Sophie's Choice (39 page)

My people are Polish, up in New Britain. Listen, what's wrong here?" Sophie says, "This is my husband. He is very upset. His mother's dying in..." She frantically tries to think of a Connecticut place, is able to blurt, "In Boston. That's why we were speeding." Sophie stares at the cop's face, eyes innocent violets, the slablike plane faintly bucolic, the countenance of a peasant. She thinks: He could be tending cows in some Carpathian valley. "Please," she cajoles, leaning forward over Nathan, pouting her prettiest, "please, sir, do understand about his mother. We promise to go slow now." The Grzemkowski presence reverts to stolid business, the voice becomes police-gruff. "I'm givin' you a warning this time. Now slow down." Nathan says, "Merci beacoup, mon chef." He gazes directly ahead into infinity. His lips work wordlessly, without cease, as if speaking to some helpless auditor lodged within his breast. He has begun to sweat in glycerine streams. The cop is suddenly gone. Sophie hears Nathan whispering to himself as the car moves once more. It is almost noon. They drive north (more sedately) through bowers and overhanging clouds and raging storms of multichrome leaves in aerial frenzy--here belching color like blazing lava, there like exploding stars, all like nothing Sophie has ever seen or imagined--the pent-up muttering which she cannot comprehend becomes vocal, unleashed in a new spasm of paranoia. And in its encompassing fury it terrifies her as completely as if he had set loose in the car a cage full of savage rats. Poland. Anti-Semitism. And what did you do, baby, when they burned the ghettos down? Did you hear the line about what one Polish bishop said to the other Polish bishop? "If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a kike!" Harharhar! Nathan, don't, she thinks, don't make me suffer so! Don't make me remember! The tears are rolling down her face when she plucks at his sleeve. "I've never told you! I've never told you!" she cries. "In 1939 my father risked his life to save Jews! He hided Jews under the floor of his office at the university when the Gestapo came, he was a good man, he died because he saved these..." On the sticky bolus of her own distress, rising in her gorge like the lie she has just uttered, she strangles, then hears her voice crack. "Nathan! Nathan! Believe me, darling, believe me!" DANBURY CITY LIMITS. "Baked a kike!" Harharhar! "I mean not hided, darling, hid..." Talktalktalk--She half listens now, thinking: If I could get him to stop and eat somewhere, I could steal away and make a phone call to Morty or Larry, get them to come... And she hears herself say, "Darling, I'm so hungry, could we stop..." Only to hear amid the talktalktalk: "Irma my pet, Irma Liebchen, I couldn't eat a single Saltine cracker if you paid me a thousand dollars, oh shit Irma I'm flying, oh Christ I'm in the sky, never so high never so high and gotta big itch for youu-u-u, you little goy Fascist nafka, hey feel this..." He reaches over and places her hand on the outside of his trousers, presses her fingers against the stiff bulge of his prick; she feels it throb then contract then throb again. "A blowjob, that's what I need, one of your five hundred gold zloty Polack blowjobs, hey Irma how many SS pricks did you suck to get out of there, how much master race come swallowed for Freiheit? Listen, all kidding aside Irma I've gotta get sucked, oh I've never flown this high, Jesus to get those sweet little gobbling lips to work right now, I mean somewhere under the blue sky and the burning maple leaves of autumn, fair autumn, and you'll suck my seed, suck my seed as thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa, that's John Milton..." ... Naked, he padded back to the bed and lightly, carefully lay down beside her. The two capsules still glistened in the ashtray, and she wondered drowsily if he had forgotten them, wondered if he again would flirt and tantalize her with their pink menace. The Nembutal, washing her downward toward sleep, pulled at her legs like the warm undertow of a gentle sea. "Sophielove," he said, his voicy drowsy too, "Sophielove, I regret only two things." She said, "What, darling?" When he failed to answer, she said again, "What?" "Just this," he said finally, "that all that hard work at the lab, all the research, that I'll never see the fruits of it." Strange, she thought as he spoke, his voice almost for the first time that day had lost its hysteric threat, its mania, its cruelty, had become edged instead with the