The Fixer Read Online Free PDF Page B

with white houses with green roofs, churches and monasteries, their gold and silver domes floating above the green foliage. He wasn’t without an eye for a pretty scene, though that added nothing to his living. Still, a man was more than a workhorse, or so they said.
      The other way, across the glassy brown river—the way he had come on a dying horse—the steppe stretched out into the vast green distance. Only thirty versts and the shtetl was invisible, gone—poof!—lost, maybe expired. Though he felt homesick he knew he would never return, yet what would it come to? More than once Raisl had accused him of being afraid to leave and maybe it was true but at last it wasn’t. So I left, he thought, what good will it do me? Was she back? he wondered. He cursed her when he thought of her.
      He went where he had not been before, speaking in Russian to anyone who spoke to him—testing himself, he explained it to himself. Why should a man be afraid of the world? Because he was, if for no other reason. Numb with fear that he would be recognized as a Jew and ordered out, he stealthily watched from the gallery of a church as the peasants, some with knapsacks on their backs, knelt and prayed at the altar before a tall gold crucifix and a jeweled ikon of the Madonna, as the priest, a huge man in rich thick vestments, chanted the Orthodox service. The fixer had the shivers as he looked, and the strange odor of incense increased his nervousness. He almost rose out of his boots as he was touched on the arm and saw at his side a black-bearded hunchback who pointed to the peasants below smacking their heads against the flagstone floor and kissing it passionately. “Go thou and do likewise! Eat salted bread and listen to the truth!” The fixer quickly left.
      Stupefied that he dared the adventure, he afterwards descended to the Lavra catacombs—under the old monastery on the Pechersky hill overlooking the Dnieper— amid a group of frightened, pasty-faced peasants holding lit candles. They moved in a loose line along low, damp-smelling passages, where through barred windows he caught glimpses of the saints of the Orthodox Church lying in open coffins, covered with shabby cloths of red and gold. Small red lamps glowed in the walls under their ikons. In a candle-lit cell, as the line moved on, a monk with rattail hair to his shoulders held out a relic of “the hand of St. Andrew” for the faithful to kiss, and each knelt to touch the parchmented hand to his lips. But though Yakov had considered a quick kiss of the bony fingers, when his time came to kneel, he blew out his candle and groped his way on in the dark.
      Outside there was a crowd of beggars, some of them armless and legless cripples from the late war. Three were blind. One rolled his eyes inward. One bulged his so that they looked like fish eyes. And one read sonorously “by divine inspiration” from a book of gospels which he held in his hands. He stared at Yakov and Yakov stared at him.

      2

      He lived in the heart of the Jewish quarter in the Podol District in a teeming tenement hung with mattresses airing and rags of clothing drying, above a courtyard crowded with wooden workshops where everyone was busy but no one earned much of anything. They stayed alive. The fixer wanted better, at least better than he had had, too much of nothing. For a while, during the cold rains of late autumn, he confined himself to the Jewish section, but after the first snowfall in the city—about a month after he had arrived—he began to edge out again, looking for work. With his tool sack slung over his shoulder he trudged from street to street through the Podol and Plossky, the flat commercial districts reaching to the river, and went up the hills into neighborhoods forbidden to Jews to work in. He sought, he continued to say to himself, opportunities, though in seeking them he sometimes felt like a spy behind enemy lines. The Jewish quarter, unchanged in ages,