The Fixer E-Book

Bernard Malamud

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 526

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Kiev, 1911. When a twelve-year-old Russian boy is found stabbed to death, his body drained of blood, the accusation of ritual murder is levelled at the Jews. Yakov Bok - a handyman hiding his Jewish identity from his anti-Semitic employer - is first outed and blamed. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit. What becomes of this man under pressure, for whom acquittal is made to seem as hopeless as conviction, is the subject of a terrifying masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. Acclaim for Malamud: 'Malamud is a rich original of the first rank' Saul Bellow 'Malamud has never produced a mediocre novel... He is always profoundly convincing' Anthony Burgess 'One of Malamud's extraordinary gifts has always been for lifting the realistic world up, into the realm of metaphysical fantasy. Another has been to take life, lives, seriously' Malcolm Bradbury 'One of those rare writers who makes other writers eat their hearts out' Melvyn Bragg Of Malamud's short stories: 'I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself' Flannery O'Connor

Leseprobe

THE FIXER

By Bernard Malamud

THE NATURAL

THE ASSISTANT

THE MAGIC BARREL

A NEW LIFE

IDIOTS FIRST

THE FIXER

PICTURES OF FIDELMAN

THE TENANTS

REMBRANDT’S HAT

DUBIN’S LIVES

GOD’S GRACE

THE PEOPLE AND UNCOLLECTED STORIES

THE COMPLETE STORIES

First published in the United States of America in 1966by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Bernard Malamud, 1966 andrenewed by the Estate of Bernard MalamudIntroduction copyright © Jonathan Safran Foer, 2004

The moral right of Bernard Malamud to be identified as theauthor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance withthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The moral right of Jonathan Safran Foer to be identified as theauthor of the introduction has been asserted by him in accordancewith the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permissionof both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,characters and incidents portrayed in it are the workof the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real.Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 094 8E-Book ISBN: 978 1 78239 353 5

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Paul

Contents

Epigraph

Introduction

The Fixer

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Note on the Author

‘Irrational streams of blood are staining earth …’

YEATS

‘O yonge Hugh of Lyncoln – slayn alsoWith cursed Jewes, as it is notable,For it is but a litel while ago –Preye eek for us, we synful folk unstable,…’

CHAUCER

Introduction

BY JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

What’s the difference between a good book and a great book? Good books can be engrossing, insightful, and new. Good books often receive critical praise, and some even stand the test of time. Good books are sometimes better – in the commonly used senses of readability and craftsmanship – than great books. (Just ask anyone who admires a great book without ever having finished it.) Great books are what our world needs, but good books are what our culture desires, so good books are what most authors, most of the time, aspire to write.

Bernard Malamud’s fourth novel, The Fixer, has all the makings of a good book. Its characters evoke empathy, its style admiration. The winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, it is still widely read. (And it’s hard to imagine the reader taking more than a day or two to get to its dramatic end.) Yet what makes it a great book, above and beyond its glowing goodness, has to do with something else altogether: its necessity.

Yakov Bok, the hero of the novel, is a fixer. If a window is broken, he replaces the glass. If a stair creaks, he silences it. But his story is one of existential fixing. ‘If I have any philosophy,’ he remarks, ‘it’s that life could be better than it is.’ After his wife leaves him, thereby ending their loveless, childless marriage, Yakov decides to try his luck in ‘the world.’ Maybe his good fortune can be found outside of the provincial shtetl where he has floundered all his life.

‘The world’ of the book is Kiev of 1911 – this is between the 1905 revolution and the overthrow of Russia’s last Tsar – and the precarious political climate has created a culture of paranoia. Latent fears and hatreds have become explicit and aggressive. When a twelve-year-old Russian boy is found stabbed to death and drained of his blood, Yakov – a nonpracticing, unbelieving Jew – is accused of ritual murder. (Such accusations were not uncommon in the Christian milieu of the period.) As the charges against him grow and deform, Yakov becomes a Job-like figure in a Kafkaesque nightmare. And his predicament becomes a symbol – not only of the Jewish epic (which would make for a simple, good book), but of the world itself.

The world is the broken thing.

The fear and hatred that Malamud evokes are familiar. That lack of humanity is not only contemporary, it is our own. It’s hard to read the paper these days without becoming paralyzed.

Good books often remind us of our troubled world.

Great books go a step further: they remind us of our humanity. And it’s only our humanity that can fix the world.

Yakov suffers, but he suffers and thinks, and suffers and struggles, and suffers and challenges his suffering. In prison, Yakov is aided by a noble gentile whose assistance is given at profound personal risk. As a chained Yakov is marched through the streets of Kiev on the way to his trial, some of those watching wave, and a few even shout his name. It’s the most they can do, and it’s a lot. The seemingly ambiguous climax is not ambiguous at all. Regardless of Yakov’s ultimate fate, a few good people have expressed their solidarity with him, and hence their humanity, and his.

When I finished reading this novel, I felt castigated and inspired. Grumbling about the state of the world suddenly wasn’t enough. And excusing myself from political activity felt wrong. In light of this book, my inaction felt immoral. While The Fixer isn’t a book about morality, it is a moral book. That is, rather than offering a flimsy directive, it presents the reader with a forceful question: Why aren’t you doing anything?

Novels that imitate sitcoms can be good, but they aren’t necessary.

Novels about heaven can be good, as can thrilling novels that imitate the movies that will be made of them, as can sassy, fashionable novels.

Our world – our desperate, broken world – needs existential novels, novels that give us something more valuable than hope: a call to action. The real fixer isn’t Yakov Bok. (He’s a character in that world.) And it isn’t Bernard Malamud. (He’s the bridge between that world and this one.) The real fixer is each of us. We must do something. That’s what this novel, like all great novels, reminds us.

