Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  Then after dinner was over and they had washed the dishes together they sat down opposite each other in the two uncomfortable straight-backed chairs with which at that time the room was furnished. Suddenly Nathan’s attention was caught by the handful of books in a row on a shelf above Sophie’s bed—the Polish translations of Hemingway and Wolfe and Dreiser and Farrell. Rising for a moment, he examined the books curiously. He said some things which made her feel that he was familiar with these writers; he spoke with special enthusiasm of Dreiser, telling her that in college he had read straight through the enormous length of An American Tragedy in a single sitting, “nearly putting my eyes out in the process,” and then in the midst of a rhapsodic description of Sister Carrie, which she had not yet read but which he insisted that she do (assuring her that it was Dreiser’s masterpiece), he stopped short in mid-sentence and gazed at her with a pop-eyed clownish look that made her laugh, and said, “You know, I haven’t the faintest notion of who you are. What do you do, Polish baby?”

  She paused for a long time before replying, “I work for a doctor, part time. I am his receptionist.”

  “A doctor?” he said, clearly with great interest. “What kind of a doctor? “

  She sensed that she was having enormous difficulty in getting the word out. But finally she said it. “He’s a—a chiropractor.”

  Sophie could almost see the spasm that went through his entire body at the sound of what she had said. “A chiropractor. A chiropractor! No wonder you’ve got troubles!”

  She found herself trying to make a foolish and lame excuse. “He’s a very nice man...” she began. “He’s what you call”—resorting suddenly to Yiddish—“a mensh. His name is Dr. Blackstock.”

  “Mensh, shmensh,” he said with a look of deep distaste, “a girl like you, working for some humbug—”

  “It was the only job I could get, when I come here,” she put in. “It was all I could do!” Now she felt herself speaking with some irritation and feeling, and either what she said or the sudden brusque way she said it caused him to mutter a quick apology. “I know,” he said, “I shouldn’t say that. It’s none of my business.”

  “I would like something better, but I have no talents.” She spoke more calmly now. “I begun an education, you see, a long time ago, but it never was finished. I am, you see, a very uncomplete person. I wished somehow to teach, to teach music, to become a teacher of music—but this was impossible. So I am a receptionist in this office. It’s not so bad, vraiment—although I would like to do something better one day.”

  “I’m so sorry for what I said.”

  She gazed at him, touched by the discomfort he seemed to suffer over his own maladroitness. In as long as she could remember she had never met anyone to whom she was so immediately drawn. There was something so appealingly intense, energetic and various about Nathan—his quiet but firm domination, his mimicry, his comic bluster about things culinary and medical, which, she felt, was the thinnest disguise for his real concern for her health. And at last this awkward vulnerability and self-reproach, which in some remote and indefinable way reminded her of a small boy. For an instant she wished he would touch her again, then the feeling went away. They were both silent for a long moment as a car slithered by on the street outside where a light rain was falling and the evening chimes from the distant church dropped nine notes on Brooklyn’s vast, reverberant midsummer stillness. Far off, thunder rolled faintly over Manhattan. It had become dark and Sophie switched on her solitary table lamp.

  Perhaps it was only the seraphic wine or Nathan’s calm and uninhibiting presence, but she felt the urge not to halt where she had left off but to continue talking, and as she talked she felt her English moving more or less smoothly and with nearly unhampered authority, as if through remarkably efficient conduits she hardly knew she possessed. “I have nothing left from the past. Nothing at all. So that is one of the reasons why, you see, I feel so uncomplete. Everything you see in this room is American, new—books, my clothes, everything—there is nothing at all that remains from Poland, from the time when I was young. I don’t even have a picture from that time. One thing I much regret about losing is that album of photographs I once had. If I only had been able to keep it, I could show you so many interesting things—how it was in Cracow before the war. My father was a professor at the university but he was also a very talented photographer—an amateur, but very good, you know, very sensitive. He had a very expensive fantastic Leica. I remember one of the pictures he take that was in this album, one of his best ones that I so regret to lose, was of me and my mother sitting at the piano. I was about thirteen then. We must have been playing a composition for four hands. We looked so happy, I remember, my mother and me. Now, somehow, just the memory of that photograph is a symbol for me, a symbol of what was and could have been and now cannot be.” She paused, inwardly proud of her fluidly shifting tenses, and glanced up at Nathan, who had leaned forward slightly, totally absorbed by her sudden outpouring. “You must see clearly, I do not pity myself. There are far worse things than being unable to finish a career, not to become what one had planned to be. If that was all I had ever lost, I would be completely content. It would have been wonderful for me to have had the career in music that I thought I would have. But I was prevented. It is seven, eight years since I have read a note of music, and I do not even know if I could read music again. Anyway, that is why I can’t any longer choose my job, so I have to work in the way that I do.”

  After a bit he said, with that disarming directness that she had come to rather enjoy, “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

  “No,” she replied. “Did you think I was?”

