Sophie's Choice - William Styron [138]
“And Sophie...”
“And she—she’s cryin’ her eyes out the whole time, the two of them packin’ their things and him screamin’ and callin’ her a whore and a cunt and Sophie bawlin’ like a baby. It made me sick!” He paused, took a swallow of air, then resumed more slowly. “I didn’t realize that they were packin’ to leave for good. Then he looked down over the railing and seen me and asked where Yetta was. I said she was over in Staten Island visitin’ her sister. He threw me down thirty dollars for the rent, Sophie’s and his. Then I realized they were gettin’ out for good.”
“When did they finally go?” I asked. A sense of loss that was as suffocatingly painful as actual bereavement welled up in me; I gagged on a wet heave of nausea. “Didn’t they leave an address?“
“I tell you they went in two different directions,” he said impatiently. “They get their stuff all packed finally and go downstairs. This was only about twenty minutes ago. Nathan gives me a buck to help bring the baggage down, also to take care of the phonograph. Says he’ll come back and get it later, along with some boxes. Then when the baggage is all out on the sidewalk he gets me to go up to the corner and flag down a couple of taxis. When I come back with the taxis he’s still hollerin’ at her, and I say to myself: Well, at least this time he didn’t hit her or nothin’. But he’s still hollerin’ at her, about Owswitch mainly. Something like Owswitch.”
“About... what?”
“About Owswitch, that’s what he says. Called her a cunt again and asked her this weirdo question over and over. Asked her how come she lived through Owswitch. What did he mean by that?”
“Called her...” I faltered helplessly, nearly bereft of speech. “Then what...”
“Then he gave her fifty bucks—it looked like about that—and told the driver to take her someplace in New York, Manhattan, some hotel I think, I can’t remember where. He said somethin’ about how happy he’d be never to have to see her again. I’ve never heard anyone cry like that Sophie was cryin’ then. Anyway, after she was gone he put his own things in the other cab and left in the opposite direction, up toward Flatbush Avenue. I think he must of went to his brother’s in Queens.”
“Gone then,” I whispered, evilly stricken now.
“Gone for good,” he replied, “and good fuckin’ riddance I say. That guy was a golem! But Sophie—Sophie I feel sorry for. Sophie was a real nice broad, you know?”
For a moment I could say nothing. The gentle Haydn, murmurous with longing, filled the abandoned room nearby with its sweet, symmetrical, pensive cadences, adding to my feeling of some absolute void, and of irretrievable loss.
“Yes,” I said finally, “I know.”
“What’s Owswitch?” said Morris Fink.
Chapter Nine
OF THE MANY COMMENTATORS on the Nazi concentration camps, few have written with greater insight and passion than the critic George Steiner. I came across Steiner’s book of essays Language and Silence in the year of its publication, 1967—a year which had considerable significance for me, aside from the fairly trivial fact that it marked exactly two decades since that summer of mine in Brooklyn. God, how the time had passed since Sophie, and Nathan, and Leslie Lapidus! The domestic tragedy which I had struggled so to bring to parturition at Yetta Zimmerman’s had long before been published (to a general acclaim far beyond my youthful hopes); I had written other works of fiction and a certain vaguely unenthusiastic and uncommitted amount of trendy sixties’ journalism. However, my heart was still with the art of the novel—said to be moribund or even, Lord help us, dead as a smelt—and I was pleased that year of 1967 to be able to disprove its demise (to my personal satisfaction at least)