The Pawnbroker (23 page)

"The doctor is here," Tessie whispered when she opened the door. "The old man is bad. He urinated blood yesterday, and today he couldn't go at all. He is in such pain he couldn't get up. I called a different doctor, a
Shwartsa
who has an office next door."

Sol walked past her into the living room. The place smelled of alcohol; it was a relief from all the other odors. He sat down and looked at her without expression. She had just a black slip on, and her hair hung loose and wild and dark. She was like one of those perpetually mourning Italian women; her skin was white and as translucent as quartz against the black slip.

She looked at him for a while and then, unable to bear his bland, indifferent gaze, lowered her eyes to her hands.

"You have eaten yet?"

"I came right here."

"I have eggs, fish...."

"Make some coffee. I will have a little something with it."

They were eating silently in the kitchen when the doctor appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands on a towel. He was a rather stout Negro with the heavy shoulders of a former athlete. His eyes were slanted down at the outside comers and gave him a melancholy expression. Though he appeared to be in his middle thirties, his hair was quite gray and already receding from the top of his head.

"He's very bad, your father," he said cheerily, as though in contrast with his naturally gloomy face. "I hardly know..." He suddenly noticed Sol and smiled shyly.

"This is a friend, Sol Nazerman," Tessie said.

"Hello, Doctor," Sol said. "What is the diagnosis?"

"That's a good one, Mr. Nazerman." He sat down at the table and nodded his thanks for the coffee Tessie poured. "The diagnosis? Only that the man's body is a crime. A man shouldn't be like that if he lived a thousand years. Oh, kidneys, lungs, heart, anus, intestines. How did he get like that? Some bad accident or what?"

"A very bad accident," Sol said dryly. "Of birth. He was in the Camps."

The doctor looked puzzled for a moment, and his heavy face, with its down-slanted eyes, resembled a bloodhound's face. Then his eyebrows raised in understanding. "Oh yes, of course. I noticed the tattoos." His eyes checked Sol's arm and then Tessie's, and he grimaced in a way that shaped his face in the lines of his smile. "I'm sorry. Some world we live in, isn't it? Well, then, I can eliminate my bedside diplomacy. Mrs. Rubin, your father is dying."

"Who isn't, Doctor?" Sol said. "The question is, how close is he to death?"

The doctor sighed heavily; it appeared his great weight oppressed him. "I could be very professional and evade by saying this many hours or this many days," he said. "The truth is, I don't know how in hell he ever lived through whatever smashed him up like that. My medical training gives every evidence that he had to be killed long ago. But the human organism defies evidence. Whatever has kept him alive up till now may still hold onto him stubbornly. Lord, I don't know, I just don't know. He could go anytime. A lot of help that is. In all honesty, that's the best I can do."

"Is there anything I can do for him?" Tessie asked without intonation.

"I've shot him full of dope. I don't think he will be in too much pain."

Tessie grunted and filled Sol's cup again.

"Feel free to call me anytime," the doctor said.

"How much do I owe you, Doctor?" Tessie asked, looking at Sol.

"Oh well, look; my office is just two houses down. It wasn't even out of my way home. Suppose you give me the dollar for the shot I gave him. Call it an introductory offer—maybe you'll be a regular customer, Mrs. Rubin."

When the doctor was gone, they sat in the living room listening to the drug-dimmed moans of the old man in the bedroom.

After a while, Tessie got up and came over to sit next to Sol on the sofa. She looked at him for a few minutes. Then she slipped the straps of her slip from her shoulders, exposing her big, white breasts. Sol sat there stonily. She took his hand timidly and lifted it to her nipples, rubbed it against the warm softness of flesh.

He jerked his hand away. "No, no, forget it," he said.

She shrugged and returned her breasts to the slip. Then she laid her head back on the couch and stared at the ceiling with a bitter smile.

"How is the
business?
" she asked finally.

"Marvelous. Ah, I have trouble with Murillio. I want to get out of being his partner. It is impossible. Then I have a funny feeling about the
Shwartsa
who works for me. He is a strange kid. Sometimes I think he ... Anyhow, I have this suspicion that he has something up his sleeve. He hangs around with these criminal types. I do not know but what they may be thinking of robbing me somehow."

"And your family, do they still bother you?"