THE FIXER

I

From the small crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody in the same direction. Vey iz mir, he thought uneasily, something bad has happened. The Russians, coming from streets around the cemetery, were hurrying, singly or in groups, in the spring snow in the direction of the caves in the ravine, some running in the middle of the slushy cobblestone streets. Yakov hastily hid the small tin can in which he saved silver rubles, then rushed down to the yard to find out what the excitement was about. He asked Proshko, the foreman, loitering near the smoky brickkilns, but Proshko spat and said nothing. Outside the yard a black-shawled, bony-faced peasant woman, thickly dressed, told him the dead body of a child had been found nearby. ‘Where?’ Yakov asked. ‘How old a child?’ but she said she didn’t know and hurried away. The next day the Kievlyaninreported that in a damp cave in a ravine not more than a verst and a half from the brickworks, the body of a murdered Russian boy, Zhenia Golov, twelve years old, had been found by two older boys, both fifteen, Kazimir Selivanov and Ivan Shestinsky. Zhenia, dead more than a week, was covered with stab wounds, his body bled white. After the funeral in the cemetery close by the brick factory, Richter, one of the drivers, brought in a handful of leaflets accusing the Jews of the murder. They had been printed, Yakov saw when he examined one, by the Black Hundreds organizations. Their emblem, the Imperial double-headed eagle, was imprinted on the cover, and under it: SAVE RUSSIA FROM THE JEWS. In his room that night, Yakov, in fascination, read that the boy had been bled to death for religious purposes so that the Jews could collect his blood and deliver it to the synagogue for the making of Passover matzos. Though this was ridiculous he was frightened. He got up, sat down, and got up again. He went to the window, then returned hastily and continued to read the newspaper. He was worried because the brick factory where he worked was in the Lukianovsky District, one in which Jews were forbidden to live. He had been living there for months under an assumed name and without a residence certificate. And he was frightened of the pogrom threatened in the newspaper. His own father had been killed in an incident not more than a year after Yakov’s birth – something less than a pogrom, and less than useless: two drunken soldiers shot the first three Jews in their path, his father had been the second. But the son had lived through a pogrom when he was a schoolboy, a three-day Cossack raid. On the third morning when the houses were still smoldering and he was led, with a half dozen other children, out of a cellar where they had been hiding he saw a black-bearded Jew with a white sausage stuffed into his mouth, lying in the road on a pile of bloody feathers, a peasant’s pig devouring his arm.

2

Five months ago, on a mild Friday in early November, before the first snow had snowed on the shtetl, Yakov’s father-in-law, a skinny worried man in clothes about to fall apart, who looked as though he had been assembled out of sticks and whipped air, drove up with his skeletal horse and rickety wagon. They sat in the thin cold house – gone to seed two months after Raisl, the faithless wife, had fled – and drank a last glass of tea together. Shmuel, long since sixty, with tousled gray beard, rheumy eyes, and deeply creased forehead – dug into his caftan pocket for half a yellow sugar lump and offered it to Yakov who shook his head. The peddler – he was his daughter’s dowry, had had nothing to give so he gave favors, service if possible – sucked tea through sugar but his son-in-law drank his unsweetened. It tasted bitter and he blamed existence. The old man from time to time commented on life without accusing anyone, or asked harmless questions, but Yakov was silent or short with answers.

After he had sipped through half his glass of tea, Shmuel, sighing, said, ‘Nobody has to be a Prophet to know you’re blaming me for my daughter Raisl.’ He spoke in sadness, wearing a hard hat he had found in a barrel in a neighboring town. When he sweated it stuck to his head, but being a religious man he didn’t mind. Otherwise he had on a patched and padded caftan from which his skinny hands hung out. And very roomy shoes, not boots, which he ran in, and around in.

‘Who said anything? You’re blaming yourself for having brought up a whore.’

Shmuel, without a word, pulled out a soiled blue handkerchief and wept.

‘So why, if you’ll excuse me, did you stop sleeping with her for months? Is that a way to treat a wife?’

‘It was more like weeks but how long can a man sleep with a barren woman? I got tired of trying.’

‘Why didn’t you go to the rabbi when I begged you?’

‘Let him stay out of my business and I’ll stay out of his. All in all he’s an ignorant man.’

‘Charity you were always short of,’ the peddler said.

Yakov rose, enraged. ‘Don’t talk to me about charity. What have I had all my life? What have I got to give away? I was practically born an orphan – my mother dead ten minutes later, and you know what happened to my poor father. If somebody said Kaddish for them it wasn’t me till years later. If they were waiting outside the gates of heaven it was a long cold wait, if they’re not still waiting. Throughout my miserable childhood I lived in a stinking orphans’ home, barely existing. In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams. Torah I had little of and Talmud less, though I learned Hebrew because I’ve got an ear for language. Anyway, I knew the Psalms. They taught me a trade and apprenticed me five minutes after age ten – not that I regret it. So I work – let’s call it work – with my hands, and some call me “common” but the truth of it is few people know who is really common. As for those that look like they got class, take another look. Viskover, the Nogid, is in my eyes a common man. All he’s got is rubles and when he opens his mouth you can hear them clink. On my own I studied different subjects, and even before I was taken into the army I taught myself a decent Russian, much better than we pick up from the peasants. What little I know I learned on my own – some history and geography, a little science, arithmetic, and a book or two of Spinoza’s. Not much but better than nothing.’

‘Though most is treyf I give you credit—’ said Shmuel.

‘Let me finish. I’ve had to dig with my fingernails for a living. What can anybody do without capital? What they can do I can do but it’s not much. I fix what’s broken – except in the heart. In this shtetl everything is falling apart – who bothers with leaks in his roof if he’s peeking through the cracks to spy on God? And who can pay to have it fixed let’s say he wants it, which he doesn’t. If he does, half the time I work for nothing. If I’m lucky, a dish of noodles. Opportunity here is born dead. I’m frankly in a foul mood.’

