Sophie's Choice - William Styron [223]
...“I’m floating down easy,” she heard him murmur in the bedroom after a long silence. “I thought I was going to really crash. I thought I was going to crash hard. But I’ve been coming down easy. Thank God, I found the barbies.” He paused. “We had trouble finding them, didn’t we, the barbies?”
“Yes,” she replied. She was very sleepy now. Outside, it was nearly dark and the blazing leaves had become lusterless, fading into the smoky gun-metal autumnal sky. The light in the bedroom was flickering out. Sophie stirred next to Nathan, gazed at the wall where the New England grandmother from another century, trapped in an amber ectoplasmic halo, gazed back beneath her kerchief with an expression both benign and perplexed. Sophie thought drowsily: The photographer has just said keep still for a whole minute. She yawned, drowsed for a moment, yawned again.
“Where did we finally find them?” Nathan said.
“In the glove compartment of the car,” she said. “You put them there this morning, then forgot you put them there. The little bottle of Nembutals.”
“Christ, how awful. I was really out of it. I was in space. Outer space. Gone!” With a sudden rustle of bedclothes he heaved himself about and groped for her. “Oh, Sophie—Jesus Christ, I love you!” He wrapped an arm around her and with a heavy squeeze drew her toward him; simultaneously, on an outpouring of breath, she screamed. It was not a loud scream she heard herself give, but the pain was stabbingly severe, real, and it was a small, real scream. “Nathan!”...
...But not screaming when the point of the polished leather shoe strikes hard between two of her ribs, draws back, strikes again in the same place, driving the breath from her lungs and causing a white blossom of pain to swell beneath her breast.) “Nathan!” It is a desperate groan but not a scream, the hoarse flow of her breath merging in her ears with his voice coming in brutish methodical grunts: “Und die... SS Mäddchen... spracht... dot vill teach you... dirty Jüdinschwein!” She does not really flinch from the pain but rather absorbs it, collecting it into some cellar or dustbin deep within her being where she has stored up all his savagery: his threats, his taunts, his imprecations. Nor does she weep, yet, as she lies once again in the deepest woods, a kind of brambly and bethicketed promontory high on the hillside where he has half pulled, half dragged her and from where she can see through the trees, far below, the car, its convertible top down as it stands minute and solitary in the wind-swept parking lot swirling with leaves and debris. The afternoon, partly overcast now, is waning. They have been in the woods for what seems hours. Three times he kicks her. The foot draws back once more and she waits, trembling now less with fear or pain than with the permeating soggy autumnal chill in her legs, her arms, her bones. But the foot does not strike this time, falls to rest in the leaves. “Piss on you!” she hears him say, then, “Wunderbar, vot an idea!” Now he uses his polished shod foot as an instrument to pry her face from its sideways posture against the earth to confront him, looking upward; the leather is cold and slippery on her cheek. And even as she watches him unzip his fly and, at his command, opens her mouth she falls into a moment’s trance and remembers his words: My darling, I think you have absolutely no ego at all. This spoken to her with enormous tenderness after an episode: calling from the laboratory one summer evening, he had idly expressed a hunger for Nusshörnchen, pastries they had eaten together in Yorkville, whereupon without his knowledge she had immediately traveled the miles and miles by subway from Flatbush to Eighty-sixth Street, and following a crazy search had found the goodies, brought them back after many hours, presented them to him with a radiant “Voilà, monsieur, die Nusshörnchen!” But you mustn’t do that, he had said ever so lovingly, that’s