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By Root 12464 0

sudden return of an ugly recollection. She strokes her ribs with her fingertips, lightly, tracing the feverish outline of the ache itself. She wonders whether he might not have broken something. Feeling dazed now, and in the hurtful slow delay of the daze, she is aware that she has lost all track of time. She barely hears him when from the front seat where he lies sprawled with one leg twitching (the twitching mud-spattered trouser cuff is all she can see) he murmurs something which though muffled and obscure sounds like “the necessity of death.” And the laugh comes, not loud: Harharharhar... For a long time there is no sound. Then, “Darling,” she says quietly, “you mustn’t call me Irma.”

“Irma was something I just couldn’t bear,” Sophie told me. “I could take anything from Nathan but that... that he should turn me into Irma Griese. I saw that woman once or twice at the camp—that monster woman, she would have made Wilhelmine appear to be an angel. It hurt me more than all his kicking that he called me Irma Griese. But before we got to the inn that night I tried to make him stop calling me that, and when he begun to call me Sophielove I knew he was not so high—so crazy—any more. Even though he was still playing with those little capsules of poison. This scared me now. I didn’t know how far he was going to go. I was out of my mind with the idea of our life with each other and I didn’t want us to die—separate or together. No. Anyway, the Nembutal begun to work on him, I could tell that, he came slowly down off his high and when he squeezed me it hurt so bad I thought I would faint and I gave this scream and then he realized what he had done to me. He was so full of guilt then, kept whispering in bed, ‘Sophie. Sophie, what have I done to you, how could I have hurt you?’ And such as that. But the other pills—what he called the barbies—were beginning to make this effect on him and he couldn’t keep his eyes open and pretty soon he was asleep.

“I remember the woman who owned the inn walked upstairs again and asked me through the door when were we coming down, it was getting late, when were we coming down for the rum punch and the dinner. And when I told her we were tired, we were just going to sleep, she got very upset and angry and said it was the most thoughtless thing, et cetera, but I didn’t care, I was so very tired and sleepy myself. So I went back and lie down next to Nathan and begun to go to sleep. But then, oh my God, I thought of the capsules of poison that were still in the ashtray. I was filled with this panic. I was just terrified because I didn’t know what to do with them. They were so terribly dangerous, you know. I couldn’t throw them out the window or even in the trash basket because I was afraid they would crack open and the fumes would kill someone. And I thought of the toilet, and that still worried me, make me afraid about the fumes or poisoning the water or even the earth, and I didn’t know what to do. I knew I had to get them away from Nathan. So anyway, I decided to take a chance on the toilet. The bathroom. There was some light in there. I very carefully picked up the capsules from the ashtray and walked through the dark into the bathroom and threw them into the toilet. They didn’t float like I had imagined but sank like two little pebbles and I quickly flushed the toilet and they were gone.

“I went back to the bed and slept then. I have never slept in such a dark, dreamless profound way. I don’t know how long I slept. But sometime in the night Nathan woke up screaming. It must have been some reaction to all the drugs, I don’t know, but it was so frightening to hear him next to me in the middle of the night, shouting like a mad demon. I still don’t know how he didn’t wake up everybody for miles. But I jumped awake at his screams, he begun to shout about death and destruction and hanging and gas and Jews burning in ovens and I don’t know what else. I had been scared all day but this was somehow worse than anything. He had been in and out of craziness for so many hours but this was like someone gone crazy