Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  “You have a nice schlong, Stingo,” she said, grasping me delicately but with a subtle, knowing firmness.

  “Thank you,” I heard myself mumble. A wave of disbelief swept over me (She is actually grabbing me there, I thought) but I tried to affect a saving savoir-faire. “Why do you call it schlong? Down South we call it something else.” My voice had a bad quaver.

  “It’s what Nathan calls it,” she replied. “What do you call it in the South?”

  “Sometimes we call it a pecker,” I whispered. “In parts of the upper South they call it a dong or a tool. Or a peter.”

  “I’ve heard Nathan call it his dork. Also, his putz.”

  “Do you like mine?” I could barely hear myself.

  “It’s sweet.”

  I no longer recall what—if any one thing precisely—brought this ghastly dialogue to its termination. She was of course supposed to compliment me more floridly—“gigantic,” “une merveille,” even “big” would do, almost anything but “sweet”—and perhaps it was only my glum silence after this which impelled her to begin to stroke and pump me with a zest that mingled the adroitness of a courtesan and a milkmaid. It was exquisite; I listened to her sigh in rapid breaths, I sighed too, and when she whispered, “Turn over on your back, Stingo darling,” there flashed through my mind the scenes of insatiable oral love with Nathan she had so frankly described. But it was too much, too much to bear—all this divine, accomplished friction and (My God, I thought, she called me “darling”) the sudden command to join her in paradise: with a bleat of dismay like that of a ram being slaughtered I felt my eyelids slam shut and I let loose the floodgates in a pulsing torrent. Then I died. Certainly in the grief of that moment she was not supposed to giggle, but she did.

  Minutes later, however, sensing my despair, she said, “Don’t let it make you sad. Stingo. That happens sometimes, I know.” I lay crumpled like a wet paper bag, my eyes tightly shut, quite unable to contemplate the depths of my failure. Ejaculatio praecox (Psychology 4B at Duke University). A squad of evil imps yammered the phrase derisively in the black pit of my despair. I felt I would never again open my eyes to the world—a mud-imprisoned mollusk, lowliest creature in the sea.

  I heard her giggle again, peered upward. “Look, Stingo,” she was saying in front of my disbelieving gaze, “it’s good for the complexion.” And I watched while the crazy Polack took a gulp of whiskey straight from the bottle and with her other hand—the one which had wrought upon me such mixed mortification and pleasure—gently massaged into the skin of her face my hapless exudate.

  “Nathan always said that come is filled with these very wonderful vitamins,” she said. For some reason my eyes fixed themselves on her tattoo; it seemed profoundly incongruous at this moment. “Don’t look so tragique, Stingo. It’s not the end of the world, it happens to all men sometimes, especially when they are young. Par example, in Warsaw when Jozef and me first try to make love he done the same thing, exactly the same thing. He was a virgin too.”

  “How did you know I was a virgin?” I said with a wretched sigh.

  “Oh, I can tell, Stingo. I knew that you had no success with that Leslie girl, you were just making up stories when you said you have gone to bed with her. Poor Stingo—Oh, to be honest, Stingo, I did not really know. I just guessed. But I was right, no?”

  “Yes,” I groaned. “Pure as the driven snow.”

  “Jozef was so much like you in many ways—honest, direct, with this quality that make him like a little boy in a certain fashion. It is hard to describe. Maybe that’s why I like you so much, Stingo, because you remind me quite a bit of Jozef. I maybe would have married him if he had not been killed by the Nazis. You know, none of us could ever find out who it was who betrayed him after he killed Irena. It was a total mystery, but somebody must have told. We used to go on picnics like this together. It was very difficult during the war—so little food—but once or twice we went out into the country in the summer and spread a blanket this way...”

