The Fixer Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.”
    â€œI was hoping to sell him in Kiev.”
    â€œWhat fool would buy a bag of old bones?”
    â€œI thought maybe a horse butcher or someone—at least the skin.”
    â€œI 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 that proved useless, farted loudly.
    â€œI don’t recognize the accent you speak,” said the boatman, pulling the oars. “It’s Russian but from what province?”
    â€œI’ve lived in Latvia as well as other places,” the fixer muttered.
    â€œAt 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.”
    â€œLatvian,” said Yakov.
    â€œAnyway, God save us all from the bloody Jews,” the boatman said as he rowed, “those long-nosed, pock-marked, 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.
    â€œDay 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.
    â€œAnd 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