Sophie's Choice - William Styron [199]
“Celebrate what, darling?” she asked. Her love for him and her sense of salvation were at that moment so lunatic that she would have tried to swim the Atlantic with him had he commanded her to do so. Nonetheless, she was perplexed and all but engulfed by his electric fever (an intense feeling of famishment stabbed her too) and she reached out her hands in a vain, fluttering effort to quiet him down. “Celebrate what?” she said again. She couldn’t restrain herself from chortling at his loud runaway enthusiasm. She kissed his schnoz.
“Remember the experiment I was telling you about?” he said. “That blood-classification thing that had us stumped all last week. The problem I was telling you about having to do with serum enzymes?”
Sophie nodded. She had never understood the vaguest thing about his laboratory research but had listened faithfully and remained an attentive one-woman gallery for his complex disquisitions on physiology and the chemical enigmas of the human body. Had he been a poet, he would have read her his gorgeous verse. But he was a biologist and he made her captive to macrocytes and hemoglobin electrophoresis and ion exchange resins. She understood nothing of this. But she loved it all because she loved Nathan, and now in reply to his question, which was largely rhetorical, she said, “Oh yes.”
“We crashed through on that this afternoon. We got the whole problem licked. I mean licked, Sophie! It was our biggest barrier by far. Now all we have to do is to run the whole experiment one more time for the Standards and Control Department—a formality, that’s all—and we’ll be in like a bunch of burglars. We’ll have a clear road to the most important medical breakthrough in history!”
“Hooray!” said Sophie.
“Give me a kiss.” He shmoozed and whispered around the edge of her lips with his own lips and stuck his tongue in her mouth, insinuating it there with droll titillating little forays and retreats, making movements gently copulatory. Then abruptly he drew away. “So we’re going to celebrate at Morty’s. Let’s go!”
“I’m hungry!” she exclaimed. It was not a very firm objection, but she felt compelled to say it, feeling honest stomach pangs.
“We’ll eat at Morty’s,” he replied cheerfully, “don’t worry. There’ll be plenty for noshing—let’s go!”
“A special bulletin.” It arrested them both at the same instant—that radio announcer’s voice with its coached and modulated rhythms. Sophie saw Nathan’s face lose all mobility for a split second, as if frozen, and then she herself glimpsed in the mirror her jaw cocked awkwardly sideways in a rigid attitude of dislocation, a pained look in her eyes, as if she had broken a tooth. The announcer was saying that in the prison at Nuremberg ex-Field Marshal Hermann Goring had been discovered dead in his cell, a suicide. The means of death was apparently cyanide poisoning, accomplished orally by a capsule or pill which had been secreted somewhere on his body. Contemptuous to the last (the voice droned on), the condemned Nazi leader thus avoided retribution at the hands of his enemies in the same way as had such of his predecessors in death as Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and the master planner Adolf Hitler... Sophie felt a shiver run through her body and saw Nathan’s face unfreeze, regaining its vivacious shape just as he said with a soft gasp, “Jesus! He beat the man. He beat the man with the rope. That clever, fat son of a bitch!”
He leaped at the radio, hovering over it while he played with the dial. Sophie stirred about restlessly. She had with methodical determination tried to banish from her mind practically everything to do with the past war, and she had completely ignored the Nuremberg trials, which had captured the headlines all during the year. Indeed, her aversion to reading about Nuremberg had provided one of her rationalizations for not applying herself to American journalism and thus improving—or at least enlarging—an important compartment of her English. She had thrust it all from her head, as with nearly everything else of the immediate past. As a matter of fact, so oblivious had she been in recent weeks of the final scene of G