Sophie's Choice - William Styron [65]
She recalled it all so clearly—emerging from the flatulent warmth of the detested subway and onto the sunny campus with its sprawling rectangles of ripe green grass, its crowd of summer-school students, the trees and flowered walks. She always felt somewhat more at peace here than in other parts of Brooklyn; though this college bore as much resemblance to the venerable Jagiellonian University of her past as does a shiny chronometer to a mossy old sundial, its splendidly casual and carefree mob of students, its hustling between-classes pace, its academic look and feel made Sophie comfortable, relaxed, at home. The gardens were a serene and blossoming oasis amid the swarm of a chaotic Babylon. That day as she traversed the edge of the gardens on her way toward the library she caught a glimpse of something which thereafter dwelled so immovably in her mind that she wondered if it, too, was not at last bound up in a mystical way with Nathan, and the imminence of his appearance in her life. What she saw even by the decorous standards of Brooklyn College and the forties was hardly shocking, and Sophie was not so much shocked as fiercely agitated, as if the swift and desperate sensuality of the little scene had the power to stir up embers of a fire within her which she thought had been almost forever quelled. It was the merest fleeting glance she had, this color snapshot of the two dark and resplendently beautiful young people lolling against a tree trunk: with arms full of schoolbooks yet as abandoned as David and Bathsheba, they stood pressed together kissing with the urgent hunger of animals devouring each other’s substance, and their tongues thrust and explored each other gluttonously, the darting flesh visible through the black mantle of the girl’s rich cascading hair.
The instant passed. Sophie, feeling as if she had been stabbed in the breast, wrenched her eyes away. She hurried on down the crowded sidewalk, aware that she must be blushing feverishly and that her heart was pounding at a gallop. It was unexplainable and alarming, this incandescent sexual excitement she felt everywhere inside herself. After having felt nothing for so long, after having lived for so long with dampened desire! But now the fire was in her fingertips, coursing along the edges of all her extremities, but mainly it blazed at the core of herself, somewhere near the womb, where she had not felt such an insistent craving in months and years beyond counting.
But the incredible emotion evaporated swiftly. It was gone by the time she entered the library, and long before she encountered the librarian behind the desk—a Nazi. No, of course he was not a Nazi, not only because the black-and-white engraved nameplate identified him as Mr. Sholom Weiss but because—well, what would a Nazi be doing apportioning volume after volume of the earth’s humane wisdom at the Brooklyn College library? But Sholom Weiss, a pallid dour thirtyish man with aggressive horn-rims and a green eyeshade, was such a startling double of every heavy, unbending, mirthless German bureaucrat and demi-monster she had known in years past that she had the weird sense that she had been thrust back into the Warsaw of the occupation. And it was doubtless this moment of déjà vu, this rush of identification, that caused her to become so quickly and helplessly unstrung. Feeling suffocatingly weak and ill again, she asked Sholom Weiss in a diffident voice where the catalogue file would be in which she might find listed the works of the nineteenth-century American poet Emil Dickens.
“In the catalogue room, first door to the left,” muttered Weiss, unsmiling, then after a long pause added, “But you won’t find any such listing.”
“Won’t find any such listing?” Sophie echoed him, puzzled.