Sophie's Choice (17 page)

caused him to turn red and to mutter in a flustered voice, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry! I'm a terrible intruder... I'm just an ass sometimes. An ass!" "Please don't say that," she put in quickly, ashamed of the way her tone had confounded him. "I didn't mean to be so..." She paused, in sequence groping for then finding the right word in French, Polish, German and Russian but totally at sea in English. So she said only, "I'm sorry." "I have a knack for poking my big schnoz into places where it has no business," he said, as she watched the rosy flush of embarrassment recede from his face. Then abruptly he said, "Look, I've got to go. I've got an appointment. But listen--can I come back tonight? Don't answer that! I'll be back tonight." She couldn't answer. Having been swept off her feet (no figure of speech but a literal truth, for that is just what he had done two hours before; carrying her crumpled in his arms from the library to the place by the curb where he had hailed the taxi), she could only nod and say yes and smile a smile which still lingered as she heard him clatter down the steps. The time after that dragged badly. She was amazed at theexcitement with which she had awaited the sound of his stomping shoes when, at about seven in the evening, he returned, bringing another bulging grocery bag and two dozen of the most bewitchingly lovely long-stemmed yellow roses she had ever seen. She was up and around now, feeling almost fully recovered, but he ordered her to relax, saying, "Please, you just let Nathan take charge." This was the moment when she first heard his name. Nathan. Nathan! Nathan, Nathan! Never, never, she told me, would she ever forget this initial meal they had together, the sensuously concocted dinner which he fashioned from, of all humble things, calf's liver and leeks. "Loaded with iron," he proclaimed, the sweat popping out on his brow as he bent over the sputtering hot plate. "There is nothing better than liver. And leeks--filled with iron! Also will improve the timbre of your voice. Did you know that the Emperor Nero had leeks served to him every day to deepen the sonority of his voice? So he could croon while he had Seneca drawn and quartered? Sit down. Quit fussing around!" he commanded. "This is my show. What you need is iron. Iron! That's why we're also going to have creamed spinach and a plain little salad." She was captivated by the way in which Nathan, ever intent upon his cooking, was still able to intersperse his observations on gastronomie with scientific detail, largely nutritional. "Liver with onions is of course standard, but with leeks, sweetiepie, it becomes something special. These leeks are hard to find, I got them in an Italian market. It is as plain as the nose on your pretty but incredibly pale face that you need massive infusions of iron. Therefore the spinach. There was some research not long ago which came up with the interesting discovery that the oxalic acid content of spinach tends to neutralize a lot of the calcium, which you probably need also. Too bad, but it's still so loaded with iron that you'll get a good jolt of it anyway. Also the lettuce..." But if the dinner, though excellent in itself, was mainly restorative, the wine was ambrosial. In the household of her early youth, in Cracow, Sophie had grown up with wine, her father having possessed a strain of hedonism which caused him to insist (in a country as barren of vineyards as Montana) that her mother's ample and often elegant Viennese meals be accompanied with some regularity by the fine wines of Austria and the Hungarian plains. But the war, which had swept so much else out of her life, had obliterated such a simple pleasure as wine, and since then she had not bothered to go out of her way to drink any, even if she had been tempted to within the purlieus of Flatbush, itsconstituency pledged to Mogen David. But she had no notion of this--this gods' liquor! The bottle Nathan brought was of such a quality as to make Sophie want to redefine the nature of taste; ignorant of the mystique of French wine, she did not need to be told by Nathan that it was a Château-Margaux, or that it was a 1937--the last of the great prewar vintages--or that it cost the flabbergasting sum of fourteen dollars (roughly half her salary for a week, she noted with incredulity as she caught a glimpse of the price on the sticker), or that it might have gained in bouquet had there been time to decant it first. Nathan went on and on divertingly about such matters. But she only knew that the savor of it gave her an unparalleled sense of delight, a luscious and reckless and great-hearted warmth that spread downward to her toes, validating all quaint and ancient maxims as to the healing properties of wine. Light-headed, woozy, she heard herself say to her provider toward the end of the meal, "You know, when you live a good life like a saint and die, that must be what they make you to drink in paradise." To which