Sophie's Choice - William Styron [209]
...As she lay in the dusk watching the leaves dim and fade, she heard the sound of his urine in steady noisy collision with the water in the toilet. She remembered. Amid the fantastic leaves earlier, in the deep woods, standing above her, he had tried to piss into her mouth, had failed; it had been the commencement of his downward slide. She stirred on the bed, smelling the steamy rising fumes of cabbage, her eyes lighting drowsily on the two capsules he had deposited gently in the ashtray. BOAR’S HEAD INN, read the Old English letters around the china rim, AN AMERICAN LANDMARK. She yawned, thinking how strange it was. How strange it was that she should not fear death, if he was truly going to force death upon her, but that she should fear simply death taking him and him alone, leaving her behind. That through some unforeseen fuck-up, as he would put it, the lethal dose would do its work only on him and she would be once again the hapless survivor. I cannot live without him, she heard herself whisper aloud in Polish, aware of the triteness of the thought but also of its absolute truth. His death would be my final agony. From afar a train whistle cried across the valley with its strange name, Housatonic, the long cry a richer and more melodic sound than that of the shrill European horns yet no different in the sudden way that railroad lament wrenched the heart.
She thought of Poland. Her mother’s hands. She had so seldom thought of her mother, that sweet dim self-effacing soul, and now for a moment she could only think of her mother’s elegant expressive pianist’s hands, strong-fingered, at once supple and gentle, like one of the Chopin nocturnes she played, the ivory skin reminding her of the muted white of lilacs. So remarkably white indeed that Sophie only in retrospect ever connected the lovely blanched bloodlessness with the consumption that was devouring her mother even then, and which finally stilled those hands. Mama, Mama, she thought. So often those hands had stroked her brow when as a little girl she spoke the bedtime prayer that every Polish child knows by heart, embedded in the soul more firmly than any nursery rhyme: Angel of God, my guardian angel, stay always by my side; in the morning, during the day, and in the night, come always to my aid. Amen. On one of her mother