Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  I am certain that my father—so ordinarily mild and forbearing—said something harsh, scathing. But it was not his words that I ever remembered, only the cold—the blood-congealing cold and darkness of the woodshed where he marched me and where he made me stay until long after darkness fell over the village and frigid moonlight seeped in through the cracks of my cell. How long I shivered and wept there I cannot recall. I was only aware that I was suffering exactly in the same way that my mother had and that my deserts could scarcely be more fitting; no malefactor ever endured his punishment with less rancor. I suppose I was incarcerated for no more than two hours, but I would willingly have stayed there until dawn or, indeed, until I had frozen to death—so long as I was able to expiate my crime. Could it have been that my father’s sense of justice had instinctively responded to this need in me for such a fitting atonement? Whatever—and in his calm unflustered way he had done his best—my crime was ultimately beyond expiation, for in my mind it would inescapably and always be entangled in the sordid animal fact of my mother’s death.

  She died a disgusting death, in a transport of pain. Amid the heat of July, seven months later, she faded away in a stupor of morphine, while all the night before, I pondered over and over those feeble embers in the cold smoky room and speculated with dread on the notion that my abandonment that day had sent her into the long decline from which she never recovered. Guilt. Hateful guilt. Guilt, corrosive as brine. Like typhoid, one can harbor for a lifetime the toxin of guilt. Even as I writhed on the McAlpin’s damp and lumpy mattress, grief drove like a spear of ice through my chest when I recaptured the fright in my mother’s eyes, wondered once again if that ordeal had not somehow hastened her dying, wondered if she ever forgave me. Fuck it, I thought. Prompted by a commotion next door, I began to think of sex.

  The wind rushing through my father’s deviated septum had become a wild jungle rhapsody—monkey cries, parrot yawps, pachydermous trumpetings. Through the interstices, so to speak, of this tapestry of noise I heard two people in the next room making whoopee—the old man’s archaic term for fornication. Soft sighs, the noise of a thumping bed, a cry of slippery unclothed pleasure. My God, I thought, thrashing about, would I forever be a mere solitary listener of lovemaking—never, never a partaker? Racked with misery, I recalled how my first knowledge of Sophie and Nathan had come like this: Stingo, the hapless eavesdropper. As if he had become an accomplice to the suffering provided me by the couple beyond the wall, my father rolled over with a sudden grunt and fell momentarily quiet, allowing my ears access to each nuance of that bliss. It was sculpted sound, incredibly close, almost tactile—oh, honeyhoneyhoney, the woman breathed—and a rhythmic liquid slurping (which my imagination amplified like a loudspeaker) drove me to glue one ear against the wall. I marveled at the grave colloquy: he asked if he was big enough, then if she had “climaxed.” She said she didn’t know. Worries, worries. Then there was a sudden silence (a shift, I imagined, of formation) and the peeping prism of my mind tried out Evelyn Keyes and Robert Stack in a breathless soixante-neuf, though I soon gave up the fantasy as logic forced me to repopulate my mise en scene with characters far more likely to be clients of the McAlpin—two horny dance instructors, Mr. and Mrs. Universe, a pair of insatiable honeymooners from Chattanooga, and the like; the pornographic pageant which I let unfold in my mind became alternately a cauldron and an immolation. (Impossible for me to imagine then—nor would I have believed it had the millennium been foretold to me—that in a matter of scant decades the steamy cinema bazaars on the avenue below would allow me, for five dollars, freely and without anxiety to view sex like the conquistadores beheld the New World: glistening coralpink vulvas as lofty as the portals of the Carlsbad Caverns; pubic hair like luxuriant groves of Spanish moss; ejaculating priapic engines the size of sequoias; jumbo-sized dreamy-faced wet-lipped young Pocahontases in all conceivable and meticulously detailed attitudes of suck and fuck.)

