Authors: William Styron
“Irma was something I just couldn’t bear,” Sophie told me. “I could take anything from Nathan but that... that he should turn me into Irma Griese. I saw that woman once or twice at the camp—that monster woman, she would have made Wilhelmine appear to be an angel. It hurt me more than all his kicking that he called me Irma Griese. But before we got to the inn that night I tried to make him stop calling me that, and when he begun to call me Sophielove I knew he was not so high—so crazy—any more. Even though he was still playing with those little capsules of poison. This scared me now. I didn’t know how far he was going to go. I was out of my mind with the idea of our life with each other and I didn’t want us to die—separate or together. No. Anyway, the Nembutal begun to work on him, I could tell that, he came slowly down off his high and when he squeezed me it hurt so bad I thought I would faint and I gave this scream and then he realized what he had done to me. He was so full of guilt then, kept whispering in bed, ‘Sophie. Sophie, what have I done to you, how could I have hurt you?’ And such as that. But the other pills—what he called the barbies—were beginning to make this effect on him and he couldn’t keep his eyes open and pretty soon he was asleep.
“I remember the woman who owned the inn walked upstairs again and asked me through the door when were we coming down, it was getting late, when were we coming down for the rum punch and the dinner. And when I told her we were tired, we were just going to sleep, she got very upset and angry and said it was the most thoughtless thing, et cetera, but I didn’t care, I was so very tired and sleepy myself. So I went back and lie down next to Nathan and begun to go to sleep. But then, oh my God, I thought of the capsules of poison that were still in the ashtray. I was filled with this panic. I was just terrified because I didn’t know what to do with them. They were so terribly dangerous, you know. I couldn’t throw them out the window or even in the trash basket because I was afraid they would crack open and the fumes would kill someone. And I thought of the toilet, and that still worried me, make me afraid about the fumes or poisoning the water or even the earth, and I didn’t know what to do. I knew I had to get them away from Nathan. So anyway, I decided to take a chance on the toilet. The bathroom. There was some light in there. I very carefully picked up the capsules from the ashtray and walked through the dark into the bathroom and threw them into the toilet. They didn’t float like I had imagined but sank like two little pebbles and I quickly flushed the toilet and they were gone.
“I went back to the bed and slept then. I have never slept in such a dark, dreamless profound way. I don’t know how long I slept. But sometime in the night Nathan woke up screaming. It must have been some reaction to all the drugs, I don’t know, but it was so frightening to hear him next to me in the middle of the night, shouting like a mad demon. I still don’t know how he didn’t wake up everybody for miles. But I jumped awake at his screams, he begun to shout about death and destruction and hanging and gas and Jews burning in ovens and I don’t know what else. I had been scared all day but this was somehow worse than anything. He had been in and out of craziness for so many hours but this was like someone gone crazy forever. ‘We must die!’ he begun to rave in the dark. I heard him say in a kind of long groan, ‘Death is a necessity,’ and then he kept groping across me toward the table as if he was hunting for the poison. But strange, you know, all this lasted only a few moments. He was very weak, it seemed to me, I was able to hold him back with my arms and I pressed him down and said over and over again, ‘Darling, darling, go to sleep, everything’s all right, you’ve had a nightmare.’ Foolish things like that. But somehow what I said and done have this effect on him because quite soon he was asleep again. It was so dark in that room. I kissed him on the cheek. His skin was cool now.
“We slept for hours and hours and hours. When I finally woke up I could tell from the way the sun shined in the window that it was early in the afternoon. The leaves were bright outside the window, as if the whole woods was on fire. Nathan was still asleep and I just lay there beside him for a long time, thinking. I knew that I couldn’t keep buried any longer the thing that was the last thing on earth that I wanted to remember. But I couldn’t hide it any longer from myself, and I couldn’t hide it from Nathan either. We couldn’t live together unless I told him. I knew that there were certain things I could never tell him—
never!
—but there was at least one thing he had to know, otherwise we couldn’t continue on, never get married surely, never. And without Nathan I would be... nothing. So I make up my mind to tell him this thing which was not a secret really, but just something I had never mentioned because the pain of it was still more than I could bear. Nathan was still sleeping. His face was very pale but all that craziness had gone away from it and he looked peaceful. I had the feeling that maybe all the drugs had left him, the demon had gone and all the black winds, you know, of the
tempête,
and he had returned to being the Nathan I loved.
