The Pawnbroker (15 page)

"I had a child, I had a husband," she whispered savagely.

"What do you want from me?" he shouted. "Kill yourself then, and be done with it!" He threw his cards down and shoved the table away from him. His face was like a rock from which tiny grainings were being shaken loose under a child's weak but persistent hammering.

Tessie held up her hand fearfully, her face violet-lidded, deep-eyed, raw. "Wait, wait, sit," she cried. "I'll go make coffee, I have cake. We will eat something, Sol."

He fell back sullenly and closed his eyes in agreement.

Tessie went into the kitchen, where the dance music sounded with unmitigated violence over the old man's mutterings.

"Turn it down, Pa," she said. "I can't hear to think."

But the radio continued its assault. It was only one sound in the cacophony of the building. Tessie made more noise than necessary, to hold her own in all the din. She slammed the coffeepot onto the stove and struck the saucers with the cups. One of the pieces of china made a dull, suicidal sound.

"I broke it," she said bewilderedly.

The old man shut off the radio with a groan. "Listen to those murderers screaming the
Deutsch,
" he snarled forlornly.

"That is Spanish, Pa, not German," she told him in a dull voice.

"They are all
Deutsch,
" he roared, then, in a sly, vicious tone, "You are not mixing the
fleishica
dishes vit the
mil-chik?
"

"No, Pa, everything is kosher," she said wearily.

And then the door shook under a pounding fist.

Tessie gasped and went to the doorway of the kitchen to look at Sol. He glanced disdainfully at her before getting slowly to his feet and walking toward the front door. With his hand on the knob, he looked back at Tessie and nodded.

"Who is it?" she called in a shakily innocent tone.

"Your conscience, Goberman. Pay your debts," said the hoarse voice on the other side of the door.

Sol swung the door open suddenly. A short, thickset figure stood there, revealed like a joke in the wake of the heavy threat of the voice. Goberman had a pale face from which all the large features strained as if he were the victim of a slow garroting. The tip of his bulbous nose was snowy white in its thrust, his lips pressed forward in a grotesque kiss, his boiled-looking eyes protruded like those of birds that can move each eye independently. His chin and cheeks were mangy with patches of unshaved beard, as though he shaved with a dull kitchen knife; it lent the whole face the look of something just dug up and not yet shaken clean of the grayish poor soil of its recent burial.

"Who are you? The light is bad here," he complained in that rough voice. "Where's the woman here, that Rubin woman? Ah, but you look familiar, too.
Du bist ein Yid?
Oh yeh, aha, I see," he said triumphantly, squeezing past Sol into the lighted room, his eyes victorious on the tattooed numbers on Sol's arm. He held up a chewed-looking brief case and waved it at Sol's face. "I expect from you, too. The Jewish Appeal. Do you know how many Jews are still in Cairo? I'll tell you for enlightenment. Thirty-seven thousand six hundred and twenty-two. That's as of last week. God knows how many been killed since then. And in Syria! Twenty-nine thousand eight hundred and forty. Then we got seventeen thousand four hundred and thirty-three in Iran, thirty-six thousand and seven in Germany, nineteen thousand..."

"Let me see your credentials," Sol said coldly.

"Credentials, credentials," Goberman spat indignantly. "Where is she, where is that woman who would like to ease her conscience? You don't reside here. I got in my address book, lives here one woman, Tessie Rubin, aged forty-three, one man, Mendel Solowitz, aged seventy-five. You are a interloper. I will deal with the woman of the house."

"I'm here, I'm here," Tessie called fearfully. "It's all right, Goberman. This man handles my business."

The old man peered wildly over her shoulder, muttering against ancient crimes.

"Your
business,
he handles," Goberman said nastily. "I
see,
I see very well. The husband cold in the grave, so you must take care..."

"What right have you to come in here like this?" Sol said. "Before you say another word I must see your credentials."

