“IN CRACOW, when I was a little girl,” Sophie told me, “we lived in a very old house on an old winding street not far from the university. It was a very ancient house, I’m sure some of it must have been built centuries ago. Strange, you know, that house and Yetta Zimmerman’s house are the only houses I ever lived in—real houses, I mean—in my life. Because, you see, I was born there and spend all my childhood there and then when I was married I lived there still, before the Germans came and I had to go live for a while in Warsaw. I adored that house, it was quiet and full of shadows high up on the fourth floor when I was very little, and I had my own room. Across the street there was another old house, with these crooked chimneys, and the storks had builded their nests on top of these. Storks, isn’t that it? Funny, I used to get that word mixed up with ‘stilts’ in English. Anyway, I remember the storks on the chimney across the street and how they looked just like the storks in my book of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm that I read in German. I remember that so very, very plainly, those books, and the color of the outside and the pictures of the animals and birds and people on the cover. I could read German before I read Polish, and do you know, I even spoke German before I spoke Polish, so that when I first went to the convent school I would get teased for my German accent.
“You know, Cracow is a very ancient city, and our house was not far from the central square, where in the middle is this beautiful building that was made in medieval times—the Sukiennice it is called in Polish, which I believe translated in English means the cloth-hall, where they would have a market in all types of cloths and fabrics. Then there is a clock tower there on the church of St. Mary’s, very high, and instead of bells they have actual live men who come out on a kind of balustrade, these men who come out and blow trumpets to announce the hour. It makes a very beautiful sound in the night. Kind of distant and sad, you know, like the trumpets in one of the suites for orchestra of Bach, that make me think always of very ancient times, and how mysterious is this thing of time. When I was a little girl I would lie in the dark of my room and listen to the sound of the horses’ feet on the street below—they did not have too many motorcars in Poland then—and when I would go off to sleep I would hear the men blow the trumpets on the clock tower, very sad and distant, and I would wonder about time—this mystery, you know. Or I would lie there and think about clocks. In the hallway there was a very old clock on a kind of stand that had belonged to my grandparents, and once I opened the back of it and looked into it while it was running and saw a whole lot of levers and wheels and jewels—I think they were mostly rubies—shining in the reflection from the sun. So at night lying there I would think of myself inside the clock—imagine anything so crazy from a child!—where I would just float around on a spring and watch the levers moving and the various wheels turning and see the rubies, red and bright and as big as my head. And I would go to sleep finally with this clock in my dreams.
“Oh, there are so many memories of Cracow, so many, I can’t begin to describe them! They were wonderful times, those years between those wars, even for Poland, which is a poor country and suffer from, you know, an inferiority complex. Nathan thinks I’m exaggerating about the good times we had—he makes so many jokes about Poland—but I tell him about my family and how we lived in a wonderful civilized way, the best kind of life you can imagine, really. ‘What did you do for fun on Sunday?’ he says to me. ‘Throw rotten potatoes at Jews?’ You see, all he can think of about Poland is how anti-Semitic it is being and make those jokes about it, which cause me to feel so bad. Because it is true, I mean it is famous that Poland has this strong anti-Semitism and that make me so terribly ashamed in many ways, like you, Stingo, when you have this misère over the colored people down in the South. But I told Nathan that yes, it is true, quite true about this bad history in Poland, but he must understood—vraiment, he must comprehend that not all Polish people was like that, there are good decent people like my family who... Oh, it is such an ugly thing to talk about. It makes me think sadly about Nathan, he is... obsessed, so I think I must change the subject...
“Yes, my family. My mother and father was both professors at the university, which is why almost all my memories have this connection with the university. It is one of the oldest universities in Europe, it was started far back in the fourteenth century. I didn’t know no other kind of life except being the daughter of teachers, and maybe that is why my memories of all those times are so gentle and civilized. Stingo, someday you must go to Poland and see it and write about it. It is so beautiful. And so sad. Imagine, those twenty years when I was growing up there was the only twenty years that Poland was ever free. I mean after centuries! I suppose that is why I used to hear my father say so often, ‘These are sunny times for Poland.’ Because everything was free for the first time, you see, in the universities and schools—you could study anything which you wished to study. And I suppose that is one of the reasons why people was able to enjoy life so much, studying and learning, and listening to music, and going away to the country on Sundays in the spring and summer. Sometime I have thought that I love music almost as much as life, really. We were at concerts always. When I was a little girl in this house, this ancient house, I would lie awake at night in my bed and listen to my mother play downstairs on the piano—Schumann or Chopin she would play, or Beethoven or Scarlatti or Bach, she was a wonderful pianist—I would lie awake and hear the music faint and beautiful rising up through the house and I would feel so warm and comfortable and secure. I would think that no one had a more wonderful mother and father or a better life than me. And I would think of growing up and what I would become when I was not a child any more, perhaps become married and become a teacher of music like my mother. This would be such a fine life to live, I thought, to be able to play beautiful music, and teach and be married to a fine professor like my father.
“Neither of my parents come from Cracow in the beginning. My mother was from Lodz and my father was from Lublin. They met in Vienna when they were students. My father was studying the law at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and my mother was studying music in the city. They were both very religious Catholics, so I was brought up very devout and went to Mass always and church school, but I don’t mean I was, you know, fanatic, nut. I believed very much in God, but my mother and father they were not, you know, I don’t know what the exact word is in English, like dur—yes, hard, harsh. They were not like that. They were very liberal—even, you could say, almost socialist—and always voted with labor or the democrats. My father hated Pilsudski. He said he was a worse terror for Poland than Hitler, and drunk a whole lot of schnapps to celebrate the night Pilsudski died. He was a pacifist, my father, and even though he would talk about these sunny times for Poland, I knew that au fond he was gloomy and worried. Once I heard him talking to my mother—it must have been around 1932—and I heard him say in this gloomy voice, ‘This cannot truly last. There will be a war. Fate has never allowed Poland to be happy for very long.’ This he spoke in German, I remember. In our house we spoke in German more often than we spoke in Polish. Français I learned to speak almost perfect in school but I spoke German even more easier than French. It was the influence of Vienna, you see, where my father and mother had spend so much time, and then my father was a professor of law and German was so much the language of scholars in those days. My mother was a wonderful cook in the Viennese style. Oh, there were a few good Polish things she cooked, but Polish cooking is not exactly haute cuisine, and so I remember the food she cooked in this big kitchen we had in Cracow—Wiener Gulash Suppe and Schnitzel, and oh! especially I remember this wonderful dessert she made called Metternich pudding that was all filled with chestnuts and butter and orange skin.
