Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  I continued to writhe inwardly, gazing at Sophie’s pensive and downcast face. She had assumed that reflective pose I had become so accustomed to, hands cupped lightly over her eyes in an attitude that contained an inexpressible combination of emotions (What would she be thinking about now? I wondered): perplexity, amazement, recollected terror, recaptured grief, rage, hatred, loss, love, resignation—all these dwelt there for an instant in a dark tangle even as I watched. Then they went away. As they did I realized that she as well as I knew that the dangling threads of the chronicle she had told me, and which had obviously neared its conclusion, still remained to be tied. I also realized that the momentum which had been building up in her memory all evening had not really diminished, and that despite her weariness she was under a compulsion to scrape out the rest of her appalling and inconceivable past to its bottommost dregs.

  Even so, a curious evasiveness seemed to prevent her from closing in directly on the matter of what happened to her little boy, and when I persisted once more—saying “And Jan?”—she let herself fall into a moment’s reverie. “I’m so ashamed about what I done, Stingo—when I swam out into the ocean. Making you risk yourself like that—that was so bad of me, so bad. You must forgive me. But I will be truthful with you when I say that there have been many times since those days in the war when I have thought to kill myself. It seems to come and go in this rhythm. In Sweden right after the war was over and I was in this center for displaced persons I tried to kill myself there. And like in that dream I told you about, the chapel—I had this obsession with le blasphème. Outside the center there was a little church, I do not believe it was Catholic, I think it must have been Lutheran, but it don’t matter—I had this idea that if I killed myself in this church, it would be the greatest sacrilege I could ever commit, le plus grand blasphème, because you see, Stingo, I didn’t care no more; after Auschwitz, I didn’t believe in God or if He existed. I would say to myself: He has turned His back on me. And if He has turned His back on me, then I hate Him so that to show and prove my hatred I would commit the greatest sacrilege I could think of. Which is, I would commit my suicide in His church, on sacred ground. I was feeling so bad, I was so weak and sick still, but after a while I got some of my strength back and one night I decide to do this thing.

  “So I come out of the gate of the center with a piece of very sharp glass I found in the hospital where I was kept. It was easy enough to do. The church was quite near. There weren’t any guards or anything at this place and I arrived at the church in the late evening. There was some light in the church and I sat in the back row for a long time, alone with my piece of glass. It was summertime. In Sweden there is always light in the summer night, cool and pale. This place was in the countryside and I could hear the frogs outside and smell the fir and the pines. It was a lovely smell, it remind me of the Dolomites when I was a child. For a while I imagined having this conversation with God. One of the things I imagined that He said was ‘Why are you going to kill yourself, Sophie, here in My holy place?’ And I remember saying out loud, ‘If You don’t know in all Your wisdom, God, then I can’t tell You.’ Then He said, ‘So it’s your secret.’ And I answered, ‘Yes, it’s my secret from You. My last and only secret.’ So then I started to cut my wrist. And do you know something, Stingo? I did cut my wrist a little and it hurt and bled some, but then I stopped. And do you know what make me stop? I’ll swear to you, it was one thing. One thing! It was not the hurt or the fear. I had no fear. It was Rudolf Höss. It was thinking of Höss very suddenly and knowing he was alive in Poland or Germany. I saw his face in front of me just as the piece of glass cut my wrist. And I stopped cutting and—I know it sounds like folie, Stingo—well, I have this understanding which comes in a flash that I cannot die as long as Rudolf Höss is alive. It would be his final triumph.”

  There was a long pause, then: “I never saw my little boy again. You see, on that morning Jan was not in Höss’s office when I went in. He was not there. I was so certain that he was there that I thought he might be hiding under the desk—you know, for fun. I looked around but there was no Jan. I thought it must be some joke, I knew he had to be there. I called out for him. Höss had closed the door and was standing there, watching me. I asked him where was my little boy. He said, ‘Last night after you were gone I realized that I couldn’t bring your child here. I apologize for an unfortunate decision. To bring him here would be dangerous—it would compromise my position.’ I couldn’t believe this, couldn’t believe he was saying this, I really couldn’t believe it. Then all of a sudden I did believe it, I believed it completely. And then I went crazy. I went insane. Insane!

