Sophie's Choice Read online

  With the coming of spring Prospect Park, so close at hand, became Sophie’s favorite refuge—wonderful to recall, a safe place in those days for a solitary and lovely blonde to wander. In the pollen-hazy light, dappled in shades of gold-flecked green, the great towering locusts and elms that loomed over meadow and rolling grass seemed prepared to shelter a fête champêtre in a scene by Watteau or Fragonard, and it was beneath one of these majestic trees that Sophie, on her free days or on weekends, would deposit herself, along with a marvelous luncheon picnic. She later confessed to me, with just the vaguest touch of shame, that she became quite possessed, truly unhinged by food as soon as she arrived in the city. She knew she had to exercise caution in eating. At the D.P. center the doctor from the Swedish Red Cross who took care of her had said that her malnutrition was so severe that it had probably caused some more or less permanent and damaging metabolic changes; he cautioned her that she must guard against quick overconsumption of food, especially of fats, no matter how strong the temptation. But this made it all the more fun for her, a pleasant game, when at lunchtime she entered one of the glorious delicatessens of Flatbush and shopped for her Prospect Park spread. The privilege of choice gave her a feeling achingly sensual. There was so much to eat, such variety and abundance, that each time her breath stopped, her eyes actually filmed over with emotion, and with slow and elaborate gravity she would choose from this sourly fragrant, opulent, heroic squander of food: a pickled egg here, there a slice of salami, half a loaf of pumpernickel, lusciously glazed and black. Bratwurst. Braunschweiger. Some sardines. Hot pastrami. Lox. A bagel, please. Clutching the brown paper bag, the warning like a litany in her mind—“Remember what Dr. Bergstrom said, don’t gorge yourself—she would make her methodical way into one of the farthest recesses of the park, or near a backwater of the huge lake, and there—munching with great restraint, taste buds enthralled in rediscovery—would turn to page 350 of Studs Lonigan.

  She was feeling her way. In every sense of the word having experienced rebirth, she possessed some of the lassitude and, as a matter of fact, a great deal of the helplessness of a newborn child. Her clumsiness was like that of a paraplegic regaining the use of her limbs. Small things, preposterous tiny things, still confounded her. She had forgotten how to connect the two sides of the zipper on a jacket she had been given. Her maladroit fumblings appalled her, and once she burst into tears when, trying to squeeze out some cosmetic lotion from an ordinary plastic tube, she applied such careless force that the stuff gushed out all over her and ruined a new dress. But she was coming along. Occasionally she ached in her bones, her shins and ankles mainly, and her walk still had a hesitancy which seemed connected with the spiritlessness and fatigue that often overtook her and which she desperately hoped would go away. Yet if she did not quite exist in the full flood of sunlight, which is the hackneyed metaphor for good health, she was comfortably and safely far away from that abyssal darkness down into which she had nearly strayed. Specifically, this had been not much more than a year ago, when, at the just-liberated camp in the terminal hours of that existence she no longer allowed herself to remember, the Russian voice—a bass-baritone but harsh, corrosive as lye—pierced her delirium, penetrated the sweat and the fever and the kennel filth of the hard straw-strewn wooden shelf where she lay, to mutter over her in an impassive tone, “I think this one is finished too.” For even then she knew that somehow she was not finished—a truth now borne out, she was relieved to say (while sprawled on the lakeside grass), by the timid yet voluptuous gurgles of hunger that attended the exalted instant, just before biting down, when her nostrils breathed in the briny smell of pickles, and mustard, and the caraway-tinged scent of Levy’s Jewish rye.