"Some more animals. What is there to say! The whole world is a big zoo. Maybe I will go to Alaska, to the North Pole," he said with glassy humor. "The polar bears should be amusing company."

"They are said to be vicious animals, the polar bears," Tessie said seriously.

Sol began to laugh harshly. She shushed him, reminding him of the old man. Later on, she lit a memorial candle for one or another of her dead. Then she began to cry, and Sol had to make love to her after all. When he got home, he fell into his bed like a piece of butchered meat. He didn't even consider the risk of dreaming. But he did dream.

 

He was standing with his hands up to his cheeks, staring at the child's dead body twisted on a monstrous hook which pierced it from behind and came out the breast. He began screaming, the screams of such unbearable size that the sensation was that of vomiting or giving birth. His grief
forced all his blood out of his pores. He could not contain it; soon his body would fly into pieces.

"
Naomi, Naomi
kinder,
my baby, my baby...
"

And then, suddenly, there on the same childish body appeared another face. It was a grotesque face for that delicate, childish body, a young man's thin, sallow face—Morton! And then there appeared the lined, pathetically depraved face of George Smith. And then the face was that of Jesus Ortiz. Each face appeared on the frail baby body with the cruel hook pointing up toward the head. They were like slides projected there. Yet in spite of the unreality, the succession of faces brought him no relief, indeed, made his pain grow worse, become cumulative, and each moment he thought to be the ultimate agony was exposed by the next moment's increased intensity. And the faces kept changing over the body of his child impaled on the hook, on and on, a descent into Hell that had no ending. Mabel Wheatly took her place on the hook, Tessie, Cecil Mapp, Mendel, Buck White, Mrs. Harmon, Goberman, one after the other without end....

 

He woke up so drained by poor sleep that it seemed he was more exhausted than he had been the night before. His limbs could have been just old weathered bones, riddled with porousness, as remote from life as anything on earth.

But in his head and his breast there was a crush of anguish, and he gasped in the morning light, "Perhaps I will die soon. All right. But what is all
this
about then?"

Selig caught him in the living room and asked for two hundred dollars for a hernia operation, speaking out of the corner of his mouth as though the intended surgery were some illicit entertainment. After Sol nodded and mumbled something about arranging it, he was waylaid by his sister, who warned that the house would be flooded if plumbing repairs weren't forthcoming. In the yard, his niece, Joan, asked for "...a loan, Uncle Sol, strictly a loan. Until I get caught up with my vacation savings. I insist you charge me the regular rate of interest."

And Saturday had been a bedlam in the store, so that by the time he reached his quiet bedroom and fell on the bed with a book tented over his chest, his nephew's knock on the door was like a physical blow on his body.

"What do
you
want, Morton?" he asked, barely masking his irritation.

"Well, I have to get next semester's art supplies, and I was wondering if..."

"Money, you want money, too? I am made of money for all of you. There is nothing else, just a man made of dollar bills. Someday you will peel all the money off and there will be nothing underneath, just air. What will you do then?"

"I don't know....I just..." And then Morton's face found a dignity in anger, too. "If you don't want to give me the money..."

"Oh, I will give it. Don't I always? What else is there for a money man to do? Nothing else. Make money, give it away, make some more, on and on." He got up and went to the bureau. He took a checkbook and a fountain pen from the drawer and stood there, looming huge and shapeless over the youth. Morton looked away from his uncle with a bitter expression on his face. "All right, Morton, how much shall I make the check out for? Or perhaps I should just sign it and let you fill out the amount? You could make it a thousand, a hundred thousand, even a million. There is no limit."

"I need twenty-four dollars," Morton said in a flat voice, his eyes on the dusk in the yard.

For some reason, that figure pierced Sol, and he closed his lips against his own words. He wrote out the check for the amount and handed it to his nephew. Morton went out of the room without thanking him, hunched and self-protecting, like someone with a severe pain in his middle.

"If I do not want to give you the money, hah!" Sol said to the closed door. "What would you do if I did not want to give you the money? As though you would go someplace else for it, as though you had other alternatives, Morton, you miserable creature. Do not make me laugh with your offended dignity, do not make me laugh...." And then he stood there before the open checkbook, pen still in hand, and nowhere near laughing. He was filled with cruel vibration, like a savagely plucked violin string, sick and dying and yet nowhere near the ease of physical death.

