Sophie's Choice Read online

  I turned back toward the house. I thought I would go and sit down and reply to my father’s letter. I wanted to ask him to tell me in greater detail the circumstances of Maria’s death—probably not knowing at the time, however, that my subconscious was already beginning to grapple with that death as the germinal idea for the novel so lamentably hanging fire on my writing table. But I did not write any such letter that evening. Because when I returned to the house I encountered Sophie in the flesh for the first time and fell, if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomlessly in love with her. It was a love which, as time wore on that summer, I realized had many reasons for laying claim to my existence. But I must confess that at first, certainly one of them was her distant but real resemblance to Maria Hunt. And what is still ineffaceable about my first glimpse of her is not simply the lovely simulacrum she seemed to me of the dead girl but the despair on her face worn as Maria surely must have worn it, along with the premonitory, grieving shadows of someone hurtling headlong toward death.

  At the house Sophie and Nathan were embroiled in combat just outside the door of my room. I heard their voices clear on the summer night, and saw them battling in the hallway as I walked up the front steps.

  “Don’t give me any of that, you hear,” I heard him yell.

  “You’re a liar! You’re a miserable lying cunt, do you hear me? A cunt!”

  “You’re a cunt too,” I heard her throw back at him. “Yes, you’re a cunt, I think.” Her tone lacked aggressiveness.

  “I am not a cunt,” he roared. “I can’t be a cunt, you dumb fucking Polack. When are you going to learn to speak the language? A prick I might be, but not a cunt, you moron. Don’t you ever call me that again, you hear? Not that you’ll ever get a chance.”

  “You called me that!”

  “But that’s what you are, you moron—a two-timing, double-crossing cunt! Spreading that twat of yours for a cheap, chiseling quack doctor. Oh God!” he howled, and his voice rose in wild uncontained rage. “Let me out of here before I murder you—you whore! You were born a whore and you’ll die a whore!”

  “Nathan, listen...” I heard her plead. And now as I approached closer to the front door I saw the two of them pressed together, defined in obscure relief against the pink hallway where a dangling forty-watt lightbulb, nearly engulfed by a cloud of fluttering moths, cast its palsied chiaroscuro. Dominating the scene by his height and force was Nathan: broad-shouldered, powerful-looking, crowned with a shock of hair swarthy as a Sioux’s, he resembled a more attenuated and frenetic John Garfield, with Garfield’s handsome, crookedly agreeable face—theoretically agreeable, I should say, for now the face was murky with passion and rage, was quite emphatically anything but agreeable, suffused as it was with such an obvious eagerness for violence. He wore a light sweater and slacks and appeared to be in his late twenties. He held Sophie’s arm tight in his grasp, and she flinched before his onslaught like a rosebud quivering in a windstorm. Sophie I could barely see in the dismal light. I was able to discern only her disheveled mane of straw-colored hair and, behind Nathan’s shoulder, about a third of her face. This included a frightened eyebrow, a small mole, a hazel eye, and a broad, lovely swerve of Slavic cheekbone across which a single tear rolled like a drop of quicksilver. She had begun to sob like a bereft child. “Nathan, you must listen, please,” she was saying between sobs. “Nathan! Nathan! Nathan! I’m sorry I called you that.”

  He thrust her arm down abruptly and drew back from her. “You fill me with in-fin-ite revulsion,” he shouted. “Pure un-a-dul-ter-a-ted loathing. I’m getting out of here before I murder you!” He wheeled away from her.

  “Nathan, don’t go!” she implored him desperately and reached out to him with both hands. “I need you, Nathan. You need me.” There was something plaintive, childlike in her voice, which was light in timbre, almost fragile, breaking a little in the upper register and of a faint huskiness lower down. The Polish accent overlaying it all made it charming or, I thought, would have made it so under less horrible circumstances. “Please don’t go, Nathan,” she cried. “We need each other. Don’t go!”

