Sophie's Choice - William Styron [305]
Sophie fell silent again, and she pressed her fingers against her closed eyes. Something quickened in the monotone of her voice. She turned to me, as if she had become diverted from her remembrance. “We will have music where we’re going, then, Stingo. I wouldn’t be able to last long without music.”
“Well, I’ll be honest, Sophie. Out in the sticks—outside New York, that is—there’s nothing on the radio. No WQXR, no WNYC. Only Milton Cross and the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon. The rest is hillbilly. Some of it’s terrific. Maybe I’ll make you a Roy Acuff fan. But like I say, the first thing we’ll do after we move in is to buy a record player and records—”
“I’ve been so spoiled,” she put in, “after all the music Nathan bought me. But it’s my blood, my life’s blood, you know, and I can’t help it.” She paused, once again collecting the strands of her memory. Then she said, “Princess Czartoryska had a phonograph. It was one of those early machines, not very good, but it was the first one I had ever seen or heard. Strange, isn’t it, this old Polish Jew-hater with her love of music. She had a lot of records and it almost drove me mad with pleasure when she’d put them on for our benefit—my mother and my father and me and maybe some other guests—and we’d listen to these recordings. Most of them were arias from Italian and French operas—Verdi and Rossini and Gounod—but there was one record that I remember just made me nearly swoon, I loved it so. It must have been a rare and precious record. It’s hard to believe now, because it was very old and filled with noise, but I just adored it. It was Madame Schumann-Heink singing Brahms Lieder. On one side there was ‘Der Schmied,’ I remember, and on the other was ‘Von ewige Liebe,’ and when I first heard it I sat there in a trance listening to that wonderful voice coming through all those scratches, thinking all the while that it was the most gorgeous singing I had ever heard, that it was an angel come down to earth. Strange, I heard those two songs only once during all the times I went with my father to visit the Princess. I longed to hear them again. Oh God, I felt I would do almost anything—do something very naughty, even—to hear them once more, and I was just so hungry to ask that they be played again, but I was too shy, and besides, my father would have punished me if I had ever been so... so bold...
“So in the dream that has returned to me over and over I see Princess Czartoryska in her handsome gown go to the phonograph and she turns and always says, as if she were talking to me, ‘Would you like to hear the Brahms Lieder?’ And I always try to say yes. But just before I can say anything my father interrupts. He is standing next to the Princess and he is looking directly at me, and he says, ‘Please don’t play that music for the child. She is much too stupid to understand.’ And then I wake up with this pain... Only this time it was even worse, Stingo. Because in the dream I had just now he seemed to be talking to the Princess not about the music but about...” Sophie hesitated, then murmured, “About my death. He wanted me to die, I think.”
I turned away from Sophie. I walked the few steps to the window, filled with a disquietude and unhappiness that was like a deep, twisting, visceral pain. A faint and bitter odor of combustion had seeped into the room, but despite this I opened the window and saw where smoke drifted down the street in fragile bluish veils. In the distance over the burning building a cloud rose in dingy turbulence but I saw no flame. The stench, growing stronger, was of scorched paint or tar or varnish mingled with hot rubber. More sirens sounded, but this time dimly, from the opposite direction, and I glimpsed a plume of water that gushed skyward toward hidden windows, met some hidden inferno and then evaporated in a nimbus of steam. Along the sidewalks below gawkers in shirt sleeves sidled tentatively toward the fire, and I saw two policemen begin to block the street with wooden barricades. There was no threat to the hotel, or to us, but I found