“These long years after, in 1945, when the war was over and I was in this center for displaced persons in Sweden, I would think back to that time when my father and Kazik were murdered and think of all the tears I cried, and wonder why after all that had happened to me I couldn’t cry no longer. And this was true, Stingo, I had no more emotions. I was beyond feeling, like there was no more tears in me to pour on the earth. At this place in Sweden, I became friends with a Jewish woman from Amsterdam who was very kind to me, especially after I tried to kill myself. I suppose I didn’t try very hard, cut my wrist with a piece of glass, and it didn’t bleed much, but this older Jewish woman become very friendly to me and that summer we talked a lot together. She had been at the concentration camp where I was, and lost two sisters. I don’t understood how she survived, there were so many Jews murdered there, you know, millions and millions of Jews, but somehow she survived as I did, just a very few of us. She spoke very good English, besides German, and that is how I begun to learn English, since I knew I would probably come to America.
“She was very religious, this woman, and always go to pray at the synagogue they had there. She told me that she still very much believed in God and once she asked me if I did not believe in Him too—the Christian God—just as she believed in her God, the God of Abraham. She said that what happened to her made more strong her belief of Him, even though she knew Jews who felt now God was gone from the world. And I said to her yes, I once believed in Christ and His Holy Mother too, but now after these years I was like those Jews who think God was gone forever. I said that I knew that Christ had turned His face away from me and I could no longer pray to Him as I did once in Cracow. I couldn’t any longer pray to Him or could I any more cry. And when she asked how I know that Christ have turned His face away from me, I said I just knew, I just knew that only a God, only a Jesus who had no pity and who no longer care for me could permit the people I loved to be killed and let me live with such guilt. It was terrible enough they died like they done, but this guilt was more than I could bear. On peut souffrir, but you can suffer only so much...
“You can perhaps think it is a little thing, Stingo, but it is to permit someone to die without a farewell, an adieu, a single word of comfort or understanding that is so terrible to bear. I wrote to my father and Kazik in Sachsenhausen many letters but they always came back marked ‘Unknown.’ I only wanted to tell them how very much I loved them, especially Kazik, not because I loved him any more than Papa but because our very last time together we had a big fight and that was terrible. We almost never had fights, but we were married above three years and I suppose it was natural to quarrel sometime. Anyway, the night before this terrible day we had a big fight, I don’t longer remember what it was even about, really, and I told him ‘Spadaj!’—which in Polish is like saying ‘Drop dead’—and he rushed away and that night we didn’t sleep in the same room. And I never seen him even once after that. So that is what I found it so difficult to bear, that we don’t have even a gentle parting, a kiss, an embrace, nothing. Oh, I know Kazik knew I loved him still and I knew he loved me, but somehow it is all the worse that he must have suffered too, from not reaching me to say it, to communicate we love each other.
“So, Stingo, I have lived long with this very, very strong guilt which I can’t lose, even though I know it has no reason, like that Jewish woman in Sweden said, when she try to make me see that the love we had was the most important thing, not the silly fight. But I still have this strong guilt. Funny, Stingo, you know I have learned to cry again, and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of a human being, but yes, a human being. Often I cry alone when I listen to music, which remind me of Cracow and those years past. And you know, there is one piece of music that I cannot listen to, it makes me cry so much my nose stops up, I cannot breathe, my eyes run like streams. It is in these Handel records I got for Christmas, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ that make me cry because of all my guilt, and also because I know that my Redeemer don’t live and my body will be destroyed by worms and my eyes will never, never again see God...”
