The Fixer Read Online Free PDF Page A

but didn’t dare.
      “I’m a bitter man, you bastard horse. Come to your senses or you’ll suffer.”
      It availed him nothing.
      By then it was pitch dark. The wind boomed. The steppe was a black sea full of strange voices. Here nobody spoke Yiddish, and the nag, maybe feeling the strangeness of it, began to trot and soon came close to flight. Though the fixer was not a superstitious man he had been a superstitious boy, and he recalled Lilith, Queen of Evil Spirits, and the Fish-witch who tickled travelers to death or otherwise made herself helpful. Ghosts rose like smoke in the Ukraine. From time to time he felt a presence at his back but would not turn. Then a yellow moon rose like a flower growing and lit the empty steppe deep into the shadowy distance. The distance glowed. It’ll be a long night, the fixer thought. They galloped through a peasant village, its long-steepled church yellow in moonlight, the squat thatched huts dark, no lights anywhere. Though he smelled woodsmoke he saw none. Yakov considered dismounting, knocking on a strange door and begging for a night’s lodging. But he felt that if he got off the horse he would never get back on. He was afraid he might be robbed of his few rubles, so he stayed put and made uncertain progress. The sky was thick with stars, the wind blowing cold in his face. Once he slept momentarily and woke in shivering sweat from a nightmare. He thought he was irretrievably lost, but to his amazement, before him in the distance rose a vast height glowing in dim moonlight and sprinkled sparsely with lights, at the foot of which ran a broad dark river reflecting the half-hidden moon. The nag stopped jogging and it took them an almost endless hour to make the last half verst to the water.

      3

      It was freezing cold but the wind was down on the Dnieper. There was no ferry, the boatman said. “Closed down. Closed. Shut.” He waved his arms as though talking to a foreigner although Yakov had spoken to him in Russian. That the ferry had stopped running sharpened the fixer’s desire to get across the river. He hoped to rent a bed at an inn and wake early to look for work.
      “I’ll row you across for a ruble,” the boatman said.
      “Too much,” Yakov answered, though deadly tired. “Which way to the bridge?”
      “Six or eight versts. A long way for the same thing.”
      “A ruble,” the fixer groaned. “Who’s got that much money?”
      “You can take it or leave it. It’s no easy thing rowing across a dangerous river on a pitch-black night. We might both drown.”
      “What would I do with my horse?” The fixer spoke more to himself.
      “That’s none of my business.” The boatman, his shoulders like a tree trunk, and wearing a shaggy grizzled beard, blew out one full nostril on a rock, then the other. The white of his right eye was streaked with blood.
      “Look, mate, why do you make more trouble than it’s worth? Even if I could haul it across, which I can’t, the beast will die on you. It doesn’t take a long look to see he’s on his last legs. Look at him trembling. Listen to him breathing like a gored bull.”
      “I was hoping to sell him in Kiev.”
      “What fool would buy a bag of old bones?”
      “I thought maybe a horse butcher or someone—at least the skin.”
      “I say the horse is dead,” said the boatman, “but you can save a ruble if you’re smart. I’ll take him for the cost of the trip. It’s a bother to me and I’ll be lucky to get fifty kopeks for the carcass, but I’ll do you the favor, seeing you’re a stranger.”
      He’s only given me trouble, the fixer thought.
      He stepped into the rowboat with his bag of tools, books, and other parcels. The boatman untied the boat, dipped both oars into the water and they were off.
      The nag, tethered to a paling, watched from the moonlit shore.
      Like an old Jew he looks, thought the fixer.
      The horse whinnied, and when