Sophie's Choice (54 page)

Sophie added to her story a short while later. She said that during the chaotic days immediately after her arrival she was in such shock--so torn to fragments by what happened on the ramp, and by Jan's disappearance into the Children's Camp--that she was barely able to hold on to her reason. But in her barracks one day she could not help paying attention to a conversation between two German Jewish women, new prisoners who had managed to live through the selection. It was plain from their physical description that the doctor of whom they were speaking--the one who had been responsible for their own survival--was the one who had sent Eva to the gas chamber. What Sophie had remembered most vividly was this: one of the women, who was from the Charlottenburg part of Berlin, said that she distinctly remembered the doctor from her youth. He had not recognized her on the ramp. She in turn had not known him well, although he had been a neighbor. The two related things she did recall about him--aside from his striking good looks--the two things she had not been able to forget about him, for some reason, were that he was a steadfast churchgoer and that he had always planned to enter the ministry. A mercenary father forced him into medicine. Other of Sophie's recollections point to the doctor as a religious person. Or at least as a failed believer seeking redemption, groping for renewed faith. For example, as a hint--his drunkenness. All that we can deduced from the record indicates that in the pursuit of their jobs SS officers, including doctors, were almost monkish in their decorum, sobriety and devotion to the rules. While the demands of butchery at its most primitive level--mainly in the neighborhood of the crematoriums--caused a great deal of alcohol to be consumed, this bloody work was in general the job of enlisted men, who were allowed (and indeed often needed) to numb themselves to their activities. Besides being spared these particular chores, officers in the SS, like officers everywhere, were expected to maintain a dignified comportment, especially when going about their duties. Why, then, did Sophie have the rare experience of meeting a doctor like Jemand von Niemand in his plastered condition, crosseyed with booze and so unkempt that he still bore on his lapel grains of greasy rice from a probably long and sodden repast? This must have been for the doctor a very dangerous posture. I have always assumed that when he encountered Sophie, Dr. Jemand von Niemand was undergoing the crisis of his life: cracking apart like bamboo, disintegrating at the very moment that he was reaching out for spiritual salvation. One can only speculate upon Von Niemand's later career, but if he was at all like his chief, Rudolf Höss, and the SS in general, he had styled himself Gottgläubiger--which is to say, he had rejected Christianity while still outwardly professing faith in God. But how could one believe in God after practicing one's science for months in such a loathsome environment? Awaiting the arrival of countless trains from every corner of Europe, then winnowing out the fit and the healthy from the pathetic horde of cripples and the toothless and the blind, the feeble-minded and the spastic and the unending droves of helpless aged and helpless little children, he surely knew that the slave enterprise he served (itself a mammoth killing machine regurgitating once-human husks) was a mockery and a denial of God. Besides, he was at bottom a vassal of IG Farben. Surely he could not retain belief while passing time in such a place. He had to replace God with a sense of the omnipotence of business. Since the overwhelming number of those upon whom he stood in judgment were Jews, he must have been relieved when once again Himmler's order arrived directing that all Jews without exception would be exterminated. There would no longer be any need for his selective eye. This would take him away from the horrible ramps, allowing him to pursue more normal medical activities. (It may be hard to believe, but the vastness and complexity of Auschwitz permitted some benign medical work as well as the unspeakable experiments which--given the assumption that Dr. von Niemand was a man of some sensibility--he would have shunned.) But quickly Himmler's orders were countermanded. There was a need for flesh to fill IG Farben's insatiable maw; it was back to the ramps again for the tormented doctor. Selections would begin again. Soon only Jews would go to the gas chambers. But until final orders came, Jews and "Aryans" alike would undergo the selection process. (There would be occasional capricious exceptions, such as the shipment of Jews from Malkinia.) The renewed horror scraped like steel files at the doctor's soul, threatened to shred his reason. He began to drink, to acquire sloppy eating habits, and to miss God. Wo, wo ist der lebende Gott? Where is the God of my fathers? But of course the answer finally dawned on him, and one day I suspect the revelation made him radiant with hope. It had to do with the matter of sin, or rather, it had to do with the absence of sin, and his own realization that the absence of sin and the absence of God were inseparably intertwined. No sin! He had suffered boredom and anxiety, and even revulsion, but no sense of sin from the bestial crimes he had been party to, nor had he felt that in sending thousands of the wretched innocent to oblivion he had transgressed against divine law. All had been unutterable monotony. All of his depravity had been enacted in a vacuum of sinless and businesslike godlessness, while his soul thirsted for beatitude. Was it not supremely simple, then, to restore his belief in God, and at the same time to affirm his human capacity for evil, by committing the most intolerable sin that he was able to conceive? Goodness could come later. But first a great sin. One whose glory lay in its subtle magnanimity--a choice. After all, he had the power to take both. This is the only way I have been able to explain what Dr. Jemand von Niemand did to Sophie when she appeared with her two little children on April Fools' Day, while the wild tango beat of "La Cumparsita" drummed and rattled insistently off-key in the gathering dusk.