"My credentials, you want to see my credentials? All right, I'll show, I'll show." He plunked down the brief case, which made a wet soft sound, like the body of an animal. Then he tore off his coat and rolled up his sleeves muttering, "Credentials, credentials, I'll show credentials." On his left arm were the familiar blue numbers framed in a border of white tape like some weird sampler on the hairless surface. "Inside my heart is more credentials, too. Go get a knife from the kitchen and open me up. I'll show you the stab wounds, the burnt pieces from the murders of my wife, my five children, my mother, my sister. Go, get the knife; I'll show you credentials, printed in red, in blood! You want more? Chop open my brain, see there the pictures of the walking dead, the raped, the disemboweled." His breath came in shuddery gasps, his eyes threatened to fall out and roll down his face. He stood crouched and threatening, exuding a violence of smell and fury, his shirt pulled half out of his pants, his neck beating a wild rhythm. "Is that credentials, tell me, is that?"

"All right, Goberman, I'll give, I'll give," Tessie wailed. "Is there any need to go on like that. I try; you have no reason to curse me. I feel for the Jews, I do, I do!"

Goberman slid the coat back onto his shoulders with a smug, righteous expression. He looked at Sol. "And you, can you refuse the slaves, the suffering
Yiddlach?
"

"I have been looking at you, Goberman," Sol said in a soft, thoughtful voice. "And I have been trying to recall where I know you from. And now, suddenly, it occurs to me. You were there, yes you were. About 1941, in Dachau ... no, no, Bergen-Belsen. Yess-ss, I remember you very well."

"What, what?" Goberman said a little nervously. "You couldn't have remembered me. I was..."

"Yes, yes, I'm certain now. You were even a little fatter then. You had a method for getting more food. There was some talk—I don't know for sure how true—but there was some talk of
co-operation
with a certain..."

"It was a he, a complete he!" Goberman shouted, beating on his brief case. "No one could accuse..."

"If I am not mistaken there was someone who claimed that you even informed on members of your own family...."

"That is the greatest lie in the world, the most abominable piece of filth anyone could say about a man," Goberman screamed, his voice leaping the decibels to a sort of shattered alto.

Sol shrugged, obviously just repeating what he had heard.

"Not my own family, never my own family. What kind of a person would say a thing like that? Here, look at me, see how I collect money for the Jews, how I bleed for them all over the world. Day and night I try to get money for their salvation. I scream, I threaten, I sacrifice my self-respect to do for them. And this, this is my reward! No one can say to my face that I...
never
in a million years would I have done a thing like that to my
immediate
family. Do you think I could sleep at night, do you think I could sit still for a minute if...? Would I run around like a madman, day and night, if I...? Wouldn't I sit still and try to have some peace and quiet...? How could anyone...? It is beyond imagining that such a person could walk the face of the earth...." His mouth sagged like a too-wet formation of clay. "I
NEVER ... SOLD ... MY ... OWN ... FAMILY ... NEVERNEVERNEVERNEVER
!"

"What do you do with all the money?" Sol asked in an icy voice, his face and body motionless, remorseless. "Do you sew it into your mattress or are you enlightened enough to put it into a three-and-a-half-per-cent account? What are you saving for?"

"I save for the Jewish People," Goberman wailed, his face soaking wet and pulpy. "The Jewish People."

"You save for Goberman. You are a crook, a fake, Goberman. I could have the police on you. Or better still," he said, thinking of Murillio, "I could have you beaten to a pulp with just one phone call."

"You don't understand, you just don't understand what I have been through." Goberman was weeping like a woman by then, hugging the sloppy brief case to his chest and sobbing.

"I understand you very well, Goberman. You are a common type. A professional sufferer, a practicing refugee. You are an opportunist who can put anything to profit. But you feel guilty about some of your crimes, you cannot sleep too well. So you run around with that brief case and try to make everyone else feel as guilty as you, meantime turning a pretty penny. Now I do not judge you, understand, it does not matter to me what you do. Only you must know that you are naked to me. You do not impress me." Sol took off his glasses and began wiping them, staring meanwhile at Goberman with the flat, nearsighted gaze which looked so remote and beyond appeal.

"Are you any better than I am? Don't tell me you didn't leave your dead there and run out as fast as a rabbit, saying good riddance to all this, to all the smelly dead. Don't tell me," Goberman whined, his finger accusatorily pointed at Sol's face, his eyes like jellyfish in the welter of his teary features. "Can you stand there, Tessie Rubin, can you let him say this to a representative ... to a rep ... Is it human to stand there like a rock and tear a person to pieces, to throw up his griefs to a man, to a victim!"

