“You see, they were all listening to the radio about the hangings in Nuremberg. It was some special shortwave broadcast, but actual—you know, direct—and I could hear this CBS reporter in the static sounding very far-off describing everything at Nuremberg just as they were doing the hangings. He said that Von Ribbentrop had already gone, and I think Jodl, and then I think he said Julius Streicher was next. Streicher! I couldn’t stand this! I suddenly felt clammy all over, sick, awful. It is difficult to describe, this sick feeling, because of course you could only be, I mean, insane with gladness that these men were being hanged—I wasn’t sick at that—but because it just reminded me again of so much I wanted to forget. I had this same feeling last spring, like I told you, Stingo, when I saw that picture in the magazine of Rudolf Höss with a rope tied around his neck. And so in that room with these people listening about the hangings at Nuremberg, I just wanted suddenly to escape, you know, and I kept saying to myself: Won’t I ever be free of the past? I watched Nathan. He was still on his incredible high, I could tell from his eyes, but he was listening like everyone else to the hangings and his face was very dark and aching. There was something frightening and wrong about his face. And the rest. Everything that was fun, that was truly gay about the party had disappeared, at least in that room. It was like being at a Mass for the dead. Finally the news stopped or maybe the radio become turned off or something and the people all began talking very seriously and with this sudden passion.
“I knew all of them a little, they were friends of Nathan. There was one friend especially I remember. I have talked to him before. His name was Harold Schoenthal, Nathan’s age I guess, and he taught I think it was philosophy at the college. He was very intense and serious but he was one of the ones I liked a little more than the others. I thought he was really a very feeling person. He always seemed to me very tortured and unhappy, very conscious of being Jewish, and he talked a lot, and this night I remember he was even more in this high key and excited, though I’m sure he wasn’t high on anything like Nathan, even beer or wine. He was quite, well, arresting-looking, with a bald head and a droopy mustache like—I don’t know the animal in English—a morse on the iceberg, and a big belly. Yes, walrus. He kept walking up and down the room with his pipe—people always listened when he spoke—and he begun to say things such as ‘Nuremberg is a farce, these hangings are a farce. This is only a token vengeance, a sideshow!’ He said, ‘Nuremberg is an obscene diversion to give the appearance of justice while murderous hatred of the Jews still poisons the German people. It is the German people who should be themselves exterminated—they who allowed these men to rule them and kill Jews. Not these’—and he used these words—‘not these handful of carnival villains.’ And he said, ‘What about Germany of the future? Are we going to allow those people to grow rich and slaughter Jews again?’ It was like listening to a very powerful speaker, this man. I had heard he was supposed to keep his students hypnotized and I remember being fascinated as I watched and listened. He had this terrible angoisse in his voice, talking about the Jews. He asked where on earth are the Jews safe today? And then answered himself, saying nowhere. Alors, he asked, where on earth have the Jews ever been safe? And he said nowhere.
“Then suddenly I realized he was talking about Poland. He was speaking how at one of the trials, Nuremberg or somewhere, there have been this testimony about how during the war some Jews escaped from one of the camps in Poland and tried to find safety among the local people but the Poles turned against the Jews and did not help them. They did horribly worse. In fact, they murdered them all. These Polish people just killed all the Jews. This was a horrible fact, Schoenthal said, and it proves that Jews can never be safe anywhere. He almost shouted that word anywhere. Even in America! Mon dieu, I remember his rage. When he spoke of Poland I felt even sicker and my heart begun to beat fast, although I don’t think he was giving me any special thought. He said Poland might be the worst example, perhaps even worse than Germany or at least as bad, for wasn’t it in Poland where after the death of Pilsudski, who protected the Jews, the people leaped to persecute the Jews as soon as they had a chance? He said wasn’t it in Poland that young, harmless Jewish students were segregated, made to sit on separate seats at school and treated worse than Negroes in Mississippi? What make people think this couldn’t happen in America, things like these ‘ghetto benches’ for the students? And when Schoenthal speak like this, of course I couldn’t stop thinking of my father. My father, who helped create that idea himself. It was suddenly like the presence, l’esprit of my father have come into the room very near me, and I wanted to drop through the floor. I couldn’t stand no more of this. I had put such things away from myself for so long, buried them, sweeped them under the rug—a coward, I suppose, but I felt this way—and now it was all pouring out of this Schoenthal and I couldn’t stand it. Merde, I couldn’t stand it!