‘Opportunity you don’t have to tell me about—’

‘They conscripted me for the Russo-Japanese War but it was over before I got in. Thank God. When I got sick they booted me out. An asthmatic Jew wasn’t worth the trouble. Thank God. When I got back I scraped again with my broken nails. After a long run-around which started when I met her, I married your daughter, who couldn’t get pregnant in five and a half years. She bore me no children so who could I look in the eye? And now she runs off with some stranger she met at the inn – a goy I’m positive. So that’s enough – who needs more? I don’t want people pitying me or wondering what I did to be so cursed. I did nothing. It was a gift. I’m innocent. I’ve been an orphan too long. All I have to my name after thirty years in this graveyard is sixteen rubles that I got from selling everything I own. So please don’t mention charity because I have no charity to give.’

‘Charity you can give even when you haven’t got. I don’t mean money. I meant for my daughter.’

‘Your daughter deserves nothing.’

‘She ran from one rabbi to another in every town I took her, but nobody could promise her a child. She ran to the doctors too when she had a ruble, but they told her the same thing. It was cheaper with the rabbis. So she ran away – may God protect her. Even a sinner belongs to Him. She sinned but she was desperate.’

‘May she run forever.’

‘She was a true wife to you for years. She shared your every misfortune.’

‘What she caused she shared. She was a true wife to the last minute, or the last month, or the month before that, and that makes her untrue, a black cholera on her!’

‘God forbid,’ cried Shmuel, rising. ‘On you!’

Eyes agitated, he thickly cursed the fixer and fled from the house.

Yakov had sold everything but the clothes on his back, which he wore as peasants do – embroidered shirt belted outside his trousers, whose legs were stuffed into wrinkled high boots. And a peasant’s worn and patched, brown sheepskin coat, which could, on occasion, smell of sheep. He had kept his tools and a few books: Smirnovsky’s Russian Grammar, an elementary biology book, Selections from Spinoza, and a battered atlas at least twenty-five years old. He had made a small bundle of the books with a piece of knotted twine. The tools were in a flour sack tied at the neck, the crosscut blade protruding. There was also some food in a cone of newspaper. He was leaving behind his few ruined sticks of furniture – a junkman had wanted to be paid to take them – and two sets of cracked dishes, also unsaleable, that Shmuel could do with whatever he wanted – use, ax, or fire – they were worth nothing. Raisl had had two sets for her father’s sake, for herself it made not much difference. But in exchange for the horse and wagon the peddler would get a fairly good cow. He could take over his daughter’s little dairy business. It could hardly pay less than peddling. He was the only person Yakov knew who peddled nothing and sold it, in bits and slices, for real kopeks. Sometimes he traded nothing for pig bristles, wool, grain, sugar beets, and then sold the peasants dried fish, soap, kerchiefs, candy, in minute quantities. That was his talent and on it he miraculously lived. ‘He who gave us teeth will give us bread.’ Yet his breath smelled of nothing – not bread, not anything.

Yakov, in loose clothes and peaked cap, was an elongated nervous man with large ears, stained hard hands, a broad back and tormented face, lightened a bit by gray eyes and brownish hair. His nose was sometimes Jewish, sometimes not. He had to no one’s surprise – after Raisl ran away – shaved off his short beard of reddish cast. ‘Cut off your beard and you no longer resemble your creator,’ Shmuel had warned. Since then he had been admonished by more than one Jew that he looked like a goy but it had caused him neither to mourn nor rejoice. He looked young but felt old and for that he blamed nobody, not even his wife; he blamed fate and spared himself. His nervousness showed in his movements. Generally he moved faster than he had to, considering how little there was to do, but he was always doing something. After all, he was a fixer and had to keep his hands busy.

Dumping his things into the open wagon, a rusty water bucket hanging under it between the back wheels, he was displeased with the appearance of the nag, a naked-looking animal with spindly legs, a brown bony body and large stupid eyes, who got along very well with Shmuel. They asked little from each other and lived in peace. The horse did mostly as he pleased and Shmuel indulged him. After all, what difference did a short delay make in a mad world? Tomorrow he would be no richer. The fixer was irritated with himself for acquiring this decrepit beast, but had thought better a lopsided exchange with Shmuel than getting nothing for the cow from a peasant who coveted her. A father-in-law’s blood was thicker than water. Although there was no railroad station anywhere around, and the coachman came for travelers only every second week, Yakov could have got to Kiev without taking over the horse and wagon. Shmuel had offered to drive him the thirty or so versts but the fixer preferred to be rid of him and travel alone. He figured that once he got into the city he could sell the beast and apology-for-dray, if not to a butcher, then at least to a junk dealer for a few rubles.

Dvoira, the dark-uddered cow, was out in the field behind the hut, browsing under a leafless poplar tree, and Yakov went out to her. The white cow raised her head and watched him approach. The fixer patted her lean flank. ‘Goodbye, Dvoira,’ he said, ‘and lots of luck. Give what you got left to Shmuel, also a poor man.’ He wanted to say more but couldn’t. Tearing up some limp yellowing grass, he fed it to the cow, then returned to the horse and wagon. Shmuel had reappeared.

Why does he act as though he were the one who had deserted me?

‘I didn’t come back to fight with anybody,’ Shmuel said. ‘What she did I won’t defend – she hurt me as much as she did you. Even more, though when the rabbi says she’s now dead my voice agrees but not my heart. First of all she’s my only child, and since when do we need more dead? I’ve cursed her more than once but I ask God not to listen.’

‘Well, I’m leaving,’ Yakov said, ‘take care of the cow.’

‘Don’t leave yet,’ Shmuel said, his eyes miserable. ‘If you stay Raisl might come back.’

‘If she does who’s interested?’

‘If you had been more patient she wouldn’t have left you.’

‘Five years going on six is enough of patience. I’ve had enough. I might have waited the legal ten, but she danced off with some dirty stranger, so I’ve had my fill, thanks.’

‘Who can blame you?’ Shmuel sighed sadly. He asked after a while, ‘Have you got tobacco for a little cigarette, Yakov?’

‘My bag is empty.’

The peddler briskly rubbed his dry palms.