  But one late afternoon in June nearly brought a disastrous ending to the precarious equilibrium she had devised for herself. An aspect of the city’s life which had to be entered negatively into her ledger of impressions was the subway. She detested New York subway trains for their grime and their noise, but even more for the claustrophobic nearness of so many human bodies, the rush-hour jam and jostle of flesh which seemed to neutralize, if not to cancel out, the privacy she had sought for so long. She was aware that it was a contradiction that someone who had been through all that she had should be so fastidious, should shrink so from strange epidermises, from alien touch. But there it was, she could not get rid of the feeling; it was a part of her new and transformed identity. A last resolve she had made at the swarming refugee center in Sweden was to spend the rest of her life avoiding people en masse; the rackety BMT mocked such an absurd idea. Returning home one early evening from Dr. Blackstock’s office, she climbed into a car that was even more than normally congested, the hot and humid cage packed not only with the usual mob of sweating, shirt-sleeved and bare-necked Brooklynites of every shade and of every aspect of docile misery but soon with a crowd of screaming high school boys with baseball trappings who flooded aboard the train at a downtown stop, thrusting their way in all directions with such rowdy and brutish force that the sense of pressure became nearly unbearable. Pushed remorselessly toward the end of the aisle in a crush of rubbery torsos and slick perspiring arms, she found herself tripping and side-stepping into the dank dim platform that connected cars, firmly sandwiched between two human shapes whose identity, in an abstracted way, she was trying to discern just as the train screeched to a slow and shuddering halt and the lights went out. She was seized by a queasy fear. An audible feel of chagrin in the car, making itself known by soft moans and sighs, was drowned out by the boys’ raucous cheers, at first so deafening and then so continuous that Sophie, rigidly immobilized in the blackest dark, knew in a flash that no cry or protest would avail her when she felt, now, from behind her the hand slither up between her thighs underneath her skirt.

  If any small consolation was needed, she later reasoned, it was that she was spared the panic which otherwise surely would have overtaken her in such a tumult, in the oppressive heat and on a stopped and darkened train. She might even have groaned like the others. But the hand with its rigid central finger—working with surgical skill and haste, unbelievably assertive as it probed and burrowed—took care of that, causing simple panic to be superseded in her mind by the shocked and horrified disbelief of anyone experiencing sudden digital rape. For such it was, no random and clumsy grope but a swift all-out onslaught on, to put it simply, her vagina, which the disembodied finger sought like some evil, wiggling little rodent, quickly circumvented the silk, then entered at full length, causing her pain, but less pain than a kind of hypnotic astonishment. Dimly she was conscious of fingernails, and heard herself gasp “Please,” certain of the banality, the stupidity of the word even as she uttered it. The whole event could not have been of more than thirty seconds’ duration when finally the loathsome paw withdrew and she stood trembling in a suffocating darkness which it seemed would never know light again. She had no idea how long it was before the lights came on—five minutes, perhaps ten—but when they did, and the train began to move with a shuffling around of bodies, she realized that she had not the slightest way of knowing her attacker, submerged somewhere amid the half-dozen male backs and shoulders and protruding paunches surrounding her. Somehow she managed to flee the train at the next stop.

  A straightforward, conventional rape would have done less violation to her spirit and identity, she thought later, would have filled her with less horror and revulsion. Any atrocity she had witnessed in the past five years, any outrage she herself had suffered—and she had known both past all recounting—had not numbed her to this gross insult. A classical face-to-face rape, however repellent, would at least permit the small gratification of knowing your assailant’s features, of making him know that you knew, quite aside from the chance it presented, through a grimace or a hot level stare or even tears, of registering something: hatred, fright, malediction, disgust, possibly just derision. But this anonymous stroke in the dark, this slimy and bodiless entry from the rear, like a stab in the back from s
ome vile marauder unknown to you forever; no, she would have preferred (she told me many months later when distance from the act allowed her to regard it with a saving hint of humor) a penis. It was bad enough in itself, yet she could have borne the episode with comparative strength at some other time in her life. But now her distress was compounded by the way it upset the fragile balance of her newly renovated psyche, by the manner in which this looting of her soul (for she felt it to be that as much as her body) not only pushed her back toward the cauchemar, the nightmare from which she was ever so delicately and slowly trying to retreat, but actually symbolized, in its wanton viciousness, the very nature of that nightmare world.

  She who had for so long been off and on literally naked and who, these few months in Brooklyn, had so painstakingly reclothed herself in self-assurance and sanity had again by this act, she knew, been stripped bare. And she felt once more the freezing cold of the spirit. Without giving a specific reason for her request—and telling no one, not even Yetta Zimmerman, what had happened—she asked Dr. Blackstock for a week off from work and went to bed. Day after day in the balmiest part of summer she lay asprawl with the blinds drawn down to admit only thin yellow slivers of light. She kept her radio silent. She ate little, read nothing, and rose only to heat tea on her hot plate. In the deep shadows she listened to the crack of ball against bat and the shouts of boys in the baseball fields of the park, drowsed, and thought of the womblike perfection of that clock into which as a child she had crawled in her fancy, afloat on a steel spring, regarding the levers, the rubies, the wheels. Ever threatening at the margin of her consciousness were the shape and shadow, the apparition of the camp—the very name of which she had all but rejected from her private lexicon, and seldom used or thought of, and which she knew she could allow to trespass upon memory only at the danger of her losing—which is to say taking—her life. If the camp came too close again, as it had before in Sweden, would she have the strength to withstand the temptation, or would she seize the cutting edge once more and this time not botch the job? The question helped her to occupy the hours as she lay there those days, gazing up at the ceiling where flickers of light, seeping in from outside, swam like minnows on the desolating pink.