Chapter 16

All my life I have retained a streak of uncontrolled didacticism. God knows into what suffocating depths of discomfort I have, over the years, plunged family and friends, who out of love have tolerated my frequent seizures and have more or less successfully concealed yawns, the faint crack of jaw muscles and those telltale drops at the tear ducts signaling a death struggle with tedium. But on rare occasions, when the moment is exactly right and the audience is utterly responsive, my encyclopedic ability to run on and on about a subject has served me in good stead; at a time when the situation demands the blessed release of witless diversion, nothing can be more soothing than useless facts and empty statistics. I employed all my knowledge about--of all things--peanuts to try to captivate Sophie that evening in Washington, as we ambled past the floodlight-drenched White House and then made our roundabout way toward Herzog's restaurant and "the best crab cakes in town." After what she had told me, peanuts seemed the appropriate commonplace out of which to refashion new conduits of communication. For during the two hours or so following her story I don't think I had been able to say more than three or four words to her. Nor had she been able to say much to me. But peanuts allowed me at last to breach our silence, to try to break out of the cloud of depression hovering over us. "The peanut's not a nut," I explained, "but a pea. It's a cousin of the pea and the bean but different in an important way--it develops its pods under the ground. The peanut's an annual, growing low over the soil. There are three major types of peanuts grown in the United States--the large-seeded Virginia, the runner and the Spanish. Peanuts have to have a lot of sunshine and a long frost-free growing period. That's why they grow in the South. The major peanut-growing states are, in order, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Texas. There was an incredibly gifted Negro scientist named George Washington Carver who developed dozens of uses for peanuts. Aside from just food, they're used in cosmetics, plastics, insulation, explosives, certain medicines, lots of other things. Peanuts are a booming crop, Sophie, and I think that this little farm of ours will grow and grow, and pretty soon we'll not only be self-sufficient but maybe even rich--at least, very well-off. We won't have to depend on Alfred Knopf or Harper and Brothers for our daily bread. The reason I want you to know something about peanuts as a crop is simply because if you're going to be the chatelaine of the manor, there are times when you'll have to have a hand in the running of the operations. Now, as for the actual growing, peanuts are planted after the last frost by seeding three to ten inches apart in rows about two feet apart. The pods usually mature about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and forty days after planting..." "You know, Stingo, I just thought of something," Sophie said, breaking in at some point on my soliloquy. "It's something very important." "What's that?" I said. "I don't know how to drive. I don't know how to drive a car." "So?" "But we'll be living on this farm. From what you say, so far away from things. I'll have to be able to drive a car, won't I? I never learned in Poland--so few people had cars. At least, you never learned to drive until you were so much older. And here--Nathan said he was going to teach me but he never did. Surely I'll have to learn how to drive." "Easy," I replied. "I'll teach you. There's a pickup truck already there. Anyway, in Virginia they're very lax about driver's licenses. Jesus"--I had a sudden fit of recollection--"I remember I got my license on my fourteenth birthday. I mean, it was legal!" "Fourteen?" said Sophie. "Christ, I weighed about ninety pounds and could barely see over the steering wheel. I remember the state trooper who was giving the test looked at my father and said, 'Is he your son or a midget?' But I got the license. That's the South... There's something that's so different about the South even in trivial ways. Take the matter of youth, for instance. In the North you'd never be allowed to get a driver's license so young. It's as if you got older much younger in the South. Something about the lushness, the ripeness maybe. Like that joke about what's the Mississippi definition of a virgin. The answer is: a twelve-year-old girl who can run faster than her daddy." I heard myself giggle self-indulgently, in the first spell of what could even remotely be called good humor I had experienced in hours. And suddenly the hunger in me to get down to Southampton County, to start planting roots, was nearly as intense as the real need I had by this time to consume some of Herzog's celebrated crab cakes. I began jabbering at Sophie with brainless unrestraint, not so much actually forgetful of what she had just finished telling me as, I think, thoughtlessly oblivious of the fragile mood