  “I don’t remember anything I done—everything was black for a time—except I must have done two things. I attacked him, I attacked him with my hands. I know this because after the blackness went away and I was sitting in a chair where he had pushed me I looked up and I saw the place on his cheek where I had scraped him with my fingernails. He was wiping a little blood away from the place with his handkerchief. He was looking down at me, but there was no anger in his eyes, he seemed very calm. The other thing I remember is this echo in my ears, the sound of my own voice when I screamed at him just a minute before. ‘Gas me, then!’ I remember shouting at him. ‘Gas me like you gassed my little girl!’ I shouted at him over and over. ‘Gas me, then, you... ’ Et cetera. And I must have screamed a lot of dirty names in German because I remember them like an echo in my ear. But now I just put my head in my hands and wept. I didn’t hear him say anything and then finally I felt his hand on my shoulder. I heard his voice. ‘I repeat, I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I should not have made that decision. I will try to make it up to you somehow, in some other way. What is there that I can do?’ Stingo, it was so strange, hearing this man talk like this—asking me such a question in such a voice, apologetic, you know, asking me what he might do.

  “And then, of course, I thought about Lebensborn, and what Wanda had said I must try to do—the thing I should have mentioned to Höss the day before but was somehow unable to. And so I made myself calm and stopped crying and finally I looked up at him and said, ‘You can do this for me.’ I used the word ‘Lebensborn’ and I knew right away from the look in his eyes that he had a knowledge of what I was speaking about. I said something like this, I said, ‘You could have my child moved away from the Children’s Camp and into the program of Lebensborn which the SS has and which you know about. You could have him sent to the Reich, where he would become a good German. Already he is blond and looks German and speaks perfect German like I do. There are not many Polish children like that. Don’t you see how my little boy Jan would be excellent for Lebensborn?’ For a long time I remember Höss didn’t say anything, just stood there lightly touching the place on his cheek where I had cut him. Then he said something like this: ‘I think that what you say might be a possible solution. I will look into the matter.’ But that was not enough for me. I knew I was groping for straws, desperate, he could have simply shut me up right there—but I had to say it, had to say, ‘No, you’ve got to give me a more definite answer than that, I cannot bear it living with any more uncertainty.’ After a moment he said, ‘All right, I will see that he is removed from the camp.’ But even this was not good enough for me. I said, ‘How will I know? How will I know for certain that he has been taken away from here? Also, you must promise me this,’ I went on, ‘you must promise to let me know where he has been taken in Germany so that someday when the war is over I will be able to see him again.’

  “This last thing, Stingo, I could hardly believe I was saying, making these demands on such a man. But in truth, you see, I was relying on his feeling for me, depending on that emotion he had shown for me the day before, you know, when he had embraced me, when he had said, ‘Do you think I am some kind of monster?’ I was depending on some small remaining piece of humanity in him to help me. So after I said this he kept quiet again for a time and then he answered me by saying, ‘All right, I promise. I promise
that the child will be removed from the camp and you will hear of his whereabouts from time to time.’ Then I said—I knew I was maybe risking his anger, but I couldn’t help it, ‘How can I be sure of this? My little girl is already dead, and without Jan I will have nothing. You said to me yesterday that you would let me see Jan today, but you didn’t. You went back on your word.’ This must have—well, hit him in some way, because he said then, ‘You can be sure. You will have a message from me from time to time. You have my assurance and word as a German officer, my word of honor.’ ”

  Sophie paused and gazed into the murky evening light of the Maple Court, invaded by a fluttering crowd of vagrant moths, the place deserted now except for ourselves and the bartender, a weary Irishman making a muffled clacking sound at the cash register. Then she said, “But this man did not keep his word, Stingo. And I never saw my little boy any more. Why should I think this SS man might have a thing called honor? Maybe it was because of my father, who was always talking about the German army, and officers and their high sense of honor and principles and such. I don’t know. But Höss did not keep his word, and so I don’t know what happened. Höss left Auschwitz for Berlin soon after this and I went back to the barracks, where I was an ordinary stenographer. I never got any kind of message from Höss, ever. Even when he came back the next year he did not contact me. For a long time I figure, well, Jan has been taken out of the camp and sent to Germany and soon I will get a message saying where he is and how his health is, and so on. But I never heard nothing at all. Then sometime later I got this terrible message on a piece of paper from Wanda, which said this—just this and nothing more: ‘I have seen Jan again. He is doing as well as can be expected.’ Stingo, I almost died at this because, you see, it meant that Jan had not been taken out of the camp, after all—Höss had not arranged for him to be put in Lebensborn.

