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

by Styron, William

  “What about Jozef?” I persisted, a little impatiently.

  “We lived in this building in Warsaw that was bombed but fixed up. You could live in it. But only barely. It was a terrible place. You can’t imagine how terrible Warsaw was then during the occupation. So little food, often just a little water, and in the winter it was so cold. I worked in a factory that made tar paper. I worked ten, eleven hours a day. The tar paper made my hands bleed. They bled all the time. I didn’t work for money, really, but to keep a work card. A work card would keep me from being sent off to Germany to a camp for slave labor. I lived in a tiny little place on the fourth floor of the building and Jozef lived with his half sister downstairs. His half sister was named Wanda, she was a little over my age. They were both involved with the underground, the Home Army it would be called in English. I wish I could describe Jozef good but I can’t, don’t have the words. I was fond of him so very much. But there was no true romance, really. He was small, muscular, very intense and nervous. He was pretty dark for a Pole. Strange, we didn’t make love together very often. Though we slept in the same bed. He said he have to preserve his energies for the fight going on. He wasn’t very educated, you know, in a formal way. He was like me—the war destroyed our education chances. But he had read a lot, he was very bright. He wasn’t even a Communist, he was an anarchist. He worshipped the memory of Bakunin and was a complete atheist, which was a little strange too, because at that time I was still a very devout Catholic girl and I sometimes wondered how I could fall in love with this young man who don’t believe in God. But we made this agreement not ever to talk about religion, and so we didn’t.

  “Jozef was a murder—” She paused, then reconstructed the thought and said, “Killer. He was a killer. That was what he done for the underground. He killed Polish people that was betraying Jews, betraying where Jews were hiding. There were Jews hiding out all over Warsaw, not ghetto Jews, naturellement, but better-class Jews—assimiles, many intellectuals. There were many Polish people who would betray the Jews to the Nazis, sometimes for a price, sometimes for nothing. Jozef was one of those which the underground had to kill those who were betraying. He would strangle them with the wire from a piano. He would try to get to know them in some way and then strangle them. Each time he killed someone he would vomit. He killed over six or seven people. Jozef and Wanda and I had a friend in the next building that we were all very fond of—a beautiful girl named Irena, about thirty-five, so beautiful. She had been a teacher before the war. Strange, she taught American literature and I remember she had this expertise in a poet named Hart Crane. Do you know of him, Stingo? She worked for the underground too; I mean, so we thought—because after a while we learned secretly that she was a double agent and was also betraying many Jews. So Jozef had to kill her. Even though he had liked her so much. He strangled her with the piano wire one night late and all the next day he just stayed in my room looking out of the window into space, not saying a word.”

  Sophie fell silent. I eased my face down against the sand, and thinking of Hart Crane, felt myself shiver to a gull’s cry, the rhythmic wash and heave of sullen waves. And you beside me, blessed now while sirens sing to us, stealthily weave us into day...

  “How did he die?” I said again.

  “After he killed Irena the Nazis found out about him. This was about a week later. The Nazis had these huge Ukrainians who done their killing. They came one afternoon when I was out and cut Jozef’s throat. When I arrived Wanda had already found him. He was bleeding to death on the stairs...”

  Minutes passed before either of us spoke. Every word she said had been, I knew, absolutely true, and I was swept with desolation. It was a feeling deeply involved in a bad conscience, and although a logical part of my mind reasoned that I must not blame myself for cosmic events which had dealt with me in one way and with Jozef in another, I could not help but view my own recent career with repugnance. What had old Stingo been up to while Joszef (and Sophie and Wanda) had been writhing in Warsaw’s unspeakable Gehenna? Listening to Glen Miller, swilling beer, horsing around in bars, whacking off. God, what an iniquitous world! Suddenly, after the nearly interminable silence, with my face still downward in the sand, I felt Sophie’s fingers reach up into my trunks and lightly stroke that spectacularly sensitive epidermal zone down deep where thigh and buttock intersect, a scant centimeter from my balls. It was a sensation at once surprising and unabashedly erotic; I heard an involuntary gurgle rise up from the back of my throat. The fingers went away.