At the time of which I write, that hectic summer of 1947, when she told me so many things about her past and when I was fated to get ensnared, like some hapless June bug, in the incredible spider’s nest of emotions that made up the relation between Sophie and Nathan, she was working in an out-of-the-way corner of Flatbush as a part-time receptionist in the office of Dr. Hyman Blackstock (né Bialystok). At this point Sophie had been in America a little less than a year and a half. Dr. Blackstock was a chiropractor and a long-ago immigrant from Poland. His patients included many old-time immigrants or more recent Jewish refugees. Sophie had obtained her job with the doctor not long after her arrival in New York in the early months of the previous year, when she had been brought to America under the auspices of an international relief organization. At first Blackstock (who spoke fluent Polish aside from his mamaloshen Yiddish) was rather distressed that the agency had sent him a young woman who was a goy and who had only a smattering of Yiddish learned in a prison camp. But, a warm-hearted man who was doubtless impressed by her beauty, by her plight and by the fact that she spoke flawless German, he hired her for this job which she sorely needed, possessing as she did little more than the flimsy clothes that had been given to her at the D.P. center in Sweden. Blackstock need not have worried; within days Sophie was chattering with the patients in Yiddish as if she had sprung from the ghetto. She rented the cheap room at Yetta Zimmerman’s—her first true home in seven years—at about the same time she took the job. Working only three days a week allowed Sophie to keep body and soul together, in a manner of speaking, while also granting her extra days to improve her English at a free class at Brooklyn College and in general to become assimilated into the life of that vivid, vast and bustling borough.
She told me that she had never been bored. She was determined to put behind her the madness of the past—or as much as a vulnerable and memory-racked mind permitted—and so for her the huge city became the New World in spirit as well as fact. Physically she sensed that she was still badly run-down, but this did not prevent her from partaking of the pleasures around her like a child turned loose in an ice cream parlor. Music, for one thing; just the availability of music alone, she said, filled her insides with a sense of delectation, as one feels just before what one knows will be a sumptuous meal. Until she met Nathan she could not afford a phonograph, but no matter; on the inexpensive little portable radio she bought there was splendid music emanating from these stations with weird initials she could never get straight—WQXR, WNYC, WEVD—and men with silken voices announcing the enchanted names of all the musical potentates and princes whose harmonies she had been deprived of so long; even a shopworn composition like Schubert’s Unfinished or Eine kleine Nachtmusik touched her with fresh rapture. And of course there were the concerts too, at the Academy of Music and, in the summer, at Lewisohn Stadium in Manhattan, gorgeous music so cheap as to be virtually free, music like Beethoven’s Violin Concerto played one night at the stadium by Yehudi Menuhin with such wild, voracious passion and tenderness that as she sat there alone high on the rim of the amphitheatre, shivering a little beneath the blazing stars, she felt a serenity, a sense of inner solace that amazed her, along with the awareness that there were things to live for, and that she might actually be able to reclaim the scattered pieces of her life and compose of them a new self, given half a chance.
Those first months Sophie was alone a great deal of the time. Her difficulty with the language (soon overcome) made her shy, but even so she was content to be alone a lot, indeed luxuriated in solitude, since privacy had been something she had greatly lacked in recent years. These same years she had been deprived of books, of printed matter of almost any kind, and she began to read greedily, subscribing to a Polish-American newspaper and frequenting a Polish bookstore off Fulton Street that had a large lending library. Her taste ran mainly to translations of Amer
ican writers, and the first book she finished, she recalled, was Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer. This was followed by A Farewell to Arms, An American Tragedy and Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, the last translated so wretchedly into Polish that she was forced to break the vow she had made, in the prison camp, to forswear for the rest of her life anything written in German, and read a German version that she was able to obtain from a branch of the public library. Possibly because this translation was felicitous and rich, or because Wolfe’s lyrical, tragic though optimistic and sweeping vision of America was what Sophie’s soul demanded at that moment—she being a newcomer to these shores, with only a rudimentary knowledge of the country’s landscape and its gargantuan extravagance—it was Of Time and the River that excited her the most of all the books she read that winter and spring. In fact, Wolfe so captured her imagination that she decided to have a go at Look Homeward, Angel in English, but quickly gave up that chore, which she found excruciatingly difficult. For the initiate ours is a cruel language, its freaky orthography and idiosyncrasies never so absurdly apparent as on the printed page, and Sophie’s skill at reading and writing always lagged behind her—to me—fetchingly erratic speech.
