William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (253 page)

“Remember the experiment I was telling you about?” he said. “That blood-classification thing that had us stumped all last week. The problem I was telling you about having to do with serum enzymes?”

Sophie nodded. She had never understood the vaguest thing about his laboratory research but had listened faithfully and remained an attentive one-woman gallery for his complex disquisitions on physiology and the chemical enigmas of the human body. Had he been a poet, he would have read her his gorgeous verse. But he was a biologist and he made her captive to macrocytes and hemoglobin electrophoresis and ion exchange resins. She understood nothing of this. But she loved it all because she loved Nathan, and now in reply to his question, which was largely rhetorical, she said, “Oh yes.”

“We crashed through on that this afternoon. We got the whole problem licked. I mean
licked,
Sophie! It was our biggest barrier by far. Now all we have to do is to run the whole experiment one more time for the Standards and Control Department—a formality, that’s all—and we’ll be in like a bunch of burglars. We’ll have a clear road to the most important medical breakthrough in history!”

“Hooray!” said Sophie.

“Give me a kiss.” He
shmoozed
and whispered around the edge of her lips with his own lips and stuck his tongue in her mouth, insinuating it there with droll titillating little forays and retreats, making movements gently copulatory. Then abruptly he drew away. “So we’re going to celebrate at Morty’s. Let’s go!”

“I’m hungry!” she exclaimed. It was not a very firm objection, but she felt compelled to say it, feeling honest stomach pangs.

“We’ll
eat
at Morty’s,” he replied cheerfully, “don’t worry. There’ll be plenty for
noshing
—let’s go!”

“A special bulletin.”
It arrested them both at the same instant—that radio announcer’s voice with its coached and modulated rhythms. Sophie saw Nathan’s face lose all mobility for a split second, as if frozen, and then she herself glimpsed in the mirror her jaw cocked awkwardly sideways in a rigid attitude of dislocation, a pained look in her eyes, as if she had broken a tooth. The announcer was saying that in the prison at Nuremberg ex-Field Marshal Hermann Goring had been discovered dead in his cell, a suicide. The means of death was apparently cyanide poisoning, accomplished orally by a capsule or pill which had been secreted somewhere on his body. Contemptuous to the last (the voice droned on), the condemned Nazi leader thus avoided retribution at the hands of his enemies in the same way as had such of his predecessors in death as Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and the master planner Adolf Hitler... Sophie felt a shiver run through her body and saw Nathan’s face unfreeze, regaining its vivacious shape just as he said with a soft gasp, “Jesus! He beat the man. He beat the man with the rope. That clever, fat son of a bitch!”

He leaped at the radio, hovering over it while he played with the dial. Sophie stirred about restlessly. She had with methodical determination tried to banish from her mind practically everything to do with the past war, and she had completely ignored the Nuremberg trials, which had captured the headlines all during the year. Indeed, her aversion to reading about Nuremberg had provided one of her rationalizations for not applying herself to American journalism and thus improving—or at least enlarging—an important compartment of her English. She had thrust it all from her head, as with nearly everything else of the immediate past. As a matter of fact, so oblivious had she been in recent weeks of the final scene of Götterdämmerung being performed on the stage at Nuremberg that she was quite unaware even that Goring had been sentenced to the gallows, and she was left strangely unmoved by this news that he had thwarted the hangman only hours before his scheduled execution.

Someone named H.V. Kaltenborn was uttering one of those prolonged and portentous obituaries—the voice mentioned among other things that Goring had been a drug addict—and Sophie began to giggle. She giggled at Nathan, carrying on a zany monologue in counterpoint to the depressing biography. “Where in the
fuck
did he hide that capsule of cyanide? Up his ass? Surely they looked up his ass. A dozen times! But in those mountainous cheeks of lard—maybe they missed it. Where else? In his belly button? In a tooth? Didn’t the Army morons look into his navel? Maybe in one of those folds of flab. Under his chin! I’ll bet you Fatso had that capsule tucked away there all the time. Even as he was grinning at Shawcross, at Telford Taylor, grinning at the madness of the whole proceedings, he had that pill tucked up under his fat chin...” A squawk of static. Sophie heard the commentator say, “Many informed observers are of the opinion that it was Goring more than any other single German leader who was responsible for instituting the concept of the concentration camps. Although roly-poly and jolly in appearance, reminding many people of a comic-opera buffoon, Goring, it is believed, in his evil genius was the real father of such places which shall be ever known in infamy as Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz...”

