Sophie's Choice - William Styron [55]
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