  This was astounding. After the steamy sexuality of only moments before, after this encounter—despite fumbling and failure, the single most cataclysmic and soul-stirring event of its kind that I bad ever experienced—she was rattling on in reminiscence like someone plunged into a daydream, seemingly no more touched by our prodigious intimacy than if we had done a two-step together innocently on a dance floor. Was part of this due to some perverse effect of the booze? She had gotten a little glassy-eyed by now and was running off at the mouth like a tobacco auctioneer. Whatever the cause, her sudden insouciance gave me acute distress. Here she was, unconcernedly smearing my frenzied spermatozoa across her cheeks as if she were using Pond’s cold cream, talking not about me (whom she had called “darling”!)—talking not about us but about a lover dead and buried years before. Had she forgotten that only minutes ago she had been on the brink of initiating me into the mysteries of the blowjob, a sacrament I had awaited with anxious joy since the age of fourteen? Could women, then, so instantaneously turn off their lust like a light switch? And Jozef! Her preoccupation with her sweetheart was maddening, and I could hardly bear the thought—thrust it into the back of my mind—that this precipitate passion she had for a few hot moments lavished on me was the result of a transfer of identity; that I was merely an instant surrogate Jozef, flesh to occupy space in an ephemeral fantasy. In any case, I also noticed that she was becoming a little incoherent; her voice had an intonation that was both stilted and thick, and her lips moved in an odd artificial way as if they had been numbed by Novocaine. It was more than a little alarming, this mesmerized appearance. I removed the bottle with its few remaining ounces from her hand.

  “It make me sick, Stingo, so sick to think how things might have been. If Jozef hadn’t died. I cared for him very much. So much more than Nathan, really. Jozef never mistreated me like Nathan done. Who knows? Maybe we would have been married, and if we were married, life would have been so different. Just one thing, par example—his half sister, Wanda. I would have removed him from her evil influence and that would have been such a good thing. Where’s that bottle, Stingo?” Even as she spoke I was pouring—behind my back and out of sight—what was left of the liquor into the sand. “The bottle. Anyway, that kvetch Wanda, such a kvetch she was!” (I loved kvetch. Nathan, Nathan again!) “It was her who was responsible for Jozef being killed. All right, I’ll admit it—il fallait que... I mean it was necessary for someone to retaliate for betraying the Jews, but why every time to make Jozef the killer? Why? That was Wanda’s power, this kvetch. Okay, she was an underground leader, but was it fair to make your brother the only killer in our part of the city? Was it fair, I ask you? He vomited every time he kill, Stingo. Vomited! It turn him half crazy.”

  I held my breath as her face faded into an ashy white, and with a desperate clawing motion she groped about for the bottle, mumbling. “Sophie,” I said, “Sophie, the whiskey’s all gone.”

  Abstracted, stranded in her memory, she seemed not to hear, and also was plainly close to tears. Suddenly and for the first time I was aware of the meaning of the phrase “Slavic melancholy”: sorrow had flooded across her face like black shadows sweeping over a snowy field. “Goddamned cunt, Wanda! She was the cause of everything. Everything! Jozef dying and me going to Auschwitz and everything!” She began to sob, and the tears made disfiguring trails down her cheeks. I stirred miserably, not knowing really what to do. And although Eros had fled, I reached up and took her in my arms, bringing her down next to me. Her face lay against my chest. “Oh, goddamn, Stingo, I’m so awful unhappy!” she wailed. “Where’s Nathan? Where’s Jozef? Where’s everybody? Oh, Stingo, I want to die!”

  “Hush, Sophie,” I said softly, stroking her bare shoulder, “everything’s going to be all right.” (Fat chance!)

  “Hold me, Stingo,” she whispered despairingly, “hold me. I feel so lost. Oh Christ, I feel so lost! What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I’m so alone!”

  Booze, exhaustion, grief
, the limpid soggy heat—it was doubtless all of these which put her to sleep in my arms. Beered-up and depleted, I too fell asleep, tightly hanging on to her body as to a security blanket. I dreamed aimless, convoluted dreams of the sort which all my life have seemed to be a recurrent specialty—dreams within dreams of ludicrous pursuit, of a quest for some unnameable prize taking me to unknown destinations: up steep angular stairways, by rowboat down sluggish canals, through cockeyed bowling alleys and labyrinthine railroad yards (where I saw my adored English professor at Duke, fully clad in his tweeds, standing at the controls of a rapidly moving switch engine), across yawning acres of garishly lit basements, subbasements and tunnels. Also a weird and terrible sewer. My goal as always was an enigma, although it seemed to have something vaguely to do with a lost dog. Then when I awoke, with a start, the first thing I realized was that Sophie had somehow loosened herself from my grasp and was gone. I heard myself utter a cry, which, however, got lodged in the back of my mouth and became a strangled moan. I felt my heart begin a pounding commotion. Struggling back into my trunks, I climbed to the side of the dune where I could look up and down the beach—saw nothing on that gloomy dull expanse of sand, nothing at all. She had vanished from sight.