  “At first I guess I just assumed you were. There are not many blond goyim roaming around Brooklyn College. Then I took a closer look at you in the taxi. There I thought you were Danish, or maybe Finnish, eastern Scandinavian. But, well—you have those Slavic cheekbones. Finally, by deduction I pegged you for a Polack, excuse me, divined that you were of Polish extraction. Then when you mentioned Warsaw, I was sure. You are a very beautiful Polack, or Polish lady.”

  She smiled, aware of the warm blush in her cheeks. “Pas de flatterie, monsieur.”

  “But then,” he went on, “all these preposterous contradictions. What in God’s name is a darling Polish shiksa doing working in the office of a chiropractor named Blackstock, and where on earth did you learn Yiddish? And lastly—and goddamnit, you’re going to have to put up with my prying nose again, but I’m concerned about your condition, don’t you see, and I’ve got to know these things!—lastly, how did you get that number on your arm? You don’t want to talk about it, I know. I hate asking, but I think you’ve got to tell me.”

  She dropped her head back against the dingy pillow of the pink and creaking chair. Perhaps, she thought with resignation, with mild despair, if she explained the rudimentary part of it to him now, patiently and explicitly, she would get it all over with, and if she was lucky, be spared any further inquisitiveness about more somber and complex matters which she could never describe or reveal to anyone. Perhaps, too, it was absurd or offensive of her to be so enigmatic, so ostentatiously secretive about something which, after all, should be common knowledge by now to almost everybody. Even though that was the strange thing: people here in America, despite all of the published facts, the photographs, the newsreels, still did not seem to know what had happened, except in the most empty, superficial way. Buchenwald, Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz—all stupid catchwords. This inability to comprehend on any real level of awareness was another reason why she so rarely had spoken to anyone about it, totally aside from the lacerating pain it caused her to dwell on that part of the past. As for the pain itself, she knew before speaking that what she was about to say would cause her almost physical anguish—like tearing open a nearly healed sore or trying to hobble on a broken limb incompletely mended; yet Nathan, after all, had by now amply demonstrated that he was only trying to help her; she knew she did in fact need that he
lp—rather desperately so—and thus she owed him at least a sketchy outline of her recent history.

  So after a bit she began to speak to him about it, gratified by the emotionless, truly pedestrian tone she was able to sustain. “In April of 1943 I was sent to the concentration camp in the south of Poland called Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was near the town of Oświȩcim. I had been living in Warsaw. I had been living there for three years, ever since the beginning of 1940, which is when I had to leave Cracow. Three years is a long time, but there was still two years more before the war was over. I often have thought that I would have lived through those two years safely if I had not made a terrible méprise—pardon me, mistake. This mistake was really very foolish, I hate myself when I think about it. I had been so careful, you see. I had been so careful that I am a little ashamed to admit it. I mean, up until then I was, you see, well-off. I was not Jewish, I was not in the ghetto, so I could not get caught for that reason. Also, I did not work for the underground. Franchement, it seemed to me to be too dangerous; it was a question of being involved in a situation where—But I don’t wish to talk about that. Anyway, since I was not working for the underground, I did not worry about being caught for that reason either. I got caught for a reason which may seem to you very absurd. I got caught smuggling meat into Warsaw from a place that belonged to a friend in the country just outside the city. It was completely forbidden to possess meat, which was all commanded to go to the German army. But I risked this anyway, and tried to smuggle the meat so as to help make well my mother. My mother was very sick with—how do you say it?—la consomption.”

  “Tuberculosis,” Nathan said.

  “Yes. She had tuberculosis years before in Cracow, but it went away. Then it come back in Warsaw, you know, with these very cold winters without heat and this terrible thing with almost no food to eat, everything going to the Germans. In fact, she was so sick that everyone thought she was dying. I was not living with her, she lived nearby. I thought if I could get this meat it might improve her condition, so on one Sunday I went out to this village in the country and bought a forbidden ham. Then I come back into the city and I was halted by two police from the Gestapo and they discovered the ham. They make me under arrest and bring me to the Gestapo prison in Warsaw. I was not allowed to go back to the place where I was living, and I never saw my mother again. Much later I learned that she died a few months after that.”

  Where they sat it had become muggy and close, and while Sophie spoke Nathan had risen to open the window wide, letting a small fresh breeze bend and shake the yellow roses he had brought and filling the room with the sound of splashing rain. The mild drizzle had become a downpour, and a short way across the meadows of the park lightning seemed to rend some oak or elm with an instant’s white blaze, almost simultaneous with a crack of thunder. Nathan stood by the window, looking out at the sudden evening tempest, hands clasped behind him. “Go on,” he said, “I’m listening.”

