Sophie's Choice - William Styron [214]
“The marijuana filled me with this sweet glow. It was chilly on the roof but all of a sudden I was feeling warm and the whole earth and the night and the future seemed more beautiful than ever, if that could be possible. Une merveille, la nuit! Brooklyn down below, with a million lights. I stayed out on the roof for a long time talking with Ronnie and his Chinese girl and listening to the jazz music, looking up at the stars and feeling better than I could ever remember. I guess I haven’t realize how much time had passed because when I went back inside I see it was late, nearly four o’clock. The party was still going very much, you know, strong, lots of music still, but some of the people were gone and for a short time I hunted for Nathan but couldn’t find him. I asked several guests and they pointed out a certain room near one end of the loft. So I went to it and there Nathan was with six or seven other people. There was no fun at all there any more. It was kind of quiet. It was as if someone have just suffered a terrible accident and they were discussing what to do. It was deeply somber there and when I went in I think it was then that I begun to get a little upset, uncomfortable. Begun to realize that something very serious, very bad was going to happen with Nathan. It was an awful feeling, as if I have been hit by a freezing seawave. Bad, very bad, what I felt.
“You see, they were all listening to the radio about the hangings in Nuremberg. It was some special shortwave broadcast, but actual—you know, direct—and I could hear this CBS reporter in the static sounding very far-off describing everything at Nuremberg just as they were doing the hangings. He said that Von Ribbentrop had already gone, and I think Jodl, and then I think he said Julius Streicher was next. Streicher! I couldn’t stand this! I suddenly felt clammy all over, sick, awful. It is difficult to describe, this sick feeling, because of course you could only be, I mean, insane with gladness that these men were being hanged—I wasn’t sick at that—but because it just reminded me again of so much I wanted to forget. I had this same feeling last spring, like I told you, Stingo, when I saw that picture in the magazine of Rudolf Höss with a rope tied around his neck. And so in that room with these people listening about the hangings at Nuremberg, I just wanted suddenly to escape, you know, and I kept saying to myself: Won’t I ever be free of the past? I watched Nathan. He was still on his incredible high, I could tell from his eyes, but he was listening like everyone else to the hangings and his face was very dark and aching. There was something frightening and wrong about his face. And the rest. Everything that was fun, that was truly gay about the party had disappeared, at least in that room. It was like being at a Mass for the dead. Finally the news stopped or maybe the radio become turned off or something and the people all began talking very seriously and with this sudden passion.
“I knew all of them a little, they were friends of Nathan. There was one friend especially I remember. I have talked to him before. His name was Harold Schoenthal, Nathan’s age I guess, and he taught I think it was philosophy at the college. He was very intense and serious but he was one of the ones I liked a little more than the others. I thought he was really a very feeling person. He always seemed to me very tortured and unhappy, very conscious of being Jewish, and he talked a lot, and this night I remember he was even more in this high key and excited, though I’m sure he wasn’t high on anything like Nathan, even beer or wine. He was quite, well, arresting-looking, with a bald head and a droopy mustache like