  “Need?” he retorted, turning back toward her. “Me need you? Let me tell you something”—and here he began to shake his entire outstretched hand at her, as his voice grew more outraged and unstrung—“I need you like any goddamned insufferable disease I can name. I need you like a case of anthrax, hear me. Like trichinosis! I need you like a biliary calculus. Pellagra! Encephalitis! Bright’s disease, for Christ’s sake! Carcinoma of the fucking brain, you fucking miserable whore! Aaaahooooo-o-o!” This last was a rising, wavering wail—a spine-chilling sound that mingled fury with lamentation in a way that seemed almost liturgical, like the keening of a maddened rabbi. “I need you like death,” he bellowed in a choked voice. “Death!”

  Once more he turned away, and again she said, weeping, “Please don’t go, Nathan!” Then, “Nathan, where are you going?”

  He was near the door now, barely two feet away from me where I stood at the threshold, irresolute, not knowing whether to forge on toward my room or to turn and flee. “Going?” he shouted. “I’ll tell you where I’m going—I’m going to get on the first subway train and go to Forest Hills! I’m going to borrow my brother’s car and come back here and load up my things in the car. Then I’m going to clear out of this place.” All of a sudden his voice diminished in volume, his manner became somewhat more collected, even casual, but his tone was dramatically, slyly threatening. “After that, maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to sit down and write a registered letter to the Immigration Service. I’m going to tell them that you’ve got the wrong visa. I’m going to tell them that they should issue you a whore’s visa, if they’ve got one. If they don’t, I’m going to tell them they’d better ship you back to Poland for peddling your ass to any doctor in Brooklyn that wants a quick lay. Back to Cracow, baby!” He gave a satisfied chuckle. “Oh, baby, back to Cracow!”

  He turned and plunged out the door. As he did so he brushed against me, and this caused him to whirl about again and draw up short. I could not tell whether he thought I had overheard him or not. Clearly winded, he was panting heavily and he eyed me up and down for a moment. Then I felt that he thought I had overheard, but it didn’t matter. Considering his emotional state, I was surprised at his way with me, which if not exactly gracious seemed at least momentarily civil, as if I had been magnanimously excluded from the territory of his rage.

  “You the new roomer Fink told me about?” he managed between breaths.

  I answered in the feeblest, briefest affirmative.

  “You’re from the South,” he said. “Morris told me you were from the South. Said your name’s Stingo. Yetta needs a Southerner in her house to fit in with all the other funnies.” He sent a dark glance back toward Sophie, then looked at me and said, “Too bad I won’t be around for a lively conversation, but I’m getting out of here. It would have been nice to talk with you.” And here his tone became faintly ominous, the forced civility tapering off into the baldest sarcasm I had heard in a long time. “We’d have had great fun, shootin’ the shit, you and I. We could have talked about sports. I mean Southern sports. Like lynching niggers—or coons, I think you call them down there. Or culture. We could have talked about Southern culture, and maybe could have sat around here at old Yetta’s listening to hillbilly records. You know, Gene Autry, Roy Acuff and all those other standard bearers of classical Southern culture.” He had been scowling as he spoke, but now a smile parted his dark, troubled face and before I knew it he had reached out and clasped my unwilling hand in a firm handshake. “Ah well, that’s what could have been. Too bad. Old Nathan’s got to hit the road. Maybe in another life, Cracker, we’ll get together. So long, Cracker! See you in another life.”

  And then, before my lips could part to utter protest or counter with an outraged sally or insult, Nathan had turned and pounded down the steps to the sidewalk, where his hard leather heels mad
e a demonic clack-clack-clack as the sound receded, then faded out beneath the darkening trees, in the direction of the subway.

  It is a commonplace that small cataclysms—an automobile accident, a stalled elevator, a violent assault witnessed by others—bring out an unnatural communicativeness among total strangers. After Nathan had disappeared into the night, I approached Sophie without hesitation. I had no idea what I was about to say—doubtless some gauche words of comfort—but it was she who spoke first, behind hands clenched to a tear-stained face. “It is so unfair of him,” she sobbed. “Oh, I love him so!”

  I did the clumsy thing they often do in movies at such a point, when dialogue is a problem. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and silently gave it to her. She took it readily and began to mop at her eyes. “Oh, I love him so much!” she exclaimed. “So much! So much! I’ll die without him.”