“I know maybe it sound tiresome to say so all the time, but my mother and father was wonderful people. Nathan, you know, is okay now, he is calm, he is in one of his good times—periods, you say? But when he is in one of the bad times like the time when you first saw him—when he is in one of his tempêtes, I call them, he start to scream at me and always then call me an anti-Semitic Polish pig. Oh, his language, and what he calls me, words I’ve never heard before, in English, then Yiddish, everything! But always like ‘You filthy Polish pig, crummy nafka, kurveh, you’re killing me, you’re killing me like you filthy Polish pigs have always killed the Jews!’ And I try to talk to him, but he won’t listen, he just stays crazy with this rage, and I have always knew it was no good at such a time to tell him about the good Poles like my father. Papa was born in Lublin when it belonged to the Russians and there were many, many Jews there who suffered from those terrible pogroms against them. Once my mother told me—because my father would never talk about such a thing—that when he was a young man he and his brother, who was a priest, risked their lives by hiding three Jewish families from the pogrom, from the Cossack soldiers. But I know that if I tried to tell this to Nathan during one of these tempêtes, he would only yell at me some more and call me a dirty pig Polack liar. Oh, I have to be so patient with Nathan then—I know then that he is becoming very sick, that he is not all right—and just turn away and keep silent and think of other things, waiting for the tempête to go away, when he will be kind and so sweet to me again, so full of tendresse and loving.
“It must be about ten years ago, a year or two before the war began, that I first heard my father say Massenmord. It was after the stories in the newspapers about the terrible destruction the Nazis had done in Germany on the synagogues and the Jewish stores. I remember my father first said something about Lublin and the pogroms he seen there, and then he said, ‘First from the east, now from the west. This time it will be ein Massenmord.’ I didn’t realize completely what he mean then by what he said, I suppose a little bit because in Cracow there was a ghetto but not so many Jews as other places, and anyway, I didn’t think about them being truly different or being victims or being persecuted. I suppose I was ignorant, Stingo. I was married then to Casimir—you know, I was married very, very young and I suppose I was still in this state of being a little girl and thinking that this wonderful life so comfortable and safe and secure would continue forever. Mama and Papa and Casimir and Zosia—Zosia, that is the, you know, nickname for Sophie—all living so happy in the big house, eating Wiener Gulash Suppe and studying and learning and listening to Bach—oh, forever. I don’t understood how I might be so stupid. Casimir was an instructor in mathematics that I met when my mother and father had a party for some of the young teachers at the university. When Casimir and I were married we had these plans to go to Vienna like my mother and father did. It was going to be very much like the way they done their study. Casimir would get this supérieur degree in mathematics at the Austrian Academy and I would study music. I had been playing the piano myself ever since I was eight or nine years old and I was going to study under this very famous teacher, Frau Theimann, who had teached my mother and was still teaching although she was quite old. But that year there came the Anschluss and the Germans went into Vienna. It begun to be very frightening and my father said we were certain to go to war.
“I remember so well that last year when we were all together in Cracow. Somehow I still could not believe that this life we all have together would ever be changed. I was so happy with Casimir—Kazik—and loved him so very much. He was so generous and loving, and so intelligent—you see, Stingo, how I am attracted only to intelligent men. I cannot say whether I loved Kazik more than Nathan—I love Nathan so much that it hurts my heart—and maybe we should not do such a thing as compare one love with another. Well, I loved Kazik deeply, deeply, and I could not bear to think of the war coming so near and this possibility of Kazik being a soldier. So we put it out of our heads and that year we listened to concerts and read many books and went to the theatre and took long walks in the city, and on these walks I begin to learn to speak Russian. Kazik was in the beginning from Brest-Litovsk, which was for so long Russian, and he spoke that language as good as Polish and taught me it pretty good. Not like my father, who had also lived beneath the Russians but hated them so much that he refused to speak that language unless he was compelled to. Anyway, during this time I refused to think of this life ending. Well, I knew there would be some changes, but natural changes, you know, like moving out of the house of my parents and having our own house and family. But this I thought would come after the war, if there was one, because surely the war would be very short and the Germans would be defeated and then soon Kazik and I would go to Vienna and study like we had always planned to.
“I was so stupid to think of such a thing, Stingo. It was like my Uncle Stanislaw, who was my father’s brother and was a colonel in the Polish horse troops. He was my favorite uncle, so full of life and this big laugh and this kind of wonderful, innocent feeling about the greatness of Poland—la gloire, tu comprends, la patrie, et cetera, as if Poland had never been under the Prussians and the Austrians and the Russians all these many years but had this continuité like France or England or some places like those. He would visit us in Cracow in his uniform with his saber and this mustache of a hussar and would talk very loud and laugh a lot and say that the Germans would be teach a lesson if they tried to fight Poland. I think my father would continue to be nice to my uncle—you know, try to humor him—but Kazik had this very direct, logical mentality and would argue with Uncle Stanislaw in a friendly way and ask him how these horse troops would have effect when the Germans came with their Panzer troops and tanks. And my uncle would say that all that was important was the terrain and that the Polish cavalry knew how to maneuver in the familiar terrain and the Germans would get total lost in the strange terrain, and that is how the Polish troops would turn the Germans back. And you know what happened when there was this confrontation—une catastrophe totale, in less than three days. Oh, it was all so foolish and gallant and futile. All those men and horses! And so sad, Stingo, sad...
“When the German soldiers came into Cracow—this was in September of 1939—we were all shocked and scared and of course we hate this thing that was happening to us but we stayed calm and hoped for the best things. Truly that part was not so bad, Stingo, I mean in the beginning, because we had faith that the Germans would treat us decent. They had not bombed the city like Warsaw, and so we feel a little special and protected, spared. The German soldiers they had very good behavior and I remember that my father said that this proved what he had believed for so long. And that was that the German soldier was in this tradition of ancient Prussia which had the code of honor and decency and so they would never harm civilians or be cruel to them. Also, it make us to feel calm to hear of these thousands of soldiers speaking German, which to our family was almost like the native tongue. So we had this panic at the very beginning but then it seemed not so bad. My father suffered terribly over the news about what happened in Warsaw but he said we must continue with our lives in the old way. He said that he had no illusions about what Hitler think of the intellectuals but he said that in other places like Vienna and Prague many teachers in the universities was permitted to continue their work, and he thought that he and Casimir would too. But after weeks and weeks passed and anything didn’t happen, we saw that this time in Cracow was going to be okay, tolerable I mean.
“One morning that November I went to Mass in St. Mary’s church, that is the church that has the trumpets, you know. In Cracow I went to Mass quite often and went many times after the Germans came, to pray that the war be over. Maybe it sound selfish and horrible to you, Stingo, but I think mainly I wished the war to be over so I could go to Vienna with Kazik and study. Oh, naturally there were a million other reasons to pray, but people are selfish, you know, and I felt very lucky that my family had been spared and was safe, so I just wished for the war to be over so that life could be as it was in the old days. But when I prayed at Mass this morning I had a... a prémonition—yes, the same, a premonition, and was filled with this slowly mounting frightful sensation. I didn’t know what the fright was about, but in a sudden the prayer stop in my mouth and I could feel the wind blowing in the church around me, very wet and cold. And then I remembered what caused the fright, something that just came over me like a bright flash. Because I remembered that this same morning the new Nazi Governor General of Cracow district, this man named Frank, had make the faculty of the university to assemble in the cour de maison, you know, courtyard of the university, where they were to be told the new rules for the faculty under the occupation. It was nothing. It was to be a simple assembly. They were supposed to be there that morning. My father and Kazik heard about this only the day before and it appeared, you know, perfectly reasonable and no one thought about it very much. But now in this bright flash I felt something very, very wrong and I run from the church into the street.
