Sophie's Choice - William Styron [55]
She told me that she had never been bored. She was determined to put behind her the madness of the past—or as much as a vulnerable and memory-racked mind permitted—and so for her the huge city became the New World in spirit as well as fact. Physically she sensed that she was still badly run-down, but this did not prevent her from partaking of the pleasures around her like a child turned loose in an ice cream parlor. Music, for one thing; just the availability of music alone, she said, filled her insides with a sense of delectation, as one feels just before what one knows will be a sumptuous meal. Until she met Nathan she could not afford a phonograph, but no matter; on the inexpensive little portable radio she bought there was splendid music emanating from these stations with weird initials she could never get straight—WQXR, WNYC, WEVD—and men with silken voices announcing the enchanted names of all the musical potentates and princes whose harmonies she had been deprived of so long; even a shopworn composition like Schubert’s Unfinished or Eine kleine Nachtmusik touched her with fresh rapture. And of course there were the concerts too, at the Academy of Music and, in the summer, at Lewisohn Stadium in Manhattan, gorgeous music so cheap as to be virtually free, music like Beethoven’s Violin Concerto played one night at the stadium by Yehudi Menuhin with such wild, voracious passion and tenderness that as she sat there alone high on the rim of the amphitheatre, shivering a little beneath the blazing stars, she felt a serenity, a sense of inner solace that amazed her, along with the awareness that there were things to live for, and that she might actually be able to reclaim the scattered pieces of her life and compose of them a new self, given half a chance.
Those first months Sophie was alone a great deal of the time. Her difficulty with the language (soon overcome) made her shy, but even so she was content to be alone a lot, indeed luxuriated in solitude, since privacy had been something she had greatly lacked in recent years. These same years she had been deprived of books, of printed matter of almost any kind, and she began to read greedily, subscribing to a Polish-American newspaper and frequenting a Polish bookstore off Fulton Street that had a large lending library. Her taste ran mainly to translations of American writers, and the first book she finished, she recalled, was Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer. This was followed by A Farewell to Arms, An American Tragedy and Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, the last translated so wretchedly into Polish that she was forced to break the vow she had made, in the prison camp, to forswear for the rest of her life anything written in German, and read a German version that she was able to obtain from a branch of the public library. Possibly because this translation was felicitous and rich, or because Wolfe’s lyrical, tragic though optimistic and sweeping vision of America was what Sophie’s soul demanded at that moment—she being a newcomer to these shores, with only a rudimentary knowledge of the country’s landscape and its gargantuan extravagance—it was Of Time and the River that excited her the most of all the books she read that winter and spring. In fact, Wolfe so captured her imagination that she decided to have a go at Look Homeward, Angel in English, but quickly gave up that chore, which she found excruciatingly difficult. For the initiate ours is a cruel language, its freaky orthography and idiosyncrasies never so absurdly apparent as on the printed page, and Sophie’s skill at reading and writing always lagged behind her