Sophie's Choice - William Styron [40]
“When I first met this one here,” Nathan said as she sat down on the rug beside his chair and contentedly leaned against his leg, “she was a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. And that was a whole year and a half after the Russians liberated that camp she was in. How much was it you weighed, sweetie?”
“Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight kilos.”
“Yeah, about eighty-five pounds. Can you imagine? She was a wraith.”
“How much do you weigh now, Sophie?” I asked.
“Just fifty.”
“One hundred and ten pounds,” Nathan translated, “which still isn’t enough for her frame and height. She should weigh about one-seventeen, but she’s getting there—she’s getting there. We’ll make a nice big milk-fed American girl out of her in no time.” Idly, affectionately he fingered the butter-yellow strands of hair that curled out from beneath the rim of her beret. “But, boy, was she a wreck when I first got hold of her. Here, drink some beer, sweetie. It’ll help make you fat.”
“I was a real wreck,” Sophie put in, her tone affectingly light-hearted. “I looked like an old witch—I mean, you know, the thing that chases birds away. The scarecrow? I didn’t have hardly any hair and my legs ached. I had the scorbut—”
“The scurvy,” Nathan interjected, “she means she’d had the scurvy, which was cured as soon as the Russians took over—”
“Le scorbut—scurvy I mean—I had. I lose my teeth! And typhus. And scarlet fever. And anemia. All of them. I was a real wreck.” She uttered the litany of diseases with no self-pity yet with a certain childish earnestness, as if she were reciting the names of some pet animals. “But then I met Nathan and he taked care of me.”
“Theoretically she was saved as soon as the camp was liberated,” he explained. “That is, she wasn’t going to die. But then she was in a displaced persons’ camp for a long time. And there were thousands of people there, tens of thousands, and they just didn’t have the medical facilities to take care of all the damage that the Nazis had done to so many bodies. So then last year, when she arrived over here in America, she still had a quite serious, I mean a really serious, case of anemia. I could tell.”
“How could you tell?” I asked, with honest interest in his expertise.
Nathan explained, briefly, articulately, and with a straightforward modesty that I found winning. Not that he was a physician, he said. He was, rather, a graduate in science from Harvard, with a master’s degree in cellular and developmental biology. It had been his achievement in this field of study which had led him to be hired as a researcher at Pfizer, a Brooklyn-based firm and one of the largest pharmaceutical houses in the nation. So much, then, for the background. He claimed no intricate or extensive medical knowledge, and had no use for the lay habit of venturing amateur diagnoses of illness; his training had, however, made him more than ordinarily enlightened about the chemical vagaries and ailments of the human body, and so the moment he first laid eyes on Sophie (“this sweetie,” he murmured with enormous concern and gentleness, twisting the lock of her hair) he guessed, with dead accuracy as it turned out, that her ravaged appearance was the result of a deficiency anemia.
“I took her to a doctor, a friend of my brother’s, who teaches at Columbia Presbyterian. He does work in nutrition diseases.” A proud note, not at all unattractive in the sense it conveyed of quiet authority, stole into Nathan’s voice. “He said I was right on target. A critical deficiency of iron. We put the little sweetie here on massive doses of ferrous sulfate and she began to bloom like a rose.” He paused and looked down at her. “A rose. A rose. A beautiful fucking rose.” He lightly ran his fingers over his lips and transferred his fingertips to her brow, anointing it with his kiss. “God, you’re something,” he whispered, “you’re the greatest.”
She gazed up at him. She looked incredibly beautiful but somehow tired and drawn. I thought of the previous night’s orgy of sorrow. She lightly stroked the blue-veined surface of his wrist.