“I got up and walked to the window and looked at the woods—they were bright and flaming, so beautiful. I almost forgot the pain in my side and all that had happened, and the poison and the mad things Nathan have done. When I was a little girl in Cracow and very religious I would play a game with myself which I called ‘the shape of God.’ And I would see something so beautiful—a cloud or a flame or the green side of a mountain or the way light filled the sky—and I would try to discover God’s shape in it, as if God actually took the form of what I was watching and lived in it and I was able to see Him there. And that day when I looked out the window at those incredible woods that sweeped down to the river and the sky so clear above, why, I forgot myself and for a moment I felt like a little girl again and begun to try to see God’s shape in these things. There was a wonderful smell of smoke in the air and I saw smoke rising far off in the woods and I saw God’s shape in that. But then—but then it came to my mind what I really knew what was really the truth: that God have left me again, left me forever. I felt I could actually see Him go, turning His back on me like some great beast and go crashing away through the leaves. God! Stingo, I could see this huge
back
of Him, going away in the trees. The light faded then and I felt such an emptiness—the memory coming back and knowing what I would have to say.
“When Nathan finally waked up I was beside him on the bed. He smiled and said a few words and I felt he hardly knew what had happened all these last hours. We said one or two ordinary things to each other, you know, sleepy waking-up things, and then I bent down close to him and said, ‘’Darling, I have something I must say to you.’ And he begun to come back with a laugh. ‘Don’t look so—’ Stopping like that, and then he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘You thought I have been some kind of unattached woman from Poland who was never married and so on, with no family or anything in the past.’ I said, ‘It has been easier for me to make it look like that, for I’ve not wanted to dig up the past. I know it has been easier for you, maybe, too.’ He looked painful and then I said, ‘But I must tell you. It is just this. I was married a number of years ago and I had a child, a little boy named Jan who was with me at Auschwitz.’ I stopped speaking then, looking away, and he was silent for a long, long time, and then I heard him say, ‘Oh good God, oh good God.’ He kept saying this over and over. Then he was quiet again, and finally he said, ‘What happened to him? What happened to your little boy?’ And I said to him, ‘I don’t know. He was lost.’ And he said, ‘You mean dead?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. It don’t matter. Just lost. Lost.’
“And that’s all I could say, except for one thing. I said, ‘Now that I’ve told you I must make you promise this. I must make you promise never to ask about my child ever again. Or speak of him. Nor will I ever speak of him either.’ And he promised with one word—‘Yes,’ he said—but the look on his face was filled with such sorrow that I had to turn away.
“Don’t ask me, Stingo, don’t ask me why—after all this—I was still ready for Nathan to piss on me, rape me, stab me, beat me, blind me, do anything with me that he desired. Anyway, a long time passed before he spoke to me again. Then he said, ‘Sophielove, I’m insane, you know. I want to apologize for my insanity.’ And after a bit he said, ‘Want to fuck?’ And I said right away without even thinking twice, ‘Yes. Oh yes.’ And we made love all afternoon, which made me forget the pain but forget God too, and Jan, and all the other things I had lost. And I knew Nathan and me would live for a while more together.”
I
N THE SMALL HOURS
of that morning, after her long soliloquy, I had to put Sophie into bed—
pour
her into bed, as we used to say in those days. I was amazed that after all the booze she had guzzled she could remain so coherent throughout the evening; but by the time the bar closed at four o’cock I saw that she was pretty well smashed. I splurged and we took a taxi the mile or so back to the Pink Palace; on the way she dozed heavily against my shoulder. I maneuvered her up the stairs, pushing at her waist from behind, and her legs wobbled dangerously. She uttered only the smallest of sighs when I eased her down into her bed, fully clothed, and watched her pass instantly away into a pale coma. I was drunk and exhausted myself. I threw a coverlet over Sophie. Then I went downstairs to my own room and after undressing slithered between the sheets, falling into the blank slumber of a cretin.