‘So you haven’t, you haven’t, but what I don’t understand is why you want to bother with Kiev. It’s a dangerous city full of churches and anti-Semites.’

‘I’ve been cheated from the start,’ Yakov said bitterly. ‘What I’ve been through personally you know already, not to mention living here all my life except for a few months in the army. The shtetl is a prison, no change from the days of Khmelnitsky. It moulders and the Jews moulder in it. Here we’re all prisoners, I don’t have to tell you, so it’s time to try elsewhere I’ve finally decided. I want to make a living, I want to get acquainted with a bit of the world. I’ve read a few books in recent years and it’s surprising what goes on that none of us knows about. I’m not asking for Tibet but what I saw in St. Petersburg interested me. Whoever thought of white nights before, but it’s a scientific fact; they have them there. When I left the army I thought I would get out of here as soon as possible, but things caught up with me, including your daughter.’

‘My daughter wanted to run away from here the minute you got married but you wouldn’t go.’

‘It’s true,’ said Yakov, ‘it was my fault. I thought it couldn’t get worse so it must get better. I was wrong both ways so now enough is enough. I’m on my way at last.’

‘Outside the Pale only wealthy Jews and the professional classes can get residence certificates. The Tsar doesn’t want poor Jews all over his land, and Stolypin, may his lungs collapse, urges him on. Ptu!’ Shmuel spat through two fingers.

‘Since I can’t be a professional on account of lack of education I wouldn’t mind being wealthy. As the saying goes, I’d sell my last shirt to be a millionaire. Maybe, by luck, I’ll make my fortune in the outside world.’

‘What’s in the world,’ Shmuel said, ‘is in the shtetl – people, their trials, worries, circumstances. But here at least God is with us.’

‘He’s with us till the Cossacks come galloping, then he’s elsewhere. He’s in the outhouse, that’s where he is.’

The peddler grimaced but let the remark pass. ‘Almost fifty thousand Jews live in Kiev,’ he said, ‘restricted to a few districts, and all in the way of the first blow that falls if a new pogrom should come. And it will fall faster in the larger places than it falls here. When we hear their cries we will rush into the woods. Why should you walk straight into the hands of the Black Hundreds, may they hang by their tongues?’

‘The truth of it is I’m a man full of wants I’ll never satisfy, at least not here. It’s time to get out and take a chance. Change your place change your luck, people say.’

‘Since the last year or so, Yakov, you’re a different man. What wants are so important?’

‘Those that can’t sleep and keep me awake for company. I’ve told you what wants: a full stomach now and then. A job that pays rubles, not noodles. Even some education if I can get it, and I don’t mean workmen studying Torah after hours. I’ve had my share of that. What I want to know is what’s going on in the world.’

‘That’s all in the Torah, there’s no end to it. Stay away from the wrong books, Yakov, the impure.’

‘There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.’

Shmuel unstuck his hat and wiped his brow with his handkerchief.

‘Yakov, if you want to go to foreign parts, Turks or no Turks, why not to Palestine where a Jew can see Jewish trees and mountains, and breathe the Jewish air? If I had half a chance there’s where I’d go.’

‘All I’ve had in this miserable town is a beggarly existence. Now I’ll try Kiev. If I can live there decently that’s what I’ll do. If not, I’ll make sacrifices, save up, and head for Amsterdam for a boat to America. To sum it up, I have little but I have plans.’

‘Plans or none you’re looking for trouble.’

‘I’ve never had to look,’ said the fixer. ‘Well, Shmuel, good luck to you. The morning’s gone so I’d better go.’

He climbed up onto the wagon and reached for the reins.

‘I’ll ride with you as far as the windmills.’ Shmuel got up on the seat on the other side.

Yakov touched the nag with a birch switch the old man kept in the holder, a hole bored into the edge of the seat, but the horse, after an initial startled gallop, stopped short and stood motionless in the road.

‘Personally I never use it,’ the peddler remarked. ‘It’s there as a warning. If he dawdles I remind him it’s there. He seems to like to hear me talk about it.’

‘If that’s the case I’m better off walking.’

‘Patience.’ Shmuel smacked his lips. ‘Gidap, beauty – he’s very vain. Whenever you can afford it, Yakov, feed him oats. Too much grass and he’s prone to gas.’

‘If he’s prone to gas let him fart.’ He flicked the reins.

Yakov didn’t look back. The nag moved along a crooked road between black plowed fields with dark round haystacks piled up here and there, the peasant’s church visible on the left in the distance; then slowly up the narrow stony cemetery road, a few thin yellow willows amid the graves, and around a low tombstone-covered hill where Yakov’s parents, a man and woman in their early twenties, lay buried. He had considered a visit to their weed-strewn graves but hadn’t the heart at the last minute. The past was a wound in the head. He thought of Raisl and felt depressed.

The fixer snapped the rod against the nag’s ribs but got no increase of motion.

‘I’ll get to Kiev by Hanukkah.’

‘If you don’t get there it’s because God wills it. You won’t miss a thing.’

A shnorrer in rags called to the fixer from beside a tilted tombstone. ‘Hey, there, Yakov, it’s Friday. How about a two-kopek piece for a Sabbath blessing? Charity saves from death.’

‘Death is the last of my worries.’

‘Lend me a kopek or two, Yakov,’ said Shmuel.

‘A kopek I haven’t earned today.’

The shnorrer, a man with ugly feet, called him goy, his mouth twisted, eyes lit in anger.

Yakov spat in the road.

Shmuel said a prayer to ward off evil.

The nag began to trot, drawing the rickety wagon with its swinging bucket banging the axle past the cemetery hill, down the winding road. They drove by the poorhouse, a shabby structure with an addition for orphans, which Yakov averted his eyes from, then clop-clopped across a wooden bridge into the populous section of the town. They passed Shmuel’s hut, neither of them looking. A blackened bath-house with boarded windows stood near a narrow stream and the fixer felt suddenly itchy for a bath, thinking of himself in the thick steam, slapping his soapened sides with a twig brush as the attendant poured water on his head. God bless soap and water, Raisl used to say. In a few hours the bathhouse, steaming from its cracks, would be bulging with Jews washing up for Friday night.