her confessional had created within herself. "Now then," I said in my best pastor's counseling voice, "I have a feeling from some of the things you mentioned that you think you're going to be out of place down there. But listen, nothing's further from the truth. They might be a little stand-offish at first--and you'll worry about your accent and your foreignness, and so on--but let me tell you something, Sophie darling, Southerners are the warmest and most accepting people in America, once they get to know you. They're not like big-city hooligans and shysters. So don't worry. Of course, we'll have to do a little adjusting. As I said before, I think the wedding ceremony will have to come pretty soon--you know, to avoid ugly gossip if nothing else. So after we get the feel of the place and introduce ourselves around--this'll take several days, that's all--we'll make out a big shopping list and take the truck and drive up to Richmond. There'll be thousands of things we'll need. The place is filled with all the basics, but we'll need so many other things. Like I told you, a phonograph and a bunch of records. Then there's the little matter of your wedding clothes. You'll naturally want to be dressed nice for the ceremony, and so we'll shop around in Richmond. You won't find Paris couture there but there are some excellent stores--" "Stingo!" she cut in sharply. "Please! Please! Don't run on like that, about wedding clothes and such as that. What do you think I have in my suitcase right now? Just what!" Her voice had risen, cross and quavering, touched with an anger she had rarely ever aimed at me. We stopped walking, and I turned to look at her face in the shadows of the cool evening. Her eyes were clouded with murky unhappiness and I knew then, with a painful catch in my chest, that I had said the wrong thing, or things. "What?" I stupidly asked. "Wedding clothes," she said somberly, "the wedding clothes from Saks that Nathan bought me. I don't need any wedding clothes. Don't you see..." And yes, I did see. To my awful distress, I did see. It was bad. At this instant I sensed for the first time a distance separating us--an intolerable distance which, in my delusory dreams about a Southern love nest, I had not realized had been keeping us apart as effectively as a wide river in flood, preventing any real communion. At least on the loving level I so craved. Nathan. She was still totally absorbed in Nathan, so much so that even the sad nuptial garments she had transported so far had some huge importance to her that was both tactile and symbolic. And I suddenly grasped another truth: how ludicrous it was of me to think of a wedding and sweet uxorious years down on the old plantation when the mistress of my passion--standing before me now with her tired face so twisted with hurt--was lugging around with her wedding clothes meant to please a man she had loved to the point of death. Christ, my stupidity! My tongue had turned to a lump of concrete, I struggled for words but could say nothing. Over Sophie's shoulder George Washington's cenotaph, a blazing stiletto in the night sky, was washed in October mist, and tiny people crawled around its foundation. I felt weak and hopeless, with a central part of me in shambles. Each ticking moment seemed to bear Sophie away from me with the speed of light. Yet just then she murmured something I didn't understand. She made a sibilant sound, almost inaudible, and right there on Constitution Avenue, moved toward me in a rush and pressed herself into my arms. "Oh, Stingo dear," she whispered, "please forgive me. I didn't mean to raise my voice. I still want to go to Virginia with you. Really I do. And we are going tomorrow together, aren't we? It's just that when you mention getting married, I get so... so full of trouble. So uncertain. Don't you understand?" "Yes," I replied. And of course I did, although with thickwitted belatedness. I held her close. "Of course I do, Sophie." "Oh, we'll go to the farm tomorrow," she said, squeezing me, "we really will. Just don't talk about marriage. Please." At that moment I also realized that something not quite genuine had attended my little spasm of euphoria. There had been an ingredient of escapism in my trying so doggedly to lay out the attractions of this garden of terrestrial happiness hard by the Dismal Swamp, where no blowflies buzzed, no pumps broke down, no crops failed, no underpaid darkies ever sulked in the cotton patch, no pig shit stank; for all I knew, despite the trust I had in my father's opinion, dear old "Five Elms" might be a squalid demesne and a gone-to-seed wreck, and to booby-trap Sophie, so to speak, by enticing her into some tumble-down Tobacco Road would be an indefensible disgrace. But I dismissed all this from my mind, it was something I could not even consider. And there was a more troubling matter. What now had become hideously apparent was that our brief bubble bath of good spirits was flat, finished, dead. When we