“And oh, Stingo! now I tell you: I never saw my father or Kazik, ever again. I run, it was not far, and when I got to the university there was a vast crowd of people near the main gate in front of the courtyard. The street was closed to the traffic, and there were these huge German vans and hundreds and hundreds of German soldiers with rifles and machine guns. There was a barrière and these German soldiers wouldn’t let me pass and just then I saw this older woman I knew well, Mrs. Professor Wochna, whose husband was teaching la chimie, you know, chemistry. She became hysterical and crying and she fell into my arms, saying, ‘Oh, they are all gone, they have been taken away! All of them!’ And I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it, but another wife of the faculty came near and she was crying too and she said, ‘Yes, it’s true. They have been taken away, they took my husband too, Professor Smolen.’ And then I begun to believe it little by little, and I saw these closed vans going down the street toward the west, and then I believed it and cried and came into hysteria also. And run home and told my mother and we fell crying into each other’s arms. My mother said, ‘Zosia, Zosia, where did they go? Where did they take them?’ And I said I didn’t know, but only in a month we learned. My father and Kazik were taken to the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen and we learned that they were both shot to death on New Year’s Day. Murdered only because they were Polish, and professors. There were many other teachers, one hundred eighty total I believe, and many of them didn’t come back neither. It was not long after this that we went to Warsaw—it was necessary that I find work...
“These long years after, in 1945, when the war was over and I was in this center for displaced persons in Sweden, I would think back to that time when my father and Kazik were murdered and think of all the tears I cried, and wonder why after all that had happened to me I couldn’t cry no longer. And this was true, Stingo, I had no more emotions. I was beyond feeling, like there was no more tears in me to pour on the earth. At this place in Sweden, I became friends with a Jewish woman from Amsterdam who was very kind to me, especially after I tried to kill myself. I suppose I didn’t try very hard, cut my wrist with a piece of glass, and it didn’t bleed much, but this older Jewish woman become very friendly to me and that summer we talked a lot together. She had been at the concentration camp where I was, and lost two sisters. I don’t understood how she survived, there were so many Jews murdered there, you know, millions and millions of Jews, but somehow she survived as I did, just a very few of us. She spoke very good English, besides German, and that is how I begun to learn English, since I knew I would probably come to America.
“She was very religious, this woman, and always go to pray at the synagogue they had there. She told me that she still very much believed in God and once she asked me if I did not believe in Him too—the Christian God—just as she believed in her God, the God of Abraham. She said that what happened to her made more strong her belief of Him, even though she knew Jews who felt now God was gone from the world. And I said to her yes, I once believed in Christ and His Holy Mother too, but now after these years I was like those Jews who think God was gone forever. I said that I knew that Christ had turned His face away from me and I could no longer pray to Him as I did once in Cracow. I couldn’t any longer pray to Him or could I any more cry. And when she asked how I know that Christ have turned His face away from me, I said I just knew, I just knew that only a God, only a Jesus who had no pity and who no longer care for me could permit the people I loved to be killed and let me live with such guilt. It was terrible enough they died like they done, but this guilt was more than I could bear. On peut souffrir, but you can suffer only so much...
“You can perhaps think it is a little thing, Stingo, but it is to permit someone to die without a farewell, an adieu, a single word of comfort or understanding that is so terrible to bear. I wrote to my father and Kazik in Sachsenhausen many letters but they always came back marked ‘Unknown.’ I only wanted to tell them how very much I loved them, especially Kazik, not because I loved him any more than Papa but because our very last time together we had a big fight and that was terrible. We almost never had fights, but we were married above three years and I suppose it was natural to quarrel sometime. Anyway, the night before this terrible day we had a big fight, I don’t longer remember what it was even about, really, and I told him ‘Spadaj!’—which in Polish is like saying ‘Drop dead’—and he rushed away and that night we didn’t sleep in the same room. And I never seen him even once after that. So that is what I found it so difficult to bear, that we don’t have even a gentle parting, a kiss, an embrace, nothing. Oh, I know Kazik knew I loved him still and I knew he loved me, but somehow it is all the worse that he must have suffered too, from not reaching me to say it, to communicate we love each other.
“So, Stingo, I have lived long with this very, very strong guilt which I can’t lose, even though I know it has no reason, like that Jewish woman in Sweden said, when she try to make me see that the love we had was the most important thing, not the silly fight. But I still have this strong guilt. Funny, Stingo, you know I have learned to cry again, and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of a human being, but yes, a human being. Often I cry alone when I listen to music, which remind me of Cracow and those years past. And you know, there is one piece of music that I cannot listen to, it makes me cry so much my nose stops up, I cannot breathe, my eyes run like streams. It is in these Handel records I got for Christmas, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ that make me cry because of all my guilt, and also because I know that my Redeemer don’t live and my body will be destroyed by worms and my eyes will never, never again see God...”
At the time of which I write, that hectic summer of 1947, when she told me so many things about her past and when I was fated to get ensnared, like some hapless June bug, in the incredible spider’s nest of emotions that made up the relation between Sophie and Nathan, she was working in an out-of-the-way corner of Flatbush as a part-time receptionist in the office of Dr. Hyman Blackstock (né Bialystok). At this point Sophie had been in America a little less than a year and a half. Dr. Blackstock was a chiropractor and a long-ago immigrant from Poland. His patients included many old-time immigrants or more recent Jewish refugees. Sophie had obtained her job with the doctor not long after her arrival in New York in the early months of the previous year, when she had been brought to America under the auspices of an international relief organization. At first Blackstock (who spoke fluent Polish aside from his mamaloshen Yiddish) was rather distressed that the agency had sent him a young woman who was a goy and who had only a smattering of Yiddish learned in a prison camp. But, a warm-hearted man who was doubtless impressed by her beauty, by her plight and by the fact that she spoke flawless German, he hired her for this job which she sorely needed, possessing as she did little more than the flimsy clothes that had been given to her at the D.P. center in Sweden. Blackstock need not have worried; within days Sophie was chattering with the patients in Yiddish as if she had sprung from the ghetto. She rented the cheap room at Yetta Zimmerman’s—her first true home in seven years—at about the same time she took the job. Working only three days a week allowed Sophie to keep body and soul together, in a manner of speaking, while also granting her extra days to improve her English at a free class at Brooklyn College and in general to become assimilated into the life of that vivid, vast and bustling borough.
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—to me—fetchingly erratic speech.