  “I spend a lot of days and nights in the Gestapo prison. Then I was deported by train to Auschwitz. It take two complete days and a night to arrive there, although in normal times the train is only six or seven hours. There were two separate camps at Auschwitz—the place called Auschwitz itself and the camp, a few kilometers away, called Birkenau. There was a difference between the camps that one must understood, since Auschwitz was used for slave labor and Birkenau was used for just one thing, and that was extermination. When I come off the train I was selected not to go to... to... not to Birkenau and the...” To Sophie’s chagrin, she felt the thin outer layer of her cool façade begin to shiver and crack, and her composure faltered; she was aware of a quirky quaver in her voice. She was stammering. But she quickly gained control of herself. “Not to go to Birkenau and the gas chambers, but to Auschwitz, for labor. This was because I was of the right age, also good health. I was at Auschwitz for twenty months. When I arrived everyone who was selected to be killed was sent to Birkenau, but very soon later Birkenau become the place where only Jews were killed. It was a place for the mass extermination of the Jews. There was still another place not far away, a vast usine where was made artificial—synthétique—caoutchouc, rubber. The prisoners at the Auschwitz camp worked there too, but mainly there was one purpose for the Auschwitz prisoners, which was to help in the extermination of les juifs at Birkenau. So the camp at Auschwitz become mostly composed of what the Germans called the Aryans, who worked to maintain the Birkenau crematoriums. To help murder Jews. But one must see that the Aryan prisoners was also supposed to die, finally. After their bodies and strength and santé was gone and they was inutiles, they would be made to die too, by shooting or with the gas at Birkenau.”

  Sophie had not spoken for very long, but her diction was rapidly decomposing into French, she felt unaccountably and deeply fatigued beyond the fatigue of her illness—whatever it was—and decided to make her chronicle even more brief than she had intended. She said, “Only, I did not die. I suppose I had more good fortune than others. For a time I have a more favored position than many of the other prisoners, because of my knowledge of German and Russian, especially German. This give me an advantage, you see, because for this time I eat better and was clothed a little better and I had more strength. It give me this extra strength to survive. But this situation did not last too long, really, and in the end I was like all the rest. I starved and because I starved I had le scorbut—scurvy I think it is in English—and then I had typhus and also la scarlatine. Scarlet fever, I think. As I say, I was there for twenty months, but I survived. If I had been there twenty months and one day, I know I would be dead.” She paused. “Now you say I have anemia, and I think you must be right. Because after I was made free from that place there was a doctor, a Red Cross doctor, who told me to be careful because I might develop such a thing. Anemia, I mean.” She sensed her exhausted voice trailing off in a sigh. “But I forgot about that. I had so many other things sick with my body that I just forgot about that.”

  For a long while they were both silent as they listened to the gusting wind and the throbbing patter of the rain. Washed by the storm, the air poured in cool breaths through the open window, bearing from the park an odor of drenched soil, fresh and clean. The wind diminished and the thunder grumbled off eastward toward the far reaches of Long Island. Soon there was only a fitful dripping sound from the darkness outside, and a gentle breeze, and the distant slick murmur of tires on wet streets. “You need sleep,” he said, “and I will go.” But she later recalled that he did not go, at least then. The last part of The Marriage of Figaro was playing on the radio, and together they listened to it without speaking—Sophie stretched out now on her bed, Nathan sitting on the chair beside her—while summer moths swooped and flickered around the dim lightbulb hovering above them. She closed her eyes and drowsed, passing across the threshold of some outlandish but untroubled dream in which the gay redemptive music mingled in soft confusion with a fragrance of grass and rain. Once she felt against her cheek, with movement as light and delicate as a moth’s wing, the touch of his fingertips in a moment’s gentle tracery, but it was only for a second or two—and then she felt nothing. And slept.

  But now it again becomes necessary to mention that Sophie was not quite straightforward in her recital of past events, even granted that it was her intention to present a very abbreviated account. I would learn this later, when she confessed to me that she left out many crucial facts in the story she told Nathan. She did not actually lie (as she did about one or two important aspects of her life in the account she gave me concerning the early years in Cracow). Nor did she fabricate something or distort anything important; it is easy to substantiate nearly everything she told Nathan that evening. Her brief observation on the function of Auschwitz-Birkenau—while of course greatly oversimplified—is basically an accurate one, and she neither exaggerated nor underestimated the nature of her various diseases. About all the rest, there is no reason to doubt anything: her mother and her mother’s illness and death, the sequen
ce about the smuggled meat and her own arrest by the Germans followed by her swift deportation to Auschwitz. Why, then, did she leave out certain elements and details that anyone might reasonably have expected her to include? Fatigue and depression that night, certainly. Then in the long run there may have been multiple reasons, but the word “guilt,” I discovered that summer, was often dominant in her vocabulary, and it is now clear to me that a hideous sense of guilt always chiefly governed the reassessments she was forced to make of her past. I also came to see that she tended to view her own recent history through a filter of self-loathing—apparently not a rare phenomenon among those who had undergone her particular ordeal. Simone Weil wrote about this kind of suffering: “Affliction stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.” Thus with Sophie it may have been this complex of emotions that caused her to be silent about certain things—this corrosive guilt together with a simple but passionately motivated reticence. Sophie was in general always secretive about her sojourn in the bowels of hell—secretive to the point of obsession—and if that is the way she wanted it, it was, God knows, a position one had to honor.