  “There, there,” I said, or something equally awful.

  Her eyes implored me—I whom she had never before laid eyes on—with the despairing plea of an innocent prisoner protesting her virtue before the bar. I’m no whore, your honor, she seemed to be trying to say. I was flabbergasted both by her candor and her passion. “It is so unfair of him,” she said again. “To say that! He is the only man I have ever made love to, except my husband. And my husband’s dead!” And she was shaken by more sobs, and more tears poured forth, turning my handkerchief into a wet little monogrammed sponge. Her nose was swollen with grief and the pink tear stains marred her extraordinary beauty, but not so much that the beauty itself (including the mole, felicitously placed near the left eye, like a tiny satellite) failed to melt me on the spot—a distinct feeling of liquefaction emanating not from the heart’s region but, amazingly, from that of the stomach, which began to churn as if in revolt from a prolonged fast. I hungered so deeply to put my arms around her, to soothe her, that it became pure discomfort, but a cluster of oddly assorted inhibitions caused me to hold back. Also, I would be a liar if I did not confess that through all this there rapidly expanded in my mind a strictly self-serving scheme, which was that somehow, God granting me the luck and strength, I would take over this flaxen Polish treasure where Nathan, the thankless swine, had left off.

  Then a tingling sensation in the small of my back made me realize that Nathan was behind us again, standing on the front steps. I wheeled about. He had managed to return in phantasmal silence and now glared at the two of us with a malevolent gleam, leaning forward with one arm outstretched against the frame of the door. “And one last thing,” he said to Sophie in a flat hard voice. “One other last thing, whore. The records. The record albums. The Beethoven. The Handel. The Mozart. All of them. I don’t want to have to lay eyes on you again. So take the records—take the records out of your room and put them in my room, on the chair by the door. The Brahms you can keep only because Blackstock gave it to you. Keep it, see? The rest of them I want, so make sure you put them where I tell you. If you don’t, when I come back here to pack up I’ll break your arms, both of them.” After a pause, he inhaled deeply and whispered, “So help me God, I’ll break your fucking arms!”

  Then this time he was gone for good, moving in loose-limbed strides back to the sidewalk and quickly losing himself in the darkness.

  Having no more tears to shed for the moment, Sophie slowly composed herself. “Thank you, you were kind,” she said to me softly, in the stuffed-head-cold tones of one who has wept copiously and long. She stretched out her hand and pressed into my own the handkerchief, a soggy wad. As she did so I saw for the first time the number tattooed on the suntanned, lightly freckled skin of her forearm—a purple number of at least five digits, too small to read in this light but graven, I could tell, with exactitude and craft. To the melting love in my stomach was added a sudden ache, and with an involuntary motion that was quite inexplicable (for one brought up to mind where he put his hands) I gently grasped her wrist, looking more closely at the tattoo. Even at that instant I knew my curiosity might be offensive, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Where were you?” I said.

  She spoke a fibrous name in Polish, which I understood, barely, to be “Oświȩcim.” Then she said, “I was there for a long time. Longtemps.” She paused. “Vous voyez...” Another pause. “Do you speak French?” she said. “My English is very bad.”

  “Un peu,” I replied, grossly exaggerating my facility. “It’s a little rusty.” Which meant that I had next to none.

  “Rusty? What is rusty?”

  “Sale” I tried recklessly.

  “Dirty French?” she said, with the faintest whisper of a smile. After a moment she asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Which did not even draw from me a “Nein.”

  “Oh, forget it,” I said. “You speak good English.” Then after a moment’s silence I said, “That Nathan! I’ve never seen anything like him in my life. I know it’s not my business, but—but he must be nuts! How can he talk like that to anyone? If you ask me, you’re well rid of him.”

  She shut her eyes tightly and pursed her lips in pain, as if in recollection of all that had just transpired. “Oh, he’s right about so much,” she whispered. “Not about I wasn’t faithful. I don’t mean that. I have been faithful to him always. But other things. When he said I didn’t dress right. Or when he said I was a sloppy Pole and didn’t clean up. Then he called me a dirty Polack, and I knew that I... yes, deserved it. Or when he took me to these nice restaurants and I always keeped...” She questioned me with her gaze.