resumed strolling along, the gloom hovering around Sophie seemed almost visible, touchable, like a fog from which one, after reaching out to her, would withdraw a hand damp with despair. "Oh, Stingo, I need a drink so bad," she said. We walked through the evening in total silence. I gave up pointing out the landmarks of the capital, abandoning the tourguide approach I had used to try to perk up Sophie during the beginning of our meander. It was clear to me that try as she might, she could not shake off the horror which she had felt compelled to spill forth in our little hotel room. Nor indeed could I. Here on Fourteenth Street in the frosty cider air of an early autumn night, with L'Enfant's stylish oblong spaces luminescent all around us, it was plain that Sophie and I could appreciate neither the symmetry of the city nor its air of wholesome and benevolent peace. Washington suddenly appeared paradigmatically American, sterile, geometrical, unreal. I had identified so completely with Sophie that I felt Polish, with Europe's putrid blood rushing through my arteries and veins. Auschwitz still stalked my soul as well as hers. Was there no end to this? No end? And finally, seated at a table overlooking the sparkling moonflecked Potomac, I asked Sophie about her little boy. I watched Sophie take a gulp of whiskey before she said, "I'm glad you asked that question, Stingo. I thought you would and I wanted you to, because for some reason I couldn't bring it up myself. Yes, you're right. I've often thought to myself: If I only knew what happened to Jan, if I could only find him, that might truly save me from all this sadness that comes over me. If I found Jan, I might be--oh, rescued from all these terrible feelings I still have, this desire I have had and still have to be... finished with life. To say adieu to this place which is so mysterious and strange and... and so wrong. If I could just find my little boy, I think that could save me. "It might even save me from the guilt I have felt over Eva. In some way I know I should feel no badness over something I done like that. I see that it was--oh, you know--beyond my control, but it is still so terrible to wake up these many mornings with a memory of that, having to live with it. When you add it to all the other bad things I done, it makes everything unbearable. Just unbearable. "Many, many times I have wondered whether the chances are possible that Jan is still alive somewhere. If Höss done what he said he would do, then maybe he still is alive, somewhere in Germany. But I don't think I could ever find him, after these years. They took away the identities of those children in Lebensborn, changed their names so fast, turned them so quickly into Germans--I wouldn't know where to start to find him. If he's really there, that is. When I was in the refugee center in Sweden it was all I could think about night and day--to get well and healthy so that I could go to Germany and find my little boy. But then I met this Polish woman--she was from Kielce, I remember--and she had the most tragic, haunted face I ever saw on a person. She had been a prisoner at Ravensbrück. She had lost her child, too, to Lebensborn, a little girl, and for months after the war she'd wandered all through Germany, hunting and hunting. But she never found the little girl. She said no one ever found their children. It was bad enough, she told me, not to find her daughter, but the search was even worse, this agony. Don't go, she told me, don't go. Because if you do you'll see your child everywhere, in those ruined cities, on every street corner, in every crowd of schoolchildren, on buses, passing, in cars, waving at you from playgrounds, everywhere--and you'll call out and rush toward the child, only he will not be yours. And so your soul will break apart a hundred times a day, and finally it is almost worse than knowing your child is dead... "But to be quite honest, Stingo, like I told you, I don't think Höss ever done anything for me, and I think Jan stayed in the camp, and if he did, then I am certain he didn't live. When I was so sick myself in Birkenau that winter just before the war ended--I didn't know anything about this, I heard about it later, I was so sick I almost died--the SS wanted to get rid of the children who were left, there were several hundred of them far off, in the Children's Camp. The Russians were coming and the SS wanted the children destroyed. Most of them were Polish; the Jewish children were already dead. They thought of burning them alive in a pit, or shooting them, but they decided to do something that wouldn't show too many marks and evidence. So in the freezing cold they marched the children down to the river and made them take off their clothes and soak them in the water as if they were washing them, and then made them put on these wet clothes again. Then they marched them back to the area in front of the barracks where they had been living and had a roll call. Standing in their wet