They rattled along a rutted dusty street with thatched cottages on one side, open weedy fields on the other. A big-wigged Jewess, sitting on her doorstep, plucked a bloody-necked hen between her knees, as she cursed out a peasant’s sow rooting in the remnants of her potato garden. A pool of blood in the ditch marked the passage of the ritual slaughterer. Farther on, a bearded black goat with a twisted horn, tethered to a post, baaed at the horse and charged, but the rope around his neck held and though the post toppled, the goat was thrown on its back. The doors of some of the cottages hung loose, and where there were steps they sagged. Fences buckled and were about to collapse without apparent notice or response, irritating the fixer, who liked things in place and functioning.

Tonight the white candles would gleam from the lit windows. For everybody else.

The horse zigzagged towards the marketplace, and now the quality of the houses improved, some large and attractive, with gardens full of flowers in the summertime.

‘Leave it to the lousy rich,’ the fixer muttered.

Shmuel had nothing to say. His mind, he had often said, had exhausted the subject. He did not envy the rich, all he wanted was to share a little of their wealth – enough to live on while he was working hard to earn a living.

The market, a large open square with wooden houses on two sides, some containing first-floor shops, was crowded with peasant carts laden with grains, vegetables, wood, hides and whatnot. Around the stalls and bins mostly women clustered, shopping for the Sabbath. Though the market was his usual hangout, the fixer waved to no one and no one waved to him.

I leave with no regret, he thought. I should have gone years ago.

‘Who have you told?’ Shmuel asked.

‘Who’s there to tell? Practically nobody. It’s none of their business anyway. Frankly, my heart is heavy – I’ll tell the truth – but I’m sick of this place.’

He had said goodbye to his two cronies, Leibish Polikov and Haskel Dembo. The first had shrugged, the other wordlessly embraced him, and that was that. A butcher holding up by its thick yellow feet a squawking hen beating its wings saw the wagon go by and said something witty to his customers. One of these, a young woman who turned to look, called to Yakov, but by then the wagon was out of the marketplace, scattering some chickens nesting in the ruts of the road and a flock of jabbering ducks, as it clattered on.

They approached the domed synagogue with its iron weathercock, a pock-marked yellow-walled building with an oak door, for the time being resting in peace. It had been sacked more than once. The courtyard was empty except for a black-hatted Jew sitting on a bench reading a folded newspaper in the sunlight. Yakov had rarely been inside the synagogue in recent years yet he easily remembered the long high-ceilinged room with its brass chandeliers, oval stained windows, and the prayer stands with stools and wooden candleholders, where he had spent, for the most part wasted, so many hours.

‘Gidap,’ he said.

At the other side of the town – a shtetl was an island surrounded by Russia – as they came abreast a windmill, its patched fans turning in slow massive motion, the fixer jerked on the reins and the horse clopped to a stop.

‘Here’s where we part,’ he said to the peddler.

Shmuel drew out of his pocket an embroidered cloth bag.

‘Don’t forget these,’ he said embarrassed. ‘I found them in your drawer before we left.’

In the bag was another containing phylacteries. There was also a prayer shawl and a prayer book. Raisl, before they were married, had made the bag out of a piece of her dress and embroidered it with the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

‘Thanks.’ Yakov tossed the bag among his other things in the wagon.

‘Yakov,’ said Shmuel passionately, ‘don’t forget your God!’

‘Who forgets who?’ the fixer said angrily. ‘What do I get from him but a bang on the head and a stream of piss in my face. So what’s there to be worshipful about?’

‘Don’t talk like a meshummed. Stay a Jew, Yakov, don’t give up our God.’

‘A meshummed gives up one God for another. I don’t want either. We live in a world where the clock ticks fast while he’s on his timeless mountain staring in space. He doesn’t see us and he doesn’t care. Today I want my piece of bread, not in Paradise.’

‘Listen to me, Yakov, take my advice. I’ve lived longer than you. There’s a shul in the Podol in Kiev. Go on Shabbos, you’ll feel better. “Blessed are they who put their trust in God.” ’

‘Where I ought to go is to the Socialist Bund meetings, that’s where I should go, not in shul. But the truth of it is I dislike politics, though don’t ask me why. What good is it if you’re not an activist? I guess it’s my nature. I incline toward the philosophical although I don’t know much about anything.’

‘Be careful,’ Shmuel said, agitated, ‘we live in the middle of our enemies. The best way to take care is to stay under God’s protection. Remember, if He’s not perfect, neither are we.’

They embraced quickly and Shmuel got down from the wagon.

‘Goodbye, sweetheart,’ he called to the horse. ‘Goodbye, Yakov, I’ll think of you when I say the Eighteen Blessings. If you ever see Raisl, tell her her father is waiting.’

Shmuel trudged back towards the synagogue. When he was quite far away Yakov felt a pang for having forgotten to slip him a ruble or two.

‘Get on now.’ The nag flicked an ear, roused itself for a short trot, then slowed to a tired walk.

It’ll be some trip, the fixer thought.

The horse stopped abruptly as a field mouse skittered across the road.

‘Gidap, goddamit’ – but the nag wouldn’t move.

A peasant passed by with a long-horned bullock, prodding the animal with a stick.

‘A horse understands a whip,’ he said across the road in Russian.

Yakov belabored the beast with the birch rod until he drew blood. The nag whinnied but remained tightly immobile on the road. The peasant, after watching awhile, moved on.

‘You son-of-a-bitch,’ said the fixer to the horse, ‘we’ll never get to Kiev.’

He was at the point of despair when a brown dog rustling through a blanket of dead leaves under some trees came onto the road, yelping at the horse. The nag hurried forward, Yakov barely grabbing the reins. The dog chased them, barking sharply at the horse’s hooves, then at a turn in the road, disappeared. But the wagon rolled on, bucket rattling, its wheels wobbling, the nag trotting as fast as it could.