Her whole experience of America was New York—mostly Brooklyn—and eventually she came to love the city and to be terrified by it in almost equal measure. In her entire life she had known just two urban places—tiny Cracow in its Gothic repose and later the shapeless rubble heap of Warsaw after the Blitzkrieg. Her sweeter memories—that is, the ones she cared to dwell upon—were rooted in the town of her birth, immemorially suspended in a frieze of ancient rooftops and crooked streets and lanes. The intervening years between Cracow and Brooklyn had forced her—almost as a means of retaining sanity—to try to obliterate that time from recollection. Thus she said that those first mornings at Yetta’s rooming house, waking in a strange bed surrounded by strange pink walls as she drowsily listened to the faint far-off rumble of traffic on Church Avenue, she would for long seconds be so unable to name or recognize either herself or her surroundings that she felt herself to be in a somnolent trance, like the enchanted maiden in one of those Grimm fairy tales of her childhood, transported after a nocturnal spell to a new and unknown kingdom. Then, blinking awake with a feeling in which sorrow and cheer were curiously commingled, she would say to herself: You are not in Cracow, Zosia, you are in America. And then rise to face the pandemonium of the subway and the chiropractic patients of Dr. Blackstock. And Brooklyn’s greenly beautiful, homely, teeming, begrimed and incomprehensible vastness.
With the coming of spring Prospect Park, so close at hand, became Sophie’s favorite refuge—wonderful to recall, a safe place in those days for a solitary and lovely blonde to wander. In the pollen-hazy light, dappled in shades of gold-flecked green, the great towering locusts and elms that loomed over meadow and rolling grass seemed prepared to shelter a fête champêtre in a scene by Watteau or Fragonard, and it was beneath one of these majestic trees that Sophie, on her free days or on weekends, would deposit herself, along with a marvelous luncheon picnic. She later confessed to me, with just the vaguest touch of shame, that she became quite possessed, truly unhinged by food as soon as she arrived in the city. She knew she had to exercise caution in eating. At the D.P. center the doctor from the Swedish Red Cross who took care of her had said that her malnutrition was so severe that it had probably caused some more or less permanent and damaging metabolic changes; he cautioned her that she must guard against quick overconsumption of food, especially of fats, no matter how strong the temptation. But this made it all the more fun for her, a pleasant game, when at lunchtime she entered one of the glorious delicatessens of Flatbush and shopped for her Prospect Park spread. The privilege of choice gave her a feeling achingly sensual. There was so much to eat, such variety and abundance, that each time her breath stopped, her eyes actually filmed over with emotion, and with slow and elaborate gravity she would choose from this sourly fragrant, opulent, heroic squander of food: a pickled egg here, there a slice of salami, half a loaf of pumpernickel, lusciously glazed and black. Bratwurst. Braunschweiger. Some sardines. Hot pastrami. Lox. A bagel, please. Clutching the brown paper bag, the warning like a litany in her mind—“Remember what Dr. Bergstrom said, don’t gorge yourself—she would make her methodical way into one of the farthest recesses of the park, or near a backwater of the huge lake, and there—munching with great restraint, taste buds enthralled in rediscovery—would turn to page 350 of Studs Lonigan.
She was feeling her way. In every sense of the word having experienced rebirth, she possessed some of the lassitude and, as a matter of fact, a great deal of the helplessness of a newborn child. Her clumsiness was like that of a paraplegic regaining the use of her limbs. Small things, preposterous tiny things, still confounded her. She had forgotten how to connect the two sides of the zipper on a jacket she had been given. Her maladroit fumblings appalled her, and once she burst into tears when, trying to squeeze out some cosmetic lotion from an ordinary plastic tube, she applied such careless force that the stuff gushed out all over her and ruined a new dress. But she was coming along. Occasionally she ached in her bones, her shins and ankles mainly, and her walk still had a hesitancy which seemed connected with the spiritlessness and fatigue that often overtook her and which she desperately hoped would go away. Yet if she did not quite exist in the full flood of sunlight, which is the hackneyed metaphor for good health, she was comfortably and safely far away from that abyssal darkness down into which she had nearly strayed. Specifically, this had been not much more than a year ago, when, at the just-liberated camp in the terminal hours of that existence she no longer allowed herself to remember, the Russian voice—a bass-baritone but harsh, corrosive as lye—pierced her delirium, penetrated the sweat and the fever and the kennel filth of the hard straw-strewn wooden shelf where she lay, to mutter over her in an impassive tone, “I think this one is finished too.” For even then she knew that somehow she was not finished—a truth now borne out, she was relieved to say (while sprawled on the lakeside grass), by the timid yet voluptuous gurgles of hunger that attended the exalted instant, just before biting down, when her nostrils breathed in the briny smell of pickles, and mustard, and the caraway-tinged scent of Levy’s Jewish rye.
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 a
udible 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.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 169