Sophie suddenly wandered away behind the Chinese screen and busied herself at the washbasin. She felt a hovering and ominous discomfort at the bubbling-over of all the things on earth she wanted to forget. Why hadn’t she left that damned radio turned off? Through the screen she listened to the flow of Nathan’s soliloquy. It no longer seemed so funny to her because she knew how wound up Nathan could get, how upset and jangled he could become when in certain moods he tried to reckon with the recently bygone unspeakables. It could at times turn into a preoccupying rage that scared her, so quickly was he transformed from his exuberant, rollicking, outgoing self to a desperate soul riddled with anguish. “Nathan,” she called. “Nathan darling, turn off the radio and let’s go to Morty’s. I’m really so hungy. Please!”

But she could tell he didn’t hear her, or didn’t care to, and she wondered if—just possibly—the foundation of his obsession about the Nazi handiwork, the whole intolerable history which she yearned to reject as passionately as he seemingly desired to embrace, had not been laid that afternoon only weeks before when they had seen a certain newsreel. For at the RKO Albee theatre, where they had gone to a film staring Danny Kaye (still her favorite clown in all the world), the glorious mood of tomfoolery had been abruptly shattered by a brief sequence in a newsreel showing the Warsaw ghetto. Sophie had been washed in a flood of recognition. Even in its rubble, like an exploded volcano, the configuration of the ghetto was familiar to her (she had lived on its perimeter), but as with all movie scenes of war-blasted Europe she tended to narrow her eyes to slits, as if to filter out the wasteland and render it even more a smudge, a neutral blur. But she was conscious of some religious ceremony as an assemblage of Jews unveiled a monument commemorating their massacre and their martyrdom and the sound of a tenor voice keened its Hebrew requiem over the desolate gray scene like an angel with a dagger through its heart. In the darkness of the theatre Sophie heard Nathan murmur the unfamiliar word
Kaddish,
and when they emerged into the sunlight he passed his fingers in a distraught motion across his eyes and she saw the tears pouring down his cheeks. She was shocked, for it was the very first time she had ever seen Nathan—her own Danny Kaye, her own adorable clown—show that kind of emotion.

She moved from behind the Chinese screen. “Come on, darling,” she called in a lightly begging tone, but she could tell that he was not about to budge from the radio. She heard him cackle with high sardonic glee. “The boneheads—they let Fatso get away with it like all the others!” As she put on lipstick she reflected with wonder on how Nuremberg and its revelations had so powerfully taken possession of Nathan’s thoughts during the past couple of months. It had not always been that way; during their first days together he had scarcely seemed aware of the raw actuality of the experience she had gone through, even though the by-products of that experience—her malnutrition, her anemia, her vanished teeth—had been his constant and devoted concern. Certainly he had not been entirely unaware of the camps; perhaps, Sophie thought, the enormity of their existence had been for Nathan, as for so many Americans, part of a drama too far away, too abstract, too
foreign
(and thus too hard to comprehend) to register fully on the mind. But then almost overnight there had come this change in him, this swift turnabout; the newsreel scene of the Warsaw ghetto had smitten him terribly, for one thing, and this was followed almost immediately by a
Herald Tribune
series which caught his eye: an investigative analysis “in depth” of one of the more satanic exposes coughed up by the Nuremberg tribunal, in which the full scope of the extermination of the Jews at Treblinka—almost unimaginable simply in its spilling forth of sheer statistical evidence—was revealed.

Full revelation had been slow yet certain. The first news of the camp atrocities had been made public, of course, in the spring of 1945, just as the European war ended; it was now a year and half later, but the rainshower of poisonous detail, the agglomeration of facts, piling up at Nuremberg and at trials elsewhere like mountainous unmentionable dungheaps, began to tell more than the consciousness of many could bear, even more than those numbing early newsclips of bulldozed cordwood cadavers suggested. As she watched Nathan, Sophie felt she was regarding a person in the grip of a delayed realization, as in one of the later phases of shock. Until now he simply had not allowed himself to believe. But now he believed, all right. He had made up for lost time by absorbing everything available on the camps, on Nuremberg, on the war, on anti-Semitism and the slaughter of the European Jews (many recent nights that were supposed to be movie or concert evenings for Sophie and Nathan had been sacrificed to Nathan’s restless prowls through the main Brooklyn branch of the New York Public Library, where in the periodical room he scratched notes by the dozen on Nuremberg revelations he had missed and where he borrowed volumes with titles like
The Jew and Human Sacrifice, The New Poland and the Jews
and
The Promise Hitler Kept),
and with his astonishing retentiveness, made himself an expert on the Nazi saga and the Jew, as he had in so many other areas of knowledge. Wasn’t it possible, he asked Sophie once—and, he added, speaking as a cellular biologist—that on the level of human behavior the Nazi phenomenon was analogous to a huge and crucial colony of cells going morally berserk, creating the same kind of danger to the body of humanity as does a virulently malignant tumor in a single human body? He asked her such questions at odd times all during that late summer and fall, and behaved like a soul quite troubled and possessed.

