Free The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant

Rothschild, a Baruch! Maybe he should know that I made bread soaked in evaporated milk for supper for me and the
alta.
"
    "I gave you fifty dollars last week. Why bread and milk?" Sol said angrily as he reclined on the sofa, which was as shapeless as the chair she sat on.
    "Why, why! I had to have the doctor twice for him, the old man—
house calls.
Ten dollars each time."
    "So, thirty dollars in five days. Not a fortune, but you should have more than bread and milk from it."
    "Oh, I go crazy, too, you know. So I took in one little movie, so I bought one little house dress I shouldn't walk around with holes showing. It's a crime?" She glared at him savagely, as though to make up for her unaltered position of repose.
    Sol waved his hand to dismiss the subject. "I'll leave you a few dollars before I go. Remind me." He turned his head toward the doorway that led to the two bedrooms. "How is he, the old man?"
    "Eh, he fives. How can he be?"
    Sol nodded and slid lower on the couch, so that he was lying almost horizontal. He exhaled slowly through his teeth and crossed his arms over his eyes. The ugly grotto of the room permeated him with all its stale, musty odors; and yet oddly, as always, his body went limp with relaxation. He heard Tessie sighing quietly across the small room, seemed to see, even through his covering arms, the crowding, unattractive mementoes she had reclaimed or imitated from her past life: a brass samovar, a twin-framed ornate picture of herself and her late husband, Herman Rubin, a brown depressing tapestry which depicted a waterway in Venice, a fluted china plate teeming with iridescent-green tulips, a picture of her father and her mother in the frozen poses of a half-century ago, an oval-framed portrait of a fat-faced child with slightly crossed eyes—her late son, Morris. The sink in the kitchen leaked steadily, not drops, but in a persistent trickle. From above came the sound of many footsteps, the heavy ones of men and women, the dance of the young. The old man groaned in the bedroom, called out a complicated Yiddish-Polish curse, and then subsided into high, womanish moans, which gradually diminished to little respiratory grunts. There was a smell of sour milk and cauliflower and an all-pervading odor of sweat, as though the building were a huge living creature. Gradually, Sol's body lightened, his breathing came more deeply and regularly. He lay there listening to the sound of his body drifting toward sleep, observing the numbing peace of his limbs, until he slept, deeply and peacefully.
    When he woke he couldn't remember where he was for a moment. The room was dark except for the thick beam of light cast on the floor from the kitchen. He lay without moving, listening to the clattering of pots and pans, savoring the nerveless ease of his body.
    "Vat is to eat?
Ich bin kronk.
I need strength,
kayach,
" the old querulous voice said. "I eat bread and milk and you ... vat do you hide and eat ven I sleep? Hah, vat—lox and herring, some juicy smoked fish?
Ich bin kronk, dine aine tata.
You would starve me. Ah, it is all up vit me," he whined.
    "Shh, you will wake him, let him sleep. He is so tired, that man, he needs to sleep. I took some money from his pocket and bought some nice fresh eggs, some cream cheese. You like cream cheese, Pa," she said.
    "I dream about smoked butterfish. Why can't we have smoked butterfish?" the old man complained.
    "I'll fry the eggs hard, the way you like them," the woman's voice said. "Just don't talk so loud, please. He gets his best sleep here."
    Sol lay without moving. The smell of the frying eggs came to him, the sounds of the other people in the building. All around him fife of various sorts, stone hollowed out and filled with the insect life of humans, the whole earth honeycombed with them. In another pocket of stone or brick or wood, Jesus Ortiz, Morton, George Smith, Murillio, billions. Insects ruining the sweet, silent proportions of the earth.