Sophie's Choice - William Styron [59]
She squirmed at the idea of revealing her secret—even to Blackstock, a professional man and, moreover, a person in whom she knew she could confide. The loathsomeness of what had happened to her was something that even twenty months at the camp—with its daily, inhuman degradation and nakedness—could not make her feel less befouled. Indeed, she now felt even more helplessly befouled because she had thought of Brooklyn as “safe,” and furthermore, her shame was anything but lessened by the fact that she was Catholic and Polish and a child of her time and place—that is to say, a young woman brought up with puritanical repressions and sexual taboos as adamantine as those of any Alabama Baptist maiden. (It would take Nathan, she told me later, Nathan with his liberated and passionate carnality, to unlock the eroticism in her which she never dreamed she possessed.) Add to this indwelling shame of the rape the unconventional, to say the least, the grotesque way she had been attacked—and the embarrassment she felt at having to tell Blackstock became nearly insupportable.
But somehow, on another trip to St. Albans in the Cadillac, speaking at first in stiff and formal Polish, she managed to get through to him her concern about her health, her languor and the pains in her legs and her bleeding, and then finally spoke almost in a whisper about the episode in the subway. And as she had supposed, Blackstock did not immediately get the drift of what she was saying. Then with hesitant, choking difficulty, which only much later would in itself acquire a faint touch of the comic, she made him understand that no, the act had not been consummated in the ordinary fashion. However, it was no less revolting and soul-shattering for the uncommon way in which it was carried out. “Doctor, don’t you see?” she whispered, now speaking in English. Even more revolting because of that—she said, in tears now—if he could possibly bring himself to see what she meant. “You mean,” he interrupted, “a finger...? He didn’t do it with his...” And delicately paused, for in regard to sex, Blackstock was not a coarse man. And when Sophie again affirmed all that she had been saying, he looked at her with compassion and murmured, very bitterly for him, “Oy vey, what a farshtinkener world is this.”
The upshot of all this was that Blackstock readily conceded that the violation she had suffered, peculiar as it was, could indeed have caused the symptoms that had begun to plague her, especially the gross bleeding. Specifically, his diagnosis was that her trauma, located as it was in the pelvic region, had induced a minor but not to be ignored displacement of the sacral vertebra, with consequent pressure on either the fifth lumbar or the first sacral nerve, perhaps both of these; in any case, it was certainly enough to provoke the loss of appetite, the fatigue and the aches in her bones she had complained of, while the bleeding itself triumphantly ratified the other symptoms. Clearly, he told Sophie, a course of spinal-column manipulations was needed in order to restore normal nerve function and to bring her back to what the doctor called (picturesquely, even to Sophie’s inexpert ear) “the full blush of health.” Two weeks of chiropractic treatment, he assured her, and she would be as good as new. She had become like a relative to him, he confided, and he wouldn’t charge her a penny. And to further cheer her up, he insisted that she witness his newest act of prestidigitation, in which a bouquet of multicolored silks suddenly vanished from his hands in midair, only to reappear in an instant as miniature flags of the United Nations slowly unspooling on a thread from his mouth. Sophie was able somehow to disgorge an appreciative laugh, but at the moment she felt so despairingly low, so ill, that she thought she might go mad.