clothes. The roll call lasted for many, many hours while the children stood wet and freezing and night came. All of the children died of being exposed that day. They died of exposure and pneumonia, very fast. I think Jan must have been among them... "But I don't know," Sophie said at last, gazing at me dry-eyed but sliding into the slurred diction which glass after glass of alcohol lent to her tongue, along with the merciful and grief-deadening anodyne it provided for her battered memory. "Is it best to know about a child's death, even one so horrible, or to know that the child lives but that you will never, never see him again? I don't know either for sure. Suppose I had chosen Jan to go... to go to the left instead of Eva. Would that have changed anything?" She paused to look out through the night at the dark shores of the Virginia of our destination, removed by staggering dimensions of time and space from her own benighted, cursed and--to me even at that moment--all but incomprehensible history. "Nothing would have changed anything," she said. Sophie was not given to actresslike gestures, but for the first time in the months I had known her she did this strange thing: she pointed directly to the center of her bosom, then pulled away with her fingers an invisible veil as if to expose to view a heart outraged as desperately as the mind can conceive. "Only this has changed, I think. It has been hurt so much, it has turned to stone." I knew that it was best that we should get well rested before continuing our trip down to the farm. Through various conversational stratagems, including more agricultural wisdom leavened by all the good Southern jokes I could extract from memory, I was able to infuse Sophie with enough cheer to make it through the rest of the dinner. We drank, ate crab cakes and managed to forget Auschwitz. By ten o'clock she was again quite befuddled and unsteady of gait--as was I, for that matter, with an unconscionable amount of beer stowed away--and so we took a taxi back to the hotel. She was already drowsing against my shoulder by the time we reached the stained marble steps and tobacco-fragrant lobby of the Hotel Congress, and she clung with weary heaviness to my waist as we rode the elevator up to the room. Onto the sway-back bed she flung herself wordlessly, without removing her clothes, and was instantaneously asleep. I put a blanket over her, and after stripping to my skivvy drawers, lay down beside her and fell asleep myself like one bludgeoned. At least for a time. Then came dreams. The church bell sounding intermittently through my slumber was not entirely unmusical, but it had a clangorous, hollow, Protestant ring, as if fashioned of low-priced alloys; demonically, in the midst of my turbulent erotic visions, it tolled with the voice of sin. The Reverend Entwistle, drugged with Budweiser and in bed with a woman not his wife, was basically ill-at-ease in this illicit ambience, even while asleep. DARK DOOM! DARK DOOM! pealed the wretched bell. Indeed, I'm sure it was both my residual Calvinism and my clerical disguise--also that damnable church bell--which helped cause me to falter so badly when Sophie woke me. This must have been around two in the morning. It should have been that moment in my life when literally, as the saying goes, all my dreams came true, for in the half-light I realized both by feel and evidence of my sleep-blurred eyes that Sophie was naked, that she was tenderly licking the recesses of my ear, and that she was groping for my cock. Was I asleep or awake? If all this were not puzzlingly sweet enough--the simulacrum of a dream--the dream melted instantly away at the sound of her whisper: "Oh.. . now, Stingo darling, I want to fuck." Then I felt her tugging off my underpants. I began to kiss Sophie like a man dying of thirst and she returned my kisses, groaning, but this is all we did (or all I could do, despite her gently expert, tickling manipulation) for many minutes. It would be misleading to emphasize my malfunction, either its duration or its effect on me, although such was its completeness that I recall resolving to commit suicide if it did not soon correct itself. Yet there it remained in her fingers, a limp worm. She slid down over the surface of my belly and began to suck me. I remember once how, in the abandonment of her confession regarding Nathan, she fondly spoke of him calling her "the world's most elegant cocksucker." He may have been right; I will never forget how eagerly and how naturally she moved to demonstrate to me her appetite and her devotion, planting her knees firmly between my legs like the fine craftswoman she was, then bending down and taking into her mouth my no longer quite so shrunken little comrade, bringing it swelling and jumping up by such a joyfully adroit, heedlessly noisy blend of labial and lingual rhythms that I could feel the whole slippery-sweet union of mouth and rigid prick like an electric charge running from my scalp to the