“Stingo, my child was there at Auschwitz. Yes, I had a child. It was my little boy, Jan, that they have taken away from me on the day I came there. They have put him in this place called the Children’s Camp, he was only ten years old. I know it must be strange to you that all this time you’ve known me I have never told you about my child, but this is something I have never been able to tell to anyone. It is too difficult—too much for me to ever think about. Yes, I did tell Nathan about this once, many months ago. I told him very quickly and then after that I said that we must never once talk about this again. Or tell anyone else. So now I’m telling you only because you will not be able to understand about me and Höss unless you understood about Jan. And after this I will not talk any more about him, and you must never ask me questions. No, never again...
“Anyway, that afternoon when Höss was looking down from the window I spoke to him. I knew that I had to play my last card, reveal to him what au jour le jour I had buried even from myself—in my fear of dying of grief of it—do anything, beg, shout, scream for mercy, hoping only that I can somehow touch this man enough so that he would just show a bit of mercy—if not for me, then the only thing I had left on earth to live for. So I put my voice under control and said, ‘Herr Kommandant, I know I can’t ask much for myself and you must act according to the rules. But I beg of you to do one thing for me before you send me back. I have a young son in Camp D, where all the other boys are prisoners. His name is Jan Zawistowski, age ten. I have learned his number, I will give it to you. He was with me when I arrived but I have not seen him since six months. I yearn to see him. I am afraid for his health, with winter coming. I beg of you to consider some way in which he might be released. His health is frail and he is so very young.’ Höss didn’t reply to me, just looked straight at me without blinking. I had begun to break down a little and I felt myself going out of control. I reached out and touched his shirt, then clutched at it and said, ‘Please, if you have been impressed only the slightest bit by my presence, by my being, I beg of you to do this for me. Not to release me, just to release my little boy. There is a certain way you could do this, which I will tell you about... Please do this for me. Please. Please!’
“I knew then that I was once more only a worm in his life, a piece of Polish Dreck. He grabbed my wrist and pulled my hand away from his shirt and said, ‘That’s enough!’ I’ll never forget the frenzy in his voice when he said, ‘Ich kann es unmöglich tun!’ Which means ‘It’s out of the question for me to do that.’ He said, ‘It would be unlawful for me to release any prisoner without proper authority.’ Suddenly I realized I have touched some terrible nerve in him by even mentioning what I done. He said, ‘It’s outrageous, your suggestion! What do you take me for, some Dümmling you hope to be able to manipulate? Only because I expressed a special feeling for you? You think you could get me to contravene proper authority because I expressed some little affection?’ Then he said, ‘I find this disgusting!’
“Would it make sense to you, Stingo, if I said that I couldn’t help myself and I threw myself against him, threw my arms around his waist and begged him again, saying ‘Please’ over and over? But I could tell from the way his muscles become stiff and this trembling that ran through him that he was finished with me. Even so I couldn’t stop. I said, ‘Then at least let me see my little boy, let me visit him, let me see him just once, please do that one thing for me. Can’t you understand this? You have children of your own. Just allow me to see him, to hold him once in my arms before I go back into the camp.’ And when I said this, Stingo, I couldn’t help myself and I fell on my knees in front of him. I fell on my knees in front of him and pressed my face against his boots.”
Sophie halted, gazing again for long moments into that past which seemed now so totally, so irresistibly to have captured her; she took several sips of whiskey and swallowed once or twice abstractedly in a daze of recollection. And I realized that, as if seeking whatever semblance of present reality I was able to offer, she had taken hold of my hand in a numbing grip. “There have been so much talk about people in a place like Auschwitz and the way they acted there. In Sweden when I was in this refugee center, often a group of us who was there—at Auschwitz or at Birkenau, where I later was sent—would talk about how these various people acted. Why this man would allow himself to become a vicious Kapo, who would be cruel to his fellow prisoners and cause many of them to die. Or why this other man or woman would do this or that brave thing, sometime lose their lives that another could live. Or give their bread or a little potato or thin nothing soup to someone starving, even though they were themselves starving. Or there would be people—men, women—who would kill or betray another prisoner just for a little food. People acted very different in the camp, some in a cowardly and selfish way, some bravely and beautifully—there was no rule. No. But such a terrible place was this Auschwitz, Stingo, terrible beyond all belief, that you really could not say that this person should have done a certain thing in a fine or noble fashion, as in the other world. If he or she done a noble thing, then you could admire them like any place else, but the Nazis were murderers and when they were not murdering they turned people into sick animals, so if what the people done was not so noble, or even was like animals, then you have to understand it, hating it maybe but pitying it at the same time, because you knew how easy it was for you to act like an animal too.”