It clip-clopped along the hard dirt road, on one side of which flowed a mild stream below a sloping embankment; and on the other were the scattered log huts of a peasant village, their roofs covered with rotting straw. Despite poverty and the antics of too many pigs the huts looked better than the shtetl cottages. A bearded peasant chopped wood, a woman pumped water from the village well. They both stopped to stare at him. A verst from his town and he was a stranger in the world.

The horse trotted on, Yakov gazing at the fields, some plowed under, where oats, hay, sugar beets had grown, the haystacks standing dark against the woods. A crow flew slowly over the stubble of a wheatfield. The fixer found himself counting sheep and goats grazing in the communal meadows under lazy thick clouds. It had been a dank and dreary autumn, the dead leaves still hanging on half the trees in the woods around the fields. Last year at this time it had already snowed. Though as a rule he enjoyed the landscape, Yakov felt a weight on him. The buzz and sparkle of summer were gone. In the violet distance the steppe seemed melancholy, endless.

The cut on the horse’s flank, though encrusted, still oozed red droplets and drew fleas he switched away without touching the animal. He thought his spirits would rise once he was out of the shtetl but felt no relief. The fixer was troubled by discontent, a deeper sense that he had had no choice about going than he wanted to admit. His few friends were left behind. His habits, his best memories such as they were, were there. But so was his shame. He was leaving because he had earned a worse living – although he hadn’t become a gravedigger – than many he knew with fewer brains and less skill. He was leaving because he was a childless husband – ‘alive but dead’ the Talmud described such a man – as well as an embittered, deserted one. Yet if she had been faithful he would have stayed. Then better she hadn’t been. He should be grateful to be escaping from a fruitless life. Still, he was apprehensive of going to a city of strangers – Jews as well as gentiles, strangers were strangers – in a sense a forbidden place. Holy Kiev, mother of Russian cities! He knew the towns for a dozen versts around but had only once, for a week in summer, been in Kiev. He felt the discontent of strangeness, of not knowing what was where, unable to predict or clearly visualize. All he could think of were the rows of shabby crowded tenements in the Podol. Would he go on in the same useless poverty and drab experience amid masses of Jews as poor as he, or somehow come to a better way of life? How at his age? – already thirty. Jobs for him were always scarce. With just the few rubles in his pocket how long would he last before starving? Why should tomorrow be better than today? Had he earned the privilege?

He had many fears, and since he rarely traveled long distances, had fears of traveling. The soles of his feet itched, which meant, the old wives said: ‘You will journey to a far-off place.’ So, good, but would he ever get there? The horse had slowed down again, a black year on its stupid head. Suppose those clouds, grown dark and heavy, cracked open on their undersides and poured snow upon the world. Would the horse make it? He pictured the snow falling thickly, in a few minutes turning the road and fields white so you couldn’t see where one ended and the other began, the wagon filling up with snow. The nag would stop. Yakov might switch him till his bones gleamed through the blood but the animal was the type that would quietly lie down in the snow to spite him. ‘Brother, I’m tired. If you want to go on in this storm, go in good health. But not me. I’ll take sleep and if it’s sleep forever, so much the better. At least the snow is warm.’ The fixer saw himself wandering in drifts until he perished.

But the horse said nothing, and it didn’t look like snow – or rain either. It was a brisk day beginning to be windy – it raised the nag’s mane – and though the horse moved leisurely it moved steadily. Yet as they went through a grove of black-branched trees, the leafless twigs darkly intertwined high above Yakov’s head, the small wood grew gloomy, and the fixer still searching for a change in the weather became actively nervous again. Shading his eyes in the queer light, he peered ahead – a winding road, absolutely snowless. Enough of this, he thought, I’d better eat. As though it had read his mind the nag came to a stop before he pulled the reins. Yakov got down off the seat, and taking hold of the bridle, drew the horse to the side of the road. The horse spread its hind legs and spattered a yellow stream on the road. Yakov urinated on some brown ferns. Feeling better, he tore up several handfuls of dry tussocky grass, and since he could locate no feedbag in the wagon, fed it in fistfuls to the nag. The horse, its sides heaving, chewed with its eroded yellow teeth until the grass foamed. The fixer’s stomach rumbled. He sat under a sunlit tree, raised his sheepskin collar, and opened the food parcel. He ate part of a cold boiled potato, chewing slowly, then half a cucumber sprinkled with coarse salt, with a piece of sour black bread. Ah, for some tea, he thought, or if not that, some sweetened hot water. Yakov fell asleep with his back to the tree, awoke in a hurry, and climbed up on the wagon.

‘It’s late, goddamit, come on, move.’

The nag wouldn’t budge. The fixer reached for the switch. On second thought he climbed down, unhitched the rusty bucket and went looking for water. When he found a little stream the pail leaked, but he offered it, half full, to the horse, who wouldn’t drink.

‘Games I don’t play.’ Yakov poured out the water, hitched the bucket on the hook under the wagon, and stepped up to the seat. He waved the switch till it whistled. The nag, lowering his ears, moved forward, if one could call it movement. At least it wasn’t where it had been before. The fixer again whistled the air with the switch, and the horse, after an indecisive minute, began to trot. The wagon rattled on.

They had gone on a while when the wagon caught up with an old woman, a pilgrim walking slowly in the road, leaning on her long staff, a heavy peasant in black, wearing men’s shoes and carrying a knapsack, a thick shawl wrapped around her head.

He drew over to the side to pass her but as he did Yakov called out, ‘A ride, granny?’

‘May Jesus bless you.’ She had three gray teeth.

Jesus he didn’t need. Bad luck, he thought. Yakov helped pull her up to the wagon seat and touched the nag with the birch whip. To his surprise the horse took up his trot. Then as the road turned, the right wheel struck a rock and broke with a crunch. The wagon teetered and sagged at the rear, the left wheel tilted inward.

The old woman crossed herself, slowly climbed down to the road, and walked on with her heavy stick. She did not look back.