Her whole experience of America was New York—mostly Brooklyn—and eventually she came to love the city and to be terrified by it in almost equal measure. In her entire life she had known just two urban places—tiny Cracow in its Gothic repose and later the shapeless rubble heap of Warsaw after the Blitzkrieg. Her sweeter memories—that is, the ones she cared to dwell upon—were rooted in the town of her birth, immemorially suspended in a frieze of ancient rooftops and crooked streets and lanes. The intervening years between Cracow and Brooklyn had forced her—almost as a means of retaining sanity—to try to obliterate that time from recollection. Thus she said that those first mornings at Yetta’s rooming house, waking in a strange bed surrounded by strange pink walls as she drowsily listened to the faint far-off rumble of traffic on Church Avenue, she would for long seconds be so unable to name or recognize either herself or her surroundings that she felt herself to be in a somnolent trance, like the enchanted maiden in one of those Grimm fairy tales of her childhood, transported after a nocturnal spell to a new and unknown kingdom. Then, blinking awake with a feeling in which sorrow and cheer were curiously commingled, she would say to herself: You are not in Cracow, Zosia, you are in America. And then rise to face the pandemonium of the subway and the chiropractic patients of Dr. Blackstock. And Brooklyn’s greenly beautiful, homely, teeming, begrimed and incomprehensible vastness.
With the coming of spring Prospect Park, so close at hand, became Sophie’s favorite refuge—wonderful to recall, a safe place in those days for a solitary and lovely blonde to wander. In the pollen-hazy light, dappled in shades of gold-flecked green, the great towering locusts and elms that loomed over meadow and rolling grass seemed prepared to shelter a fête champêtre in a scene by Watteau or Fragonard, and it was beneath one of these majestic trees that Sophie, on her free days or on weekends, would deposit herself, along with a marvelous luncheon picnic. She later confessed to me, with just the vaguest touch of shame, that she became quite possessed, truly unhinged by food as soon as she arrived in the city. She knew she had to exercise caution in eating. At the D.P. center the doctor from the Swedish Red Cross who took care of her had said that her malnutrition was so severe that it had probably caused some more or less permanent and damaging metabolic changes; he cautioned her that she must guard against quick overconsumption of food, especially of fats, no matter how strong the temptation. But this made it all the more fun for her, a pleasant game, when at lunchtime she entered one of the glorious delicatessens of Flatbush and shopped for her Prospect Park spread. The privilege of choice gave her a feeling achingly sensual. There was so much to eat, such variety and abundance, that each time her breath stopped, her eyes actually filmed over with emotion, and with slow and elaborate gravity she would choose from this sourly fragrant, opulent, heroic squander of food: a pickled egg here, there a slice of salami, half a loaf of pumpernickel, lusciously glazed and black. Bratwurst. Braunschweiger. Some sardines. Hot pastrami. Lox. A bagel, please. Clutching the brown paper bag, the warning like a litany in her mind—“Remember what Dr. Bergstrom said, don’t gorge yourself—she would make her methodical way into one of the farthest recesses of the park, or near a backwater of the huge lake, and there—munching with great restraint, taste buds enthralled in rediscovery—would turn to page 350 of Studs Lonigan.
She was feeling her way. In every sense of the word having experienced rebirth, she possessed some of the lassitude and, as a matter of fact, a great deal of the helplessness of a newborn child. Her clumsiness was like that of a paraplegic regaining the use of her limbs. Small things, preposterous tiny things, still confounded her. She had forgotten how to connect the two sides of the zipper on a jacket she had been given. Her maladroit fumblings appalled her, and once she burst into tears when, trying to squeeze out some cosmetic lotion from an ordinary plastic tube, she applied such careless force that the stuff gushed out all over her and ruined a new dress. But she was coming along. Occasionally she ached in her bones, her shins and ankles mainly, and her walk still had a hesitancy which seemed connected with the spiritlessness and fatigue that often overtook her and which she desperately hoped would go away. Yet if she did not quite exist in the full flood of sunlight, which is the hackneyed metaphor for good health, she was comfortably and safely far away from that abyssal darkness down into which she had nearly strayed. Specifically, this had been not much more than a year ago, when, at the just-liberated camp in the terminal hours of that existence she no longer allowed herself to remember, the Russian voice—a bass-baritone but harsh, corrosive as lye—pierced her delirium, penetrated the sweat and the fever and the kennel filth of the hard straw-strewn wooden shelf where she lay, to mutter over her in an impassive tone, “I think this one is finished too.” For even then she knew that somehow she was not finished—a truth now borne out, she was relieved to say (while sprawled on the lakeside grass), by the timid yet voluptuous gurgles of hunger that attended the exalted instant, just before biting down, when her nostrils breathed in the briny smell of pickles, and mustard, and the caraway-tinged scent of Levy’s Jewish rye.
But one late afternoon in June nearly brought a disastrous ending to the precarious equilibrium she had devised for herself. An aspect of the city’s life which had to be entered negatively into her ledger of impressions was the subway. She detested New York subway trains for their grime and their noise, but even more for the claustrophobic nearness of so many human bodies, the rush-hour jam and jostle of flesh which seemed to neutralize, if not to cancel out, the privacy she had sought for so long. She was aware that it was a contradiction that someone who had been through all that she had should be so fastidious, should shrink so from strange epidermises, from alien touch. But there it was, she could not get rid of the feeling; it was a part of her new and transformed identity. A last resolve she had made at the swarming refugee center in Sweden was to spend the rest of her life avoiding people en masse; the rackety BMT mocked such an absurd idea. Returning home one early evening from Dr. Blackstock’s office, she climbed into a car that was even more than normally congested, the hot and humid cage packed not only with the usual mob of sweating, shirt-sleeved and bare-necked Brooklynites of every shade and of every aspect of docile misery but soon with a crowd of screaming high school boys with baseball trappings who flooded aboard the train at a downtown stop, thrusting their way in all directions with such rowdy and brutish force that the sense of pressure became nearly unbearable. Pushed remorselessly toward the end of the aisle in a crush of rubbery torsos and slick perspiring arms, she found herself tripping and side-stepping into the dank dim platform that connected cars, firmly sandwiched between two human shapes whose identity, in an abstracted way, she was trying to discern just as the train screeched to a slow and shuddering halt and the lights went out. She was seized by a queasy fear. An audible feel of chagrin in the car, making itself known by soft moans and sighs, was drowned out by the boys’ raucous cheers, at first so deafening and then so continuous that Sophie, rigidly immobilized in the blackest dark, knew in a flash that no cry or protest would avail her when she felt, now, from behind her the hand slither up between her thighs underneath her skirt.