  “Stingo, let’s take our clothes off,” I thought I heard her say.

  “What did you say?” I replied dully.

  “Let’s take our things off. Let’s be naked.”

  Reader, imagine something for a moment. Imagine that you have lived for an indeterminate but longish time with the well-founded suspicion that you are suffering from some fatal disease. One morning the telephone rings and it is the doctor saying this: “You have nothing to worry about, it was all a false alarm.” Or imagine this. There have been inflicted upon you severe financial reverses, bringing you so close to penury and ruin that you have considered a way out in self-destruction. Again it’s the blessed telephone, with the message that you have won half a million dollars in the state lottery. I am not exaggerating (it may be recalled that I mentioned once that I had never yet really witnessed a female in the nude) when I say that these tidings could not have created the mingled astonishment and sheer brute happiness of Sophie’s gentle suggestion. Combined with the touch of her fingers, forthrightly lewd, it caused me to gulp air with incredible rapidity. I think I went into that state known medically as hyperventilation and I thought for a moment that I might black out completely.

  And even as I looked up she was wriggling out of her Cole of California special, so that I beheld inches away that which I thought I would see only after reaching early middle age: a young female body all creamy bare, with plump breasts that had perky brown nipples, a smooth slightly rounded belly with a frank eyewink of a belly-button, and (be still, my heart, I remember thinking) a nicely symmetrical triangle of honey-hued pubic hair. My cultural conditioning—ten years of airbrushed Petty girls and a universal blackout of the human form—had caused me to nearly forget that women possessed this last item, and I was still staring at it, wonder struck, when Sophie turned and began to scamper toward the beach. “Come on, Stingo,” she cried, “take off your clothes and let’s go in the water!” I got up then and watched her go, transfixed; I mean it when I say that no chaste and famished grail-tormented Christian knight could have gazed with more slack-jawed admiration at the object of his quest than I did at my first glimpse of Sophie’s bouncing behind—a delectable upside-down valentine. Then I saw her splash into the murky ocean.

  I think it must have been pure consternation that prevented my following her into the water. So much had happened so quickly that my senses were spinning and I stood rooted to the sand. The shift in mood—the grisly chronicle of Warsaw, followed in a flash by this wanton playfulness. What in hell did it mean? I was wildly excited but hopelessly confused, with no precedent to guide me in this turn of events. In an excess of furtiveness—despite the total seclusion of the place—I slid out of my trunks and stood there beneath the strange churning gray summer sky, helplessly flaunting my manly state to the seraphim. I gulped at the last beer, woozy with mingled apprehension and joy. I watched Sophie swim. She swam well and with what seemed relaxed pleasure; I hoped she was not too relaxed, and for an instant I worried about her mixing swimming with all that whiskey. The air was sweltering, close, but I felt myself in the clutch of malarial trembling and chills.

  “Oh, Stingo,” she said with a giggle when she returned, “tu bandes.”

  “Tu... what?”

  “You have a hard-on.”

  She had seen it immediately. Not knowing what to do with it, but trying to avoid the extremes of gaucherie, I had arranged it and me on the blanket in a nonchalant posture—or as nonchalant as possib
le in my fit of ague—with my distended part concealed beneath my forearm; the attempt was unsuccessful, it flopped into view just before she flopped down beside me, and we rolled like dolphins into each other’s arms. I have since then utterly despaired of trying to capture the tortured excitement of that embrace. I heard myself making little ponylike whinnies as I kissed her, but kissing was all I could manage; I clutched her around the waist with a maniac’s armhold, terrified of stroking her anywhere out of fear that she would disintegrate under my crude fingers. There was a fragile feel to her rib cage. I thought of Nathan’s kick but also of past starvation. My shivering and shaking continued; I was conscious now only of the whiskied sweetness of her mouth and my tongue and hers warmly mingled. “Stingo, you’re shaking so,” she whispered once, drawing back from my canine tongue play. “Just relax!” But I realized I was salivating stupidly—a further humiliation which preyed on my mind as our lips stayed wetly plastered together. I could not figure out why my mouth was leaking so, and this worry itself prevented me even more firmly from exploring breasts, bottom or, God help me, that innermost recess which had figured so thrillingly in my dreams. I was in the grip of a nameless and diabolical paralysis. It was as if ten thousand Presbyterian Sunday School teachers had massed above Long Island in a minatory cloud, their presence resolutely disabling my fingers. The seconds passed like minutes, the minutes like hours, and still I could make no serious move. But then, as if to put a stop to my suffering, or perhaps in an effort simply to get things going, Sophie herself made a move.

