The Fixer Read Free Page A

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