The Pawnbroker (20 page)

"Hey, your nerves
are
really bad, Uncle. Well that puts a different light on it. Whyn't you take yourself a nice weekend vacation, hah? We could let that kid handle things for a day or two. I'd have someone keep an eye. I tell you what. You're tense? You could knock off a piece of ass at the 'house.' Anytime you want. No charge—I give you a credit card. Hah, how's that, Joe?" he said, turning swiftly toward the man in the doorway. "A
credit card!
" Joe obliged with a weary grin. Murillio turned back to Sol and aimed an affectionate punch at his jaw, just brushed it humorously. "Sure, it's just your nerves talking. I won't talk no more about it. Forgive and forget. You get the idea, hah?"

"I am not a child, Murillio. This is no way to treat me. No, I am not satisfied. You threaten me but I am not ... Something must be done. Something...." He had been subtly made to feel like a dirty piece of flotsam in that vulgarly rich apartment. "You cannot shut me off like that. I am not..." He stood up, half maddened.

And suddenly Murillio nodded, his eyes looking over Sol's shoulder. Sol felt the cold touch of metal against his cheek. When he swung his head to see what it was, something unbelievably hard crashed against his teeth; opening his mouth at the pain, he felt the cold metal thrust between his teeth and he tasted the bitterness of steel.

"Now don't move, Uncle," Murillio said, his eyes on the man behind Sol. "Stand absolutely still and lick on that gun barrel for a while. That old Joe would pull the trigger if I just winked at him. He don't give a shit, do you, Joe? Nah, not Joe, he's a son of a bitch. Yeah, you just stand there like that a while, taste the bit. See, you're just like a horse. Get a little balky and we pull the reins. Get real wild ... well, you know what they do to horses. Just stand there and think things over, see things like they are, no bull shit, no nice talk, just that...."

And Sol stood there gagging on the horrible curb in his mouth, his gaze swinging wildly over the trappings of the hideously sumptuous room: the oil paintings, the brocaded chairs, the polished hardwoods. It had been so long, so long since his nightmares were as real as taste and touch, since they came to him in waking hours. He should have remembered more faithfully that this was the real taste of life, that it was not confined to dreams.

He sweated in spite of the air conditioning. He fluttered like a half-crushed bird, his heart pounding doom into him like a long iron nail. His stomach sickened, and he wondered what his fate would be if he vomited on the expensive, wine-colored carpeting. Downstairs, the gardens would be shining gorgeously in the floodlights and the white-uniformed doorman would be rocking contentedly on his heels, admiring his bailiwick. The city was dozing in hot weariness, and quiet got its brief handhold over the immense growth of stone. And Sol Nazerman stood in the center of an air-conditioned nightmare, wondering whether he might not be wiser, after all, to suck death from the gun in his mouth, to have done with all of it.

But inexplicably, when Murillio said, "Then you will be a good boy, Uncle, you will keep your nose clean and not bother me with this foolishness no more?" Sol just nodded and looked at the gun as it came out of his mouth, all wet with his saliva. "Because I don't want to have no aggravation. We had a nice relationship, you know. Let's see if you can't get back in good standing in my books, hah?"

And Sol just stood there nodding. After a while, he began edging toward the door, his head still going up and down.

"So we all straightened out now, right, Uncle? Everything in good shape?" Murillio followed him to the foyer, and the linen-jacketed Joe stood attentively by the door. "You gonna go home and forget this all came up."

"Yes ... all right ... I will ... try," Sol said, each word having to vault some hurdle in his throat. "I do not know what it is ... I mean I did not want trouble...."

"Yeah, I know, Uncle," Murillio said solicitously as he gently pushed Sol out the door.

"Only, you see, I have felt myself to be in a great deal of pain ... nerves ... Some things bother me.... But I want only to be left in peace, to make the money I need and be left alone. I do not wish to lose the little I have, you understand, the store, the privacy. It was just that certain things have happened to me...."

The sleek, carefully groomed head nodded understandingly. But the murderous eyes fixed on the Pawnbroker's mouth, growing a little bored even in menace. And then that womanly attention to his mouth made it appear like some stare of twisted love to Sol, and he was terrified more than before.