“Like many of his fellow Nazi leaders, Hermann Goring affected a love of art,” said H.V. Kaltenborn in his elderly, cricket’s voice, “but it was a love that went on a rampage in typical Nazi fashion. It was Goring who was responsible more than anyone in the German high command for the looting of art museums and private collections in countries like Holland, Belgium, France, Austria, Poland...” Sophie wanted to stop up her ears. Couldn’t that war, those years, be stuffed into some black closet of the mind and be forgotten? Thinking to divert Nathan again, she called, “It’s wonderful about your experiment, darling. Don’t you want to start to celebrate?”

No answer. The crickety voice still poured out its dry, bleak epitaph. Well, at least, thought Sophie, reflecting on Nathan’s obsession, she had no worry about her being drawn into that nasty web. As with so many other things having to do with her feelings, he had been decent and considerate about that. It was one point upon which she was obdurately firm: she had made it clear to him that she would not and could not speak of her experiences in the camp. Almost everything she had ever told him had crept out in meager detail on that single sweetly remembered evening, in this very room, on the day they had met. Just those few words from her made up the extent of his knowledge. Thereafter she did not have to tell him about her unwillingness to mention this part of her life; he was wonderfully responsive, and she was certain that he simply sensed her resolve not to dredge it all up. And so, except for those moments after he chauffeured her for medical tests or checkups at Columbia and it became absolutely necessary, for diagnostic reasons, to pin down some specific form of mistreatment or deprivation, they never discussed anything at all about Auschwitz. Even then she spoke in cryptic terms, but he clearly understood. And his understanding was another thing she had blessed him for.

She heard the radio snap off, and Nathan hustled around behind the screen and took her in his arms. She was used to such precipitate cowboy assaults. His eyes were glittery bright; she could feel how
high
he was from the vibrations that pulsed through him as from some mysterious new source of captured energy. He kissed her again and once more his tongue probed and explored her mouth. Whenever he was on one of these pill jags he became like a stud bull, feverishly and unapologetically sexual, treating her with an enveloping hot epidermal directness which usually had the power to cause her own blood to stampede and make her immediately ready to receive him. And at this moment she felt start her own warm wetness. He guided her hand down to his prick; she stroked it, feeling it as stiff and rigid and as clearly defined beneath the dampish flannel as the thick end of a broomstick. She weakened in the legs, heard herself moan, and plucked at the tab of his zipper. There had evolved—at such moments—between her animated hand and his receptive prick a familiar, symbiotically loving connection that was exquisitely natural; whenever she began to grope for him she was reminded of the way a tiny baby’s hand goes out to clutch an outstretched finger.

But suddenly he broke away from her. “Let’s go now,” she heard him say. Then: “We’ll have so much fun later. A ball!” And she knew what he meant. Sex with Nathan in his amphetamine thrall was no mere fun—it was unharnessed, oceanic, otherworldly. And it went on forever...

“I didn’t think anything terrible was going to happen until late in the party,” Sophie told me. “This jam session at Morty Haber’s. It was a fear I never felt before with Nathan. Morty Haber had a big loft in a building not far from Brooklyn College and that’s where the party was. Morty—you met him on the beach that day—was an instructor in biology at the college and was one of Nathan’s good friends. I liked Morty, but to be very honest, Stingo, I wasn’t terribly fond of most of Nathan’s friends, male or female. Some of this was my fault, I know. I was very shy, for one thing, and my English wasn’t all that good then. I really mean it when I say I could speak English better than I could understand it, and I would get so lost when they all begun to talking so fast. And they were always talking about things I have no knowledge of or interest in—Freud and psychoanalysis and penis envy and things such as that which maybe I would have cared for a little bit more if they hadn’t been
solemn
and
serious
about it all the time. Oh, I got along with them all right, you must understand. I would just turn my mind off and think of other things when they begun talking about the theory of the orgasm and orgones and such.
Quel ennui!
And I think they liked me okay too, though they had always been a little suspicious of me, and curious, because I would never tell much of my past life and remained a little aloof. Also, I was the only
shiksa
in the crowd and a Polack also. That made me kind of strange and mysterious, I think.