tenderness, familiar, soothing, which was so naturally a part of him and which all day long she had been certain was past recapture. Had he, too, been rescued at the last instant, was he being borne backward serenely into his salvaging barbiturate harbor? Would he in fact simply forget death and drift off to sleep? There was a creak on the stairway outside, again the unctuous female voice. "Mr. and Mrs. Landau, excuse me, please. But my husband wants to know if you would care for a drink before dinner. We have everything. But my husband does make a wonderful hot rum punch." After a moment Nathan said, "Yeah, thanks, a rum punch. Two." And she thought: It sounds like the other Nathan. But then she heard him murmur softly, "The other thing, the other thing is that you and I never had any children." She gazed into the glimmering dusk, beneath the coverlet felt her fingernails slice like blades into the flesh of her palm, thought: Why does he have to say that now? I know, as he said sometime today, I was a masochistic cunt and he was only giving me what I wanted. But why can't he at least spare me that agony? "I meant that last night about getting married," she heard him say. She made no reply. She half dreamed of Cracow and time long ago and the clipclopclipclop of horses' hoofs on the timeworn cobblestones; for no reason at all she saw in some theatre's darkness the bright pastel image of Donald Duck as he bristled about, sailor's hat askew, spluttering in Polish, then heard her mother's gentle laughter. She thought: If I could unlock the past even a little, maybe I could tell him. But the past or guilt, or something, stops up my mouth in silence. Why can't I tell him what I, too, have suffered? And lost... ... Even with his crazy whispered rhyme repeated again and again--"Don't be a teaser, Irma Griese--" even with his hand remorselessly twisting her hair as if from its roots, even with his other hand at her shoulder clamped down with sickening pain and force, even with the pervasive sense he transmits, lying there, shuddering, of a man far over the brink and prowling his own demented underworld--even with the feverish fright engulfing her she cannot help but feel the old delectable pleasure as she sucks him. And sucks and sucks and sucks. And endlessly loving sucks. Her fingers claw the loamy earth of the wooded hillside upon which he lies underneath her, she feels the dirt impacting itself beneath her fingernails. The ground is damp and chill, she smells woodsmoke, and through her eyelids' translucency is filtered the incredible radiance of the foliage afire. And she sucks and sucks. Beneath her knees fragments of shale gouge and hurt, but she makes no move to ease the pain. "Oh Jesus Christ, oh fuck, suck me Irma, suck the Jew-boy." She cups his firm balls in her palm, strokes the delicate spiderweb hair. As always she envisions within the hollow of her mouth the slippery surface of a marble palmtree, the soft spongy head, its fronds swelling and blossoming in the darkness of her brain. "This relationship, this unique thing we have, this ecstatic symbiosis," she remembers, "could only result from the meeting of a large stiff lonely Semitic schlong, which has been successfully circumvented by an army of terrified Jewish princesses, and a set of beautiful Slavic mandibles starved for fellatio." And she thinks even now in her discomfort, in her fear: Yes, yes, he even gave me that, laughing, he took away that guilt anyway when he said how absurd it was for me to feel shame about longing so madly to suck a cock, it wasn't my fault that my husband was frigid and didn't want me to and my lover in Warsaw wouldn't suggest it and I couldn't begin the thing--I was merely, he said, the victim of two thousand years of anti-sucking Judeo-Christian conditioning. That lousy myth, he said, that only faggots love sucking. Suck me, he always said, enjoy, enjoy! So even now with the cloud of fear around her, while he taunts her and abuses her--even now her pleasure is not mere mild enjoyment but the perennially re-created bliss, and chill waves shiver down her back as she sucks and sucks and sucks. She is not even surprised that the more he torments her scalp, the more he goads her with that detested "Irma," the more gluttonous becomes her lust to swallow up his prick, and when she ceases, just for an instant, and panting raises her head and gasps, "Oh God, I love sucking you," the words are uttered with the same uncomplicated and spontaneous ardor as before. She opens her eyes, glimpses his tortured face, resumes blindly, realizing