Nathan made no direct reply, appearing to be pleasantly mellow himself as he peered at her gravely and thoughtfully through the ruby dregs of his glass. "Not 'to drink,'" he corrected her gently, "just 'make you drink.' " Then he added, "Forgive me. I'm a confirmed and frustrated schoolmaster." Then after dinner was over and they had washed the dishes together they sat down opposite each other in the two uncomfortable straight-backed chairs with which at that time the room was furnished. Suddenly Nathan's attention was caught by the handful of books in a row on a shelf above Sophie's bed--the Polish translations of Hemingway and Wolfe and Dreiser and Farrell. Rising for a moment, he examined the books curiously. He said some things which made her feel that he was familiar with these writers; he spoke with special enthusiasm of Dreiser, telling her that in college he had read straight through the enormous length of An American Tragedy in a single sitting, "nearly putting my eyes out in the process," and then in the midst of a rhapsodic description of Sister Carrie, which she had not yet read but which he insisted that she do (assuring her that it was Dreiser's masterpiece), he stopped short in mid-sentence and gazed at her with a pop-eyed clownish look that made her laugh, and said, "You know, I haven't the faintest notion of who you are. What do you do, Polish baby?" She paused for a long time before replying. "I work for a doctor, part time. I am his receptionist." "A doctor?" he said, clearly with great interest. "What kind of a doctor?" She sensed that she was having enormous difficulty in getting the word out. But finally she said it. "He's a--chiropractor." Sophie could almost see the spasm that went through his entire body at the sound of what she had said. "A chiropractor. A chiropractor! No wonder you've got troubles!" She found herself trying to make a foolish and lame excuse. "He's a very nice man..." she began. "He's what you call"--resorting suddenly to Yiddish--"a mensh. His name is Dr. Black-stock." "Mensh, shmensh," he said with a look of deep distaste, "a girl like you, working for some humbug--" "It was the only job I could get, when I come here," she put in. "It was all I could do!" Now she felt herself speaking with some irritation and feeling, and either what she said or the sudden brusque way she said it caused him to mutter a quick apology. "I know," he said, "I shouldn't say that. It's none of my business." "I would like something better, but I have no talents." She spoke more calmly now. "I begun an education, you see, a long time ago, but it never was finished. I am, you see, a very uncomplete person. I wished somehow to teach, to teach music, to become a teacher of music--but this was impossible. So I am a receptionist in this office. It's not so bad, vraiment--although I would like to do something better one day." "I'm so sorry for what I said." She gazed at him, touched by the discomfort he seemed to suffer over his own maladroitness. In as long as she could remember she had never met anyone to whom she was so immediately drawn. There was something so appealingly intense, energetic and various about Nathan--his quiet but firm domination, his mimicry, his comic bluster about things culinary and medical, which, she felt, was the thinnest disguise for his real concern for her health. And at last this awkward vulnerability and self-reproach, which in some remote and indefinable way reminded her of a small boy. For an instant she wished he would touch her again, then the feeling went away. They were both silent for a long moment as a car slithered by on the street outside where a light rain was falling and the evening chimes from the distant church dropped nine notes on Brooklyn's vast, reverberant midsummerstillness. Far off, thunder rolled faintly over Manhattan. It had become dark and Sophie switched on her solitary table lamp. Perhaps it was only the seraphic wine or Nathan's calm and uninhibiting presence, but she felt the urge not to halt where she had left off but to continue talking, and as she talked she felt her English moving more or less smoothly and with nearly unhampered authority, as if through remarkably efficient conduits she hardly knew she possessed. "I have nothing left from the past. Nothing at all. So that is one of the reasons why, you see, I feel so uncomplete. Everything you see in this room is American, new--books, my clothes, everything--there is nothing at all that remains from Poland, from the time when I was young. I don't even have a picture from that time. One thing I much regret about losing is that album of photographs I once had. If I only had been able to keep it, I could show you so many interesting things--how it was in Cracow before the war. My father was a professor at the university but he was also a very talented photographer--an amateur, but very good, you know, very sensitive. He had a very expensive fantastic Leica. I remember one of the pictures he take that was in this album, one