Sophie's Choice - William Styron [128]
“It has been long enough now,” she went on, “that I no longer grieve like I did, but yet I miss him. He was such a good man—that is what make it so terrible, Stingo! When you think of all the bad people—Poles, Germans, Russians, French, all nationalities—all these evil people who escaped, people who killed Jews who are still alive right now. In Germany. And places like Argentina. And my father—this good man—who had to die! Isn’t that enough to make you not believe in this God? Who can believe in God who turn His back on people like that?” This outburst—this little aria—had come so swiftly that it surprised me; her fingers trembled slightly. Then she calmed down. And once again—as if she had forgotten that she had already once told me, or perhaps because the repetition gave her some forlorn comfort—she sketched the portrait she imagined of her father, in Lublin many years before, saving Jews from a Russian pogrom at peril to his life.
“What is the word l’ironie in English?”
“Irony?” I said.
“Yes, such an irony that a man like that, a man like my father, risk his life for Jews and die, and the Jew-killers live, so many of them, right now.”
“I’d say that’s less an irony, Sophie, than the way of the world,” I concluded a little sententiously but with seriousness, feeling the need to relieve my bladder.
I got up and made my way to the men’s room, weaving slightly, aglow at the edges of my skin with a penumbra of Rheingold, the jolly, astringent beer served at the Maple Court on draft. I richly enjoyed the men’s john at the Maple Court, where, cantilevered slightly forward over the urinal, I could brood over the plashing clear stream while Guy Lombardo or Sammy Kaye or Shep Fields or some other glutinously innocuous band rumbled faintly from the jukebox beyond the walls. It was wonderful to be twenty-two and a little drunk, knowing that all went well at the writing desk, shiveringly happy in the clutch of one’s own creative ardor and in that “grand certitude” Thomas Wolfe was always hymning—the certitude that the wellsprings of youth would never run dry, and that the wrenching anguish endured in the crucible of art would find its recompense in everlasting fame, and glory, and the love of beautiful women.
As I blissfully pissed I eyed the ubiquitous homosexual graffiti (inscribed there, God knows, not by the Maple Court regulars but by the transient trade which managed to scribble up the walls of any place, no matter how unlikely, where males unlimbered their joints) and with delight gazed once again at the smoke-stained but still vivid caricature on the wall: companion-piece to the mural outside, it was a masterpiece of 1930s innocent ribaldry, displaying Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in contortionist Peeping Tom postures, gleefully asquint through the interstices of a garden trellis as they observed little Betty Boop, enchanting and voluptuous of calf and thigh, squatting to take a pee. Suddenly I was stabbed with alarm, sensing an unholy and unnatural presence of flapping vulturous black, until I realized in an instant that the two mendicant nuns had blundered into the wrong facility. They were gone then in a flash, squawking in distressed Italian, and I rather hoped they had gotten a look at my schlong. Was it their entry—duplicating the bad omen Sophie had felt only a short while before—that presaged the evil contretemps of the next fifteen minutes or so?
I heard Nathan’s voice over Shep Fields’ rippling rhythm even as I approached the table. It was a voice not so much loud as incredibly assertive and it cut through the music like a hacksaw. It was filled with trouble, and though I wanted to retreat when I heard it I dared not, feeling something momentous in the air which impelled me on toward the voice and Sophie. And so totally immersed was Nathan in this rancorous message he was imparting to Sophie, so single-minded did he seem at that moment, that I was