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that proved useless, farted loudly.
      “I don’t recognize the accent you speak,” said the boatman, pulling the oars. “It’s Russian but from what province?”
      “I’ve lived in Latvia as well as other places,” the fixer muttered.
      “At first I thought you were a goddam Pole. Pan whosis, Pani whatsis.” The boatman laughed, then snickered. “Or maybe a motherfucking Jew. But though you’re dressed like a Russian you look more like a German, may the devil destroy them all, excepting yourself and yours of course.”
      “Latvian,” said Yakov.
      “Anyway, God save us all from the bloody Jews,” the boatman said as he rowed, “those long-nosed, pockmarked, cheating, bloodsucking parasites. They’d rob us of daylight if they could. They foul up earth and air with their body stink and garlic breaths, and Russia will be done to death by the diseases they spread unless we make an end to it. A Jew’s a devil—it’s a known fact— and if you ever watch one peel off his stinking boot you’ll see a split hoof, it’s true. I know, for as the Lord is my witness, I saw one with my own eyes. He thought nobody was looking, but I saw his hoof as plain as day.”
      He stared at Yakov with the bloody eye. The fixer’s foot itched but he didn’t touch it.
      Let him talk, he thought, yet he shivered.
      “Day after day they crap up the Motherland,” the boatman went on monotonously, “and the only way to save ourselves is to wipe them out. I don’t mean kill a Zhid now and then with a blow of the fist or kick in the head, but wipe them all out, which we’ve sometimes tried but never done as it should be done. I say we ought to call our menfolk together, armed with guns, knives, pitchforks, clubs—anything that will kill a Jew— and when the church bells begin to ring we move on the Zhidy quarter, which you can tell by the stink, routing them out of wherever they’re hiding—in attics, cellars, or ratholes—bashing in their brains, stabbing their herring-filled guts, shooting off their snotty noses, no exception made for young or old, because if you spare any they breed like rats and then the job’s to do all over again.
      “And then when we’ve slaughtered the whole cursed tribe of them—and the same is done in every province throughout Russia, wherever we can smoke them out—though we’ve got most of them nice and bunched up in the Pale—we’ll pile up the corpses and soak them with benzine and light fires that people will enjoy all over the world. Then when that’s done we hose the stinking ashes away and divide the rubles and jewels and silver and furs and all the other loot they stole, or give it back to the poor who it rightfully belongs to anyway. You can take my word—the time’s not far off when everything I say, we will do, because our Lord, who they crucified, wants his rightful revenge.”
      He dropped an oar and crossed himself.
      Yakov fought an impulse to do the same. His bag of prayer things fell with a plop into the Dnieper and sank like lead.

       II

      Where do you go if you had been nowhere? He hid at first in the Jewish quarter, emerging stealthily from time to time to see what there was to see in the world, exploring, trying the firmness of the earth. Kiev, “the Jerusalem of Russia,” still awed and disquieted him. He had been there for a few hot summer days after being conscripted into the army, and now, again, he saw it with half the self—the other half worried about his worries. Still, as he wandered from street to street, the colors were light and pretty. A golden haze hung in the air in the late afternoons. The busy avenues were full of people, among them Ukrainian peasants in their native dress, gypsies, soldiers, priests. At night the white gas globes glowed in the streets and there were thick mists on the river. Kiev stood on three hills, and he remembered his first trembling sight of the city from the Nicholas Bridge—dotted