  “Then a few weeks after this I got another message from Wanda at Birkenau, through this prisoner—a French Resistance woman who came to the barracks. The woman said that Wanda had told her to say to me that Jan was gone from the Children’s Camp. And this for a short time filled me with joy until I realized that it really meant nothing—that it might mean only that Jan was dead. Not sent to Lebensborn, but dead of disease or something—or of just the winter, it had become so cold. And there was no way for me to find out what was truly the case about Jan, whether he had died there at Birkenau or was in Germany somewhere.” Sophie paused. “Auschwitz was so vast, so hard to get news of anyone. Anyway, Höss never sent me any message like he said he would. Mon Dieu, it was imbécile for me to think that such a man would have this thing he called meine Ehre. My honor! What a filthy liar! He was nothing but what Nathan calls a crumbum. And I was just a piece of Polish Dreck for him to the end.” After another pause she peered up at me from her cupped hands. “You know, Stingo, I never knew what happened to Jan. It would almost be better that...” And her voice trailed off into silence.

  Quietude. Enervation. A sense of the summer’s wind-down, of the bitter bottom of things. I had no voice to answer Sophie after all this; certainly I had nothing to say when her own voice now rose slightly to make a quick blunt statement which, ghastly and heartbreaking as it was to me as a revelation, seemed in light of all the foregoing to be merely another agonizing passage embedded in an aria of unending bereavement. “I thought I might find out something. But soon after I got this last message from Wanda, I learned that she had been caught for her Resistance activity. They took her to this well-known prison block. They tortured her, then they hung her up on a hook and made her slowly strangle to death... Yesterday I called Wanda a kvetch. It’s my last lie to you. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”

  Sitting there in the wan light, both Sophie and I had, I think, a feeling that our nerve endings had been pulled out nearly to the snapping point by the slow accumulation of too much that was virtually unbearable. With a feeling of decisive, final negation that was almost like panic within me, I wanted to hear no more about Auschwitz, not another word. Yet a trace of the momentum of which I have spoken was still at work upon Sophie (though I realized that her spirits were bedraggled and frayed) and she kept going long enough to tell me, in one brief insistent burst, of her last leave-taking from the Commandant of Auschwitz.

  “He said to me, ‘Go now.’ And I turned and started to go and I said to him, ‘Danke, mein Kommandant, for helping me.’ Then he said—you must believe me, Stingo—he said this. He said, ‘Hear that music? Do you like Franz Lehàr? He is my favorite composer.’ I was so startled by this strange question, I could barely answer. Franz Lehár, I thought, and then I found myself saying, ‘No, not really. Why?’ He looked disappointed for a moment, and then he said again, ‘Go now.’ And so I went. I walked downstairs past Emmi’s room and there was the little radio playing again. This time I could have taken it easily because I looked around very carefully and there was no Emmi anywhere. But as I say, I didn’t have the courage to do what I should have done, with my hope for Jan and everything. And I knew that this time they would suspect me first. So I left the radio there, and was suddenly filled with a terrible hatred for myself. But I left it there and it was still playing. Can you imagine what it was that the radio was playing? Guess what, Stingo.”

  There comes a point in a narrative like this one when a certain injection of irony seems inappropriate, perhaps even “counterindicated”—despite the underlying impulse toward it—because of the manner in which irony tends so easily toward leadenness, thus taxing the reader’s patience along with his or her credulity. But since Sophie was my faithful witness, supplying the irony herself as a kind of coda to testimony I had no reason to doubt, I must set her final observation down, adding only the comment that these words of hers were delivered in that wobbly tone of blurred, burned-out, exhausted emotional pandemonium—part hilarity, part profoundest grief—which I had never heard before in Sophie, and only rarely before in anyone, and which plainly signaled the onset of hysteria.

  “What was it playing?” I said.

  “It was the overture to this operetta of Franz Lehár,” she gasped, “Das Land des Lächelns—The Land of Smiles.”

