Sophie's Choice - William Styron [264]
After leaving Emmi’s room she had made her way downstairs and then fallen into a heap on her pallet. She had sunk into almost instantaneous sleep, with only a moment’s anticipation of the coming day when she would finally see her son. And she was soon walking alone along a beach—a beach, in the manner of dreams, both familiar and strange. It was a sandy shore of the Baltic Sea, and something told her that it was the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. To the right of her was the shallow wind-swept Kiel Bay, dotted with sailing craft; on her left as she strolled north toward the distant coastal barrens of Denmark were sand dunes, and behind these a forest of pinetrees and evergreen shimmered in the noonday sun. Although she was clothed she sensed a nakedness, as if she were enveloped in a fabric of seductive transparency. She felt unashamedly provocative, conscious of her backside swaying amid the folds of her transparent skirt, attracting the eyes of the bathers umbrella-shrouded along the beach. Immediately the bathers were left behind. A path through the marsh grass made a junction with the beach; she continued past this place, aware now that a man was following her, and that his eyes were fastened on her hips and the extravagant swaying motion she felt compelled to make. The man came abreast of her, looked at her, and she returned his gaze. She could not possibly recognize the face, which was middle-aged, jovial, fair, very German, attractive—no, it was more than attractive, it made her melt with desire. But the man himself! Who was he? She struggled for an instant’s recognition (the voice, so familiar, purred “Guten Tag”) and in a flash she thought him to be a famous singer, a Heldentenor from the Berlin Opera. He smiled at her with clean white teeth, stroked her on the buttocks, uttered a few words that were at once barely comprehensible and flagrantly lewd, then disappeared. She smelled the warm sea breeze.
She was at the doorway of a chapel which itself was situated on a dune overlooking the sea. She could not see him but she felt the presence of the man somewhere. It was a sunny, simple chapel with plain wooden pews on either side of a single aisle; over the altar hung a cross of unpainted pine, almost primitive in its stripped, unadorned angularity, and somehow loomingly central to Sophie’s apprehension of the place, into which she now wandered, feverish with lust. She heard herself giggle. Why? Why should she giggle when the little chapel was suddenly suffused by the grief of a single contralto voice and the strains of that tragic cantata Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde? She stood before the altar, unclothed now; the music, pouring forth softly from some source both distant and near, enveloped her body like a benison. She giggled again. The man from the beach reappeared. He was naked, but again she could not name him. He was no longer smiling; a murderous scowl clouded his face and the threat embedded in his countenance excited her, inflaming her lust. He told her sternly to look down. His penis was thick and erect. He commanded her to get down on her knees and suck him. She did so in a frenzy of craving, pulling back the foreskin to expose a spade-shaped glans of a deep blue-black hue and so huge that she knew that she could not surround it with her lips. Yet she was able to do this, with a choking sensation that wilted her with pleasure, while at the same time the Bach chimes, freighted with the noise of death and time, shivered down her spine. Schlage dock, gewünschte Stunde! He pushed her away from his belly, told her to turn around, commanded her to kneel at the altar beneath the skeletal cruciform emblem of God’s suffering, glowing like naked bone. She