Sophie's Choice - William Styron [209]
“We crashed through on that this afternoon. We got the whole problem licked. I mean licked, Sophie! It was our biggest barrier by far. Now all we have to do is to run the whole experiment one more time for the Standards and Control Department—a formality, that’s all—and we’ll be in like a bunch of burglars. We’ll have a clear road to the most important medical breakthrough in history!”
“Hooray!” said Sophie.
“Give me a kiss.” He shmoozed and whispered around the edge of her lips with his own lips and stuck his tongue in her mouth, insinuating it there with droll titillating little forays and retreats, making movements gently copulatory. Then abruptly he drew away. “So we’re going to celebrate at Morty’s. Let’s go!”
“I’m hungry!” she exclaimed. It was not a very firm objection, but she felt compelled to say it, feeling honest stomach pangs.
“We’ll eat at Morty’s,” he replied cheerfully, “don’t worry. There’ll be plenty for noshing—let’s go!”
“A special bulletin.” It arrested them both at the same instant—that radio announcer’s voice with its coached and modulated rhythms. Sophie saw Nathan’s face lose all mobility for a split second, as if frozen, and then she herself glimpsed in the mirror her jaw cocked awkwardly sideways in a rigid attitude of dislocation, a pained look in her eyes, as if she had broken a tooth. The announcer was saying that in the prison at Nuremberg ex-Field Marshal Hermann Goring had been discovered dead in his cell, a suicide. The means of death was apparently cyanide poisoning, accomplished orally by a capsule or pill which had been secreted somewhere on his body. Contemptuous to the last (the voice droned on), the condemned Nazi leader thus avoided retribution at the hands of his enemies in the same way as had such of his predecessors in death as Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and the master planner Adolf Hitler... Sophie felt a shiver run through her body and saw Nathan’s face unfreeze, regaining its vivacious shape just as he said with a soft gasp, “Jesus! He beat the man. He beat the man with the rope. That clever, fat son of a bitch!”
He leaped at the radio, hovering over it while he played with the dial. Sophie stirred about restlessly. She had with methodical determination tried to banish from her mind practically everything to do with the past war, and she had completely ignored the Nuremberg trials, which had captured the headlines all during the year. Indeed, her aversion to reading about Nuremberg had provided one of her rationalizations for not applying herself to American journalism and thus improving—or at least enlarging—an important compartment of her English. She had thrust it all from her head, as with nearly everything else of the immediate past. As a matter of fact, so oblivious had she been in recent weeks of the final scene of Götterdämmerung being performed on the stage at Nuremberg that she was quite unaware even that Goring had been sentenced to the gallows, and she was left strangely unmoved by this news that he had thwarted the hangman only hours before his scheduled execution.
Someone named H.V. Kaltenborn was uttering one of those prolonged and portentous obituaries—the voice mentioned among other things that Goring had been a drug addict—and Sophie began to giggle. She giggled at Nathan, carrying on a zany monologue in counterpoint to the depressing biography. “Where in the fuck did he hide that capsule of cyanide? Up his ass? Surely they looked up his ass. A dozen times! But in those mountainous cheeks of lard—maybe they missed it. Where