  Providentially, though, it was music that helped save her, as it had in the past. On the fifth or sixth day—she recalled only that it was a Saturday—she awoke after a restless night filled with confused, menacing dreams and as if by old habit stretched out her hand and switched on the tiny Zenith radio which she kept on her bedside table. She had not meant to, it was simple reflex; the reason she had shut music out during these days of malignant depression was that she had found she could not bear the contrast between the abstract yet immeasurable beauty of music and the almost touchable dimensions of her own aching despair. But unknown to herself, she must have been open and receptive to the mysteriously therapeutic powers of W. A. Mozart, M.D., for the very first phrases of the music—the great Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major—caused her to shiver all over with uncomplicated delight. And suddenly she knew why this was so, why this sonorous and noble statement so filled with peculiar, chilling dissonances should flood her spirit with relief and recognition and joy. For aside from its intrinsic loveliness, it was a work whose very identity she had sought for ten years. She had been smitten nearly mad with the piece when an ensemble from Vienna had visited Cracow a year or so before the Anschluss. Sitting in the concert hall, she had listened to the fresh new work as in a trance, and let the casements and doors of her mind swing wide to admit the luxuriant, enlaced and fretted harmonies, and those wild dissonances, inexhaustibly inspired. At a time of her early youth made up of the perpetual discovery of musical treasures, this was a treasure newly minted and supreme. Yet she never heard the piece again, for like everything else, the Sinfonia Concertante and Mozart, and the plaintive sweet dialogue between violin and viola, and the flutes, the strings, the dark-throated horns were all blown away on the war’s wind in a Poland so barren, so smothered with evil and destruction that the very notion of music was a ludicrous excresence.

  So in those years of cacophony in bombed-out Warsaw, and later at the camp, the memory of that work faded, even the title, which she ultimately confused with the titles of other pieces of music she had known and loved in time long past, until all that was left was a blurred but exquisite recollection of a moment of unrecapturable bliss, in Cracow, in another era. But in her room that morning the work, joyously blaring through the plastic larynx of the cheap little radio, brought her abruptly upright with quickened heartbeat and with an unfamiliar sensation around her mouth which she realized was a smile. For minutes she sat there listening, smiling, chilled, ravished while the unrecapturable became captured and slowly began to melt her fierce anguish. Then when the music was finished, and she had carefully written down the name of the work as the announcer described it, she went to the window and raised the blind. Gazing out at the baseball diamond at the edge of the park, she found herself wondering if she would ever have enough money to buy a phonograph and a recording of the Sinfonia Concertante and then realized that such a thought in itself meant that she was coming out of the shadows.

  But thinking this, she still knew she had a long way to go. The music may have buoyed her spirit but her retreat into darkness had left her body feeling weak and ravaged. Some instinct told her that this was because she had eaten so little that the effect had been almost that of a fast; even so, she could not explain and was frightened by her loss of appetite, the fatigue, the knife-edge pains coursing down along her shins, and especially by the sudden onset of her menstrual period, arriving many days too early and with the blood flowing so copiously it was like a hemorrhage. Could this be, she wondered, an effect of her rape? The next day when she returned to work she resolved to ask Dr. Blackstock to examine her and suggest a course of treatment. She was not medically unsophisticated, so Sophie was aware of the irony involved in her seeking the ministrations of a chiropractor, but such strictures involving her employer she had of necessity abandoned when she took the desperately needed job in the first place. She knew, at least, that whatever he did was legal and that, of the multitude of the afflicted who streamed in and out of his office (including a number of policemen), some at least seemed benefited by his spinal manipulations, his pullings and stretchings and twistings and the other bodily stratagems he employed in the sanctum of his office. But the important thing was that he was one of the few people she knew well enough to turn to for advice of any kind. Thus she had a certain dependence on him, totally aside from her meager pay. And beyond this, she had come to be rather attached to the doctor in an amused and tolerant way.

