The Fixer (2 page)

  “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 amidst 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 bathhouse 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.