If any small consolation was needed, she later reasoned, it was that she was spared the panic which otherwise surely would have overtaken her in such a tumult, in the oppressive heat and on a stopped and darkened train. She might even have groaned like the others. But the hand with its rigid central finger—working with surgical skill and haste, unbelievably assertive as it probed and burrowed—took care of that, causing simple panic to be superseded in her mind by the shocked and horrified disbelief of anyone experiencing sudden digital rape. For such it was, no random and clumsy grope but a swift all-out onslaught on, to put it simply, her vagina, which the disembodied finger sought like some evil, wiggling little rodent, quickly circumvented the silk, then entered at full length, causing her pain, but less pain than a kind of hypnotic astonishment. Dimly she was conscious of fingernails, and heard herself gasp “Please,” certain of the banality, the stupidity of the word even as she uttered it. The whole event could not have been of more than thirty seconds’ duration when finally the loathsome paw withdrew and she stood trembling in a suffocating darkness which it seemed would never know light again. She had no idea how long it was before the lights came on—five minutes, perhaps ten—but when they did, and the train began to move with a shuffling around of bodies, she realized that she had not the slightest way of knowing her attacker, submerged somewhere amid the half-dozen male backs and shoulders and protruding paunches surrounding her. Somehow she managed to flee the train at the next stop.
A straightforward, conventional rape would have done less violation to her spirit and identity, she thought later, would have filled her with less horror and revulsion. Any atrocity she had witnessed in the past five years, any outrage she herself had suffered—and she had known both past all recounting—had not numbed her to this gross insult. A classical face-to-face rape, however repellent, would at least permit the small gratification of knowing your assailant’s features, of making him know that you knew, quite aside from the chance it presented, through a grimace or a hot level stare or even tears, of registering something: hatred, fright, malediction, disgust, possibly just derision. But this anonymous stroke in the dark, this slimy and bodiless entry from the rear, like a stab in the back from some vile marauder unknown to you forever; no, she would have preferred (she told me many months later when distance from the act allowed her to regard it with a saving hint of humor) a penis. It was bad enough in itself, yet she could have borne the episode with comparative strength at some other time in her life. But now her distress was compounded by the way it upset the fragile balance of her newly renovated psyche, by the manner in which this looting of her soul (for she felt it to be that as much as her body) not only pushed her back toward the cauchemar, the nightmare from which she was ever so delicately and slowly trying to retreat, but actually symbolized, in its wanton viciousness, the very nature of that nightmare world.
She who had for so long been off and on literally naked and who, these few months in Brooklyn, had so painstakingly reclothed herself in self-assurance and sanity had again by this act, she knew, been stripped bare. And she felt once more the freezing cold of the spirit. Without giving a specific reason for her request—and telling no one, not even Yetta Zimmerman, what had happened—she asked Dr. Blackstock for a week off from work and went to bed. Day after day in the balmiest part of summer she lay asprawl with the blinds drawn down to admit only thin yellow slivers of light. She kept her radio silent. She ate little, read nothing, and rose only to heat tea on her hot plate. In the deep shadows she listened to the crack of ball against bat and the shouts of boys in the baseball fields of the park, drowsed, and thought of the womblike perfection of that clock into which as a child she had crawled in her fancy, afloat on a steel spring, regarding the levers, the rubies, the wheels. Ever threatening at the margin of her consciousness were the shape and shadow, the apparition of the camp—the very name of which she had all but rejected from her private lexicon, and seldom used or thought of, and which she knew she could allow to trespass upon memory only at the danger of her losing—which is to say taking—her life. If the camp came too close again, as it had before in Sweden, would she have the strength to withstand the temptation, or would she seize the cutting edge once more and this time not botch the job? The question helped her to occupy the hours as she lay there those days, gazing up at the ceiling where flickers of light, seeping in from outside, swam like minnows on the desolating pink.
Providentially, though, it was music that helped save her, as it had in the past. On the fifth or sixth day—she recalled only that it was a Saturday—she awoke after a restless night filled with confused, menacing dreams and as if by old habit stretched out her hand and switched on the tiny Zenith radio which she kept on her bedside table. She had not meant to, it was simple reflex; the reason she had shut music out during these days of malignant depression was that she had found she could not bear the contrast between the abstract yet immeasurable beauty of music and the almost touchable dimensions of her own aching despair. But unknown to herself, she must have been open and receptive to the mysteriously therapeutic powers of W. A. Mozart, M.D., for the very first phrases of the music—the great Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major—caused her to shiver all over with uncomplicated delight. And suddenly she knew why this was so, why this sonorous and noble statement so filled with peculiar, chilling dissonances should flood her spirit with relief and recognition and joy. For aside from its intrinsic loveliness, it was a work whose very identity she had sought for ten years. She had been smitten nearly mad with the piece when an ensemble from Vienna had visited Cracow a year or so before the Anschluss. Sitting in the concert hall, she had listened to the fresh new work as in a trance, and let the casements and doors of her mind swing wide to admit the luxuriant, enlaced and fretted harmonies, and those wild dissonances, inexhaustibly inspired. At a time of her early youth made up of the perpetual discovery of musical treasures, this was a treasure newly minted and supreme. Yet she never heard the piece again, for like everything else, the Sinfonia Concertante and Mozart, and the plaintive sweet dialogue between violin and viola, and the flutes, the strings, the dark-throated horns were all blown away on the war’s wind in a Poland so barren, so smothered with evil and destruction that the very notion of music was a ludicrous excresence.
So in those years of cacophony in bombed-out Warsaw, and later at the camp, the memory of that work faded, even the title, which she ultimately confused with the titles of other pieces of music she had known and loved in time long past, until all that was left was a blurred but exquisite recollection of a moment of unrecapturable bliss, in Cracow, in another era. But in her room that morning the work, joyously blaring through the plastic larynx of the cheap little radio, brought her abruptly upright with quickened heartbeat and with an unfamiliar sensation around her mouth which she realized was a smile. For minutes she sat there listening, smiling, chilled, ravished while the unrecapturable became captured and slowly began to melt her fierce anguish. Then when the music was finished, and she had carefully written down the name of the work as the announcer described it, she went to the window and raised the blind. Gazing out at the baseball diamond at the edge of the park, she found herself wondering if she would ever have enough money to buy a phonograph and a recording of the Sinfonia Concertante and then realized that such a thought in itself meant that she was coming out of the shadows.
But thinking this, she still knew she had a long way to go. The music may have buoyed her spirit but her retreat into darkness had left her body feeling weak and ravaged. Some instinct told her that this was because she had eaten so little that the effect had been almost that of a fast; even so, she could not explain and was frightened by her loss of appetite, the fatigue, the knife-edge pains coursing down along her shins, and especially by the sudden onset of her menstrual period, arriving many days too early and with the blood flowing so copiously it was like a hemorrhage. Could this be, she wondered, an effect of her rape? The next day when she returned to work she resolved to ask Dr. Blackstock to examine her and suggest a course of treatment. She was not medically unsophisticated, so Sophie was aware of the irony involved in her seeking the ministrations of a chiropractor, but such strictures involving her employer she had of necessity abandoned when she took the desperately needed job in the first place. She knew, at least, that whatever he did was legal and that, of the multitude of the afflicted who streamed in and out of his office (including a number of policemen), some at least seemed benefited by his spinal manipulations, his pullings and stretchings and twistings and the other bodily stratagems he employed in the sanctum of his office. But the important thing was that he was one of the few people she knew well enough to turn to for advice of any kind. Thus she had a certain dependence on him, totally aside from her meager pay. And beyond this, she had come to be rather attached to the doctor in an amused and tolerant way.
