Sophie's Choice - William Styron [29]
Then a tingling sensation in the small of my back made me realize that Nathan was behind us again, standing on the front steps. I wheeled about. He had managed to return in phantasmal silence and now glared at the two of us with a malevolent gleam, leaning forward with one arm outstretched against the frame of the door. “And one last thing,” he said to Sophie in a flat hard voice. “One other last thing, whore. The records. The record albums. The Beethoven. The Handel. The Mozart. All of them. I don’t want to have to lay eyes on you again. So take the records—take the records out of your room and put them in my room, on the chair by the door. The Brahms you can keep only because Blackstock gave it to you. Keep it, see? The rest of them I want, so make sure you put them where I tell you. If you don’t, when I come back here to pack up I’ll break your arms, both of them.” After a pause, he inhaled deeply and whispered, “So help me God, I’ll break your fucking arms!”
Then this time he was gone for good, moving in loose-limbed strides back to the sidewalk and quickly losing himself in the darkness.
Having no more tears to shed for the moment, Sophie slowly composed herself. “Thank you, you were kind,” she said to me softly, in the stuffed-head-cold tones of one who has wept copiously and long. She stretched out her hand and pressed into my own the handkerchief, a soggy wad. As she did so I saw for the first time the number tattooed on the suntanned, lightly freckled skin of her forearm—a purple number of at least five digits, too small to read in this light but graven, I could tell, with exactitude and craft. To the melting love in my stomach was added a sudden ache, and with an involuntary motion that was quite inexplicable (for one brought up to mind where he put his hands) I gently grasped her wrist, looking more closely at the tattoo. Even at that instant I knew my curiosity might be offensive, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Where were you?” I said.
She spoke a fibrous name in Polish, which I understood, barely, to be “Oświȩcim.” Then she said, “I was there for a long time. Longtemps.” She paused. “Vous voyez...” Another pause. “Do you speak French?” she said. “My English is very bad.”
“Un peu,” I replied, grossly exaggerating my facility. “It’s a little rusty.” Which meant that I had next to none.
“Rusty? What is rusty?”
“Sale” I tried recklessly.
“Dirty French?” she said, with the faintest whisper of a smile. After a moment she asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Which did not even draw from me a “Nein.”
“Oh, forget it,” I said. “You speak good English.” Then after a moment’s silence I said, “That Nathan! I’ve never seen anything like him in my life. I know it’s not my business, but—but he must be nuts! How can he talk like that to anyone? If you ask me, you’re well rid of him.”
She shut her eyes tightly and pursed her lips in pain, as if in recollection of all that had just transpired. “Oh, he’s right about so much,