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By Root 12476 0

else? In his belly button? In a tooth? Didn’t the Army morons look into his navel? Maybe in one of those folds of flab. Under his chin! I’ll bet you Fatso had that capsule tucked away there all the time. Even as he was grinning at Shawcross, at Telford Taylor, grinning at the madness of the whole proceedings, he had that pill tucked up under his fat chin...” A squawk of static. Sophie heard the commentator say, “Many informed observers are of the opinion that it was Goring more than any other single German leader who was responsible for instituting the concept of the concentration camps. Although roly-poly and jolly in appearance, reminding many people of a comic-opera buffoon, Goring, it is believed, in his evil genius was the real father of such places which shall be ever known in infamy as Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz...”

Sophie suddenly wandered away behind the Chinese screen and busied herself at the washbasin. She felt a hovering and ominous discomfort at the bubbling-over of all the things on earth she wanted to forget. Why hadn’t she left that damned radio turned off? Through the screen she listened to the flow of Nathan’s soliloquy. It no longer seemed so funny to her because she knew how wound up Nathan could get, how upset and jangled he could become when in certain moods he tried to reckon with the recently bygone unspeakables. It could at times turn into a preoccupying rage that scared her, so quickly was he transformed from his exuberant, rollicking, outgoing self to a desperate soul riddled with anguish. “Nathan,” she called. “Nathan darling, turn off the radio and let’s go to Morty’s. I’m really so hungy. Please!”

But she could tell he didn’t hear her, or didn’t care to, and she wondered if—just possibly—the foundation of his obsession about the Nazi handiwork, the whole intolerable history which she yearned to reject as passionately as he seemingly desired to embrace, had not been laid that afternoon only weeks before when they had seen a certain newsreel. For at the RKO Albee theatre, where they had gone to a film staring Danny Kaye (still her favorite clown in all the world), the glorious mood of tomfoolery had been abruptly shattered by a brief sequence in a newsreel showing the Warsaw ghetto. Sophie had been washed in a flood of recognition. Even in its rubble, like an exploded volcano, the configuration of the ghetto was familiar to her (she had lived on its perimeter), but as with all movie scenes of war-blasted Europe she tended to narrow her eyes to slits, as if to filter out the wasteland and render it even more a smudge, a neutral blur. But she was conscious of some religious ceremony as an assemblage of Jews unveiled a monument commemorating their massacre and their martyrdom and the sound of a tenor voice keened its Hebrew requiem over the desolate gray scene like an angel with a dagger through its heart. In the darkness of the theatre Sophie heard Nathan murmur the unfamiliar word Kaddish, and when they emerged into the sunlight he passed his fingers in a distraught motion across his eyes and she saw the tears pouring down his cheeks. She was shocked, for it was the very first time she had ever seen Nathan—her own Danny Kaye, her own adorable clown—show that kind of emotion.

She moved from behind the Chinese screen. “Come on, darling,” she called in a lightly begging tone, but she could tell that he was not about to budge from the radio. She heard him cackle with high sardonic glee. “The boneheads—they let Fatso get away with it like all the others!” As she put on lipstick she reflected with wonder on how Nuremberg and its revelations had so powerfully taken possession of Nathan’s thoughts during the past couple of months. It had not always been that way; during their first days together he had scarcely seemed aware of the raw actuality of the experience she had gone through, even though the by-products of that experience—her malnutrition, her anemia, her vanished teeth—had been his constant and devoted concern. Certainly he had not been entirely unaware of the camps; perhaps, Sophie thought,