The Fixer by Bernard Malamud Read Free Book Online Page B

which is more than I would ordinarily pay, considering the fact that I furnish the paint and other materials; but the circumstances in this case are different. It is, of course, a matter of gratitude, but wouldn’t you rather work than peremptorily receive from me some silver coins? Is money ever valuable if it is come by without labor? An offer of work is an appreciation of merit. Notwithstanding you did me the greatest of favors—I might have suffocated in the snow, as Zina points out—isn’t my offer of work a more estimable reward than a mere payment of money?” He looked eagerly at Yakov. “Therefore will you accept?”
    â€œIn the way you put it, yes,” said Yakov. He got up quickly, said he had to be going, and after stumbling into a closet on his way out, hurriedly left the apartment.
    Though he worried what he was getting into and changed his mind every half hour as he lay restlessly on his bed-bench that night, the next morning he went back. He returned for the same reason he had gone the first time—to collect his reward. What he earned for his work in this case was the reward. Who could afford to say no to forty rubles—a tremendous sum? Therefore why worry about returning? Go, do the job quickly, collect the money, and when you have it in your pocket, leave the place once and for all and forget it. After all it’s only a job, I’m not selling my soul. When I’m finished I’ll wash up and go. They’re not bad people. The girl’s direct and honest in her way, though she makes me uneasy, and as for the old man, maybe I misjudged him. How many goyim have I known in my life? Maybe someone stuck that Black Hundreds pin on his coat when he was drunk in the tavern. Still, if it’s really his own I’d like to ask
him straight out, “Nikolai Maximovitch, will you please explain how you can cry for a dead dog yet belong to a society of fanatics that urges death on human beings who happen to be Jews? Explain to me the logic of it.” Then let him answer that.
    What also troubled the fixer was that once he went to work, even though the “reward” made it different from work though not less than work, he might be asked to produce his passport, a document stamped “Religious Denomination: Judaic,” which would at once tell Nikolai Maximovitch what he was hiding from him. He chewed his lips over that but decided that if the passport was asked for he would say the police in the Podol had it; and if Nikolai Maximovitch insisted he must produce it, that was the time to quit or there would be serious trouble. It was therefore a gamble, but if you were against gambling, stop playing cards. He guessed the Russian was probably too muddled to ask for the passport although he was required to by law. Still, after all, it was a reward, maybe he wouldn’t. Yakov was now somewhat sorry he hadn’t at once identified himself as a Jew by birth. If that had killed off the reward, at least there would be no self-contempt. The more one hides the more he has to.
    He did an expert job on the flat—scraped the walls clean of paper, and the ceilings of flakes and loose patches. He plastered where he had to, then thickly calcimined the ceilings—nothing but the best for Nikolai Maximovitch. And he pasted the wallpaper neatly though his experience with papering was limited—in the shtetl only Viskover, the Nogid, was that fancy. Yakov worked all day and into the night by yellow gaslight to get the job done, collect his rubles, and disappear. The landlord, stopping now and then to catch his breath, labored up the stairs each morning to see how the work was progressing, and expressed himself as most
pleased. In the afternoon he got out his vodka bottle, into which he had cut strips of orange peel, and by sunset was drunk. Zina, unseen during the day, sent up the cook, Lidya, with a snack at lunchtime—a fish pie, bowl of borscht, or some