  It was well past midnight when we strolled the short blocks home to the Pink Palace. Sophie was calm now. No one was abroad in the balmy darkness, and along the maple-lined summer streets the houses of the good burghers of Flatbush were lightless and hushed with slumber. Walking next to me, Sophie wound her arm around my waist and her perfume momentarily stung my senses, but I understood the gesture by now to be merely sisterly or friendly, and besides, her long recital had left me far beyond any stirrings of desire. Gloom and despondency hung over me like the August darkness itself and I wondered idly if I would be able to sleep.

  Approaching Mrs. Zimmerman’s stronghold, where a night light glowed dimly in the pink hallway, we stumbled slightly on the rough sidewalk and Sophie spoke for the first time since we had left the bar. “Have you got an alarm clock, Stingo? I’ve got to get up so early tomorrow, to move my things into my new place and then get to work on time. Dr. Blackstock has been very patient with me during these past few days, but I really must get back to work. Why don’t you call me during the middle of the week?” I heard her stifle a yawn.

  I was about to make a reply about the alarm clock when a shadow, dark gray, detached itself from the blacker shadows surrounding the front porch of the house. My heart made a bad beat and I said, “Oh my God.” It was Nathan. I uttered his name in a whisper just as Sophie recognized him too and gave a soft moan. For an instant I had the, I suppose, reasonable idea that he was going to attack us. But then I heard Nathan call out gently, “Sophie,” and she disengaged her arm from my waist with such haste that my shirttail was pulled out of my trousers’ waistband. I halted and stood quite still as they plunged toward each other through the chiaroscuro of dimly trembling, leafy light, and I heard the sobbing sounds that Sophie made just before they collided and embraced. For long moments they clung together, merged into ea
ch other amid the late-summer darkness. Then at last I saw Nathan slowly sink to his knees on the hard pavement, where, surrounding Sophie’s legs with his arms, he remained motionless for what seemed an interminable time, frozen in an attitude of devotion, or fealty, or penance, or supplication—or all of these.

  Chapter Fourteen

  NATHAN RECAPTURED US easily, not a minute too soon.

  After our remarkably sweet and easy reconciliation—Sophie and Nathan and Stingo—one of the first things that I remember happening was this: Nathan gave me two hundred dollars. Two days after their happy reunion, after Nathan had reestablished himself with Sophie on the floor above and I had ensconced myself once more in my primrose-hued quarters, Nathan learned from Sophie the fact that I had been robbed. (Morris Fink, incidentally, had not been the culprit. Nathan noticed that my bathroom window had been forced—something Morris would not have had to do. I was ashamed of my nasty suspicion.) The next afternoon, returning from lunch at a delicatessen on Ocean Avenue, I found on my desk his check made out to me for that sum which in 1947, to a person in my state of virtual destitution, can only be described as, well, imperial. Clipped to the check was the handwritten note: To the greater glory of Southern Literature. I was flabbergasted. Naturally, the money was a godsend, bailing me out at a moment when I was frantic with worry over the immediate future. It was next to impossible to turn it down. But my various religious and ancestral scruples forbade my accepting it as a gift.

  So after a great deal of palaver and good-natured argument, we reached what might be called a compromise. The two hundred dollars would remain a gift so long as I remained an unpublished writer. But when and if my novel found a publisher and made enough money to relieve me from financial pressure—then and only then would Nathan accept any repayment I might wish to make (without interest). A still, small, mean-spirited voice at the back of my mind told me that this largesse was Nathan’s way of atoning for the horrid attack he had made on my book a few nights before, when he had so dramatically and cruelly banished Sophie and me from his existence. But I dismissed the thought as unworthy, especially in the light of my newly acquired knowledge, through Sophie, of that drug-induced derangement which had doubtless caused him to say hatefully irresponsible things—words it was now clear he no longer remembered. Words which I was certain were as lost to his recollection as his own loony, destructive behavior. Besides, I was quite simply devoted to Nathan, at least to that beguiling, generous, life-enhancing Nathan who had shed his entourage of demons—and since it was this Nathan who had returned to us, a Nathan rather drawn and pale but seemingly purged of whatever horrors had possessed him on that recent evening, the reborn warmth and brotherly affection I felt was wonderful; my delight could only have been surpassed by the response of Sophie, whose joy was a form of barely controlled delirium, very moving to witness. Her continuing, unflagging passion for Nathan struck me with awe. His abuse of her was plainly either forgotten or completely pardoned. I’m certain she would have gathered him into her bosom with as much hungry and heedless forgiveness had he been a convicted child molester or ax murderer.