Yakov cursed Shmuel for wishing the wagon on him. Jumping to the ground he examined the broken wheel. Its worn metal ring had come off. The wooden rim had caved in, splintering two spokes. The split hub leaked axle grease. He groaned.

After five minutes of stunned emptiness he got his tool sack out of the wagon, untied it and spread out the tools on the road. But with hatchet, saw, plane, tinsmith’s shears, tri-square, putty, wire, pointed knife and two awls, the fixer couldn’t fix what was broken. Under the best conditions it would take him a day to repair the wheel. He thought of buying one from a peasant if he could get one that fitted, or nearly fitted, but if so where was the peasant? When you didn’t need them they were in your beard. Yakov tossed the pieces of broken wheel into the wagon. He tied up his tools and drearily waited for someone to come. Nobody came. He considered returning to the shtetl but remembered he had had enough. The wind was colder, sharper, got under his coat and between the shoulder blades. The sun was setting, the sky turning dark.

If I go slow maybe I can make it on three wheels to the next village.

He tried it, sitting lightly as far to the left on the seat as he could, and begged the nag to take it easy. To his relief they went forward, the back wheel squeaking, for half a verst. He had caught up with the pilgrim and was about to say she couldn’t ride when the other rear wheel, grinding thickly against the axle, collapsed, the back of the wagon hitting the road with a crashing thud, the bucket crushed. The horse lurched forward, snorted and reared. The fixer, his body tipped at a perilous angle, was paralyzed.

Eventually he got down off the seat. ‘Who invented my life?’ Behind him was the empty treeless steppe, ahead the old woman. She had stopped before a huge wooden crucifix at the side of the road, crossed herself, and then slowly sinking to her knees, began to hit her head against the hard ground. She banged it until Yakov had a headache. The darkening steppe was here uninhabited. He feared fog and a raging wind. Unhitching the horse and drawing him out from under the wooden yoke, Yakov gathered together the reins. He backed the nag to the wagon seat, and climbing up on it, mounted the animal. No sooner up than down. The fixer placed his tool bag, book bundle, and parcels on the tilted seat, wound the reins around him, and remounted the horse. He slung the tools over his shoulder, and with his left hand held the other things as they rested on the horse’s back, his right hand grasping the reins. The horse galloped forward. To Yakov’s surprise he did not fall off.

They skirted the old woman, prostrate at the cross. He felt foolish and uncertain on the horse but hung on. The nag had slowed to a trot, then to a dejected walk. It stood stock still. Yakov cursed it into eternity and eventually it came to life, once more inching forward. When they were on the move, the fixer, who had never sat on a horse before – he couldn’t think why except that he had never had a horse – dreamed of good fortune, accomplishment, affluence. He had a comfortable home, good business – maybe a small factory of some kind – a faithful wife, dark-haired, pretty, and three healthy children, God bless them. But when he was becalmed on the nag he thought blackly of his father-in-law, beat the beast with his fist, and foresaw for himself a useless future. Yakov pleaded with the animal to make haste – it was dark and the steppe wind cut keenly, but freed of the wagon the horse examined the world. He also stopped to crop grass, tearing it audibly with his eroded teeth, and wandering from one side of the road to the other. Once in a while he turned and trotted back a few steps. Yakov, frantic, threatened the switch, but they both knew he had none. In desperation he kicked the beast with his heels. The nag bucked and for a perilous few minutes it was like being in a rowboat on a stormy sea. Having barely survived, Yakov stopped kicking. He considered ditching his goods, hoping the lightened load might speed things up, but didn’t dare.

‘I’m a bitter man, you bastard horse. Come to your senses or you’ll suffer.’

It availed him nothing.

By then it was pitch dark. The wind boomed. The steppe was a black sea full of strange voices. Here nobody spoke Yiddish, and the nag, maybe feeling the strangeness of it, began to trot and soon came close to flight. Though the fixer was not a superstitious man he had been a superstitious boy, and he recalled Lilith, Queen of Evil Spirits, and the Fish-witch who tickled travelers to death or otherwise made herself helpful. Ghosts rose like smoke in the Ukraine. From time to time he felt a presence at his back but would not turn. Then a yellow moon rose like a flower growing and lit the empty steppe deep into the shadowy distance. The distance glowed. It’ll be a long night, the fixer thought. They galloped through a peasant village, its long-steepled church yellow in moonlight, the squat thatched huts dark, no lights anywhere. Though he smelled woodsmoke he saw none. Yakov considered dismounting, knocking on a strange door and begging for a night’s lodging. But he felt that if he got off the horse he would never get back on. He was afraid he might be robbed of his few rubles, so he stayed put and made uncertain progress. The sky was thick with stars, the wind blowing cold in his face. Once he slept momentarily and woke in shivering sweat from a nightmare. He thought he was irretrievably lost, but to his amazement, before him in the distance rose a vast height glowing in dim moonlight and sprinkled sparsely with lights, at the foot of which ran a broad dark river reflecting the half-hidden moon. The nag stopped jogging and it took them an almost endless hour to make the last half-verst to the water.

3

It was freezing cold but the wind was down on the Dnieper. There was no ferry, the boatman said. ‘Closed down. Closed. Shut.’ He waved his arms as though talking to a foreigner although Yakov had spoken to him in Russian. That the ferry had stopped running sharpened the fixer’s desire to get across the river. He hoped to rent a bed at an inn and wake early to look for work.

‘I’ll row you across for a ruble,’ the boatman said.

‘Too much,’ Yakov answered, though deadly tired. ‘Which way to the bridge?’

‘Six or eight versts. A long way for the same thing.’

‘A ruble,’ the fixer groaned. ‘Who’s got that much money?’

‘You can take it or leave it. It’s no easy thing rowing across a dangerous river on a pitch-black night. We might both drown.’

‘What would I do with my horse?’ The fixer spoke more to himself.