now that his voice has become a shout which begins to echo from the flanks of the rock-strewn hill. "Suck me, you Fascist pig, Irma Griese Jew-burning cunt!" The delicious marble palmtree, the slippery trunk swelling and expanding, tells her that he is on the edge of coming, tells her to relax so as to accept the pulsing flood, the seawater gush of palmtree milk, and in that instant of hovering expectancy, as always, she feels her eyes brim over with stinging inexplicable tears... ... "I'm floating down easy," she heard him murmur in the bedroom after a long silence. "I thought I was going to really crash. I thought I was going to crash hard. But I've been coming down easy. Thank God, I found the barbies." He paused. "We had trouble finding them, didn't we, the barbies?" "Yes," she replied. She was very sleepy now. Outside, it was nearly dark and the blazing leaves had become lusterless, fading into the smoky gunmetal autumnal sky. The light in the bedroom was flickering out. Sophie stirred next to Nathan, gazed at the wall where the New England grandmother from another century, trapped in an amber ectoplasmic halo, gazed back beneath her kerchief with an expression both benign and perplexed. Sophie thought drowsily: The photographer has just said keep still for a whole minute. She yawned, drowsed for a moment, yawned again. "Where did we finally find them?" Nathan said. "In the glove compartment of the car," she said. "You put them there this morning, then forgot you put them there. The little bottle of Nembutals." "Christ, how awful. I was really out of it. I was in space. Outer space. Gone!" With a sudden rustle of bedclothes he heaved himself about and groped for her. "Oh, Sophie--Jesus Christ, I love you!" He wrapped an arm around her and with a heavy squeeze drew her toward him; simultaneously, on an outpouring of breath, she screamed. It was not a loud scream she heard herself give, but the pain was stabbingly severe, real, and it was a small, real scream. "Nathan!"... ... (But not screaming when the point of the polished leather shoe strikes hard between two of her ribs, draws back, strikes again in the same place, driving the breath from her lungs and causing a white blossom of pain to swell beneath her breast.) "Nathan!" It is a desperate groan but not a scream, the hoarse flow of her breath merging in her ears with his voice coming in brutish methodical grunts: "Und die. . . SS Mädchen. . . spracht. . . dot vill teach you. . . dirty Jüdinschwein!" She does not really flinch from the pain but rather absorbs it, collecting it into some cellar or dustbin deep within her being where she has stored up all his savagery: his threats, his taunts, his imprecations. Nor does she weep, yet, as she lies once again in the deepest woods, a kind of brambly and bethicketed promontory high on the hillside where he has half pulled, half dragged her and from where she can see through the trees, far below, the car, its convertible top down as it stands minute and solitary in the wind-swept parking lot swirling with leaves and debris. The afternoon, partly overcast now, is waning. They have been in the woods for what seems hours. Three times he kicks her. The foot draws back once more and she waits, trembling now less with fear or pain than with the permeating soggy autumnal chill in her legs, her arms, her bones. But the foot does not strike this time, falls to rest in the leaves. "Piss on you!" she hears him say, then, "Wunderbar, vot an idea!" Now he uses his polished shod foot as an instrument to pry her face from its sideways posture against the earth to confront him, looking upward; the leather is cold and slippery on her cheek. And even as she watches him unzip his fly and, at his command, opens her mouth she falls into a moment's trance and remembers his words: My darling, I think you have absolutely no ego at all. This spoken to her with enormous tenderness after an episode: calling from the laboratory one summer evening, he had idly expressed a hunger for Nusshörnchen, pastries they had eaten together in Yorkville, whereupon without his knowledge she had immediately traveled the miles and miles by subway from Flatbush to Eighty-sixth Street, and following a crazy search had found the goodies, brought them back after many hours, presented them to him with a radiant "Voilàa, monsieur, die Nusshörnchen!" But you mustn't do that, he had said ever so lovingly, that's crazy to indulge my little whim like that, darling Sophie, sweet Sophie, I think you must have no ego at all! (And she thinking then