"Good-by, Uncle, I will call you. Keep your nose clean, now...."

Then Sol was out in the hallway and walking toward the elevator, moving stiffly, as though his partner's eyes were still on him. He was dreadfully tired. He had to think each forward attempt of his legs and direct his finger to the elevator button and command himself to step into the elevator when it came. In that paralyzing tiredness, the thought of his bed in the quiet of distant Mount Vernon seemed fantastically appealing.

 

In the kitchen, he ate standing up, a clumsy, indefinably mutilated giant. He leaned against the counter chewing on a soapy piece of American cheese and sipping root beer from one of the old
Yortzeit
glasses. Bertha hustled around him with affected timidity, and Selig slipped in for an unreturned pleasantry. Their voices bounced off the hunched rebuttal of him.

"You're not still angry about our little differences Sunday, are you, Solly?" Selig asked. "We're a family; these things..."

"I am still here, am I not?" Sol answered. He stared out the kitchen window at the blackness and he tried to decide whether the mysterious assault came from within or from outside himself. Then he wondered if it might not be a two-pronged drive, and shuddered visibly.

"What's wrong you're shaking?" his sister asked, her small eyes suddenly calculating behind his back. "Sit down so the food will do you some good, Solly. I always tell Morton he shouldn't wolf..."

Sol just shoved the plate away and threw the remains of the cheese onto it. "

"Give me some coffee. I will take it up to my room and drink it in peace." He stood waiting impatiently, a gray, alien figure in all the gleaming chrome and formica, while Bertha poured his coffee. She slid a piece of coffeecake onto his saucer with elaborate coyness. Sol just shrugged and took the cup without the saucer.

On the upstairs landing, he met his nephew. Morton had a large pad under his arm, and his untidy, vulpine face was smudged with charcoal.

"Uncle Sol," he said.

"Hello, Morton." Sol frowned for a grip on amenity. "What are you drawing? Show me. After all, I have an investment," he said with a little twist to his lips.

Morton held up a charcoal sketch of the back yard. The scene sparkled, seemed to be in a crisp twilight, and the roofs and branches were sure, steady shapes in a subtle pattern that hid under the obvious one. In one corner of the picture was a shapeless figure in a garden chair, and all the twilight led to it, so there was a brightness of sky and a brightness around the man and great darkness between.

"Could that be me?" Sol asked, pointing to the figure on the paper.

Morton nodded, cautious of opinion.

"I see. Well it seems to me to be very well drawn. What you have done with the light ... Good, good, my money is apparently not wasted." He gave as much smile as he had. Then he touched his nephew's shoulder. And though it was just a nudge to clear his way up the stairs, his nephew took it for a touch of acknowledgment and drew the warmth he desired from it. And when Sol brushed past, Morton stood on the landing for a moment, watching the huge waistless figure ascending, and there was a cherishing look on his face.

Sol drank his coffee slowly, his head resting on the wooden headboard, the fights off so he could see the faint light from the moon casting a diluted illumination that resembled twilight. There were the roofs and the branches as Morton had drawn them, the angle only slightly lower than that observed from the boy's room upstairs. He finished the coffee and leaned over the window sill to look down at the yard. Looking for the shapeless figure of a man as his nephew had drawn it? But that man was himself and there was only one of him. Or was there? God forbid there should be ghosts! He would not have been able to bear that. If there were ghosts, he would be destroyed, or
had
been destroyed long ago and was now a ghost himself. But he felt pain, deep inside him, a growth slowly extending to pierce him, to meet the stabs from people outside himself, people who would raise their hands to him. So he couldn't be a ghost ... could a ghost suffer? Ah, leave me my brain at least, do not let me go mad. Like a litany, he enforced the rules of fife on himself: You live, you eat, you rest, you protect yourself.

He took a burning-hot shower, followed it with shocking cold. Then in the surface peace of his numbed body, he lay on his bed and read from
Anna Karenina
in Russian, relaxing in the familiar words he had read several times since his youth.

The crickets came and went; the darkness was very old when he finally put the book down and closed his eyes with the light still on.

Through his opened window he heard the harsh, demanding whispers of his sister and brother-in-law in the next room. "If you're not too tired, honey..."