  I dreamed of darling dirty-mouthed Leslie Lapidus. The humiliation of my barren time with her had forced me these last weeks to blot out her memory. But now, conjuring her up in the “female superior” perch recommended by those two famous family love consultants (Drs. Van de Velde and Marie Stopes) I had clandestinely studied at home a few years before, I let Leslie romp astride me until I was smothered by her breasts, half drowned in the dark torrent of her hair. Her words in my ear—words importunate, unfake now—were exaltingly obscene and satisfying. Ever since puberty my sessions of autoerotism, although fairly inventive, had in general been conducted with the firm hand of Protestant moderation; this night, though, my longing was like a stampede and I was virtually trampled beneath it. Oh Lord, how my balls hurt as I synthesized stormy lovemaking not only with Leslie but with the two other enchantresses who had claimed my passion. These were, of course, Maria Hunt and Sophie. Thinking of all three, I realized that one was a Southern WASP, one a Sarah Lawrence Jewess, and the last a Polack—a gathering distinguished not only by its diversity but for the sense that all three were dead. No, not truly dead (only one, luscious Maria Hunt, had gone to her Maker), but in effect extinguished, defunct, kaput, so far as each of them concerned my life.

  Could it be, I wondered in my nutty fantasia, that this craving was so intolerably inflamed by the knowledge that all three of these lost china dolls had slipped through my fingers out of some tragic failing or deficiency of my own? Or that indeed their very final inaccessibility—the realization that they were all gone forever—was an actual cause of this inferno of lust? My wrist ached. I was stunned by my own promiscuity, and its recklessness. I envisioned a quick switch of partners. So somehow Leslie was transformed into Maria Hunt, with whom I lay tangled on a sandy beach of the Chesapeake Bay at high noon in summertime; in my fancy her frantic eyes rolled up beneath the lids and she chewed through the lobe of my ear. Imagine, I thought, imagine—I was possessing the heroine of my own novel! I was able to extend the ecstasy a long time with Maria; we were still going at it like minks when my father with a primitive strangled sound aborted a snore, sprang up in his bed, then padded off to the bathroom. I waited with a blank brain until finally he returned to bed and began to snore again. And then with desire that was hopeless and tumultuous like ocean breakers of grief I found myself making ravenous love to Sophie. And of course it was she I had wanted all along. It was astounding. For so boyishly idealized and ruinously romantic had been my longing for Sophie all summer that, in truth, I had never really allowed a fully contoured, many-dimensioned, vividly tinted fantasy of sex with her invade or bother, much less take command of, my mind. Now while despair over her loss encircled my throat like hands, I understood for the first time how hopeless was my love for her, and also how immeasurably huge was my lust. With a groan that was loud enough to jar my father from his tormented sleep—a groan that I’m sure sounded inconsolable—I embraced my phantom Sophie, came in an unstoppered deluge, and while coming called out her beloved name. In the shadows, then, my father stirred. I felt his hand reach out to touch me. “You all right, son?” he said in a troubled voice.

  Feigning drowsiness, I murmured something intentionally unintelligible. But both of us were awake.

  The concern in his voice turned to amusement. “You hollered ‘soapy,’ ” he said. “Crazy nightmare. You must have been caught in a bath.”

  “I don’t know what I was doing,” I lied.

  He was silent for a while. The electric fan droned on, penetrated intermittently by the city’s restless night sounds. Finally he said, “Something’s bothering you. I can tell that. Do you want to let me know what it is? Maybe I can help some. Is it a girl—a woman, that is?”

  “Yes,” I said after a bit, “a woman.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it? I’ve had my troubles in that sphere.”

  It helped some to tell him, even though my account was vague and sketchy: a nameless Polish refugee, a few years older, beautiful in a way I could not express, a victim of the war. I alluded dimly to Auschwitz bu
t said nothing about Nathan. I had loved her briefly, I went on, but for various reasons the situation had been impossible. I skimmed over the details: her Polish childhood, her coming to Brooklyn, her job, her lingering disability. She had simply disappeared one day, I told him, and I had no expectation of her returning. I said nothing for a moment, then added in a stoical voice, “I guess I’ll manage to get over it after a while.” I made it clear that I wanted to change the subject. Talking of Sophie had begun to twist my gut into spasms of pain again, waves of fearful cramps.

