Free The Fixer by Bernard Malamud Page B

“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 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 cruelest 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,