  Blackstock, a robust, handsome, gracefully balding man in his middle fifties, was one of God’s blessed whose destiny had led him from the stony poverty of a shtetl in Russian Poland to the most sublime satisfactions that American materialistic success could offer. A dandy whose wardrobe ran to embroidered waistcoats, broad foulard ties and carnation boutonnieres, a great talker and joketeller (the stories mainly in Yiddish), he seemed to float in such a luminosity of optimism and good cheer that he actually gave off a kind of candlepower. He was a lubricous charmer, an obsessive bestower of fetching trinkets and favors, and he performed for his patients, for Sophie, for anyone who would watch, clever little magic tricks and feats of sleight of hand. In the pain of her difficult transition Sophie might have been dismayed by such boundless and energetic high spirits, these corny jokes and pranks, but behind it all she saw only such a childlike desire to be loved that she couldn’t possibly let it offend her; besides, despite the obvious nature of his humor, he had been the first person in years who had caused her honest laughter.

  About his affluence he was breath-takingly direct. Perhaps only a man so indefatigably good-hearted could recite the catalogue of his worldly goods without sounding odious, but he was able to, in a guttural hybrid English whose dominant overtone, Sophie’s ear had learned to detect, was Brooklynese: “Forty t
housand dollars a year income before taxes; a seventy-five-thousand-dollar home in the most elegant part of St. Albans, Queens, free of mortgage, with wall-to-wall carpeting plus indirect lighting in every room; three cars, including a Cadillac Fleetwood with all accessories, and a thirty-two-foot Chris-Craft sleeps six in comfort. All this plus the most darling and adorable wife God ever gave. And me a hungry Jewish youth, a poor nebbish with five dollars landing on Ellis Island not knowing a single individual. Tell me! Tell me why shouldn’t I be the happiest man in the world? Why shouldn’t I want to make people laugh and be happy like me?” No reason at all, thought Sophie one day that winter as she rode back to the office sitting next to Blackstock in the Cadillac after a trip to his house in St. Albans.

  She had gone with him to help him sort out some papers in the auxiliary office he maintained at home, and there for the first time she had met the doctor’s wife—a buxom dyed blonde named Sylvia, garishly clad in ballooning silk pants like a Turkish belly dancer, who showed Sophie around the house, the first she had entered in America. This was an eerie organdy and chintz labyrinth glowing at high noon in the empurpled half-light of a mausoleum, where rosy cupids simpered from the walls down upon a grand piano in fire-engine red and overstuffed chairs glistening beneath protective shrouds of transparent plastic, and where the porcelain bathroom fixtures were jet-black. Later, in the Cadillac Fleetwood with its huge monogram on the front doors—HB—Sophie watched in fascination as the doctor made use of his mobile telephone, installed only recently for a few select customers on an experimental basis, and in Blackstock’s hands, a surpassing implement of love. Later she recalled the dialogue—his part of it, at any rate—as he made contact with his St. Albans abode. “Sylvia sweetness, this is Hymie. Loud and clear you read me? I love you, darling pet. Kisses, kisses, darling. The Fleetwood’s now on Liberty Avenue passing just now Bayside Cemetery. I adore you, darling. Here’s a kiss for my darling. (Smack, smack!) Back in a few. minutes, sweetness.” And a short while later: “Sylvia darling, this is Hymie. I adore you, my darling pet. Now the Fleetwood is at the intersection of Linden Boulevard and Utica Avenue. What a fantastic traffic jam! I kiss you, my darling. (Smack, smack!) I send you many, many kisses. What? You say you’re going shopping in New York? Buy something beautiful to wear for Hymie, my beautiful sweetness. I love you, my darling. Oh, darling, I forgot, take the Chrysler. The Buick’s got a busted fuel pump. Over and out, darling pet.” And then with a glance at Sophie, stroking the receiver: “What a sensational instrument of communication!” Blackstock was a truly happy man. He adored Sylvia more than life itself. Only the fact that he was childless, he once told Sophie, kept him from being absolutely the happiest man on earth...