  I looked behind the dunes—a sere wasteland of marsh grass. No one. And no one on the nearby beach, except for an indistinct human shape, squat, thickly set, moving in my direction. I ran toward the figure, which gradually defined itself as a large swarthy male bather munching on a hot dog. His black hair was plastered down and parted in the middle; he grinned with amiable fatuity.

  “Have you seen someone... a blond girl, I mean a real dish, very blond...” I stammered.

  He gave an affirmative nod, smiling.

  “Where?” I said in relief.

  “No hablo inglés” was the reply.

  It is graven on my memory still, that interchange—perhaps all the more vividly because at the precise instant I heard his answer I caught a glimpse of Sophie over his hairy shoulder, her head no bigger than a golden dot far out on the green petroleum waves. I did not think half a second before plunging in after her. I am a fairly good swimmer, but on that day I possessed truly Olympic bravura, aware even as I thrashed my way through the sluggish brine that sheer fright and desperation were animating the muscles of my legs and arms, propelling me outward and outward with a ferocity of strength I did not know was within me. I made brisk progress through the gently slopping sea; even so, I was amazed at how far out she had managed to get, and when I stopped briefly to tread water and find my bearings and locate her, I saw to my awful distress that she was still slicing her way through the ocean, bound for Venezuela. I shouted once, twice, but she kept on swimming. “Sophie, come back!” I cried, but I may as well have been beseeching the air.

  I filled my lungs, prayed a small regressive prayer to the Christian deity—my first in years—and resumed my heroic crawl southward toward that receding wet mop of yellow hair. Then all of a sudden I could tell that I was gaining with dramatic speed; through the salty blur of my eyes I saw Sophie’s head grow larger, nearer. I realized that she had stopped swimming and within seconds I was on top of her. Submerged nearly to her eyes, she was not yet quite on the verge of drowning; but her gaze looked as wild as a cornered cat’s, she was gulping water and was plainly at the edge of exhaustion. “Don’t! Don’t!” she gasped, warding me off with feeble little thrusts of her hand. But I lunged for her, grabbed her firmly around the waist from behind and roared “Shut up!” with hysteric necessity. I could have wept with relief at the immediate discovery that once in my embrace, she did not put up the struggle that I had foreseen but relaxed against me and let me swim with her slowly shoreward, uttering little desolate sobs that bubbled against my cheek and into my ear.

  As soon as I dragged her up onto the beach she fell on all fours and regurgitated half a gallon of seawater onto the sand. Then, choking and spluttering, she sprawled out face down at the water’s edge and like someone in a fit of epilepsy began to shudder uncontrollably, smitten by a convulsion of ragged grief such as I had never before witnessed in a human being. “Oh God,” she moaned, “why didn’t you let me die? Why didn’t you let me drown? I’ve been so bad—I’ve been so awful bad! Why didn’t you let me drown?”

  I stood above her naked form, helpless. The solitary beach walker whom I had accosted stood idly by watching us. I noted a smear of ketchup on his lips; he was offering gloomy, barely audible advice in Spanish. Suddenly I slumped down next to Sophie, aware of how utterly pooped I was, and I ran a limp hand down her bare back. A tactile impression still registers from that moment: the skeletal outline of her spine, each vertebra discrete, the whole serpentine length moving up and down with her tortured breathing. It had begun to drizzle a warm misty rain, which collected in droplets against my face. I put my head against her shoulder. Then I heard her say, “You should have let me drown, Stingo. No one is filled with such badness. No one! No one has such badness.”

  But at last I got her dressed and we took a bus back to Brooklyn and the Pink Palace. With the help of coffee she sobered up finally and slept through the late afternoon and early evening. When she awoke she was still very much on edge—the memory of that lonely swim to nowhere had plainly unnerved her—but even so, she seemed relatively composed for one who had gone so far out toward the brink. As for any physical damage, she appeared to have suffered little, although her engorgement with salt water gave her the hiccups and caused her for hours afterward to erupt in sizable, unladylike belches.

  And then—well, God knows she had already taken me with her to some of the nethermost reaches of her past. But she had also left me with unanswered questions. Perhaps she felt that there was really no returning to the present unless she could come clean, as they say, and shed light on what she had still concealed from me as well as (who knows?) from herself. And so during the remainder of that rain-soaked weekend she told me much more about her season in hell. (Much more, but not everything. There was one matter that remained entombed in her, in the realm of the unspeakable.) And I came at last to discern the outlines of that “badness” which had tracked her down remorselessly from Warsaw to Auschwitz and thence to these pleasant bourgeois streets of Brooklyn, pursuing her like a demon.

