The Pawnbroker

by Edward Lewis Wallant

  And then he was before the store and that tautness, that distended surface of his spirit made itself known to him again. He went inside, cut off the burglar alarm, switched on the lights, and began taking the wire screens from the windows; it was as though he exposed himself again to the mysterious onslaught that would destroy him. One tiny thing, he didn't know yet what it would be, would break him apart that day, and all the dark force of the growth in him would burst out for him to recognize before it consumed him.

  "Today is the twenty-eighth ... my anniversary, my anniversary," he said, standing behind the counter and gripping its edge as though for support against a vast wave. Fifteen years ago today his heart had atrophied; like the mammoth, he had been preserved in ice. What did he fear then? If the ice finally melts, the meat of the great entombed creature merely rots. One could only die once. He had been extinct for a long time, and only the carcass remained to be disposed of. Why, then, did he seize on the edge of the counter and tremble as he stared in terror at the sunlit doorway?

  Jesus Ortiz came in at nine thirty, walking with an odd stiffness, as though something in the night had robbed him of his natural grace. His face was drawn, his eyes were feverishly bright, and he kept brushing tentatively at his long, straight hair, which was impeccably combed. He muttered something to Sol and then, when he got no answer, turned nervously toward the Pawnbroker and said, "Huh? What you say?"

  Sol just shook his head, his eyes piercing and curious.

  "I'll go upstairs, work with the clothes. You call me if you want me." Jesus looked at Sol as if there were something strange in that, as if he did not trust what he heard, even his own voice.

  Jesus questioned that, too, with his eyes.

  "All right, go upstairs," Sol said gently.

  "Oh ... yeah. I be upstairs. You jus' call then..."

  The Pawnbroker nodded reassuringly, as though to a child. While he watched the slender figure of the youth slowly ascend the stairs, he continued to grip the edge of the counter.

  Leopold S. Schneider came in with the same greasy bag under his arm. His hair was wild and soft, and it made a dull halo around his bony head. "Do you remember me? Schneider? The oratory award?"

  "Yes, I remember," Sol answered, taking his hands cautiously away from the counter.

  "You still have my award, you haven't sold it?"

  "I have turned down some fine offers for it."

  "Well, I'll be in for it in about a week. I have something pending. Meanwhile, just to carry me over until I finish this play I'm working on ... I have this for you. How much can you loan me on it? It hurts me to let it out of my hands for even a week but, well..." Carefully, he skinned back the bag to reveal a pair of bronzed baby shoes. "My mother would turn in her grave ... but it's only for a little while," he said tremulously, holding them out delicately for the Pawnbroker to admire.

  Sol sighed heavily, lidded his eyes, and slowly shook his head.

  "They're mine ... when I was a baby," Leopold said tenderly, appreciating how touched the Pawnbroker seemed.

  "How much do you want?"

  "Ten dollars?"

  "Five."

  "All right, I'll take it. Just put them next to the award. Careful, don't scratch them," Leopold warned, his hands darting out in a flutter of apprehension. "Schneider, Leopold S. Schneider..."

  The anniversary of Sol's death was beginning.

  A tall marionette carved from some black wood, his limbs controlled erratically, approached Sol on a bias, his trunk aimed for the corner of the store as his legs twitched him to the counter. Sol waited, a little nerve in his own temple taking up the rhythm of the spastic walk, until the man was holding on to the counter with one struggling hand, his head beckoning constantly. Sol held on to his side of the counter with equal intensity, so it was as though each tugged against the other. He felt himself sweating as he tried to find the least tortured part of the man at which to look. Finally he discovered the eyes, which were black and solemnly lovely, like those of a deer, and which maintained a gloomy calm in the midst of the writhing surface of his face.

  "I want to borrow ten dollars on this," he said, bringing up a large, flat, rectangular package like a silent tambourine. He settled it on the counter as one flattens a spinning coin and began trying to untie the knotted cord. But the string was a live thing in his hands; he raised his wild fingers and gave Sol a pulsing, twisting smile. "You better..."

