. He took a step or two on the long road and awoke in fright.

Yakov reveried the past; the shtetl, the mistakes and failures of his life. One white-mooned night, after a bitter quarrel about something he couldn’t remember now, Raisl had left the hut and run in the dark to her father. The fixer, sitting alone, thinking over his bitterness and the falseness of his accusations, had thought of going after her but had gone to sleep instead. After all, he was dead tired doing nothing. The next year the accusation against her had come true, although it wasn’t true then. Who had made it come true? If he had run after her then, would he be sitting here now?

He turned often to pages of Hosea and read with fascination the story of this man God had commanded to marry a harlot. The harlot, he had heard it said, was Israel, but the jealousy and anguish Hosea felt was that of a man whose wife had left his bed and board and gone whoring after strangers.

“And let her put away her harlotries from her face,

and her adulteries from between her breasts;

Lest I strip her naked,

And set her as in the day that she was born,

And make her as the wilderness,

And set her like dry land,

And slay her with thirst.

And I will not have compassion on her children;

For they are the children of harlotry.

For their mother hath played the harlot,

She that conceived them hath done shamefully;

For she said: ‘I will go after my lovers,

That give me bread and my water.

My wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink!’

Therefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns,

And I will make a wall against her,

That she will not find her paths.

And she shall run after her lovers,

but she shall not overtake them,

And she shall seek them, but shall not find them;

Then shall she say: ‘I will go and return to my first husband:

For then was it better with me than now.’ “

4

One morning Zhitnyak brought the prisoner a thick letter in a soiled white envelope with a long row of red stamps. The stamps were portraits of the Tsar in military tunic, wearing a medallion of the royal coat of arms, the double-headed eagle. The letter had been opened by the censor and resealed with a strip of gummed paper. It was addressed to “The Murderer of Zhenia Golov” and sent in care of the Prosecuting Attorney of the Superior Court, Plossky District, Kiev.

Yakov’s heart palpitated when he took the letter. “Who is it from?”

“The Queen of Sheba,” said the guard. “Open and see.”

The fixer waited until the guard had gone. He put the letter down on the table to get it out of his hand. He stared at it for five minutes. Could it be the indictment? Would they address it like that? Yakov clumsily ripped open the envelope, tearing it across, and found in it a sixteen-page letter written in Russian in a woman’s spidery handwriting. There were blots of ink on every page, many words misspelled, and some heavily crossed out and rewritten.

“Sir,” it began, “I am the bereaved and unfortunate mother of the martyred Zhenia Golov, and I take my pen in my hand to beg you to do the right and decent thing. In