Sol began to laugh, a harsh metal-on-metal sound which made the listeners wince. It set the teeth in Goberman's mouth in a mold of rubber. Tessie stared in horror at Sol; she had never heard him laugh before, and it was as though he revealed a monstrosity in the unprecedented sound. The old man whimpered and withdrew into the kitchen, and even the noise of the surrounding building seemed to observe a shocked silence for a few seconds.

"Oh, he is priceless, this Goberman," he said to Tessie. "Why did you not tell me he was so amusing? You have no sense of humor, Tessie. The man is rare, absolutely rare. Goberman, my friend," he said, turning suddenly, "do you realize how you are wasting your time? You should be on television or the radio. You are one of the funniest things I have ever seen. With that brief case, that face, and your dialogue..." He began to laugh again. Tessie covered her ears, but Goberman just stared and trembled, the fat tears running into his doughy mouth. "Talk ... talk some more ... Gober ... man," Sol wheezed. "Entertain us. Laughter is said to be healthful. Make me laugh some more." And then, suddenly, he had the glasses back on, and his face turned to inhuman stone. "
Make me laugh some more!
" the Pawnbroker snarled.

"What do you want from me?" Goberman wailed. "I'll go, I'll go. You are worse than all the Nazis, you are worse than my nightmares."

"Much worse," the Pawnbroker agreed from his great height. "I could break you in a million pieces."

"I never sold my family."

"You are
dreck,
Goberman; you should be washed away."

Goberman stood transfixed by the thick-lensed gaze over him, his body seeming to come apart under the sloppy clothes, so it was as though only the grip on the pulpy brief case held him in one piece.

"Now go, S
HVEINHUNDT
!"

Goberman leaped into the air as though the word had electrocuted him. He gave one whimper, bumped softly into the wall with a cry of pain, and then ran clumsily but very swiftly out the door. The racket of his heels on the tiles of the hallway was like a machine gun.

Tessie held her cheek. The old man moaned terribly in the kitchen. And all the noise of the building descended on them again.

Later, Sol took her on the couch with a cold fury, and she sobbed and pleaded for something she could not name. Yet in spite of her crying and her inchoate begging, it was for Sol as though he made love to a dead woman and the act was a horrid travesty. When it was over, he threw himself to his feet and stood reeling, his heart pounding the blood through the constrictions of his veins.

"What are you sniveling about? Did I eliminate him for you? Do you have what to complain about? You are a miserable creature yourself." He bent over her, still panting and furious. "What do you require of me; that I bring you the Garden of Eden,
Ganaydeml
"

She held her hands over her face, and her voice came muffled and distorted through them. "No, no, nothing. You give me nothing. Only go away now; I can take no more from you."

So he dressed and straightened himself and went out of there without farewell; and before he closed the door, he stuck some money under the samovar, enough to last her and the old man until he came again.

His long journey by subway and car was quite uneventful. But he had this terrific ache all over his body. He decided it amused him. While he drove, he said aloud, "If I were Selig, I would think I was having a heart attack."

Otherwise, he thought of nothing.

"Come, Solly dear," Bertha said to him affectionately. "We're just now having coffee and dessert." She waved at the man and the two women at the table with Selig. "You know Doctor Kogan, his wife, Martha. And this is
Dorothy
she said, implying all the nice things they had said about the masculine-faced, fashionably dressed woman. "The Doctor's sister..."

Sol nodded and murmured a hello.

"Hello, Sol," the white-haired, sleek-faced man said. "How's the gift business?"

Sol glanced distastefully at his sister, and Bertha pleaded with her eyes for him not to expose her affectation.

"My business is fine, thank you. And yours, you have no slack seasons, do you?"

The Doctor laughed. "You know better than that," he said.

"So you are in the gift business," the unmarried sister said eagerly, not at all impressed by the big, unkempt man with the strange eyeglasses and the unhealthy, puffy face; but she responded by instinct to his eligibility. "I am in the retail business myself, Mr. Nazerman...."

"Call him Sol," Bertha insisted, tilting her head mischievously.