Sophie's Choice - William Styron [231]
Something about Sophie’s fury and bitterness, combined with her drinking—all of these so new to me—aggravated my jitters until the feeling became almost insupportable. While she babbled on I realized dimly that I had undergone unfortunate bodily changes: I had severe heartburn, I was sweating like a coal stoker, a wayward neurasthenic tumescence had caused my beloved waif of a cock to stiffen bone-rigid against my pants leg. And our conveyance had been rented by the devil. Heaving and rocking its way through the bungalow barrens of Queens and Nassau, clashing gears, exuding fumes, the decrepit bus seemed likely to imprison us forever. As in a trance, I listened to Sophie’s voice soar like an aria over the children’s speechless, antic mummery. And I wish I had been better prepared emotionally to accept the burden of her message. “Jews!” she exclaimed. “It’s really true, in the end they are all exactly alike sous la peau, under the skin, you understand. My father was really right when he said that he had never known a Jew who could give something in a free way, without asking for something in return. A quid pro quo, as he would say. And oh, Nathan—what an example Nathan was of that! Okay, so he helped me a lot, make me well, but so what? Do you think he done that out of love, out of kindness? No, Stingo, he done such a thing only so he could use me, have me, fuck me, beat me, have some object to possess! That’s all, some object. Oh, it was so very Jewish of Nathan to do that—he wasn’t giving me his love, he was buying me with it, like all Jews. No wonder the Jews were so hated in Europe, thinking they could get anything they wished just by paying a little money, a little Geld. Even love they think they can buy!” She clutched me by the sleeve and the odor of rye whiskey reached me through the gasoline fumes. “Jews! God, how I hate them! Oh, the lies I have told you, Stingo. Everything I told you about Cracow was a lie. All my childhood, all my life I really hated Jews. They deserved it, this hate. I hate them, dirty Jewish cochons!”
“Oh, please, Sophie, please,” I retorted. I knew she was distraught, knew she couldn’t really mean any of this, knew also that with Nathan she found his Jewishness simply an easier target than Nathan himself, for whom obviously she was still daft with love. This nasty discharge vexed me, even though I thought I understood its source. Nonetheless, the power of suggestion is mighty, her savage bile touched in me some atavistic susceptibility, and as the bus rocked its way out onto the asphalt parking lot at Jones Beach, I found myself brooding blackly on my recent robbery. And Morris Fink. Fink! That fucking little hebe, I thought, trying vainly to belch.
The little deaf-mutes debarked as we did, clambering down around us, stepping on our toes, hemming us in as they filled the air with their butterfly gesticulations. We could not seem to dislodge them; they formed an eerie, soundless retinue in our march across the beach. The sky that had been so bright in Brooklyn had become overcast; the horizon was leaden, the surf swelled with sluggish oily waves. Only a few bathers dotted the beach; the air was muggy and breathless. I felt almost unbearably anxious and depressed, yet my nerves were quiveringly aflame. My ears echoed with a delirious, inconsolable passage from the St. Matthew Passion which had wept out of Sophie’s radio earlier that morning, and for no special reason yet in fitting antiphony I recalled some seventeenth-century lines I had read not long before: “... since Death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die...” I perspired in the humid cocoon of my angst, worrying about my theft and my present near-destitution, worrying about my novel and how I would ever get it finished, worrying whether or not I should press charges against Morris Fink. As if responding to some soundless signal, the deaf-mute children suddenly dispersed and scattered like