  “Kept,” I said. Without overdoing it, I will from time to time have to try to duplicate the delicious inaccuracies of Sophie’s English. Her command was certainly more than adequate and—for me, anyway—actually enhanced by her small stumbles in the thickets of syntax, especially upon the snags of our grisly irregular verbs. “Kept what?” I asked.

  “Kept the carte, the menu I mean. I so often would keep the menu, put it in my bag for a souvenir. He said a menu cost money, that I was stealing. He was right about that, you know.”

  ‘Taking a menu doesn’t exactly seem like grand larceny to me, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Look, again I know it’s none of my business, but—”

  Clearly determined to resist my attempts to help restore her self-esteem, she interrupted me, saying, “No, I know it was wrong. What he said was true, I done so many things that were wrong. I deserved it, that he leave me. But I was never unfaithful to him. Never! Oh, I’ll just die now, without him! What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

  For a moment I was afraid that she might soar off on another little mad fugue of grief, but she gave only a single hoarse gulping sob, like some final punctuation mark, then turned away from me. “You’ve been kind,” she said. “Now I must go up to my room.”

  As she went slowly up the stairs I took a good look at her body in its clinging silk summer dress. While it was a beautiful body, with all the right prominences, curves, continuities and symmetries, there was something a little strange about it—nothing visibly missing and not so much deficient as reassembled. And that was precisely it, I could see. The odd quality proclaimed itself through the skin. It possessed the sickish plasticity (at the back of her arms it was especially noticeable) of one who has suffered severe emaciation and whose flesh is even now in the last stages of being restored. Also, I felt that underneath that healthy suntan there lingered the sallowness of a body not wholly rescued from a terrible crisis. But none of these at all diminished a kind of wonderfully negligent sexuality having to do at that moment, at least, with the casual but forthright way her pelvis moved and with her truly sumptuous rear end. Despite past famine, her behind was as perfectly formed as some fantastic prize-winning pear; it vibrated with magical eloquence, and from this angle it so stirred my depths that I mentally pledged to the Presbyterian orphanages of Virginia a quarter of my future earnings as a writer in exchange for that bare ass’s brief lodging—thirty seconds would do—within the compass of my cupped, supplicant palms. Old Stingo, I mused as she climb
ed upward, there must be some perversity in this dorsal fixation. Then as she reached the top of the stairs she turned, looking down, and smiled the saddest smile imaginable. “I hope I haven’t annoyed you with my problems,” she said. “I am so sorry.” And she moved toward her room and said, “Good night.”

  So then, from the only comfortable chair in my room, where I sat reading Aristophanes that night, I was able to see a section of the upstairs hallway through my partly open door. Once around midevening I saw Sophie take to his room the record albums which Nathan had commanded her to return to him. On her way back I could see that again she was crying. How could she go on so? Where did those tears come from? Later she played over and over on the phonograph the final movement of that First Symphony of Brahms which he so big-heartedly had allowed her to keep. It must have been her only album now. All evening that music filtered down through the paper-thin ceiling, the lordly and tragic French horn mingling in my head with the flute’s antiphonal, piercing birdcall to fill my spirit with a sadness and nostalgia almost more intense than any I had ever felt before. I thought of the moment of that music’s creation. It was music that, among other things, spoke of a Europe of a halcyon time, bathed in the soft umber glow of serene twilights—of children in pigtails and pinafores bobbing along in dogcarts, of excursions in the glades of the Wiener Wald and strong Bavarian beer, of ladies from Grenoble with parasols strolling the glittering rims of glaciers in the high Alps, and balloon voyages, of gaiety, of vertiginous waltzes, of Moselle wine, of Johannes Brahms himself, with beard and black cigar, contemplating his titanic chords beneath the leafless, autumnal beech trees of the Hofgarten. It was a Europe of almost inconceivable sweetness—a Europe that Sophie, drowning in her sorrow above me, could never have known.