Blackstock, a robust, handsome, gracefully balding man in his middle fifties, was one of God’s blessed whose destiny had led him from the stony poverty of a shtetl in Russian Poland to the most sublime satisfactions that American materialistic success could offer. A dandy whose wardrobe ran to embroidered waistcoats, broad foulard ties and carnation boutonnieres, a great talker and joketeller (the stories mainly in Yiddish), he seemed to float in such a luminosity of optimism and good cheer that he actually gave off a kind of candlepower. He was a lubricous charmer, an obsessive bestower of fetching trinkets and favors, and he performed for his patients, for Sophie, for anyone who would watch, clever little magic tricks and feats of sleight of hand. In the pain of her difficult transition Sophie might have been dismayed by such boundless and energetic high spirits, these corny jokes and pranks, but behind it all she saw only such a childlike desire to be loved that she couldn’t possibly let it offend her; besides, despite the obvious nature of his humor, he had been the first person in years who had caused her honest laughter.
About his affluence he was breath-takingly direct. Perhaps only a man so indefatigably good-hearted could recite the catalogue of his worldly goods without sounding odious, but he was able to, in a guttural hybrid English whose dominant overtone, Sophie’s ear had learned to detect, was Brooklynese: “Forty thousand dollars a year income before taxes; a seventy-five-thousand-dollar home in the most elegant part of St. Albans, Queens, free of mortgage, with wall-to-wall carpeting plus indirect lighting in every room; three cars, including a Cadillac Fleetwood with all accessories, and a thirty-two-foot Chris-Craft sleeps six in comfort. All this plus the most darling and adorable wife God ever gave. And me a hungry Jewish youth, a poor nebbish with five dollars landing on Ellis Island not knowing a single individual. Tell me! Tell me why shouldn’t I be the happiest man in the world? Why shouldn’t I want to make people laugh and be happy like me?” No reason at all, thought Sophie one day that winter as she rode back to the office sitting next to Blackstock in the Cadillac after a trip to his house in St. Albans.
She had gone with him to help him sort out some papers in the auxiliary office he maintained at home, and there for the first time she had met the doctor’s wife—a buxom dyed blonde named Sylvia, garishly clad in ballooning silk pants like a Turkish belly dancer, who showed Sophie around the house, the first she had entered in America. This was an eerie organdy and chintz labyrinth glowing at high noon in the empurpled half-light of a mausoleum, where rosy cupids simpered from the walls down upon a grand piano in fire-engine red and overstuffed chairs glistening beneath protective shrouds of transparent plastic, and where the porcelain bathroom fixtures were jet-black. Later, in the Cadillac Fleetwood with its huge monogram on the front doors—HB—Sophie watched in fascination as the doctor made use of his mobile telephone, installed only recently for a few select customers on an experimental basis, and in Blackstock’s hands, a surpassing implement of love. Later she recalled the dialogue—his part of it, at any rate—as he made contact with his St. Albans abode. “Sylvia sweetness, this is Hymie. Loud and clear you read me? I love you, darling pet. Kisses, kisses, darling. The Fleetwood’s now on Liberty Avenue passing just now Bayside Cemetery. I adore you, darling. Here’s a kiss for my darling. (Smack, smack!) Back in a few. minutes, sweetness.” And a short while later: “Sylvia darling, this is Hymie. I adore you, my darling pet. Now the Fleetwood is at the intersection of Linden Boulevard and Utica Avenue. What a fantastic traffic jam! I kiss you, my darling. (Smack, smack!) I send you many, many kisses. What? You say you’re going shopping in New York? Buy something beautiful to wear for Hymie, my beautiful sweetness. I love you, my darling. Oh, darling, I forgot, take the Chrysler. The Buick’s got a busted fuel pump. Over and out, darling pet.” And then with a glance at Sophie, stroking the receiver: “What a sensational instrument of communication!” Blackstock was a truly happy man. He adored Sylvia more than life itself. Only the fact that he was childless, he once told Sophie, kept him from being absolutely the happiest man on earth...
As will be seen in due course (and the fact is important to this narrative), Sophie told me a number of lies that summer. Perhaps I should say she indulged in certain evasions which at the time were necessary in order for her to retain her composure. Or maybe her sanity. I certainly don’t accuse her, for from the point of view of hindsight her untruths seem fathomable beyond need of apology. The passage a while back about her early life in Cracow, for example—the soliloquy which I have tried to transcribe as accurately as I have been able to remember it—is, I am now certain, made up mostly of the truth. But it contained one or two significant falsehoods, along with some crucial lacunae, as will eventually be made clear. As a matter of fact, reading back through much of what I have written so far, I note that Sophie told me a lie within moments after we first set eyes on each other. This was when, after the ghastly fight with Nathan, she leveled upon me her look of desperation and declared that Nathan was “the only man I have ever made love to beside my husband.” Although unimportant, that statement was not true (much later she admitted it to me, confessing that after her husband was shot by the Nazis—a truth—she had had a lover in Warsaw), and I bring the matter up not out of any priggish insistence on absolute veracity but to indicate Sophie’s guarded approach to sex. And thus to suggest at this point the difficulty she had in telling Blackstock about the fearful malaise which had overtaken her, and which she felt must be the result of her rape in the subway.
She squirmed at the idea of revealing her secret—even to Blackstock, a professional man and, moreover, a person in whom she knew she could confide. The loathsomeness of what had happened to her was something that even twenty months at the camp—with its daily, inhuman degradation and nakedness—could not make her feel less befouled. Indeed, she now felt even more helplessly befouled because she had thought of Brooklyn as “safe,” and furthermore, her shame was anything but lessened by the fact that she was Catholic and Polish and a child of her time and place—that is to say, a young woman brought up with puritanical repressions and sexual taboos as adamantine as those of any Alabama Baptist maiden. (It would take Nathan, she told me later, Nathan with his liberated and passionate carnality, to unlock the eroticism in her which she never dreamed she possessed.) Add to this indwelling shame of the rape the unconventional, to say the least, the grotesque way she had been attacked—and the embarrassment she felt at having to tell Blackstock became nearly insupportable.
But somehow, on another trip to St. Albans in the Cadillac, speaking at first in stiff and formal Polish, she managed to get through to him her concern about her health, her languor and the pains in her legs and her bleeding, and then finally spoke almost in a whisper about the episode in the subway. And as she had supposed, Blackstock did not immediately get the drift of what she was saying. Then with hesitant, choking difficulty, which only much later would in itself acquire a faint touch of the comic, she made him understand that no, the act had not been consummated in the ordinary fashion. However, it was no less revolting and soul-shattering for the uncommon way in which it was carried out. “Doctor, don’t you see?” she whispered, now speaking in English. Even more revolting because of that—she said, in tears now—if he could possibly bring himself to see what she meant. “You mean,” he interrupted, “a finger...? He didn’t do it with his...” And delicately paused, for in regard to sex, Blackstock was not a coarse man. And when Sophie again affirmed all that she had been saying, he looked at her with compassion and murmured, very bitterly for him, “Oy vey, what a farshtinkener world is this.”
