William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (214 page)

The morning of the day that she was scheduled to submit to the Electro-Sensilator’s macabre embrace she woke up feeling exceptionally worn-out and sick, far worse than ever before. It was her day off from work and so she drowsed through the forenoon, coming fully awake only around twelve. She recalled clearly of that morning that in her febrile doze—a half-sleep in which the far past of Cracow was curiously, senselessly intermingled with the smiling presence and sculpting hands of Dr. Blackstock—she kept dreaming with mysterious obsessiveness of her father. Humorless, forbidding in his starched wing collar, his oval unrimmed professorial spectacles and black mohair suit odorous of cigar smoke, he lectured her in German with the same ponderous intensity she remembered from her childhood; he seemed to be warning her about something—was he concerned about her sickness?—but when each time she struggled up like a swimmer out of slumber his words bubbled away and fled from her memory, and she was left only with the fading apparition of her father, comfortless and severe, somehow even vaguely threatening. At last—mainly now to throw off this irrepressible image—she forced herself to get out of bed and face the meltingly lush and beautiful summer day. She was quite shaky on her feet and was aware that again she had no appetite at all. She had been conscious for a long time of the paleness of her skin, but on this morning a glance in the bathroom mirror truly horrified her, brought her close to panic: her face was as devoid of any of the animating pink of life as those bleached skulls of ancient monks she recalled from the underground sepulcher of an Italian church.

With a wintry shiver that ran through all her bones, through her fingers—skinny and bloodless, she suddenly perceived—and to the cold bottoms of her feet, she clenched her eyes tightly shut in the smothering and absolute conviction that she was dying. And she knew the name of the malady. I have leukemia, she thought, I am dying of leukemia, like my cousin Tadeusz, and all of Dr. Blackstock’s treatment is only a kindly masquerade. He knows I am dying and all his care is simply pretense. A touch of hysteria almost perfectly pitched between grief and hilarity seized her as she pondered the irony of dying of such an insidious and inexplicable disease after all the other sicknesses she had survived and after all, in so many countless ways, she had seen and known and endured. And to this thought she was able to add the perfectly logical notion, however tortured and despairing, that such an end was perhaps only the body’s grim way of effecting the self-destruction she had been unable to manage by her own hand.

But somehow she was able to take hold of herself and push the morbid thought back into the far recesses of her mind. Drawing away slightly from the mirror, she caught a narcissistic gleam of her familiar beauty, dwelling persistently beneath the white mask, and this gave her a long moment of comfort. It was the day of her English lesson at Brooklyn College, and in order to become fortified for the dreadful trip by subway and for the session itself, she made herself eat. It was a task accompanied by waves of nausea, but she knew she
had
to force it down: the eggs and the bacon and the whole-wheat bread and the skimmed milk she assembled together listlessly in the gloom of her cramped little kitchenette. And while eating she had an inspiration—at least in part produced by the Mahler symphony playing at the moment on WQXR’s midday concert. For no clear reason a series of somber chords, struck in the middle of the symphony’s andante movement, reminded her of the remarkable poem which had been read to her at the end of her last English class, a few days before, by the teacher, an ardent, fat, patient and conscientious young graduate student known to the class as Mr. Youngstein. Doubtless because of her proficiency in other tongues, Sophie was far and away the prize student among this motley of striving scholars, a polyglot group but mainly Yiddish-speaking refugees from all the destroyed corners of Europe; her excellence had no doubt attracted Mr. Youngstein to her, although Sophie was hardly so lacking in self-awareness as to be unmindful of the fact that her simple physical presence might have worked upon the young man its plainly troubling effect.