as now: I would do anything for you, anything, anything!) But now somehow his attempt to piss down on her begins to unloose his first panic of the day. "Open your mouth wide," he orders her. She waits, watches, mouth agape, receptive, lips quivering. But he fails. One, two, three drops, soft and warm, spatter her brow, and that is all. She shuts her eyes, waiting. There is only the sense of him hovering above her, and the damp and the cold beneath, a faroff thrashing pandemonium of wind, tree branches, leaves. Then she hears him begin to moan, the moan quavering with terror. "Oh Christ, I'm going to crash!" She opens her eyes, stares at him. Suddenly greenish white, his face reminds her of the underbelly of a fish. And she has never (and in this cold) seen a face perspire so; the sweat seems plastered there like oil. "I'm going to crash!" he wails. "I'm going to crash!" He sinks down beside her in a crouched position, thrusts his head into his hands, covers his eyes, moans, trembles. "Oh Jesus, I'm going to crash, Irma, you've got to help me!" And then in precipitate dreamlike flight they are hurtling down the mountainside path, she leading him over the hard-pebbled slope like a nurse fleeing with a wounded man, gazing back from time to time to guide
his progress beneath the trees as he stumbles, self-blinded by the hand worn like a pale bandage across his eyes. Down and down they go alongside a rushing stream, across a plank bridge, through more woods ablaze with pink, orange, vermilion, slashed by the slender upright white pilasters of birch trees. She hears him, whispering this time, "I'm going to crash!" Finally, then, in the level clearing, the abandoned car lot of the state park where the convertible waits near an upset trash can, the scene a cyclonic cloud of grimy milk cartons, whirling paper plates, candy wrappers. Finally! He leaps toward the rear seat where the luggage is perched, grabs his suitcase and throws it on the ground, begins to rummage through it like some berserk ragpicker in search of an indescribable treasure. Sophie stands aside, helpless, saying nothing while the innards of the suitcase shower the air, festoon the frame of the car: socks, shirts, underwear, ties, a madman's haberdashery thrown to the winds. "That fucking Nembutal!" he roars. "Where did I put it! Oh shit! Oh Jesus, I've got to..." But he does not finish his words, instead straightens up and whirls around, hurling himself into the front seat, where he sprawls out beneath the steering wheel and frantically fiddles with the latch of the glove compartment. Found! "Water!" he gasps. "Water!" But she, in her own pain and confusion able somehow to anticipate this moment, has plucked over the edge of the back seat a carton of gingerale from the picnic basket they had never touched and now, wrestling with the fiendish opener, flips off the cap of a bottle in a shower of foam and thrusts it into his hand. He gulps the pills, and watching him, she thinks the oddest thought. Poor devil, she thinks, which are the words he--yes, he--had whispered only weeks before while watching The Lost Weekend and a crazed Ray Milland in quest of the salvation of his whiskey bottle. "Poor devil," Nathan had murmured. Now, with the green gingerale upended and the muscles of his throat working in rapid convulsions, she is reminded of that movie scene and thinks: Poor devil. Which in itself would not be odd at all, she reflects, were it not for the fact that it is the very first time she has experienced an emotion having to do with Nathan that resembles anything so degrading as pity. She cannot stand pitying him. And the shock of this realization makes her face go numb. Slowly she lowers herself to a sitting position on the ground and leans against the car. The trash in the parking lot eddies about her in gritty slow whirlpools of wind and dust. The pain in her side beneath her breast stabs her, scintillant, glowing sharply like the sudden return of an ugly recollection. She strokes her ribs with her fingertips, lightly, tracing the feverish outline of the ache itself. She wonders whether he might not have broken something. Feeling dazed now, and in the hurtful slow delay of the daze, she is aware that she has lost all track of time. She barely hears him when from the front seat where he lies sprawled with one leg twitching (the twitching mud-spattered trouser cuff is all she can see) he murmurs something which though muffled and obscure sounds like "the necessity of death." And the laugh comes, not loud: Harharharhar... For a long time