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By Root 12429 0

cream, talking not about me (whom she had called “darling”!)—talking not about us but about a lover dead and buried years before. Had she forgotten that only minutes ago she had been on the brink of initiating me into the mysteries of the blowjob, a sacrament I had awaited with anxious joy since the age of fourteen? Could women, then, so instantaneously turn off their lust like a light switch? And Jozef! Her preoccupation with her sweetheart was maddening, and I could hardly bear the thought—thrust it into the back of my mind—that this precipitate passion she had for a few hot moments lavished on me was the result of a transfer of identity; that I was merely an instant surrogate Jozef, flesh to occupy space in an ephemeral fantasy. In any case, I also noticed that she was becoming a little incoherent; her voice had an intonation that was both stilted and thick, and her lips moved in an odd artificial way as if they had been numbed by Novocaine. It was more than a little alarming, this mesmerized appearance. I removed the bottle with its few remaining ounces from her hand.

“It make me sick, Stingo, so sick to think how things might have been. If Jozef hadn’t died. I cared for him very much. So much more than Nathan, really. Jozef never mistreated me like Nathan done. Who knows? Maybe we would have been married, and if we were married, life would have been so different. Just one thing, par example—his half sister, Wanda. I would have removed him from her evil influence and that would have been such a good thing. Where’s that bottle, Stingo?” Even as she spoke I was pouring—behind my back and out of sight—what was left of the liquor into the sand. “The bottle. Anyway, that kvetch Wanda, such a kvetch she was!” (I loved kvetch. Nathan, Nathan again!) “It was her who was responsible for Jozef being killed. All right, I’ll admit it—il fallait que... I mean it was necessary for someone to retaliate for betraying the Jews, but why every time to make Jozef the killer? Why? That was Wanda’s power, this kvetch. Okay, she was an underground leader, but was it fair to make your brother the only killer in our part of the city? Was it fair, I ask you? He vomited every time he kill, Stingo. Vomited! It turn him half crazy.”

I held my breath as her face faded into an ashy white, and with a desperate clawing motion she groped about for the bottle, mumbling. “Sophie,” I said, “Sophie, the whiskey’s all gone.”

Abstracted, stranded in her memory, she seemed not to hear, and also was plainly close to tears. Suddenly and for the first time I was aware of the meaning of the phrase “Slavic melancholy”: sorrow had flooded across her face like black shadows sweeping over a snowy field. “Goddamned cunt, Wanda! She was the cause of everything. Everything! Jozef dying and me going to Auschwitz and everything!” She began to sob, and the tears made disfiguring trails down her cheeks. I stirred miserably, not knowing really what to do. And although Eros had fled, I reached up and took her in my arms, bringing her down next to me. Her face lay against my chest. “Oh, goddamn, Stingo, I’m so awful unhappy!” she wailed. “Where’s Nathan? Where’s Jozef? Where’s everybody? Oh, Stingo, I want to die!”

“Hush, Sophie,” I said softly, stroking her bare shoulder, “everything’s going to be all right.” (Fat chance!)

“Hold me, Stingo,” she whispered despairingly, “hold me. I feel so lost. Oh Christ, I feel so lost! What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I’m so alone!”

Booze, exhaustion, grief, the limpid soggy heat—it was doubtless all of these which put her to sleep in my arms. Beered-up and depleted, I too fell asleep, tightly hanging on to her body as to a security blanket. I dreamed aimless, convoluted dreams of the sort which all my life have seemed to be a recurrent specialty—dreams within dreams of ludicrous pursuit, of a quest for some unnameable prize taking me to unknown destinations: up steep angular stairways, by rowboat down sluggish canals, through cockeyed bowling alleys and labyrinthine railroad yards (where I saw my adored English professor