Sophie's Choice - William Styron [31]
Then this time he was gone for good, moving in loose-limbed strides back to the sidewalk and quickly losing himself in the darkness.
Having no more tears to shed for the moment, Sophie slowly composed herself. “Thank you, you were kind,” she said to me softly, in the stuffed-head-cold tones of one who has wept copiously and long. She stretched out her hand and pressed into my own the handkerchief, a soggy wad. As she did so I saw for the first time the number tattooed on the suntanned, lightly freckled skin of her forearm—a purple number of at least five digits, too small to read in this light but graven, I could tell, with exactitude and craft. To the melting love in my stomach was added a sudden ache, and with an involuntary motion that was quite inexplicable (for one brought up to mind where he put his hands) I gently grasped her wrist, looking more closely at the tattoo. Even at that instant I knew my curiosity might be offensive, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Where were you?” I said.
She spoke a fibrous name in Polish, which I understood, barely, to be “Oświȩcim.” Then she said, “I was there for a long time. Longtemps.” She paused. “Vous voyez...” Another pause. “Do you speak French?” she said. “My English is very bad.”
“Un peu,” I replied, grossly exaggerating my facility. “It’s a little rusty.” Which meant that I had next to none.
“Rusty? What is rusty?”
“Sale” I tried recklessly.
“Dirty French?” she said, with the faintest whisper of a smile. After a moment she asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Which did not even draw from me a “Nein.”
“Oh, forget it,” I said. “You speak good English.” Then after a moment’s silence I said, “That Nathan! I’ve never seen anything like him in my life. I know it’s not my business, but—but he must be nuts! How can he talk like that to anyone? If you ask me, you’re well rid of him.”
She shut her eyes tightly and pursed her lips in pain, as if in recollection of all that had just transpired. “Oh, he’s right about so much,” she whispered. “Not about I wasn’t faithful. I don’t mean that. I have been faithful to him always. But other things. When he said I didn’t dress right. Or when he said I was a sloppy Pole and didn’t clean up. Then he called me a dirty Polack, and I knew that I... yes, deserved it. Or when he took me to these nice restaurants and I always keeped...” She questioned me with her gaze.
“Kept,” I said. Without overdoing it, I will from time to time have to try to duplicate the delicious inaccuracies of Sophie’s English. Her command was certainly more than adequate and—for me, anyway—actually enhanced by her small stumbles in the thickets of syntax, especially upon the snags of our grisly irregular verbs. “Kept what?” I asked.
“Kept the carte, the menu I mean. I so often would keep the menu, put it in my bag for a souvenir. He said a menu cost money, that I was stealing. He was right about that, you know.”
‘Taking a menu doesn’t exactly seem like grand larceny to me, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Look, again I know it’s none of my business, but—”
Clearly determined to resist my attempts to help restore her self-esteem, she interrupted me, saying, “No, I know it was wrong. What he said was true, I done so many things that were wrong. I deserved it, that he leave me. But I was never unfaithful to him. Never! Oh, I’ll just die now, without him! What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”
For a moment I was afraid that she might