  “You have a nice schlong, Stingo,” she said, grasping me delicately but with a subtle, knowing firmness.

  “Thank you,” I heard myself mumble. A wave of disbelief swept over me (She is actually grabbing me there, I thought) but I tried to affect a saving savoir-faire. “Why do you call it schlong? Down South we call it something else.” My voice had a bad quaver.

  “It’s what Nathan calls it,” she replied. “What do you call it in the South?”

  “Sometimes we call it a pecker,” I whispered. “In parts of the upper South they call it a dong or a tool. Or a peter.”

  “I’ve heard Nathan call it his dork. Also, his putz.”

  “Do you like mine?” I could barely hear myself.

  “It’s sweet.”

  I no longer recall what—if any one thing precisely—brought this ghastly dialogue to its termination. She was of course supposed to compliment me more floridly—“gigantic,” “une merveille,” even “big” would do, almost anything but “sweet”—and perhaps it was only my glum silence after this which impelled her to begin to stroke and pump me with a zest that mingled the adroitness of a courtesan and a milkmaid. It was exquisite; I listened to her sigh in rapid breaths, I sighed too, and when she whispered, “Turn over on your back, Stingo darling,” there flashed through my mind the scenes of insatiable oral love with Nathan she had so frankly described. But it was too much, too much to bear—all this divine, accomplished friction and (My God, I thought, she called me “darling”) the sudden command to join her in paradise: with a bleat of dismay like that of a ram being slaughtered I felt my eyelids slam shut and I let loose the floodgates in a pulsing torrent. Then I died. Certainly in the grief of that moment she was not supposed to giggle, but she did.

  Minutes later, however, sensing my despair, she said, “Don’t let it make you sad. Stingo. That happens sometimes, I know.” I lay crumpled like a wet paper bag, my eyes tightly shut, quite unable to contemplate the depths of my failure. Ejaculatio praecox (Psychology 4B at Duke University). A squad of evil imps yammered the phrase derisively in the black pit of my despair. I felt I would never again open my eyes to the world—a mud-imprisoned mollusk, lowliest creature in the sea.

  I heard her giggle again, peered upward. “Look, Stingo,” she was saying in front of my disbelieving gaze, “it’s good for the complexion.” And I watched while the crazy Polack took a gulp of whiskey straight from the bottle and with her other hand—the one which had wrought upon me such mixed mortification and pleasure—gently massaged into the skin of her face my hapless exudate.

  “Nathan always said that come is filled with these very wonderful vitamins,” she said. For some reason my eyes fixed themselves on her tattoo; it seemed profoundly incongruous at this moment. “Don’t look so tragique, Stingo. It’s not the end of the world, it happens to all men sometimes, especially when they are young. Par example, in Warsaw when Jozef and me first try to make love he done the same thing, exactly the same thing. He was a virgin too.”

  “How did you know I was a virgin?” I said with a wretched sigh.

  “Oh, I can tell, Stingo. I knew that you had no success with that Leslie girl, you were just making up stories when you said you have gone to bed with her. Poor Stingo—Oh, to be honest, Stingo, I did not really know. I just guessed. But I was right, no?”

  “Yes,” I groaned. “Pure as the driven snow.”

  “Jozef was so much like you in many ways—honest, direct, with this quality that make him like a little boy in a certain fashion. It is hard to describe. Maybe that’s why I like you so much, Stingo, because you remind me quite a bit of Jozef. I maybe would have married him if he had not been killed by the Nazis. You know, none of us could ever find out who it was who betrayed him after he killed Irena. It was a total mystery, but somebody must have told. We used to go on picnics like this together. It was very difficult during the war—so little food—but once or twice we went out into the country in the summer and spread a blanket this way...”

