Free The Fixer by Bernard Malamud Page A

Terrible. It had entered the madman’s head that the city intended treason to him, so he had ordered a wooden wall built around it to prevent escape. Then he marched in with his army, and after putting his subjects through the crudest tortures, daily slaughtered thousands of them. This went on in increasing savagery, the sound of horror rising to the sky as the wailing mothers watched their children being roasted alive and thrown to wild dogs. At the end of five weeks, sixty thousand people, maimed, torn, broken apart, lay dead in the foul-smelling streets as disease spread. Yakov was sickened. Like a pogrom— the very worst. The Russians make pogroms against the Russians—it went on throughout their history. What a sad country, he thought, amazed by what he had read, every possible combination of experiences, where black was white and black was black; and if the Russians, too, were massacred by their own rulers and died like flies, who were then the Chosen People? Fatigued by history, he went back to Spinoza, rereading chapters on biblical criticism, superstition, and miracles which he knew almost by heart. If there was a God, after reading Spinoza he had closed up his shop and become an idea.
      When he wasn’t reading, Yakov was composing little essays on a variety of subjects—”I am in history,” he wrote, “yet not in it. In a way of speaking I’m far out, it passes me by. Is this good, or is something lacking in my character? What a question! Of course lacking but what can I do about it? And besides is this really such a great worry? Best to stay where one is, unless he has something to give to history, like for instance Spinoza, as I read in his life. He understood history, and also because he had ideas to give it. Nobody can burn an idea even if they burn the man. On the other hand there was the activist Jan De Witt, Spinoza’s friend and benefactor, a good and great man who was torn to pieces by a Dutch mob when they got suspicious of him although he was innocent. Who needs such a fate?” Some of the little essays were criticisms of “Certain Conditions” as he had read about them in the newspapers. He read these over and burned them in the stove. He also burned the pamphlets he could not resell.
      Something that unexpectedly bothered him was that he was no longer using his tools. He had built himself a bed, table, and chair, also some shelves on the wall, but this was done in the first few days after he had come to the brickyard. He was afraid that if he didn’t go on carpentering he might forget how and thought he had better not. Then he got another letter, this from Zina, her handwriting full of surprising thick black strokes, inviting him—with her father’s permission—to call on her. “You are a sensitive person, Yakov Ivanovitch,” she wrote, “and I respect your ideals and mode of behavior; however, please don’t worry about your clothes, although I am sure you can purchase new ones with the improved salary you are earning.” He had sat down to reply but couldn’t think what to say to her, so he didn’t answer the letter.
      In February he went through a period of severe nervousness. He blamed it on his worries. He had visited the place where he could get counterfeit papers, had found they were not impossibly expensive although they were not inexpensive, and he was thinking of having a passport and residence certificate made out under his assumed name. When he awoke, hours before he had to, to check the number of bricks in the trucks his muscles were tight, his chest constricted, breathing sometimes painful, and he was uneasy when he dealt with Proshko. Even to ask him the most routine questions troubled the fixer. He was irritable all day and cursed himself for trifling mistakes in his accounts, a matter of a kopek or two. Once, at nightfall, he drove two boys out of the brickyard. He knew them as troublemakers, one a pale-faced pimply boy of about twelve, the other like a