  And it seemed as great an effort for Sol to undo the knot. In the end, he cut the cord with a razor blade, and the spastic gave a little sigh as the string popped. Inside was a framed glass of brilliantly colored butterflies.

  "What's this?" Sol said.

  "Butterflies."

  Sol looked at the man scornfully.

  "I collect them. I have a lot more at home. For years I went into the country with a net, all the equipment....I don't know, lately I have lost interest." But then, noticing a look of rejection on the Pawnbroker's face, he hastened to reassure. "Oh, but I definitely will redeem it; don't worry on that score."

  "What would I do with it if you didn't?" Sol shook his head. "I'll let you have five dollars. I couldn't even sell them for that."

  "Oh, you'd be surprised how many people nowadays use them for decoration. And then there's lots of collectors like me. I got some very good ones there." He leaned over the glass, his ambling fingers striving to point to the brilliant bow-tie shapes. "That there, for instance, is a monarch, and that one is a great spangled fritillary. Oh, and see this here beauty, that's a mourning cloak and that one with the eye design, that's called a buckeye. And there's a tiger swallowtail, and a question-sign anglewing..."

  "All that double talk means nothing to me. All right, all right, I'll give you eight dollars on it."

  "That is not double talk," the spastic said, trying to compose his face for dignity. "Those are the real names of those butterflies. At one time I would have starved rather than let them out of my hands, even for a minute. But lately it doesn't seem to matter to me. All right, I'll take the eight dollars."

  And Sol wrote up the transaction while the black lepidopterist danced his grotesquely patient dance; it seemed Sol could see it even through his lowered eyelids.

  The next customer came in out of a flash of briefly reflected sunlight, so all Sol could see at first was the un-memorable shape of his head and shoulders and the two boxlike things he carried, one in each hand. And then he was in the undisputed domain of the fiuorescents and his deformed face was like a stunning noise in the quiet store. He had no lower jaw, only a gaping, wet redness and a restless tongue. Sol felt like screaming in rage and revulsion. What was the idea of letting such a creature out in the open?

  "Yes," Sol said, fixing his attention on the two boxes and following them up when the man lifted them to the counter.

  "Ah ant oo ah ... ehee, ehee." He held up all ten fingers twice, held them so high that Sol had to see his face again through them.

  "Twenty, you want twenty," Sol translated through clenched teeth, feeling nausea rise in his throat. He heard the sound that must have been confirmation and he pulled the two wooden boxes toward him. The larger one was a well-equipped oil-painting box with several palettes, many new tubes of paint, brushes, and palette knives. The smaller box contained a fine set of wood-carving knives of Swiss manufacture. "All right, twenty," Sol agreed, just wanting to get the man out. "What is your name?"

  The man just waved in furious disgust.

  "You mean you won't want to take them out again?"

  "Aghh, aghh," the jawless man gurgled, making violent signs of rejection. Then he waved his hands in a horizontal gesture like an umpire calling a ballplayer out, indicating final and definite termination to his relationship with the paints and the knives. He took the money and walked back out toward the street. From behind, the sickened Pawnbroker noticed how shapely his head was, how broad his shoulders above the tapering, graceful torso. For a moment he felt like bursting out in laughter, but held it back
for fear of what it might turn into.

  A young white woman came in. She was bone-thin in her cheap housedress, breastless and stooped; really it was only that Sol sensed her to be young, for nothing in her appearance gave evidence of it. Her face was cadaverous, as from some serious wasting disease. She brought a hand mirror and a box of baby clothes in excellent condition, almost new.

  "Whatever you want to give," she answered dispiritedly to his query, her voice apparently a great and extravagant expenditure for her. "I've got no use for them any more."

  "Well, look here, lady, I'm in business to make money. I would like to give as little as possible. Tell me what you want to borrow, and if it's reasonable..."

  She looked at him with weary disgust, lidded her large, doomed eyes, and shrugged. "Ohh ... I don't know."

  "The clothes are in good condition, the mirror.... How about eight dollars?"

  She nodded.

  "What is your name?"