Flustered and bashful, he was obviously smitten by her, but had made no advances other than to suggest awkwardly each day that she remain for a few moments after class so that he might read her what he called some “representative American verse.” This he would do in a nervous voice, slowly intoning the lines from Whitman and Poe and Frost and others in hoarse, unmusical but clearly enunciated syllables, while she listened with great care, touched often and deeply by this poetry which from time to time brought exciting new nuances of meaning to the language, and by Mr. Youngstein’s clumsy and grasping passion for her, expressed in faun-gazes of yearning from behind his monstrous prismlike spectacles. She found herself both warmed and distressed by this callow, transfixed infatuation and could really respond only to the poetry, for besides being, at twenty or so, at least ten years younger than she was, he was also physically unappealing—that is, enormously overweight aside from his grotesquely disoriented eyes. His feeling for these poets, though, was so profound, so genuine that he could scarcely fail to communicate much of their essence, and Sophie had been captured in particular by the haunted melody of one verse, which began:

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

She adored hearing Mr. Youngstein read the poem and wanted actually to read it herself in her much improved English, along with the poet’s other works, so that she might commit it to memory. But there was a small confusion. She had missed one of the teacher’s inflections. Sophie had understood that this brief poem, this enchanted, simply wrought vision with its thronging sound of the eternal, was the handiwork of an American poet whose last name was identical to that of one of the immortal novelists of the world. And so in her room at Yetta’s, reminded of the poem again today by those somber chords of Mahler, she decided to go before class began to the Brooklyn College library and browse through the work of this marvelous artificer, whom she also ignorantly conceived to be a man. Such an innocuous misunderstanding, she later observed to me, was actually a crucial piece in the finally assembled little mosaic which resolved itself as the portrait of her meeting with Nathan.

She recalled it all so clearly—emerging from the flatulent warmth of the detested subway and onto the sunny campus with its sprawling rectangles of ripe green grass, its crowd of summer-school students, the trees and flowered walks. She always felt somewhat more at peace here than in other parts of Brooklyn; though this college bore as much resemblance to the venerable Jagiellonian University of her past as does a shiny chronometer to a mossy old sundial, its splendidly casual and carefree mob of students, its hustling between-classes pace, its academic look and feel made Sophie comfortable, relaxed, at home. The gardens were a serene and blossoming oasis amid the swarm of a chaotic Babylon. That day as she traversed the edge of the gardens on her way toward the library she caught a glimpse of something which thereafter dwelled so immovably in her mind that she wondered if it, too, was not at last bound up in a mystical way with Nathan, and the imminence of his appearance in her life. What she saw even by the decorous standards of Brooklyn College and the forties was hardly shocking, and Sophie was not so much shocked as fiercely agitated, as if the swift and desperate sensuality of the little scene had the power to stir up embers of a fire within her which she thought had been almost forever quelled. It was the merest fleeting glance she had, this color snapshot of the two dark and resplendently beautiful young people lolling against a tree trunk: with arms full of schoolbooks yet as abandoned as David and Bathsheba, they stood pressed together kissing with the urgent hunger of animals devouring each other’s substance, and their tongues thrust and explored each other gluttonously, the darting flesh visible through the black mantle of the girl’s rich cascading hair.

The instant passed. Sophie, feeling as if she had been stabbed in the breast, wrenched her eyes away. She hurried on down the crowded sidewalk, aware that she must be blushing feverishly and that her heart was pounding at a gallop. It was unexplainable and alarming, this incandescent sexual excitement she felt everywhere inside herself. After having felt
nothing
for so long, after having lived for so long with dampened desire! But now the fire was in her fingertips, coursing along the edges of all her extremities, but mainly it blazed at the core of herself, somewhere near the womb, where she had not felt such an insistent craving in months and years beyond counting.

But the incredible emotion evaporated swiftly. It was gone by the time she entered the library, and long before she encountered the librarian behind the desk—a Nazi. No, of course he was not a Nazi, not only because the black-and-white engraved nameplate identified him as Mr. Sholom Weiss but because—well, what would a Nazi be doing apportioning volume after volume of the earth’s humane wisdom at the Brooklyn College library? But Sholom Weiss, a pallid dour thirtyish man with aggressive horn-rims and a green eyeshade, was such a startling double of every heavy, unbending, mirthless German bureaucrat and demi-monster she had known in years past that she had the weird sense that she had been thrust back into the Warsaw of the occupation. And it was doubtless this moment of
déjà vu,
this rush of identification, that caused her to become so quickly and helplessly unstrung. Feeling suffocatingly weak and ill again, she asked Sholom Weiss in a diffident voice where the catalogue file would be in which she might find listed the works of the nineteenth-century American poet Emil Dickens.