tips of my toes. "Oh, Stingo," she gasped, pausing once for breath, "don't come yet, darling." Fat chance. I would lie there and let her suck me until my hair grew thin and gray. The varieties of sexual experience are, I suppose, so multifarious that it is an exaggeration to say that Sophie and I did that night everything it is possible to do. But I'll swear we came close, and one thing forever imprinted on my brain was our mutual inexhaustibility. I was inexhaustible because I was twenty-two, and a virgin, and was clasping in my arms at last the goddess of my unending fantasies. Sophie's lust was as boundless as my own, I'm sure, but for more complex reasons; it had to do, of course, with her good raw natural animal passion, but it was also both a plunge into carnal oblivion and a flight from memory and grief. More than that, I now see, it was a frantic and orgiastic attempt to beat back death. But at the time I was unable to perceive this, running as I was the temperature of an overheated Sherman tank, being out of my wits with excitement, and filled all night long with dumb wonder at our combined frenzy. For me it was less an initiation than a complete, well-rounded apprenticeship, or more, and Sophie, my loving instructress, never ceased whispering encouragement into my ear. It was as if through a living tableau, in which I myself was a participant, there were being acted out all the answers to the questions with which I had half maddened myself ever since I began secretly reading marriage manuals and sweated over the pages of Havelock Ellis and other sexual savants. Yes, the female nipples did spring up like little pink semi-hard gumdrops beneath the fingers, and Sophie emboldened me to even sweeter joys by asking me to excite them with my tongue. Yes, the clitoris was really there, darling little bud; Sophie placed my fingers on it. And oh, the cunt was indeed wet and warm, wet with a saliva-slick wetness that astounded me with its heat; the stiff prick slid in and out of that incandescent tunnel more effortlessly than I had ever dreamed, and when for the first time I spurted prodigiously somewhere in her dark bottomlessness, I heard Sophie cry out against my cheek, saying that she could feel the gush. The cunt also tasted good, I discovered later, as the church bell--no longer admonitory--dropped four gongs in the night; the cunt was simultaneously pungent and briny and I heard Sophie sigh, guiding me gently by the ears as if they were handles while I licked her there. And then there were all those famous positions. Not the twenty-eight outlined in the handbooks, but certainly, in addition to the standard one, three or four or five. At some point Sophie, returning from the bathroom where she kept the liquor, switched on the light, and we fucked in a glow of soft copper; I was delighted to find that the "female superior" posture was every bit as pleasurable as Dr. Ellis had claimed, not so much for its anatomical advantages (though those too were fine, I thought as from below I cupped Sophie's breasts in my hands or, alternately, squeezed and stroked her bottom) as for the view it afforded me of that wideboned Slavic face brooding above me, her eyes closed and her expression so beautifully tender and drowned and abandoned in her passion that I had to avert my gaze. "I can't stop coming," I heard her murmur, and I knew she meant it. We lay quietly together for a while, side by side, but soon without a word Sophie presented herself in such a way as to fulfill all my past fantasies in utter apotheosis. Taking her from behind while she knelt, thrusting into the cleft between those smooth white globes, I suddenly clenched my eyes shut and, I remember, thought in a weird seizure of cognition of the necessity of redefining "joy," "fulfillment," "ecstasy," even "God." Several times we stopped long enough for Sophie to drink, and for her to pour whiskey and water down my own gullet. The booze, far from numbing me, heightened the images as well as the sensations of what then bloomed into phantasmagoria... Her voice in my ear, the incomprehensible words in Polish nonetheless understood, urging me on as if in a race, urging me to some ever-receding finish line. Fucking for some reason on the gritty bone-hard floor, the reason unclear, dim, stupid--why, for Christ's sake?