Free The Fixer by Bernard Malamud

don’t have to trouble yourself.”
      “Tell me, Dologushev,” said Proshko, “why is it you talk Russian like a Turk?”
      “And what if I am a Turk?” The fixer smiled crookedly.
      “He who runs too fast raises the wind against him.” Lifting his leg Proshko farted.
      Afterwards Yakov felt too uneasy to eat supper. I’m the wrong man to be a policeman, he thought. It’s a job for a goy.
      Yet he did what he was asked to. He appeared in the shed every morning in the 4 A.M. cold and counted the bricks in the wagons. And when he looked out the shack window and saw them loading up during the daylight hours, he went outside to watch. He did it openly, preventing the thieves from their thievery. When Yakov appeared at the shed, no one spoke but the drivers sometimes stopped their work to stare at him.
      Proshko no longer turned in vouchers each morning, so Yakov wrote his own. The bookkeeping was not so difficult as he had thought—he had caught on to the system, and besides there wasn’t that much business. Once a week Nikolai Maximovitch, more drearily melancholic, arrived by sledge for receipts to be deposited in his bank, and after a month Yakov received a long congratulatory letter from him. “Your work is diligent and effective, as I foresaw, and I shall continue to vest in you my utmost confidence. Zinaida Nikolaevna sends her regards. She too applauds your efforts.” But no one else did. Neither the drivers nor their helpers paid any attention to him, even when he tried to make conversation. Richter, the heavy-faced German, spat in the snow at his approach, and Serdiuk, a tall Ukrainian who smelled ol horse sweat and hay, watched him, breathing heavily. Proshko, passing the fixer in the yard, muttered, “Bastard stool pigeon!” Yakov pretended not to hear. If he heard “Jew” he would dive into the sky.
      Except for these he was on more or less decent terms with the other workers in the yard—he paid them on time, about fifty left from almost two hundred employed when the yard had turned out six or seven thousand bricks a day—and this was so despite the fact that Proshko was spreading nasty stories about him; one that Skobeliev, the yardkeeper, had told him was that the fixer had once done time as a convicted thief. But no one sought him out as friend or kept him company when the brickyard was closed, so he was mostly alone. After work Yakov stayed in his room. He read by lamplight— though Nikolai Maximovitch had promised to install an electric bulb—for hours each night. His reading in the past was what he had accidentally come across; he now read what he wanted to know. He continued to study Russian, wrote out long grammatical exercises and read them aloud. And he devoured two newspapers every day, though they often gave him the shivers, both things reported as fact, and things hinted at; for instance, Rasputin and the Empress, new plots of terrorists, threats of pogroms, and the possibility of a Balkan war. So much was new to him, how is one to know all he ought to know? He began then to haunt the bookshops in the Podol in his free time, searching for inexpensive books. He bought a Life of Spinoza to read during the lonely nights in his stable room. Was it possible to learn from another’s life? And Russian history fascinated him. He went through stacks of pamphlets on the shelves in the rear of the shops. He read some on serfdom, the Siberian penal system—a terrifying account he had found in a bushel the bookseller had winked at. He read about the revolt and destruction of the Decembrists, and a fascinating account of the Narodniki, idealists of the 1870’s who had devoted themselves to the peasants in an impulsive attempt to stir them to social revolution, were rebuffed by them, and turned from peasant-mysticism to terrorism. Yakov also read a short biography of Peter the Great, and after that a horrifying account of the bloody destruction of Novgorod by Ivan the