“So when Schoenthal was still talking I went tiptoe around to Nathan’s side and make a whisper to him that we must go home, remember the trip to Connecticut tomorrow. But Nathan didn’t move. He was like—well, he was like someone who was hypnotized, like one of Schoenthal’s students I had heard about, just staring at him, listening to each word. But finally he whispered back to me that he was staying, that I should now go home by myself. He had this wild-eyed look, I was frightened. He said, ‘I won’t be able to sleep until Christmas.’ He said with this crazy look, ‘Go home now and sleep and I’ll come and get you early in the morning.’ So I left in a very big hurry, stopping up my ears to Schoenthal, whose words were half killing me. I took a taxi home, feeling terrible. I completely forgot that Nathan said we were going to be married, I felt that awful. I felt every minute like I must begin to scream.”
Connecticut.
The capsule in which reposed the sodium cyanide (tiny granulated crystals as characterless as Bromo-Seltzer, said Nathan, and similarly water soluble, melting almost immediately, though not effervescent) was really quite small, a bit smaller than any medicinal capsule she had ever seen, and was also metallically reflective, so that as he held it inches above her face where she lay against the pillow—wiggling it between thumb and forefinger and causing the pinkish oblong to do a little midair pirouette—she could see shimmering along its surface the miniature conflagration which was only a captured image of the autumnal leaves outside, set afire by the sunset. Drowsily Sophie inhaled the odor of cooking from the kitchen two floors below—a mingled fragrance of bread and, she thought, cabbage—and watched the capsule dance slowly in his hand. Sleep moved up like a tide through her brain; she was aware of steady lulling vibrations that partook of both sound and light, erasing apprehension—blue trance of Nembutal. She mustn’t suck it. She would have to bite down hard, he told her, but don’t worry: there would be a swift bittersweet taste like that of almonds, an odor a bit like that of peaches, then nothing. Profound black nothing—rienada fucking nothing!—accomplished with an instantaneousness so complete as to preclude even the onset of pain. Possibly, he said, just possibly a split second’s distress—discomfort rather—but as brief and as inconsequential as a hiccup. Rien nada niente fucking nothing!
“Then, Irma my love, then—” A hiccup.
Without looking at him, staring past him at the amber photograph of some faded bekerchiefed grandmother immobilized in the shadows on the wall, she murmured, “You said you wouldn’t. So long ago today you said you wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Wouldn’t call me that. Wouldn’t say Irma again.”
“Sophie,” he said without emotion. “Sophie love. Not Irma. Of course. Of course. Sophie. Love. Sophielove.”
He seemed to be much calmer now, the frenzy of the morning, the raging lunacy of the afternoon stilled or at least momentarily calmed by the same Nembutal he had given her—the blessed barbiturate which in their common terror they thought he would never find but, only two hours ago, found. He was calmer but, she knew, still deranged; curious, she thought, how in t
his present pacified form of his derangement he seemed no longer so frightening and menacing, despite the unequivocal menace of the cyanide capsule six inches from her eyes. The minuscule Pfizer trademark was clearly imprinted on the gelatine; the capsule was tiny. It was, he explained, a special veterinary capsule, meant to contain antibiotics for small cats and puppy dogs, which he had obtained as a receptacle for the dose; and because of office technicalities, the capsules themselves had been more difficult to get hold of yesterday than the ten grains of sodium cyanide—five grains for her and five for himself. It was no joke, she knew; at some other time and place she would have regarded the whole display as one of his morbid tricks: the shiny pink pod at the last minute popping open between his fingers to reveal a wee flower, a garnet, a chocolate kiss. But not after this day and its unending delirium. She knew quite beyond doubt that the little casket held death. Odd, though. She felt nothing but a spreading lassitude now, watching him as he raised the capsule to his lips and inserted it between his teeth, biting down just hard enough to lightly bend the surface but not to break it. Was her lack of terror due to the Nembutal or to some intuition that he was still faking? He had done this before. He withdrew the capsule from his mouth and smiled. “Rienada fucking nothing.” She recalled the other moment when he flirted thus, less than two hours before in this very room, although it seemed a week ago, a month. And she wondered now through what miraculous alchemy (the Nembutal?) had he been made to cease his daylong uninterrupted rant. Talktalktalktalktalk... The talk had only a few times stopped since that morning at about nine o’clock when he stormed up the steps at the Pink Palace and awakened her...
...Eyes still shut, her head still woolly from sleep, she hears Nathan make a cackling noise. “Up and at ’em!”
She hears him say, “Schoenthal is right. If it can happen there, won’t it happen here? The Cossacks are coming! Here’s one Jew-boy who’s going to make tracks for the countryside!”
