Sophie's Choice - William Styron [45]
I had read of the peasantry’s medieval vengeance only a week before, while standing on an uptown Lexington Avenue local, squashed between an enormously fat woman with an S. Klein shopping bag and a small Popsicle-licking Puerto Rican in a busboy’s jacket whose gardenia-ripe brilliantine floated sweetishly up to my nose as he mooned over my Mirror, sharing with me its devil’s photographs. While he was still alive Bobby Weed’s cock and balls had been hacked off and thrust into his mouth (this feature not displayed), and when near death, though reportedly aware of all, had by a flaming blowtorch received the brand on his chest of a serpentine “L”—representing what? “Lynch?” “Lula?” “Law and Order?” “Love?” Even as Nathan raved at me, I recalled having semi-staggered out of the train and up into the bright summer light of Eighty-sixth Street, amid the scent of Wienerwurst and Orange Julius and scorched metal from the subway gratings, moving blindly past the Rossellini movie I had traveled that far to see. I did not go to the theatre that afternoon. Instead, I found myself at Gracie Square on the promenade by the river, gazing as if in a trance at the municipal hideousness of the river islands, unable to efface the mangled image of Bobby Weed from my mind even as I kept murmuring—endlessly it seemed—lines from Revelation I had memorized as a boy: And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain... Perhaps it had been an overreaction, but—ah God, even so, I could not weep.
Nathan’s voice, still badgering me, swam back into hearing. “Look, in the concentration camps the brutes in charge would not have stooped to that bestiality!”
Would they? Would they not? It seemed hardly to matter, and I was sick of the argument, sick of the fanaticism I was unable to counter or find shelter from, sick with the vision of Bobby Weed and—despite feeling no complicity whatever in the Georgia abomination—suddenly sick with a past and a place and a heritage I could neither believe in nor fathom. I had the idle urge now—at risk of a broken nose—to heave the rest of my beer in Nathan’s face. Restraining myself, I tensed my shoulders and said in tones of frosty contempt, “As a member of a race which has been unjustly persecuted for centuries for having allegedly crucified Christ, you—yes, you, goddamnit!—should be aware of how inexcusable it is to condemn any single people for anything!” And then I found myself so enraged that I blurted out something which to Jews, in that tormented bygone year scant months removed from the crematoriums, was freighted with enough incendiary offensiveness to make me regret the words as soon as they escaped my lips. But I didn’t take them back. “And that goes for any people,” I said, “by God, even the Germans!”
Nathan flinched, then reddened even more deeply, and I thought that the showdown had finally arrived. Just then, however, Sophie miraculously salvaged the entire cheerless situation by swooping down in her campus-cutup costume and inserting herself between the two of us.
“Stop this talk right now,” she demanded. “Stop it! It is too serious for Sunday.” There was playfulness in her manner but I could tell she meant business. “Forget Bobby Weed. We must talk about happy things. We must go to Coney Island and swim and eat and have a lovely