there is no sound. Then, "Darling," she says quietly, "you mustn't call me Irma." "Irma was something I just couldn't bear," Sophie told me. "I could take anything from Nathan but that... that he should turn me into Irma Griese. I saw that woman once or twice at the camp--that monster woman, she would have made Wilhelmine appear to be an angel. It hurt me more than all his kicking that he called me Irma Griese. But before we got to the inn that night I tried to make him stop calling me that, and when he begun to call me Sophielove I knew he was not so high--so crazy--any more. Even though he was still playing with those little capsules of poison. This scared me now. I didn't know how far he was going to go. I was out of my mind with the idea of our life with each other and I didn't want us to die--separate or together. No. Anyway, the Nembutal begun to work on him, I could tell that, he came slowly down off his high and when he squeezed me it hurt so bad I thought I would faint and I gave this scream and then he realized what he had done to me. He was so full of guilt then, kept whispering in bed, 'Sophie, Sophie, what have I done to you, how could I have hurt you?' And such as that. But the other pills--what he called the barbies--were beginning to make this effect on him and he couldn't keep his eyes open and pretty soon he was asleep. "I remember the woman who owned the inn walked upstairs again and asked me through the door when were we coming down, it was getting late, when were we coming down for the rum punch and the dinner. And when I told her we were tired, we were just going to sleep, she got very upset and angry and said it was the most thoughtless thing, et cetera, but I didn't care, I was so very tired and sleepy myself. So I went back and lie down next to Nathan and begun to go to sleep. But then, oh my God, I thought of the capsules of poison that were still in the ashtray. I was filled with this panic. I was just terrified because I didn't know what to do with them. They were so terribly dangerous, you know. I couldn't throw them out the window or even in the trash basket because I was afraid they would crack open and the fumes would kill someone. And I thought of the toilet, and that still worried me, make me afraid about the fumes or poisoning the water or even the earth, and I didn't know what to do. I knew I had to get them away from Nathan. So anyway, I decided to take a chance on the toilet. The bathroom. There was some light in there. I very carefully picked up the capsules from the ashtray and walked through the dark into the bathroom and threw them into the toilet. They didn't float like I had imagined but sank like two little pebbles and I quickly flushed the toilet and they were gone. "I went back to the bed and slept then. I have never slept in such a dark, dreamless profound way. I don't know how long I slept. But sometime in the night Nathan woke up screaming. It must have been some reaction to all the drugs, I don't know, but it was so frightening to hear him next to me in the middle of the night, shouting like a mad demon. I still don't know how he didn't wake up everybody for miles. But I jumped awake at his screams, he begun to shout about death and destruction and hanging and gas and Jews burning in ovens and I don't know what else. I had been scared all day but this was somehow worse than anything. He had been in and out of craziness for so many hours but this was like someone gone crazy forever. 'We must die!' he begun to rave in the dark. I heard him say in a kind of long groan, 'Death is a necessity,' and then he kept groping across me toward the table as if he was hunting for the poison. But strange, you know, all this lasted only a few moments. He was very weak, it seemed to me, I was able to hold him back with my arms and I pressed him down and said over and over again, 'Darling, darling, go to sleep, everything's all right, you've had a nightmare.' Foolish things like that. But somehow what I said and done have this effect on him because quite soon he was asleep again. It was so dark in that room. I kissed him on the cheek. His skin was cool now. "We slept for hours and hours and hours. When I finally woke up I could tell from the way the sun shined in the window that it was early in the afternoon. The leaves were bright outside the window, as if the whole woods was on fire. Nathan was still asleep and I just lay there beside him for a long time, thinking. I knew that I couldn't keep buried any longer the thing that was the last thing on earth that I wanted to remember. But I couldn't hide it any longer from myself, and I couldn't hide it from Nathan either. We couldn't live together unless I told him. I knew that there were certain things I could never tell him--never!