  This was astounding. After the steamy sexuality of only moments before, after this encounter—despite fumbling and failure, the single most cataclysmic and soul-stirring event of its kind that I bad ever experienced—she was rattling on in reminiscence like someone plunged into a daydream, seemingly no more touched by our prodigious intimacy than if we had done a two-step together innocently on a dance floor. Was part of this due to some perverse effect of the booze? She had gotten a little glassy-eyed by now and was running off at the mouth like a tobacco auctioneer. Whatever the cause, her sudden insouciance gave me acute distress. Here she was, unconcernedly smearing my frenzied spermatozoa across her cheeks as if she were using Pond’s cold cream, talking not about me (whom she had called “darling”!)—talking not about us but about a lover dead and buried years before. Had she forgotten that only minutes ago she had been on the brink of initiating me into the mysteries of the blowjob, a sacrament I had awaited with anxious joy since the age of fourteen? Could women, then, so instantaneously turn off their lust like a light switch? And Jozef! Her preoccupation with her sweetheart was maddening, and I could hardly bear the thought—thrust it into the back of my mind—that this precipitate passion she had for a few hot moments lavished on me was the result of a transfer of identity; that I was merely an instant surrogate Jozef, flesh to occupy space in an ephemeral fantasy. In any case, I also noticed that she was becoming a little incoherent; her voice had an intonation that was both stilted and thick, and her lips moved in an odd artificial way as if they had been numbed by Novocaine. It was more than a little alarming, this mesmerized appearance. I removed the bottle with its few remaining ounces from her hand.

  “It make me sick, Stingo, so sick to think how things might have been. If Jozef hadn’t died. I cared for him very much. So much more than Nathan, really. Jozef never mistreated me like Nathan done. Who knows? Maybe we would have been married, and if we were married, life would have been so different. Just one thing, par example—his half sister, Wanda. I would have removed him from her evil influence and that would have been such a good thing. Where’s that bottle, Stingo?” Even as she spoke I was pouring—behind my back and out of sight—what was left of the liquor into the sand. “The bottle. Anyway, that kvetch Wanda, such a kvetch she was!” (I loved kvetch. Nathan, Nathan again!) “It was her who was responsible for Jozef being killed. All right, I’ll admit it—il fallait que... I mean it was necessary for someone to retaliate for betraying the
Jews, but why every time to make Jozef the killer? Why? That was Wanda’s power, this kvetch. Okay, she was an underground leader, but was it fair to make your brother the only killer in our part of the city? Was it fair, I ask you? He vomited every time he kill, Stingo. Vomited! It turn him half crazy.”

  I held my breath as her face faded into an ashy white, and with a desperate clawing motion she groped about for the bottle, mumbling. “Sophie,” I said, “Sophie, the whiskey’s all gone.”

  Abstracted, stranded in her memory, she seemed not to hear, and also was plainly close to tears. Suddenly and for the first time I was aware of the meaning of the phrase “Slavic melancholy”: sorrow had flooded across her face like black shadows sweeping over a snowy field. “Goddamned cunt, Wanda! She was the cause of everything. Everything! Jozef dying and me going to Auschwitz and everything!” She began to sob, and the tears made disfiguring trails down her cheeks. I stirred miserably, not knowing really what to do. And although Eros had fled, I reached up and took her in my arms, bringing her down next to me. Her face lay against my chest. “Oh, goddamn, Stingo, I’m so awful unhappy!” she wailed. “Where’s Nathan? Where’s Jozef? Where’s everybody? Oh, Stingo, I want to die!”

  “Hush, Sophie,” I said softly, stroking her bare shoulder, “everything’s going to be all right.” (Fat chance!)

  “Hold me, Stingo,” she whispered despairingly, “hold me. I feel so lost. Oh Christ, I feel so lost! What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I’m so alone!”