The upshot of all this was that Blackstock readily conceded that the violation she had suffered, peculiar as it was, could indeed have caused the symptoms that had begun to plague her, especially the gross bleeding. Specifically, his diagnosis was that her trauma, located as it was in the pelvic region, had induced a minor but not to be ignored displacement of the sacral vertebra, with consequent pressure on either the fifth lumbar or the first sacral nerve, perhaps both of these; in any case, it was certainly enough to provoke the loss of appetite, the fatigue and the aches in her bones she had complained of, while the bleeding itself triumphantly ratified the other symptoms. Clearly, he told Sophie, a course of spinal-column manipulations was needed in order to restore normal nerve function and to bring her back to what the doctor called (picturesquely, even to Sophie’s inexpert ear) “the full blush of health.” Two weeks of chiropractic treatment, he assured her, and she would be as good as new. She had become like a relative to him, he confided, and he wouldn’t charge her a penny. And to further cheer her up, he insisted that she witness his newest act of prestidigitation, in which a bouquet of multicolored silks suddenly vanished from his hands in midair, only to reappear in an instant as miniature flags of the United Nations slowly unspooling on a thread from his mouth. Sophie was able somehow to disgorge an appreciative laugh, but at the moment she felt so despairingly low, so ill, that she thought she might go mad.
Nathan once referred to the way in which he and Sophie met as having been “cinematic.” By this he meant that they had met not as most people do, thrown together by the common circumstance of upbringing or school or office or neighborhood, but in the delightful and haphazard way of those romantic strangers of Hollywood daydreams, those lovers-to-be whose destinies became intertwined from the first twinkling of their chance encounter: John Garfield and Lana Turner, for instance, utterly doomed from the instant of their mingled glance in a roadside café, or, more whimsically, William Powell and Carole Lombard on hands and knees at the jeweler’s, their skulls colliding as they search for an elusive diamond. On the other hand, Sophie attributed the convergence of their paths simply to the failure of chiropractic medicine. Suppose, she sometimes later mused, that all of Dr. Blackstock’s ministrations and those of his young associate, Dr. Seymour Katz (who came in after office hours to help take care of the prodigious overflow of sufferers), had worked; suppose the chain of events that led from the vandalizing finger to the sacral vertebra to the compressed fifth lumbar nerve not only had proved not to be a chiropractic chimera but had been terminated in triumph, radiantly, healthfully, as a result of Blackstock’s and Katz’s fortnight of thumping and stretching and drubbing of her tormented spine.
Cured in this fashion, she never would have met Nathan, no doubt of that. But the trouble was that all the vigorous treatment she submitted to only made her feel worse. It made her feel so horrible that she overcame her unwillingness to hurt Blackstock’s sensibilities, telling him that none of her symptoms had subsided and that in fact they had grown more nagging and alarming. “But, my darling girl,” Blackstock exclaimed, shaking his head, “you’ve gotta feel better!” Two full weeks had gone by, and when Sophie suggested to the doctor, with great reticence, that perhaps she was in need of an M.D., a real diagnostician, he flew into the closest approximation of a rage she had ever seen in this almost pathologically benign man. “A doctor of medicine you want? Some fancy gozlin from Park Slope that’ll rob you blind! My darling girl, better you should take yourself to a veterinarian!” To her despair, he then proposed to treat her with an Electro-Sensilator, a newly developed and complicated-looking device, shaped rather like a small refrigerator and containing many wires and gauges, which was supposed to rearrange the molecular structure of her spinal bone cells and which he had just acquired (“for a pretty penny,” he said, adding to her store of idiomatic English) from world chiropractic headquarters somewhere in Ohio or Iowa—states whose names she always got confused.
The morning of the day that she was scheduled to submit to the Electro-Sensilator’s macabre embrace she woke up feeling exceptionally worn-out and sick, far worse than ever before. It was her day off from work and so she drowsed through the forenoon, coming fully awake only around twelve. She recalled clearly of that morning that in her febrile doze—a half-sleep in which the far past of Cracow was curiously, senselessly intermingled with the smiling presence and sculpting hands of Dr. Blackstock—she kept dreaming with mysterious obsessiveness of her father. Humorless, forbidding in his starched wing collar, his oval unrimmed professorial spectacles and black mohair suit odorous of cigar smoke, he lectured her in German with the same ponderous intensity she remembered from her childhood; he seemed to be warning her about something—was he concerned about her sickness?—but when each time she struggled up like a swimmer out of slumber his words bubbled away and fled from her memory, and she was left only with the fading apparition of her father, comfortless and severe, somehow even vaguely threatening. At last—mainly now to throw off this irrepressible image—she forced herself to get out of bed and face the meltingly lush and beautiful summer day. She was quite shaky on her feet and was aware that again she had no appetite at all. She had been conscious for a long time of the paleness of her skin, but on this morning a glance in the bathroom mirror truly horrified her, brought her close to panic: her face was as devoid of any of the animating pink of life as those bleached skulls of ancient monks she recalled from the underground sepulcher of an Italian church.
With a wintry shiver that ran through all her bones, through her fingers—skinny and bloodless, she suddenly perceived—and to the cold bottoms of her feet, she clenched her eyes tightly shut in the smothering and absolute conviction that she was dying. And she knew the name of the malady. I have leukemia, she thought, I am dying of leukemia, like my cousin Tadeusz, and all of Dr. Blackstock’s treatment is only a kindly masquerade. He knows I am dying and all his care is simply pretense. A touch of hysteria almost perfectly pitched between grief and hilarity seized her as she pondered the irony of dying of such an insidious and inexplicable disease after all the other sicknesses she had survived and after all, in so many countless ways, she had seen and known and endured. And to this thought she was able to add the perfectly logical notion, however tortured and despairing, that such an end was perhaps only the body’s grim way of effecting the self-destruction she had been unable to manage by her own hand.
But somehow she was able to take hold of herself and push the morbid thought back into the far recesses of her mind. Drawing away slightly from the mirror, she caught a narcissistic gleam of her familiar beauty, dwelling persistently beneath the white mask, and this gave her a long moment of comfort. It was the day of her English lesson at Brooklyn College, and in order to become fortified for the dreadful trip by subway and for the session itself, she made herself eat. It was a task accompanied by waves of nausea, but she knew she had to force it down: the eggs and the bacon and the whole-wheat bread and the skimmed milk she assembled together listlessly in the gloom of her cramped little kitchenette. And while eating she had an inspiration—at least in part produced by the Mahler symphony playing at the moment on WQXR’s midday concert. For no clear reason a series of somber chords, struck in the middle of the symphony’s andante movement, reminded her of the remarkable poem which had been read to her at the end of her last English class, a few days before, by the teacher, an ardent, fat, patient and conscientious young graduate student known to the class as Mr. Youngstein. Doubtless because of her proficiency in other tongues, Sophie was far and away the prize student among this motley of striving scholars, a polyglot group but mainly Yiddish-speaking refugees from all the destroyed corners of Europe; her excellence had no doubt attracted Mr. Youngstein to her, although Sophie was hardly so lacking in self-awareness as to be unmindful of the fact that her simple physical presence might have worked upon the young man its plainly troubling effect.