  Sophie was taken prisoner sometime during the middle of March, 1943. This was several days after Jozef had been killed by the Ukrainian guards. A gray day with wind in gusts and lowering clouds still touched with the raw look of winter. She remembered that it was late in the afternoon. When the speedy little three-car electric train in which she was riding screeched to a halt somewhere in the outskirts of Warsaw she had something more powerful than a mere premonition. It was a certainty—certainty that she would be sent to one of the camps. This deranging flash came to her even before the Gestapo agents—half a dozen or more—clambered onto the car and ordered everyone down to the street. She knew it was the łapanka—a roundup—which she had dreaded and anticipated even as the tramway-style car came to its shuddering halt; something in that suddenness and quick deceleration spelled doom. There was doom, too, in the acrid, metallic stench of the wheels braking against the rails and the way in which, simultaneously, the seated and standing passengers in the jammed train all lurched forward, clutching wildly and aimlessly for support. This is no accident, she thought, it’s the German police. And then she heard the bellowed command: “Raus!”

  They found the twelve-kilo cut of ham almost immediately. Her stratagem—fastening the newspaper-wrapped package to her body beneath her dress in a way that would make her appear corpulently pregnant—was shopworn enough by now almost to call attention to itself rather than work as a ruse; she had tried it anyway, urged on by the farm woman who had sold her the precious meat. “You can at least give it a try,” the woman had said. “They’ll surely catch you if they see you carrying it in the open. Also, you look and dress like an intellectual, not one of our country babas. That will help.” But Sophie had not foreseen either the łap
anka or its thoroughness. And so the Gestapo goon, pressing Sophie up against a damp brick wall, made no effort to conceal his contempt for her doltish Polack dodge, extracting a penknife from the pocket of his jacket and inserting the blade with relaxed, almost informal delicacy into that bulgingly bogus placenta, leering as he did so. Sophie recalled the smell of cheese on the Nazi’s breath and his remark as the knife sank into the haunch of what had been, until recently, contented pig. “Can’t you say ouch, Liebchen?” She was unable, in her terror, to utter anything more than some desperate commonplace, but for her small pains, received a compliment on the felicity of her German.

  She felt sure that she was going to be tortured, but she somehow escaped this. The Germans seemed to be caught up in an enormous hullaballoo that particular day; all over the streets hundreds of Poles were being corralled and taken into custody, and thus the crime she had committed (a grave one, smuggling meat), which at another time would certainly have caused her to be subjected to the most detailed scrutiny, got overlooked or forgotten in the general confusion. But by no means did she go unnoticed, nor did her ham. At the infamous Gestapo headquarters—that terrible Warsaw simulacrum of Satan’s antechamber—the ham lay unwrapped and pinkly glistening on the desk between herself, handcuffed, and a hyperactive, monocled zealot who almost exactly resembled Otto Kruger and who demanded to know where she had obtained this contraband. His interpreter, a Polish girl, had a coughing fit. “You be a smuggler!” he said loudly in clumsy Polish, and when Sophie replied in German she received her second compliment of the day. A big molar-filled greasy Nazi smile, right out of a 1938 Hollywood movie. But it was barely even a pleasantry. Did she not know the seriousness of her act, did she not know that meat of any kind but especially of this quality was designated for the Reich? With a long fingernail he pried loose a fat sliver of the ham and conveyed it to his mouth. He nibbled. Hochqualitätsfleisch. His voice suddenly became tough, a snarl. Where did she get such meat? Who supplied her with this? Sophie thought of the poor farm woman, knew of the vengeance awaiting her too, and temporizing now, replied, “It was not for me, sir, this meat. It was for my mother who lives on the other side of the city. She is seriously ill from tuberculosis.” As if such an altruistic sentiment could have the vaguest effect on this caricature of a Nazi, who was already being besieged by knocks at the door and an irruptive jangle of the telephone. What a wild day for the Germans and their łapanka. “I don’t give a damn for your mother!” he roared. “I want to know where you got this meat! Tell me now or I’ll have it beaten out of you!” But the hammering at the door continued, another telephone began ringing; the little office became the cell of a madman. The Gestapo officer shrieked to a subordinate to have this Polish bitch taken away—and that was the last Sophie ever saw of him or the ham.