  "Rosemary O'Conner," she said in a musing, wondering way, as though surprised that she still bore that name. Then she frowned angrily and watched him set her property to one side and bring up the pawn ticket.

  She ran her eyes briefly over the fine print on the back. She appeared clean and neat, but there was a faint disagreeable odor to her body, the smell of the chronically sick: sour, fetid, and dying. "And if someone else was to come in someday in my place with this ticket, could they get the things?"

  Sol nodded, dumb in the ruined smell of her.

  "Because God knows I sure as hell won't be back."

  Where did they come from? The devil, my anniversary will be a great day! "No more, for God's sake, no more," he said silently at the sight of another customer.

  But then he let his breath out in minute relief; it was Marilyn Birchfield. She seemed so astoundingly clean and lovely to him. He nodded weakly at her.

  "Hello, Sol," she said softly. "See, I can't be avoided." She smiled at him, and he felt his heart lurch wistfully. To rest with her, to spend quiet, endless hours in the sunlight in her presence. Ah, an old dream, as foolish and unreal as the case of butterflies, the carving knives, the hand mirror that revealed no beauty.

  "I am sorry if I seemed rude when I spoke to you last. You must forgive me."

  "No, don't even speak of it. You have some private troubles and I should know better than to intrude. Only I want you to know again that I'm your friend, that I'll always be available to you." She fixed him with a serious gaze. "Go through what you must go through, but remember to call me when you're ready for friendship again." She seemed to offer something distant and bright, which he recognized as a drowning man might recognize a life ring, a means of rescue that is either too distant or that he is too tired to try for.

  "Thank you; you are a fine, generous woman. If all this—" he moved his eyes over the litter of the shop in a gesture of description—"lets up, if I can see my way clear..."

  She just touched his wrist briefly, nodded, and went out. Sol watched the life preserver disappear, leaving him in the empty, silent sea.

  And then, as though that respite were something he had to pay for with usurious interest, the traffic came worse than ever before.

  A stuttering deviate with the body of a dancer pressed his soft courtship for a few dollars on a silver bracelet, his ancient hunter's nostrils sniffing fastidiously in a world of close and ugly scents. And right behind him, patient for her turn, a stone-faced, masculine-looking woman stood holding her pudgy Mongoloid son's hand, paying the child no attention, but, rather, welded to him in the clasped flesh. She brought a child's sterling cup and spoon with no regret, because she had nothing she wished to commemorate. A smiling postman pawned a dazzling pair of shoes, and his smile was flat and shallow, because he appeared to live in a pocket of time only five minutes wide. An old, filthy pilgrim presented himself like an apparition, with a battered flashlight for pawn, and at the Pawnbroker's snarl of dismissal he went out of the store with the dead flashlight like some hopeless Diogenes moving under old momentum. A blind fat woman, with her hair cut in that short, institutional bob, offered up a concertina with a dull forgotten smile; her tiny, empty eyes fixed mercilessly on Sol's face, and she waited through his mutters of exasperation and disgust until he paid her. She was replaced by the filthy young Negro in the Ivy League cap with the addict's eyes and the terrified jackal's face. "I brung you dat radio couple weeks back. Come on, come on, I got to have it back. My mothuh say I don' get it back she gonna send me to the hospital to go col' turkey. I got to have it now, man." And when Sol demanded his ticket, he howled. "I don' know nothin' 'bout no ticket. I want dat radio, dad, you gimme dat radio." He took out a knife and began waving it at random. "I'm nobody to mess wif, man; gimme dat radio ... come on, she gonna turn my ass in I don' bring dat radio...." And Sol had to grab his surprisingly thin and feeble body and rush him out of the store, murmuring threats about calling the police on him, saying that then he would be cold turkey indeed. And he saw him go brokenly down the street before he returned to the store with the feel of the creature's sour body on his hands. Then he faced the tall old whore with the swollen, depraved face and the morocco-textured skin on her exposed chest. She talked with smoke from the ever-present cigarette half blinding her, and she was humble and grotesque with her false, frightened smile as she took a two-dollar loan on an alligator pocketbook that was topped with the dried body of a baby alligator and still bore the price tag of the store it had been lifted from.