  My father muttered a few conventionally sympathetic words, then fell silent. “How’s your work coming along?” he said at last. I had side-stepped the subject before. “How’s that book doing?”

  I felt my stomach begin to relax. “It’s been going really well,” I said, “I’ve been able to work well out there in Brooklyn. At least until this business with this woman came up, I mean this breakup. It’s brought everything pretty much to a dead stop, pretty much to a standstill.” This, of course, was an understatement. It was with sickening dread that I faced the possibility of returning to Yetta Zimmerman’s, there to try to resume work in a suffocating vacuum without Sophie or Nathan, scribbling away in a place that was a grim echo chamber of memories of shared good times, all vanished now. “I guess I’ll get started again pretty soon,” I added halfheartedly. I felt our conversation beginning to wind down.

  My father yawned. “Well, if you really want to get started,” he murmured in a sleep-thick voice, “that old farm down in Southampton is waiting for you. I know it would be just a fine place to work. I hope you think it over, son.” He began to snore again, achieving this time no zoolike medley but an all-out bombardment, as of a news-reel soundtrack of the siege of Stalingrad. I plunged my head into my pillow in despair.

  Yet I drowsed off and on, even managed to sleep in a fitful way. I dreamed of my ghostly benefactor, the slave boy Artiste, and the dream became somehow fused with the dream of another slave I had known about years before—Nat Turner. I awoke with a wild sigh. It was dawn. I gazed at the ceiling in the opalescent light, listening to the ululation of a police siren on the street below; it grew louder, uglier, demented. I listened to it with the faint anxiety which that shrill alarm always provoked; the sound faded away, a dim demonic warble, at last disappeared up into the warrens of Hell’s Kitchen. My God, my God, I thought, how could it be possible that the South and that urban shriek co-existed in this century? It was beyond comprehension.

  That morning my father prepared himself for his return to Virginia. Perhaps it was Nat Turner who spawned the flood of memories, the almost feverish nostalgia for the South that overwhelmed me as I lay there in the blossoming morning light. Or perhaps it was only that the Tidewater farm where my father had offered me free lodging now seemed far more of an attractive proposition since I had lost my loved ones in Brooklyn. At any rate, as we ate foam-rubber pancakes in the McAlpin coffee shop, I caused the old man to gape at me with astonishment when I told him to buy another ticket and meet me at Pennsylvania Station. I was coming South with him and would go to the farm, I announced in a chatter of sudden relief and happiness. All he had to do was to give me the rest of the morning to pack up my things and to check out for good from Yetta Zimmerman’s.

  Yet as I have already mentioned, it did not work out that way—for the time being at least. I called my father from Brooklyn, forced to tell him that I had decided to remain in the city, after all. For that morning I had encountered Sophie upstairs at the Pink Palace, standing alone amid the disarray of that room I thought she had abandoned forever. I realize now that I arrived at a mysteriously decisive moment. Only ten minutes later she would already have collected her odds and ends and departed, and I surely would never have laid eyes on her again. It is foolish to try to second-guess the past. But even today I can’t help wondering whether it would not have been better for Sophie had she been spared my accidental intervention. Who knows but whether she might not have made it, might not have actually survived elsewhere—perhaps beyond Brooklyn or even beyond America. Or almost any place.

  One of the lesser-known but more sinister operations contained within the Nazi master plan was the program called Lebensborn. A product of the Nazis’ phylogenetic delirium, Lebensborn (literally, spring of life) was designed to augment the ranks of the New Order, initially through a systematized breeding program, then by the organized kidnapping in the occupied lands of racially “suitable” children, who were shipped into the interior of the Fatherland, placed in homes faithful to the Führer and thus reared in an aseptic National Socialist environment. Theoretically the children were to be of pure German stock. But that many of these young victims were Polish is another measure of the Nazis’ frequent and cynical expediency in racial matters, since although Poles were regarded as subhuman, and along with other Slavic peoples, worthy successors to the Jews of the policy of extermination, they did in many cases satisfy certain crude physical requirements—familiar enough in facial feature to resemble those of Nordic blood and often of a luminiferous blondness that pleased the Nazi aesthetic sense almost more than anything else.

