William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (256 page)

She thought of Poland. Her mother’s hands. She had so seldom thought of her mother, that sweet dim self-effacing soul, and now for a moment she could only think of her mother’s elegant expressive pianist’s hands, strong-fingered, at once supple and gentle, like one of the Chopin nocturnes she played, the ivory skin reminding her of the muted white of lilacs. So remarkably white indeed that Sophie only in retrospect ever connected the lovely blanched bloodlessness with the consumption that was devouring her mother even then, and which finally stilled those hands. Mama, Mama, she thought. So often those hands had stroked her brow when as a little girl she spoke the bedtime prayer that every Polish child knows by heart, embedded in the soul more firmly than any nursery rhyme:
Angel of God, my guardian angel, stay always by my side; in the morning, during the day, and in the night, come always to my aid. Amen.
On one of her mother’s fingers was a slender golden band in the entwined form of a cobra, the eye of the serpent made of a tiny ruby. Professor Biega
ń
ski had bought the ring in Aden on his voyage back from Madagascar, where he had gone to reconnoiter the geography of his earliest dream: the relocation of the Polish Jews. His utter vulgarity. Had he shopped long for such a monstrosity? Sophie knew her mother detested the ring but wore it out of her constant deference to Papa. Nathan stopped pissing. She thought of her father and his luxuriant blond hair, beaded with sweat in the bazaars of Arabia...

...“They got Daytona Beach for car races,” says the cop, “this here’s the Merritt Parkway, for what we call motorists, now what’s the big hurry?” He is fair-haired, youngish, freckle-faced, not unpleasant-looking. He wears a Texas sheriff’s hat. Nathan says nothing, staring straight ahead, but Sophie senses him muttering rapidly beneath his breath. Still talktalktalktalktalk but sotto voce. “You want to make you and that nice girl into a statistic?” The cop wears a nameplate:
S. GREZEMKOWSKI
. Sophie says
“Przepraszam
...
”
(“If you please...”) Grzemkowski beams, answers,
“Czy jeste
ś
Polakiem?”
“Yes, I’m Polish,” Sophie returns, encouraged, continuing her native spiel, but the cop interrupts, “I just understand a few words. 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 beaucoup, 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 voice 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 the 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 gun-metal 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 Mäddchen
...
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
“Voilà, 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 far-off 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.”