  On and on they came, shy, sullen, sweating, guilty, paying in fear for tiny crimes they had done and were doomed to do, striking out with furtiveness and harshness, sickened with their hereditary curse, weary and ashamed of their small dreams and abandoning the cheap devices they had dreamed with. They brought in suits of green to try to change their luck with garments of blue or cautious gray. They packed in one kind of glitter for another, haggled in soft, furtive voices, each ashamed and desperate and hungry, each filling the Pawnbroker's spirit with rage and disgust as he smelled and saw their ugliness.

  He stretched on the rack of his sight and smell and hearing, saw all the naked souls ready to spill blood over him. And it began to seem to him that they all were making a profit on him, that they found ease from their individual pains at the sight of his great aggregate of pains, that they looked around at the stock of the store and saw it all as a tremendous weight on him. And that seemed to awe them, too, for as they added their own small item it was as though they piled on weight to prove his immense power, so that some of them even went out laughing, having left him a piece of their pain.

  Sometimes he was aware of his assistant, down from the loft to help. He looked toward him and, if he found no relief at the sight of the clear, spare beauty in Jesus' face, he must have at least gained some minimal handhold of endurance, because he continued to exist as the Pawnbroker, was still able to appraise and declare, accept and condemn. Sometimes their eyes met to make an instant of acutely profound silence in all the sounds of voices and feet.

  Jesus became blinded to all the faces except Sol's. He felt anguish and identified it as fear, and so trampled on his feeling with silent chastisement. Don't think about it, don't think about it, you got to do this, it's the only way. Then he was able to go on with what he was doing for a while with only the gloomy thought that perhaps he might always be blinded to faces after the Pawnbroker's was gone. And once it even occurred to him that this was the price he must pay to enter into the Pawnbroker's secret, that this was the price for those mysterious riches that had always been beyond him. Details of Sol's figure obsessed him; the glasses, the secret structure of his face and body, the numbers etched on his arm, all elements of something majestic and tragic, something he had to possess. Yet for all this he had only the simple words for material things: money, a business, a name.

  He was even able to feel twinges of petulant greed. The Pawnbroker was loaning out a lot of money, was passing out a lot of cash; he, Ortiz, would not be around to collect i
ts interest. And where was the messenger with the regular weekly payment of cash to be dispersed by the Pawnbroker, the money that was the incentive for all his plans? Here it was three o'clock and to his knowledge the money from the invisible partner had not come in yet. Unless it had come while he was upstairs. But no, he had been aware of almost every customer from his peek-hole upstairs, had seen the spastic, the jawless man, the ofay with the baby shoes, the fat white woman from the Youth Center. He strained to watch each transaction Sol made while he attended to his own, and wondered if he would recognize the messenger if he saw him: they changed so often. The last one he remembered was that white-haired Italian.

  Occasionally, he was faced with a piece of jewelry whose worth he didn't feel confident to judge. He would send the customer over to Sol, wait for his recognition, and then share with him once more that silence-invoking gaze wherein they found themselves bound in a dark-lit chamber of spirit; until each of them turned back to his own tumultuous commerce, a little more dazed and stricken with the strangeness of his direction.

  On and on they came, without letup, without mercy. What sense was there in all their humble, hideous vitality? Why did they exist? Sol had thought all human life had long ago been gassed and cremated. Out of what graves had all these remnants crept? Black scourged faces, white, all the shades between and beyond. Hoarse voices, whines, demanding, begging, accepting. Cells multiplying and decaying, strange mutations, smells, ugliness. All the excuses for life had been gone for a long time. What was this whole ghastly parade about? And why was he forced to endure it?

  "Five dollars."

  "But it's gold."

  "Plate. Five dollars."

  "Genuine."

  "Genuine junk. Two dollars."

  "This here brand new."

  "Come on, grandpa, that suit was old for your confirmation."

  "Valuable."

  "Worthless."

  "Hey, dad, I sell myself body an' soul for dat horn."