Outside, the hot summer evening soaked in itself with all its soft sounds. It surrounded the house, and finally the room in which he stood, a teeming, slowly exploding hulk with only the pen and the checkbook to hold on to.

He had no strength for a shower, could just about make it to the bed. He fell slantwise across it and lay without moving, feeling the dirt of the day's dried sweat, his hands coated by all the old, soiled objects he had handled that day.

After a while, he twitched slowly toward sleep.

 

A mountain of emaciated bodies, hands, and legs tossed in nightmare abandon, as though each victim had died in the midst of a frantic dance, the hollow eyes and gaping mouths expressing what could have been a demented and perverse ecstasy. Sol felt an instant's envy for the dream they might have reached in the last popping of their brains as the noxious air had soaked them in death. Certainly he envied what they had now—a blindness to scenes like this. The great pile seemed to creak slightly, could be heard in spite of the shouts of the guards, because its phantom softness was an immense thing.

All right, he would obey them, the men in the uniforms; he still, unreasonably, feared the death they could award. He helped throw the bodies onto the growing pile of the crematorium, full of shame, and praying that a familiar face wouldn't be revealed, that dead eyes wouldn't fall on him with terrible, accidental wrath. He kept his glance away from the heads, just seized the dry, bone-filled limbs and heaved. His mind fastened on the idea of work.

The sky was veiled over him, cloudy with a suggestion of blackness behind the pale gray. The guards' shouts fell short and shallow under that sky, and the soft, subtle creaking
seemed to rise and lose itself in the high, colorless ceiling. All the more-distant bodies were a blur; he couldn't see as far as the barbed-wire fence. It was better that way. Just reach and lift and stretch and throw. The bodies were really quite light, even for one as ill fed as he was. He still had his bulk, was stronger than most of the prisoners. It was as though he had begun with so much more strength that he would always have more, no matter how much he failed.

As he tugged at a corpse, something bright and delicate tumbled at his feet. He bent down quickly. It was a pair of spectacles, remarkably unbroken. He put them on, and the whole vast spectacle leapt into horrid clarity. He clenched his jaw as though to break the bone there and went back to his work, inflicting the cleared vision on himself. It was the very least he could do.

But oh, the smell, the smell—it turned him inside out. His eyes strayed to the heads with that new-found clarity of vision. God help him if he should see Ruth's face, the children's faces! God help him for having to see all the strangers' faces, for seeing at all.

He continued working with the round, old-fashioned spectacles on. They made everything savagely clear, but he kept them on. That was the least he could do.

 

"No, no, I don't think I'll lead right off with talking about Spinoza," George Smith said aloud, lowering the library book he had been reading. "I will mention some of the Spaniards casually, Baroja, Iglesias, Unamuno, Gasset. And then, in the course..." He circled cleverly, planned his benevolent assault on the Pawnbroker from his sway-backed bed. The scabrous walls almost disappeared at the ceiling; his gooseneck lamp was turned shade down for reading. There was an orange crate painted black and covered with a flowered curtain. Inside, he kept his toilet articles. He had an old end table he had bought in the Goodwill Store, and he ate his meals on it. There was a two-burner hot plate on which he cooked Japanese style, right at the table. Between his bed and the wall was the bookcase he had built himself. It was filled with a number of paperback books and three with hard covers: the Bible, Shakespeare's complete works in one volume, and a wildly obscene anthology of pornography. This last one he kept way in back and covered in a wrapping-paper dust jacket, as though secreting it from himself. But his secretiveness did no good at all; he knew the book was there, always.

Now, George Smith was safely occupied and he gave no thought to the book or the sounds of the families in the other rooms of the apartment. He smiled at the thought of Spinoza and the Pawnbroker. One of these days soon he would have to work up the nerve to invite Sol Nazerman to spend a whole evening in peaceful, unhurried talk. Maybe they could just take cans of beer and sit for hours at the edge of the river. Talk and talk and talk—all the great things would be in their conversations. Oh, he would have to broach it carefully, tactfully, make it casual and attractive sounding. He couldn't completely forget the Pawnbroker was a white man. Not that there was any question of his being an ordinary
ofay.
No, not at all. The Pawnbroker was a man of great learning and understanding, to whom color was less than nothing, a man who had suffered himself and so could be sympathetic to others' failings, a man who...