She comes awake. She had anticipated his immediate embrace, wonders if she had put her diaphragm in before going to bed, remembers that she had done so and now lazily rolls over, smiling sleepily, to greet him. She recalls his incredible gluttonous passion when on such a high. Recalls it with voluptuary delight—everything—not alone the beginning hungry tenderness, his fingers on her nipples and their gentle yet insistent search between her legs but all else and one thing specifically, again anticipated with hungry, at last liberated (adieu, Cracow!), uninhibited, self-absorbed bliss: his extravagant ability to make her come—to come not once or twice but over and over again until an almost sinister final losingness of herself has been achieved, a sucking death like descent into caverns during which she cannot tell whether she is lost in herself or in him, a sense of black whirling downward into an inseparability of flesh. (It is almost the only time she thinks in or speaks Polish any longer, whispering loudly against his ear, “We? mnie, we? mnie,” which spills out mysteriously, spontaneously and means “Take me, take me,” although once when Nathan asked her the meaning she was gaily forced to lie, saying, “It means fuck me, fuck me!”) It is, as Nathan sometimes exhaustedly proclaims afterward, the twentieth-century Superfuck—think how bland human fucking was throughout the ages before the discovery of benzedrine sulphate. Now she is wildly aroused. Stirring, stretching like a cat, she reaches out an arm toward him, inviting him to bed. He says nothing. And then, puzzled, she hears him say again, “Come on! Up and at ’em! This Jew-boy’s going to take you for a trip to the country!” She begins, “But, Nathan—” His voice, interrupting, is at once insistent and jazzed-up. “Come on! Come on! We’ve got to hit the road!” She feels quick frustration while just then a memory of bygone decorums (bonjour, Cracow!) gives her a twinge of shame at her urgent and unbuttoned lust. “Come on!” he commands. Naked, she moves out of bed, glances up, sees Nathan gazing into the dappled morning sunlight as he sniffs deeply—from a dollar bill—at what she instantly knows is cocaine...
...In the New England twilight, past his band and its poison, she could see the inferno of leaves, one tree awash in vermilion, merging with another crafted of the most violent gold. Outside, the evening woods stood in quietude and the vast patches like maps of color were captured motionless, no leaf astir, in the light of the setting sun. Distantly, cars passed on the highway. She felt drowsy but did not seek sleep. She saw now that there were two capsules between his fingers, pink identical twins. “His and hers is one of the cutest contemporary concepts,” she heard him say. “His and hers all over the bathroom, all over the house, why not his and hers cyanide, his and hers fucking nothing? Why not, Sophielove?”
There was a knock at the door and Nathan’s hand twitched slightly in response. “Yes?” he said in a flat soft tone. “Mr. and Mrs. Landau,” said the voice, “this is Mrs. Rylander. I hate to disturb you!” The voice was overly ingratiating, sedulously sweet. “In the off-season the kitchen closes at seven o’clock. Just wanted to tell you, I hate to interrupt your nap. You’re the only guests here, so there’s no hurry yet, just wanted to tell you. My husband’s making his specialty tonight, corned beef and cabbage!” Silence. “Thank you very much,” Nathan said, “we’ll be down soon.”
Footsteps thumped down the ancient carpeted staircase; the timbers squealed like a hurt animal. Talktalktalktalktalk. He had talked himself hoarse. “Consider, Sophie-love,” he was saying now, caressing the two capsules, “consider how intimately life and death are intertwined in Nature, which contains everywhere the seeds of our beatitude and our dissolution. This, for instance, HCN, is spread throughout Mother Nature in smothering abundance in the form of glycosides, which is to say, combined with sugars. Sweet, sweet sugar. In bitter almonds, in peach pits, in certain species of these autumn leaves, in the common pear, the arbutus. Imagine, then, when those perfect white porcelain teeth of yours bite down upon the delectable macaroon the taste you experience is only a molecule’s organic distance removed from that of this...”
She blanked out his voice, gazing again at the astonishing leaves, a fire-lake. She smelled the cabbage from below, blooming, dank. And remembered another voice, Morty Haber’s, filled with his nervous solicitude: “Don’t look so guilty. There’s nothing you could have done, since he’s been hooked for a long time before you ever laid eyes on him. Can it be controlled? Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know, Sophie! I wish to God I knew! Nobody knows much about amphetamines. Up to a point they’re relatively harmless. But they obviously can be dangerous, addictive, especially when mixed up with something else, like cocaine. Nathan likes to snort cocaine on top of the Bennies, and I think that’s goddamned dangerous. Then he can get out of control and go into some, I don’t know, area of psychosis where no one can reach him. I’ve checked out all the data, and yes, it’s dangerous, very dangerous—Oh, fuck it, Sophie, I don’t want to talk about it any more, but if he flips out, make sure you get in touch with me right away, me or Larry...” She gazed past Nathan at the leaves, and sensed that her lips were tingling. The Nembutal? For the first time in minutes she stirred slightly against the mattress. Instantly she felt a sharp ache in her ribs where he had kicked her...