Love.

Sol thought even sleep would be better. His body relented, went limp. The room faded toward black.

"I will sleep like the dead tonight," he said longingly.

But he slept like the living.

 

The guard wouldn't let him turn his head from the window, knocked with menacing playfulness on the side of his jaw every time he tried. So he looked into the vast room which was broken into many cubicles. There were women in each one, some standing at the open ends with weary expressions, some seated listlessly on their beds gazing at the floor. Wild laughter echoed from various parts of the great subdivided room and, like the perverted echo of the laughter, the low crushed sound of moaning.

But for all the rest of the calibrations of the compass, the needle of his attention had only a disinterested hovering movement. His eyes swung back and forth in ever-lessening arcs until they settled with trembling force on the one cubicle. His wife, Ruth, sat on her bed with a sheet up over her nakedness and she didn't see him looking in, for her own attention was riveted on the entrance of her cubicle with terrified anticipation.

"
Let me go from here," he begged the guard.

"
You bothered and bothered. 'Whafs happened to my wife? What exactly is she doing?' you asked. 'Why did they take her from the Woman's Section?' You wouldn't be satisfied with half-truths, would you?
'I must know exactly,' you said. All right, I got fed up with you. So here we are. I'm being generous, I'm taking you to see for yourself," the guard said, giving another of those little nudges to the side of Sol's jaw. "So look, keep looking, that's what you're here for. After this you won't ask me any more, you'll know.
"

"
I know now, I understand. It is enough. Please, I couldn't stand to see any more," he whimpered, dry spasms shaking his body like chastising hands.

"
You'll stay and you'll look, once and for all," the guard said, pressing his short truncheon into Sol's neck.

So he turned back for what he deserved.

A black-uniformed man entered Ruth's cubicle. He took off his clothes and for a few minutes just displayed his exposed body to the terrified woman on the bed. Finally he pulled the sheet from her nakedness. He seemed to be speaking to her, but only silence reached Sol outside the glass. Ruth began shuddering. Her face turned the color of calcimine, the texture of some powdery substance that could crumble at a touch.

For a minute or two the SS man handled her breasts and her loins vengefully. Her mouth stretched in soundless agony. As though he had been waiting for that, the SS man pulled her to her knees and forced her head down against his body.

Sol began to moan. But just before tears could bring mercy to his eyes, he saw her recognize him. And from that hideously obscene position, pierced so vilely, she endured the zenith of her agony and was able to pass through it. Until finally she was able to award him the tears of forgiveness. But he was not worthy of her award and took the infinitely meaner triumph of blindness, and though he was reamed by cancerous, fiery torments, he was no longer subject to the horrid view, no longer had to share the obscene experience with her. For a while, he could see nothing, could only feel the air moving around him, hear the familiar sounds of the camp, which now had a homely, familiar note and which made the blood beats of pain in his joints almost bearable. And then he went a step further toward the empty blackness of animal relief; he fainted and felt nothing for a long time.

 

He woke palpitating and drenched in sweat, wondering where he was. For a minute or two, he stared full at the lamp bulb. Then he turned his violet-starred vision on the rest of the room, on the window from which a tender breeze came, filtered through the heavy foliage, and then, finally, on the length of his own body, shining with sweat.

"Good God, how can I stand this?" he said.

With the answer, that somehow he would have to, vibrating in his brain, he got up and went into the bathroom. He stripped the wet underclothes off and took another shower. When he was dried, he went back into the bedroom. He propped his pillows so he was sitting up, took his book, and began to read. Outside, there was the near-silence of the night, and only his own breathing made the slightest distraction. He read without stopping until morning.

Marilyn Birchfield woke up behind the walls of her apartment and saw morning with the familiar sensation of hollowness. She swallowed against it as though it were hunger for food.

There was a delicacy of taste evident all around her room; handsome modern prints, white walls, a nakedly structural bookcase copied from a prominent designer's work and filled with good books, the speaker connected to a high-fidelity phonograph in the living room. There was a Japanese lantern hanging over some austerely simple chests of drawers and a comfortable chair upholstered in brown corduroy upon which lay a bright-orange pillow.