‘That’s none of my business.’ The boatman, his shoulders like a tree trunk, and wearing a shaggy grizzled beard, blew out one full nostril on a rock, then the other. The white of his right eye was streaked with blood.

‘Look, mate, why do you make more trouble than it’s worth? Even if I could haul it across, which I can’t, the beast will die on you. It doesn’t take a long look to see he’s on his last legs. Look at him trembling. Listen to him breathing like a gored bull.’

‘I was hoping to sell him in Kiev.’

‘What fool would buy a bag of old bones?’

‘I thought maybe a horse butcher or someone – at least the skin.’

‘I say the horse is dead,’ said the boatman, ‘but you can save a ruble if you’re smart. I’ll take him for the cost of the trip. It’s a bother to me and I’ll be lucky to get fifty kopeks for the carcass, but I’ll do you the favor, seeing you’re a stranger.’

He’s only given me trouble, the fixer thought.

He stepped into the rowboat with his bag of tools, books, and other parcels. The boatman untied the boat, dipped both oars into the water and they were off.

The nag, tethered to a paling, watched from the moonlit shore.

Like an old Jew he looks, thought the fixer.

The horse whinnied and, when that proved useless, farted loudly.

‘I don’t recognize the accent you speak,’ said the boatman, pulling the oars. ‘It’s Russian but from what province?’

‘I’ve lived in Latvia as well as other places,’ the fixer muttered.

‘At first I thought you were a goddam Pole. Pan whosis, Pani whatsis.’ The boatman laughed, then snickered. ‘Or maybe a motherfucking Jew. But though you’re dressed like a Russian you look more like a German, may the devil destroy them all, excepting yourself and yours of course.’

‘Latvian,’ said Yakov.

‘Anyway, God save us all from the bloody Jews,’ the boatman said as he rowed, ‘those long-nosed, pockmarked, cheating, bloodsucking parasites. They’d rob us of daylight if they could. They foul up earth and air with their body stink and garlic breaths, and Russia will be done to death by the diseases they spread unless we make an end to it. A Jew’s a devil – it’s a known fact – and if you ever watch one peel off his stinking boot you’ll see a split hoof, it’s true. I know, for as the Lord is my witness, I saw one with my own eyes. He thought nobody was looking, but I saw his hoof as plain as day.’

He stared at Yakov with the bloody eye. The fixer’s foot itched but he didn’t touch it.

Let him talk, he thought, yet he shivered.

‘Day after day they crap up the Motherland,’ the boatman went on monotonously, ‘and the only way to save ourselves is to wipe them out. I don’t mean kill a Zhid now and then with a blow of the fist or kick in the head, but wipe them all out, which we’ve sometimes tried but never done as it should be done. I say we ought to call our menfolk together, armed with guns, knives, pitchforks, clubs – anything that will kill a Jew – and when the church bells begin to ring we move on the Zhidy quarter, which you can tell by the stink, routing them out of wherever they’re hiding – in attics, cellars, or ratholes – bashing in their brains, stabbing their herring-filled guts, shooting off their snotty noses, no exception made for young or old, because if you spare any they breed like rats and then the job’s to do all over again.

‘And then when we’ve slaughtered the whole cursed tribe of them – and the same is done in every province throughout Russia, wherever we can smoke them out – though we’ve got most of them nice and bunched up in the Pale – we’ll pile up the corpses and soak them with benzine and light fires that people will enjoy all over the world. Then when that’s done we hose the stinking ashes away and divide the rubles and jewels and silver and furs and all the other loot they stole, or give it back to the poor who it rightfully belongs to anyway. You can take my word – the time’s not far off when everything I say, we will do, because our Lord, who they crucified, wants His rightful revenge.’

He dropped an oar and crossed himself.

Yakov fought an impulse to do the same. His bag of prayer things fell with a plop into the Dnieper and sank like lead.

II

Where do you go if you had been nowhere? He hid at first in the Jewish quarter, emerging stealthily from time to time to see what there was to see in the world, exploring, trying the firmness of the earth. Kiev, ‘the Jerusalem of Russia,’ still awed and disquieted him. He had been there for a few hot summer days after being conscripted into the army, and now, again, he saw it with half the self – the other half worried about his worries. Still, as he wandered from street to street, the colors were light and pretty. A golden haze hung in the air in the late afternoons. The busy avenues were full of people, among them Ukrainian peasants in their native dress, gypsies, soldiers, priests. At night the white gas globes glowed in the streets and there were thick mists on the river. Kiev stood on three hills, and he remembered his first trembling sight of the city from the Nicholas Bridge – dotted with white houses with green roofs, churches and monasteries, their gold and silver domes floating above the green foliage. He wasn’t without an eye for a pretty scene, though that added nothing to his living. Still, a man was more than a workhorse, or so they said.

The other way, across the glassy brown river – the way he had come on a dying horse – the steppe stretched out into the vast green distance. Only thirty versts and the shtetl was invisible, gone – poof! – lost, maybe expired. Though he felt homesick he knew he would never return, yet what would it come to? More than once Raisl had accused him of being afraid to leave and maybe it was true but at last it wasn’t. So I left, he thought, what good will it do me? Was she back? he wondered. He cursed her when he thought of her.

He went where he had not been before, speaking in Russian to anyone who spoke to him – testing himself, he explained it to himself. Why should a man be afraid of the world? Because he was, if for no other reason. Numb with fear that he would be recognized as a Jew and ordered out, he stealthily watched from the gallery of a church as the peasants, some with knapsacks on their backs, knelt and prayed at the altar before a tall gold crucifix and a jeweled ikon of the Madonna, as the priest, a huge man in rich thick vestments, chanted the Orthodox service. The fixer had the shivers as he looked, and the strange odor of incense increased his nervousness. He almost rose out of his boots as he was touched on the arm and saw at his side a black-bearded hunchback who pointed to the peasants below smacking their heads against the flagstone floor and kissing it passionately. ‘Go thou and do likewise! Eat salted bread and listen to the truth!’ The fixer quickly left.