The Fixer Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œPersonally 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.”
    â€œIf that’s the case I’m better off walking.”
    â€œPatience.” 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.
    â€œI’ll get to Kiev by Hanukkah.”
    â€œIf 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.”
    â€œDeath is the last of my worries.”
    â€œLend me a kopek or two, Yakov,” said Shmuel.
    â€œA 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.
    â€œLeave 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