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Sophie's Choice - William Styron [206]

By Root 22842 0
’s distress—discomfort rather—but as brief and as inconsequential as a hiccup. Rien nada niente fucking nothing!

“Then, Irma my love, then—” A hiccup.

Without looking at him, staring past him at the amber photograph of some faded bekerchiefed grandmother immobilized in the shadows on the wall, she murmured, “You said you wouldn’t. So long ago today you said you wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Wouldn’t call me that. Wouldn’t say Irma again.”

“Sophie,” he said without emotion. “Sophie love. Not Irma. Of course. Of course. Sophie. Love. Sophielove.”

He seemed to be much calmer now, the frenzy of the morning, the raging lunacy of the afternoon stilled or at least momentarily calmed by the same Nembutal he had given her—the blessed barbiturate which in their common terror they thought he would never find but, only two hours ago, found. He was calmer but, she knew, still deranged; curious, she thought, how in this present pacified form of his derangement he seemed no longer so frightening and menacing, despite the unequivocal menace of the cyanide capsule six inches from her eyes. The minuscule Pfizer trademark was clearly imprinted on the gelatine; the capsule was tiny. It was, he explained, a special veterinary capsule, meant to contain antibiotics for small cats and puppy dogs, which he had obtained as a receptacle for the dose; and because of office technicalities, the capsules themselves had been more difficult to get hold of yesterday than the ten grains of sodium cyanide—five grains for her and five for himself. It was no joke, she knew; at some other time and place she would have regarded the whole display as one of his morbid tricks: the shiny pink pod at the last minute popping open between his fingers to reveal a wee flower, a garnet, a chocolate kiss. But not after this day and its unending delirium. She knew quite beyond doubt that the little casket held death. Odd, though. She felt nothing but a spreading lassitude now, watching him as he raised the capsule to his lips and inserted it between his teeth, biting down just hard enough to lightly bend the surface but not to break it. Was her lack of terror due to the Nembutal or to some intuition that he was still faking? He had done this before. He withdrew the capsule from his mouth and smiled. “Rienada fucking nothing.” She recalled the other moment when he flirted thus, less than two hours before in this very room, although it seemed a week ago, a month. And she wondered now through what miraculous alchemy (the Nembutal?) had he been made to cease his daylong uninterrupted rant. Talktalktalktalktalk... The talk had only a few times stopped since that morning at about nine o’clock when he stormed up the steps at the Pink Palace and awakened her...

...Eyes still shut, her head still woolly from sleep, she hears Nathan make a cackling noise. “Up and at ’em!”

She hears him say, “Schoenthal is right. If it can happen there, won’t it happen here? The Cossacks are coming! Here’s one Jew-boy who’s going to make tracks for the countryside!”

She comes awake. She had anticipated his immediate embrace, wonders if she had put her diaphragm in before going to bed, remembers that she had done so and now lazily rolls over, smiling sleepily, to greet him. She recalls his incredible gluttonous passion when on such a high. Recalls it with voluptuary delight—everything—not alone the beginning hungry tenderness, his fingers on her nipples and their gentle yet insistent search between her legs but all else and one thing specifically, again anticipated with hungry, at last liberated (adieu, Cracow!), uninhibited, self-absorbed bliss: his extravagant ability to make her come—to come not once or twice but over and over again until an almost sinister final losingness of herself has been achieved, a sucking death like descent into caverns during which she cannot tell whether she is lost in herself or in him, a sense of black whirling downward into an inseparability of flesh. (It is almost the only time she thinks in or speaks Polish any longer, whispering loudly against his ear, “We? mnie, we? mnie,

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