I woke up with the late-morning sunlight ablaze in my face, and the sound in my ears of birds squabbling among the maples and sycamores, and the distant froggy noise of boys’ adolescent voices—all refracted through an aching skull and the pulsating consciousness of the worst hangover I had experienced in a year or two. Needless to say, beer too can undermine body and soul, if downed in enough quantity. I succumbed to an abrupt and terrible magnification of all sensations: the nap of the sheet beneath my naked back felt like cornfield stubble, the chitter of a sparrow outside seemed the squawk of a pterodactyl, a truck’s wheel striking a pothole on the street made a clamor like the slamming of the gates of hell. All my ganglia were quivering. Another thing: I sweltered with lust, helpless in the throes of an alcohol-induced concupiscence known, at least in that day, by the name of “the hangover hots.” Normally the prey of an ever-unfulfilled randiness—as the reader by now must be aware—I became, during these mercifully infrequent seizures of morning-after engorgement, a godforsaken organism in absolute thrall to the genital urge, capable of defiling a five-year-old of either sex, ready for coition with almost any vertebrate having a pulse and warm blood. Nor could loutish self-gratification quell this imperious, feverish desire. Desire like this was too overwhelming, sprang from sources too demandingly procreative to be satisfied by some handy makeshift. I do not think it hyperbolic to describe this derangement (for such it really was) as
primordial:
“I would have fucked mud” was the Marine Corps description for such a mania. But suddenly with a manful zeal that pleased me I bestirred myself and leaped out of bed, thinking of Jones Beach and Sophie in the room above me.
I stuck my head out into the hallway and called upstairs. I heard the faint strains of something of Bach. Sophie’s response from behind her door, while indistinct, sounded chipper enough, and I retreated and splashed about in my morning purification. It was a Saturday. The night before, in what seemed a rush of (perhaps inebriate) affection toward me, Sophie had promised to spend the entire weekend at the house before moving off to her new place near Fort Green Park. She also agreed enthusiastically to an outing with me to Jones Beach. I had never been there but I knew it to be an oceanside strand far less congested than Coney Island. Now while I soaped myself beneath the tepid trickle in the pink mildewed upright metal coffin which served as my shower stall, I began to scheme in earnest about Sophie and the immediate future. I was more than ever aware of the tragicomic nature of my passion for Sophie. On the one hand I possessed enough of a sense of humor to be aware of the ludicrousness of the contortions and writhings her very existence inflicted upon me. I had read romantic literature in sufficient bulk to know that my wretched frustrated moonings could in their collective despair almost laughably exemplify the word “lovelorn.”
Yet it was only half a joke, really. Because the anxiety and pain which this one-way love caused me was as cruel as the discovery that I had acquired some terminal disease. The only cure for this disease was her love in return—and such a genuine love seemed as remote as a cure for cancer. At times (and this moment was one) I was able actually to curse her out loud—“Bitch, Sophie!”—for I almost would have preferred her scorn and hatred to this proximate love which could be called affection or fondness but never love itself. My mind still echoed with her outpouring of the past night, with its awful vision of Nathan and its brutality and despairing tenderness and perverse eroticism and its stink of death. “God damn you, Sophie!” I said half aloud, slowly enunciating the words while I lathered my crotch. “Nathan’s out of your life now, gone for good. That death-force is gone, finished, kaput! So now love me, Sophie. Love me. Love
me!
Love life!”
Drying myself off, I considered in a businesslike way the possible practical objections Sophie might have to me as a suitor, provided of course that I could speak my way through those emotional walls and somehow gain her love. They were rather troublesome, her potential complaints. I was, of course, years younger (and a postpubescent pimple blossoming next to my nose, glimpsed in the mirror just then, underscored the fact), but this was a trifling matter with many historical precedents to make it right, or at least acceptable. Then, too, I was not nearly so solvent financially as Nathan had been. Although she could scarcely be called avaricious, Sophie loved the fat American life; self-denial was not among her most obvious qualities, and I wondered with a soft but audible groan how on earth I’d be able to provide for the two of us. And at that moment, as if in some odd reflexive response to the thought, I reached in and took my Johnson & Johnson bank down out of its hiding place in the medicine chest. And to my absolute horror I saw that every last dollar had vanished from the little box. I was wiped out!