Free The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant Page A

Undermining, soiling, hurting. Where was the gigantic foot to crush them all? Where was blessed silence? Footsteps, pots clanking, voices of strangers, of the old man, the woman in the kitchen. He drifted off to explore a last little void of dreamless sleep.
    "Sol, Sol, wake up. I have supper. Come, before it gets cold."
    He peered up at her gaunt, bleak face. She nodded to tell him he was awake; she had much experience with the violated borders between reality and dreams, knew enough to take the time to reassure a sleeper. "Eggs and rolls, coffee. Yes, yes, it is only Tessie ... come."
    Slowly he unrolled himself, sat up, then stood. She touched his arm, and he followed her. In the kitchen, the old man shrugged at him.
    "Hello Mendel," he said.
    "Sure, sure," the old man said bitterly. "What do they care? Yeh, don't esk qvestion, it's a Jew—gas him, burn him, stick him through vit hot needles."
    "Eat, Pa, while it's hot," Tessie said, looking at Sol over her father's head.
    They sat down together at the porcelain-topped table. Sol reached for a roll, and Tessie poured coffee while the old man muttered the prayer over the food sullenly, his face like an arid relief map of some forgotten valley. He was seventy-five but he looked a hundred. He had many dents in his bald head, his nose was crushed; but he had been of durable stock, so he was still alive.
    "Her husband died in Belsen," the old man said suddenly, pointing a crooked accusing finger at his daughter. "And vat they did to her, yes, yes. And she sits there like a
lady. Oy vay, ich bin zayer kronk.
" He began to weep and dab at his eyes.
    "I know, Mendel. Stop that now. Let us eat in peace, for Christ's sake," Sol said. Mournfully, he himself began to eat, as though to set an example. Tessie shrugged and ate, too, with her eyes on the food. She had a tattoo similar to Sol's on the dead-white skin of her arm. The sink dripped, the neighbors pounded on the ceiling, shouted occasionally in Spanish or Yiddish. Someone screamed in the street, and a police siren sounded, going away from all of it. Here, Rubin, here is your lovely widow, your stately father-in-law; I watch over them for you, keep them in a manner befitting their station. Let your bones lie easy in the earth—you are missing nothing, nothing at all.
    Finally they were through. Tessie herded the old man into his room and closed the door. She came back into the kitchen and cleared the dishes away. Sol went into the living room and sat down. He closed his eyes and waited. Soon he heard her come into the room and sit down beside him. He opened his eyes; the room was still lit only by the light from the kitchen. She looked at him with glittering, dismal eyes.
    "So what do we have in this life?" she said.
    "We have, we have. We live."
    "I feel like screaming all day long. I feel like screaming myself to death," she said.
    "But you don't and I don't and the old man doesn't. We live and fight off the animals."
    "They're better off, the dead ones."
    "I won't argue. I don't want to talk about it. It is ridiculous to talk about it. I don't feel so good the past week or two anyhow. Don't talk about nonsense."
    "So I won't talk," she said.
    They sat there in silence for about ten minutes, in the pose of two peaceful people seated on a cool veranda watching the country scene.
    After a while she said, "Do you want to?"
    "All right," he said.
    She took off her dress in the dimness. He lay back on the couch. Finally she pushed her heavy, hanging breasts in his face and lay against him. "You're not too tired?"
    He shook his head against her warm body, which smelled old. They turned into each other with little moans. And then they made love on the lumpy couch with the sounds of the old man's groaning madness in the other room, and there was very little of passion between them and nothing of real love or tenderness, but, rather, that immensely stronger force of desperation and mutual anguish.
    When it was over, they said