“In the catalogue room, first door to the left,” muttered Weiss, unsmiling, then after a long pause added, “But you won’t find any such listing.”

“Won’t find any such listing?” Sophie echoed him, puzzled. Following a moment’s silence, she said, “Could you tell me why?”

“
Charles
Dickens is an
English
writer. There is
no
American poet by the name of Dickens.” The voice was so sharp and hostile as to be like an incision.

Swept with sudden nausea, light-headed and with a perilous tingling moving across her limbs like the faint prickling of a multitude of needles, Sophie watched with dispassionate curiosity as Sholom Weiss’s face, sullenly inflexible in its graven unpleasantness, seemed to float away ever so slightly from the neck and the confining collar. I feel so terribly sick, she said to herself as if to some invisible, solicitous doctor, but managed to choke out to the librarian, “I’m
sure
there is an American poet Dickens.” Thinking then that those lines, those reverberant lines with their miniature, sorrowing music of mortality and time, would be as familiar to an American librarian as anything, as household objects are, or a patriotic anthem, or one’s own flesh, Sophie felt her lips part to say,
Because I could not stop for Death
... She was hideously nauseated. And she failed to realize that in the intervening seconds there had registered somewhere in the precincts of Sholom Weiss’s unmagnanimous brain her stupid contradiction of him, and its insolence. Before she could utter the line, she heard his voice rise against every library decree of silence and cause a distant, shadowy turning of heads. A hoarse rasping whisper—querulous, poisoned with needless ill will—his retort was freighted with all the churlish indignation of petty power. “Listen, I
told
you,” the voice said, “there is no
such a person!
You want me to draw you a
picture!
I am
telling
you, do you
hear
me!”

Sholom Weiss may easily have thought that he had slain her with language. For when Sophie woke up some moments later from the dead faint into which she had slumped to the floor, his words still ricocheted crazily about in her mind and she realized dimly that she had fallen into a swoon just at the instant he had finished yelling at her. But everything now had gone topsy-turvy, disjointed, and she barely knew where she was. The library, yes, certainly, that was where she was, but she seemed to be reclining awkwardly on a sort of couch or window seat not from the desk in front of which she had collapsed, and she was so weak, and a disgusting odor flooded the air around her, a sour smell she could not identify until, slowly, feeling the wet stain down the front of her blouse, she became aware that she had thrown up her last meal. A damp carapace of vomit drenched her breast like foul mud.

But even as she absorbed this knowledge she moved her head listlessly, conscious of something else, a voice, a man’s voice, orotund, powerful, raging at the half-cowering and perspiring figure whose back was to her but whom she dimly recognized by the green eyeshade gone askew on his brow as Sholom Weiss. And something stern and commanding and consummately outraged in the voice of the man, whom she could barely see from her vantage point, caused an odd and pleasant chill to course up her back even as she reclined there in her feeble, prostrate helplessness. “I don’t know who you are, Weiss, but you’ve got bad manners. I heard every fucking word you said to her, I was standing right here!” he roared. “And I heard every intolerably rude and ugly thing you said to that girl. Couldn’t you tell she was a foreigner, you fucking little
momzer
you, you
shmuck!
” A small crowd had gathered around and Sophie saw the librarian quiver as if he were being buffeted by savage winds. “You’re a kike, Weiss, a
kike,
the kind of mean little creep that gives Jews a bad name. That girl, that nice and lovely girl there with a little trouble with the language, asks you a perfectly decent question and you treat her like some piece of shit walked in. I ought to break your fucking skull! You got about as much business around books as a plumber!” Suddenly, to her drowsy astonishment, Sophie saw the man yank Weiss’s eyeshade down around his windpipe, where it dangled like a useless celluloid appendage. “You nasty little
putz,
” the voice said, full of contempt and revulsion, “you’re enough to make
anyone
puke!”