Flustered and bashful, he was obviously smitten by her, but had made no advances other than to suggest awkwardly each day that she remain for a few moments after class so that he might read her what he called some “representative American verse.” This he would do in a nervous voice, slowly intoning the lines from Whitman and Poe and Frost and others in hoarse, unmusical but clearly enunciated syllables, while she listened with great care, touched often and deeply by this poetry which from time to time brought exciting new nuances of meaning to the language, and by Mr. Youngstein’s clumsy and grasping passion for her, expressed in faun-gazes of yearning from behind his monstrous prismlike spectacles. She found herself both warmed and distressed by this callow, transfixed infatuation and could really respond only to the poetry, for besides being, at twenty or so, at least ten years younger than she was, he was also physically unappealing—that is, enormously overweight aside from his grotesquely disoriented eyes. His feeling for these poets, though, was so profound, so genuine that he could scarcely fail to communicate much of their essence, and Sophie had been captured in particular by the haunted melody of one verse, which began:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
She adored hearing Mr. Youngstein read the poem and wanted actually to read it herself in her much improved English, along with the poet’s other works, so that she might commit it to memory. But there was a small confusion. She had missed one of the teacher’s inflections. Sophie had understood that this brief poem, this enchanted, simply wrought vision with its thronging sound of the eternal, was the handiwork of an American poet whose last name was identical to that of one of the immortal novelists of the world. And so in her room at Yetta’s, reminded of the poem again today by those somber chords of Mahler, she decided to go before class began to the Brooklyn College library and browse through the work of this marvelous artificer, whom she also ignorantly conceived to be a man. Such an innocuous misunderstanding, she later observed to me, was actually a crucial piece in the finally assembled little mosaic which resolved itself as the portrait of her meeting with Nathan.
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. Following a moment’s silence, she said, “Could you tell me why?”
“Charles Dickens is an English writer. There is no American poet by the name of Dickens.” The voice was so sharp and hostile as to be like an incision.
Swept with sudden nausea, light-headed and with a perilous tingling moving across her limbs like the faint prickling of a multitude of needles, Sophie watched with dispassionate curiosity as Sholom Weiss’s face, sullenly inflexible in its graven unpleasantness, seemed to float away ever so slightly from the neck and the confining collar. I feel so terribly sick, she said to herself as if to some invisible, solicitous doctor, but managed to choke out to the librarian, “I’m sure there is an American poet Dickens.” Thinking then that those lines, those reverberant lines with their miniature, sorrowing music of mortality and time, would be as familiar to an American librarian as anything, as household objects are, or a patriotic anthem, or one’s own flesh, Sophie felt her lips part to say, Because I could not stop for Death... She was hideously nauseated. And she failed to realize that in the intervening seconds there had registered somewhere in the precincts of Sholom Weiss’s unmagnanimous brain her stupid contradiction of him, and its insolence. Before she could utter the line, she heard his voice rise against every library decree of silence and cause a distant, shadowy turning of heads. A hoarse rasping whisper—querulous, poisoned with needless ill will—his retort was freighted with all the churlish indignation of petty power. “Listen, I told you,” the voice said, “there is no such a person! You want me to draw you a picture! I am telling you, do you hear me!”
Sholom Weiss may easily have thought that he had slain her with language. For when Sophie woke up some moments later from the dead faint into which she had slumped to the floor, his words still ricocheted crazily about in her mind and she realized dimly that she had fallen into a swoon just at the instant he had finished yelling at her. But everything now had gone topsy-turvy, disjointed, and she barely knew where she was. The library, yes, certainly, that was where she was, but she seemed to be reclining awkwardly on a sort of couch or window seat not from the desk in front of which she had collapsed, and she was so weak, and a disgusting odor flooded the air around her, a sour smell she could not identify until, slowly, feeling the wet stain down the front of her blouse, she became aware that she had thrown up her last meal. A damp carapace of vomit drenched her breast like foul mud.
But even as she absorbed this knowledge she moved her head listlessly, conscious of something else, a voice, a man’s voice, orotund, powerful, raging at the half-cowering and perspiring figure whose back was to her but whom she dimly recognized by the green eyeshade gone askew on his brow as Sholom Weiss. And something stern and commanding and consummately outraged in the voice of the man, whom she could barely see from her vantage point, caused an odd and pleasant chill to course up her back even as she reclined there in her feeble, prostrate helplessness. “I don’t know who you are, Weiss, but you’ve got bad manners. I heard every fucking word you said to her, I was standing right here!” he roared. “And I heard every intolerably rude and ugly thing you said to that girl. Couldn’t you tell she was a foreigner, you fucking little momzer you, you shmuck!” A small crowd had gathered around and Sophie saw the librarian quiver as if he were being buffeted by savage winds. “You’re a kike, Weiss, a kike, the kind of mean little creep that gives Jews a bad name. That girl, that nice and lovely girl there with a little trouble with the language, asks you a perfectly decent question and you treat her like some piece of shit walked in. I ought to break your fucking skull! You got about as much business around books as a plumber!” Suddenly, to her drowsy astonishment, Sophie saw the man yank Weiss’s eyeshade down around his windpipe, where it dangled like a useless celluloid appendage. “You nasty little putz,” the voice said, full of contempt and revulsion, “you’re enough to make anyone puke!”
Sophie must have lost consciousness once more, for the next thing she remembered was Nathan’s gentle, strong and marvelously expressive fingers streaked, to her intense discomfort, with slimy smears of her own vomit yet endlessly consoling and reassuring as they lightly applied something wet and cool to her brow. “You’re all right, honey,” he whispered, “you’re going to be all right. Just don’t worry about anything. Ah-h, you’re so beautiful, how did you get to be so beautiful? Don’t move now, you’re all right, you just had a funny little spell. Just lie still, let the doctor take care of everything. There, how does that feel? Want a little sip of water? No, no, don’t try to say anything, just relax, you’re going to be all well in just a minute.” On and on the voice went, a gentle monologue, lulling, soothing, murmurously infusing her with a sense of repose; it was a soft refrain so sedative indeed that soon she was no longer even embarrassed that the hands of this stranger were greenly stained with her own sour juices, and somehow she regretted that the one thought she had expressed to him, when she had first opened her eyes, had been the impossibly foolish Oh, I think I’m going to die. “No, you’re not going to die,” he was saying again in that voice filled with its infinite and patient strength, as the fingers brought exquisite coolness to her brow, “you’re not going to die, you’ll live to be a hundred. What’s your name, sweetie? No, don’t tell me now, just lie still and look beautiful. Your pulse is fine, steady. There, try this little sip of water...”