--then abruptly dawning: to view, as on a pornographic screen, our pale white entwined bodies splashing back from the lusterless mirror on the bathroom door. A kind of furious obsessed wordlessness finally--no Polish, no English, no language, only breath. Soixante-neuf (recommended by the doctor), where after smothering for minute after minute in her moist mossy cunt's undulant swamp, I came at last in Sophie's mouth, came in a spasm of such delayed, prolonged, exquisite intensity that I verged on a scream, or a prayer, and my vision went black, and I gratefully perished. Sleep then--a sleep that was beyond mere sleep. Coldcocked. Etherized. Dead. I woke up with my face afloat in a puddle of sunlight, and I reached with an instinctive twitch for Sophie's arm, hair, breast, something. The Reverend Entwistle was, to put it with exactitude, ready for another fuck. This matutinal grope, the somnolent reaching out, was a Pavlovian reflex which I would experience often in later years. But Sophie was gone. Gone! Her absence, after the most complete (or perhaps I should say only) propinquity of flesh in my life, was spooky, almost palpable, and I drowsily realized it had partly to do with the smell of her, which remained like a vapor in the air: a musky genital odor, still provocative, still lascivious. In my waking daze I glanced down amid the landscape of tangled bedclothes, unable to believe that after all of its happy, exhausting toil my member still stood valiantly upright, serving as a tentpost to the worn and tacky sheet. Then I was washed by an awful panic, aware from the slant of the mirror that Sophie was not in the bathroom and therefore not in the room at all. Just as I leaped from the bed the headache of a hangover smote my skull like a mallet, and during my struggle with my trousers I was seized by further panic, or I should say, dread: the bell tolled outside and I counted the strokes--it was noon! My yells over the decrepit telephone brought no response. Half clothed, murmuring to myself curses, recriminations, filled with auguries of foul tidings, I burst out of the room and galloped down the fire stairs to the lobby with its single Negro bellboy pushing a mop, its potted rubber plants and rump-sprung armchairs and overflowing spittoons. There the old codger who had first greeted me drowsed behind the desk, mooning over the waiting room's midday desuetude. At the sight of me he came alert, and proceeded to unfold what was simply the worst news I had ever heard. "She came down real early, Reverend," he said, "so early she had to wake me up." He looked at the bellboy. "What time you reckon it was, Jackson?" "Hit must have been aroun' six." "Yes, it was about six o'clock. Just dawn. She looked like she was in a real state, Reverend." His pause seemed a little apologetic. "I mean, well, I think she'd had several beers. Her hair was every whichaway. Anyway, she got on the phone here, long-distance to Brooklyn, New York. I couldn't help overhearing. She was talkin' to someone--a man, I guess. She began to cry a lot and told him she was leavin' here right away. Kept callin' to him--she was real upset, Reverend. Mason. Jason. Something like that." "Nathan," I said, hearing the catch in my voice. "Nathan! Oh, Jesus Christ..." Sympathy and concern--an emotional amalgam which suddenly appeared to me rather Southern and old-fashioned--welled up in the old clerk's eyes. "Yes--Nathan. I didn't know what to do, Reverend," he explained. "She went on upstairs and then she came down with her bag and Jackson here took her over to Union Station. She looked awfully upset and I thought of you, and wondered... I thought of calling you on the phone but it was so early. And anyway, I didn't want to butt in. I mean, it wasn't my business." "Oh, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ," I kept hearing myself mutter, half aware of the questioning look on the face of the old man, who as a member of the Second Baptist Church of Washington was doubtless unprepared for such impiety from a preacher. Jackson took me back upstairs in the aged elevator, against whose curlicued cast-iron, unfriendly wall I leaned with my eyes closed in a state of stupefaction, unable to believe any of this or, even more intransigently, to accept it. Surely, I thought, Sophie would be lying in bed when I returned, the golden hair shining in a rectangle of sunshine, the nimble loving hands outstretched, beckoning me to renewed delight... Instead, tucked against the mirror above the lavatory in the bathroom, there was a note. Scrawled in pencil, it was testimony indeed to the imperfect command of written English of which Sophie had so recently lamented to me, but also to the influence of German, which she had learned from her father so many years before in Cracow and which until this moment I had not realized had embedded itself with such obstinacy, like cornices and moldings of Gothic stone, in her mind's architecture. My dearest Stingo, your such a beautiful Lover I hate to leave and forgive me for not saying Good-Bye but I must go back to Nathan. Believe me you will find some wunderful Mademoiselle to make you happy on the Farm. I am so fond of you--you must not think bei this I am being cruel. But when I woke I was feeling so terrible and in Despair about Nathan, bei that I mean so filled with Gilt and thoughts of Death it was like Eis Ice flowing in my Blut. So I must be with Nathan again for whatever that mean. I may not see you again but do believe me how much knowing you have meaned to me. Your a great Lover Stingo. I feel so bad, I must go now. Forgive my poor englisch. I love Nathan but now