  Lebensborn never achieved the vast scope which the Nazis had intended for it but it did meet with some success. The children snatched from their parents in Warsaw alone numbered in the tens of thousands, and the overwhelming majority of these—renamed Karl or Liesel or Heinrich or Trudi and swallowed up in the embrace of the Reich—never saw their real families again. Also, countless children who passed initial screenings but who later failed to meet more rigorous racial tests were exterminated—some at Auschwitz. The program, of course, was meant to be secret, like most of Hitler’s squalid schemes, but such iniquity could scarcely be kept completely in the dark. In late 1942 the fair-haired handsome five-year-old son of a woman friend of Sophie’s, living in an adjoining apartment in her bomb-blasted building in Warsaw, was spirited away and never again seen. Although the Nazis had taken some pains to throw a smoke screen around the crime, it was clear to everyone, including Sophie, who the culprits were. What bemused Sophie at a later date was how this concept of Lebensborn—which in Warsaw so horrified her and sickened her with fear that she often hid her son, Jan, in a closet at the sound of heavy footfalls on the stairway—became at Auschwitz something she dreamed about and most feverishly desired. It was urged upon her by a friend and fellow prisoner—about whom more later—and it came to mean to her the only way in which to save Jan’s life.

  That afternoon with Rudolf Höss, she told me, she had had every intention of broaching the notion of the Lebensborn program to the Commandant. She would have had to make her try in a clever, roundabout manner, but it was possible. In the days before their confrontation she had reasoned with considerable logic that Lebensborn might be the only way to free Jan from the Children’s Camp. It made special sense, since Jan had been reared bilingual in Polish and German, like herself. She then told me something she had kept from me before. Gaining the Commandant’s confidence, she planned to suggest to him that he could use his immense authority to have a lovely blond German-speaking Polish boy with Caucasian freckles and cornflower-blue eyes and the chiseled profile of a fledgling Luftwaffe pilot painlessly transferred from the Children’s Camp to some nearby bureaucratic unit in Cracow or Katowice or Wroclaw or wherever, which would then arrange for his transport to shelter and safety in Germany. She would not have to know the child’s destination; she would even forswear any need for knowledge of his whereabouts or his future so long as she could be sure that he was secure somewhere in the heart of the Reich, where he would probably survive, rather than remaining at Auschwitz, where he would certainly perish. But of course, that afternoon everything had gone haywire. In her confusion and panic she had made a direct plea to Höss for Jan’s freedom, and because of his unpredicted reaction to this plea—his rage—she found herself completely off balance, unable to speak to him of Lebensborn even if she had had the wits to remember it. Yet all was not quite lost. In order t
o be given the opportunity to propose to Höss this nearly unspeakable means for her son’s salvation, she had to wait—and that in itself involved a strange, harrowing scene the next day.

  But she was not able to tell me all this at once. That afternoon in the Maple Court, after describing to me how she fell on her knees in front of the Commandant, she suddenly broke off, and turning her eyes directly away from me toward the window, remained silent for a long time. Then she abruptly excused herself and disappeared for some minutes into the ladies’ room. The jukebox suddenly: the Andrews Sisters again. I looked up at the flyspecked plastic clock celebrating Carstairs whiskey: it was almost five-thirty, and I realized with a small shock that Sophie had been talking to me nearly the whole afternoon. I had never heard of Rudolf Höss before that day, but through her understated, simple eloquence she had caused him to exist as vividly as any apparition that had stalked my most neurotic dreams. But it was plain that she could not go on talking about such a man and such a past indefinitely, hence this firmly defined interruption. And certainly, despite the sense of mystery and unfulfillment she had left me with, I was not about to be so crude as to urge her to tell more. I wanted to shut it all off, even though I was still rocking with the revelation that she had had a child. What she had poured forth already had plainly cost her much; it was spelled out in a quick glimpse I had of her ghostly eyes, aching and fathomless in a trance of blacker memory than her mind perhaps could bear. So I said to myself that the subject, for the time being at least, was closed.