of his best ones that I so regret to lose, was of me and my mother sitting at the piano. I was about thirteen then. We must have been playing a composition for four hands. We looked so happy, I remember, my mother and me. Now, somehow, just the memory of that photograph is a symbol for me, a symbol of what was and could have been and now cannot be." She paused, inwardly proud of her fluidly shifting tenses, and glanced up at Nathan, who had leaned forward slightly, totally absorbed by her sudden outpouring. "You must see clearly, I do not pity myself. There are far worse things than being unable to finish a career, not to become what one had planned to be. If that was all I had ever lost, I would be completely content. It would have been wonderful for me to have had the career in music that I thought I would have. But I was prevented. It is seven, eight years since I have read a note of music, and I do not even know if I could read music again. Anyway, that is why I can't any longer choose my job, so I have to work in the way that I do." After a bit he said, with that disarming directness that she had come to rather enjoy, "You're not Jewish, are you?" "No," she replied. "Did you think I was?" "At first I guess I just assumed you were. There are not many blond goyim roaming around Brooklyn College. Then I took a closer look at you in the taxi. There I thought you were Danish, or maybe Finnish, eastern Scandinavian. But, well--you have those Slavic cheekbones. Finally, by deduction I pegged you for a Polack, excuse me, divined that you were of Polish extraction. Then when you mentioned Warsaw, I was sure. You are a very beautiful Polack, or Polish lady." She smiled, aware of the warm blush in her cheeks. "Pas de flatterie, monsieur." "But then," he went on, "all these preposterous contradictions. What in God's name is a darling Polish shiksa doing working in the office of a chiropractor named Blackstock, and where on earth did you learn Yiddish? And lastly--and goddamnit, you're going to have to put up with my prying nose again, but I'm concerned about your condition, don't you see, and I've got to know these things!--lastly, how did you get that number on your arm? You don't want to talk about it, I know. I hate asking, but I think you've got to tell me." She dropped her head back against the dingy pillow of the pink and creaking chair. Perhaps, she thought with resignation, with mild despair, if she explained the rudimentary part of it to him now, patiently and explicitly, she would get it all over with, and if she was lucky, be spared any further inquisitiveness about more somber and complex matters which she could never describe or reveal to anyone. Perhaps, too, it was absurd or offensive of her to be so enigmatic, so ostentatiously secretive about something which, after all, should be common knowledge by now to almost everybody. Even though that was the strange thing: people here in America, despite all of the published facts, the photographs, the newsreels, still did not seem to know what had happened, except in the most empty, superficial way. Buchenwald, Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz--all stupid catchwords. This inability to comprehend on any real level of awareness was another reason why she so rarely had spoken to anyone about it, totally aside from the lacerating pain it caused her to dwell on that part of the past. As for the pain itself, she knew before speaking that what she was about to say would cause her almost physical anguish--like tearing open a nearly healed sore or trying to hobble on a broken limb incompletely mended; yet Nathan, after all, had by now amply demonstrated that he was only trying to help her; she knew she did infact need that help--rather desperately so--and thus she owed him at least a sketchy outline of her recent history. So after a bit she began to speak to him about it, gratified by the emotionless, truly pedestrian tone she was able to sustain. "In April of 1943 I was sent to the concentration camp in the south of Poland called Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was near the town of Ooewiçim. I had been living in Warsaw. I had been living there for three years, ever since the beginning of 1940, which is when I had to leave Cracow. Three years is a long time, but there was still two years more before the war was over. I often have thought that I would have lived through those two years safely if I had not made a terrible méprise--pardon me, mistake. This mistake was really very foolish, I hate myself when I think about it. I had been so careful, you see. I had been so careful that I am a little ashamed to admit it. I mean, up until then I was, you see, well-off. I was not Jewish, I was not in the ghetto, so I could not get caught for that reason. Also, I did not work for the underground. Franchement, it seemed to me to be too dangerous; it was a question of being involved in a situation where--But I don't wish to talk about that. Anyway, since I was not working