--but there was at least one thing he had to know, otherwise we couldn't continue on, never get married surely, never. And without Nathan I would be... nothing. So I make up my mind to tell him this thing which was not a secret really, but just something I had never mentioned because the pain of it was still more than I could bear. Nathan was still sleeping. His face was very pale but all that craziness had gone away from it and he looked peaceful. I had the feeling that maybe all the drugs had left him, the demon had gone and all the black winds, you know, of the tempête, and he had returned to being the Nathan I loved. "I got up and walked to the window and looked at the woods--they were bright and flaming, so beautiful. I almost forgot the pain in my side and all that had happened, and the poison and the mad things Nathan have done. When I was a little girl in Cracow and very religious I would play a game with myself which I called 'the shape of God.' And I would see something so beautiful--a cloud or a flame or the green side of a mountain or the way light filled the sky--and I would try to discover God's shape in it, as if God actually took the form of what I was watching and lived in it and I was able to see Him there. And that day when I looked out the window at those incredible woods that sweeped down to the river and the sky so clear above, why, I forgot myself and for a moment I felt like a little girl again and begun to try to see God's shape in these things. There was a wonderful smell of smoke in the air and I saw smoke rising far off in the woods and I saw God's shape in that. But then--but then it came to mind what I really knew, what was really the truth: that God have left me again, left me forever. I felt I could actually see Him go, turning His back on me like some great beast and go crashing away through the leaves. God! Stingo, I could see this huge back of Him, going away in the trees. The light faded then and I felt such an emptiness--the memory coming back and knowing what I would have to say. "When Nathan finally waked up I was beside him on the bed. He smiled and said a few words and I felt he hardly knew what had happened all these last hours. We said one or two ordinary things to each other, you know, sleepy waking-up things, and then I bent down close to him and said, 'Darling, I have something I must say to you.' And he begun to come back with a laugh. 'Don't look so--' Stopping like that, and then he said, 'What?' And I said, 'You thought I have been some kind of unattached woman from Poland who has never married and so on, with no family or anything in the past.' I said, 'It has been easier for me to make it look like that, for I've not wanted to dig up the past. I know it has been easier for you, maybe, too.' He looked painful and then I said, 'But I must tell you. It is just this. I was married a number of years ago and I had a child, a little boy named Jan who was with me at Auschwitz.' I stopped speaking then, looking away, and he was silent for a long, long time, and then I heard him say, 'Oh good God, oh good God.' He kept saying this over and over. Then he was quiet again, and finally he said, 'What happened to him? What happened to your little boy?' And I said to him, 'I don't know. He was lost.' And he said, 'You mean dead?' And I said, 'I don't know. Yes. Maybe. It don't matter. Just lost. Lost.' "And that's all I could say, except for one thing. I said, 'Now that I've told you I must make you promise this. I must make you promise never to ask about my child ever again. Or speak of him. Nor will I ever speak of him either.' And he promised with one word--'Yes,' he said--but the look on his face was filled with such sorrow that I had to turn away. "Don't ask me, Stingo, don't ask me why--after all this--I was still ready for Nathan to piss on me, rape me, stab me, beat me, blind me, do anything with me that he desired. Anyway, a long time passed before he spoke to me again. Then he said, 'Sophielove, I'm insane, you know. I want to apologize for my insanity.' And after a bit he said, 'Want to fuck?' And I said right away without even thinking twice, 'Yes. Oh yes.' And we made love all afternoon, which made me forget the pain but forget God too, and Jan, and all the other things I had lost. And I knew Nathan and me would live for a while more together."