...“Fidelity would become you more,” he is saying in the midst of his runaway rant. She hears his voice over the roaring slipstream of wind rushing past the convertible’s windshield. Although it is chilly, Nathan has put the top down. Sitting next to him, she has covered herself with a blanket. She does not fully understand what he has said to her, half shouts to him, “What did you say, darling?” He turns to face her, she catches a glimpse of his eyes, distraught now, the pupils all but vanished, swallowed up in the violent brown ellipses. “I said fidelity would become you more, to use an elegant variation.” She is seized with puzzlement and a vague clammy fear. She looks away, heart pounding. Never in their months together has he displayed real anger toward her. Cold dismay begins to wash over her like rain on naked flesh. What does he mean? She fixes her gaze on the landscape wheeling by, the tended evergreen shrubbery at the margi
n of the manicured parkway, the forest beyond with its explosive turning leaves, blue sky, bright sun, telephone poles. WELCOME TO CONNECTICUT/DRIVE SAFELY. She is aware that he is driving very fast. They overtake car after car, passing with a whooshing noise and a vibration of air. She hears him say, “Or to not use an elegant variation, you’d better not fuck around, especially where I can see it!” She gasps aloud, she cannot believe he is saying this. As if he had slapped her she feels her head jerk sideways, then she turns. “Darling what do you—” But “Shut up!” he roars, and now again the words flow forth as upon a spillway, undammed, a babbling continuation of the jumbled semicoherence he has assailed her with since they left the Pink Palace well over an hour before. “It would appear that that luscious Polish ass of yours is irresistible to your employer the adorable quack from Forest Hills, which is quite all right, quite all right, mind you, it is a darling piece of equipment if I do say so myself, having not only fattened it up but availed myself of its uncommon pleasures, this I can understand Dr. Flimflam yearning for with all his heart and aching prick...” She hears him give a heh-heh-heh brainless giggle. “But for you to cooperate in his enterprise, to actually lay it down and hump this despicable cheat, then, then to flaunt it all right before my eyes as you did last night, letting him stand there and get one last wet feel, poking that revolting chiropractic tongue down your throat—oh, my little Polish tart, it is more than I can bear.” Unable to speak, she fixes her gaze on the speedometer: 70, 75, 80... It is not so bad, she thinks, thinking in kilometers, then in swift adjustment says to herself: Miles! We are going to go out of control! Thinks: It is beyond madness, this jealousy, that I am sleeping with Blackstock. Far behind them there is the dim sound of a siren, she is somehow aware of a flashing red light, its reflection like a tiny raspberry winking on and off against the windshield. She opens her mouth, poises her tongue for speech (“Darling!” she is trying to say), cannot utter the word. Talktalktalktalktalk... It is like the sound track of a movie pieced together by a chimpanzee, in part coherent but creating no design, making no final sense; its paranoia causes her to feel weak and ill. “Schoenthal is one hundred percent right, it is pure sentimental rubbish embedded in the Judeo-Christian ethos that makes suicide morally wrong, after the Third Reich suicide should become the legitimate option of any sane human being on earth, isn’t that right, Irma?” (Why was he suddenly calling her Irma?) “But I shouldn’t be surprised at your hankering to spread your legs for any joint that comes your way, to be quite honest and I haven’t said this before, much of you has been a mystery since first we met, I might have suspected you were a fucking goy kurveh, but what else—what else?—ohmyohmy, did some weird self-inflicted Schadenfreude cause me to be attracted to such a perfect replica of Irma Griese? She was some looker, according to the people at the trial in Lunenberg, even the prosecutors tipped their hats to that, oh shit, my beloved mama always said I was fatally attracted to blond shiksas, why can’t you be a decent Jewish boy, Nathan, and marry a nice girl like Shirley Mirmelstein who’s so beautiful and has got a father that’s made a killing in foundation garments with a summer place in Lake Placid yet.” (The siren still trails them, faintly screaming. “Nathan,” she says, “there’s a policeman.”) “The Brahmans revere suicide, many Orientals, like what’s so big about death anyway, rienada fucking nothing, so upon reconsideration not too long ago I said to myself okay, beautiful Irma Griese got the rope for personally killing x-thousands of Jews at Auschwitz but didn’t logic dictate a lot of little Irma Grieses getting away, I mean what about this funny little Polish nafka I’m shacked up with, that is, could she truly be one hundred percent true-blue Polack, she looks Polack in many ways but also echt-Nordic like some Kraut movie star masquerading as the murderous Countess of Cracow, also I might add that absolutely flawless Deutsch I have heard emerge with such precision from your lovely Rhine maiden’s lips. A Polack! Ah me! Das machst du andern weismachen! Why don’t you admit it, Irma! You played footsie with the SS, didn’t you? Isn’t that how you got out of Auschwitz, Irma? Admit it!” (She has stopped up her ears with both hands, sobbing “No! No!” She feels the car decelerate abruptly. The siren’s scream becomes a dragon’s growl, diminuendo. The police car pulls abreast.) “Admit it, you Fascist cunt!”...
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 203