Sophie paused for a few moments and locked her eyelids shut as if in savage meditation, then gazed once more out onto the baffling distances. “So there is one thing that is still a mystery to me. And that is why, since I know all this and I know the Nazis turned me into a sick animal like all the rest, I should feel so much guilt over all the things I done there. And over just being alive. This guilt is something I cannot get rid of and I think I never will.” She paused again, and then said, “I suppose it’s because...” But she hesitated, failing to round out her thought, and I heard a quaver in her voice—perhaps more because of exhaustion now than anything else—when she said, “I know I will never get rid of it. Never. And because I never get rid of it, maybe that’s the worst thing the Germans left me with.”
Finally she relaxed her grip on my hand and turned to me, looking me full in the face as she said, “I surrounded Höss’s boots with my arms. I pressed my cheek up against those cold leather boots as if they was made of fur or something warm and comforting. And do you know? I think maybe I even licked them with my tongue, licked those Nazi boots. And do you know something else? If Höss had give me a knife or a gun and told me to go kill somebody, a Jew, a Pole, it don’t matter, I would have done it without thinking, with joy even, if it mean seeing my little boy for only a single minute and holding him in my arms.
“Then I heard Höss say, ‘Get to your feet! Demonstrations like this offend me. Get up!’ But when I began to get up his voice got softer and he said, ‘Certainly you may see your son, Sophie.’ I realized that it was the first time he ever spoke my name. Then—oh Jesus Christ, Stingo, he actually embraced me again and I heard him say, ‘Sophie, Sophie, certainly you may see your little boy.’ He said, ‘Do you think I could deny you that? Glaubst du, dass ich ein Ungeheuer bin? Do you think I am some kind of monster?’ ”
11
“SON THE NORTH BELIEVES it has a veritable patent on virtue,” my father said, gingerly stroking with a forefinger his shiny new black eye. “But of course, the North is wrong. Do you think the slums of Harlem truly represent an advance for the Negro over a peanut patch in Southampton County? Do you think the Negro is going to remain content in that insufferable squalor? Son, someday the North is going to sadly rue these hypocritical attempts at magnanimity, these clever and transparent gestures that go by the name of tolerance. Someday—mark my word—it will be clearly demonstrated that the North is every bit as steeped in prejudice as the South, if not more so. At least in the South the prejudice is out in the open. But up here...” He paused to touch his sore eye again. “I really shudder to think of the violence
and hatred building up in these slums.” An almost lifelong Southern liberal, conscious of the South’s injustices, my father had never been given to shifting unreasonably the various racial evils of the South onto the shoulders of the North; with some surprise, therefore, I listened to him attentively, unaware—during that summer of 1947—of just how prophetic his words were to prove.
At some time long past midnight we were sitting in the dim, murmurously convivial bar of the Hotel McAlpin, where I had taken him after the disastrous altercation he had had with a cabdriver named Thomas McGuire, Hack License 8608, only an hour or so after his arrival in New York. The old man (I use the phrase merely in the paternal-vernacular sense; at age fifty-nine he looked strappingly fit and youthful) had not been badly damaged but there had been a considerable uproar and a crimson outpouring of alarming, albeit harmlessly let, blood from a superficial cut on the brow. This had necessitated a small bandage. After order had been restored, and as we sat drinking (he bourbon, I that steadfast spirit of my nonage—Rheingold) and talking, largely about the gulf which separated this devil’s spawn of an urban blight north of the Chesapeake and the South’s Elysian meadows (in this realm my father could scarcely have been less prophetic, not having foreseen Atlanta), I was able more than once to reflect somberly on how my old man’s imbroglio with Thomas McGuire had at least allowed me momentary diversion from my newly acquired despair.
For, it may be recalled, all this would necessarily have taken place only brief hours after that moment in Brooklyn when I had assumed that Sophie and Nathan had disappeared from my life forever. Certainly I was convinced—since I had no reason to think otherwise—that I would never lay eyes on her again. And so the melancholy which had taken hold of me when I left Yetta Zimmerman’s and journeyed by subway to stay with my father in Manhattan had been as close to creating an excruciating physical malaise as any I had ever known—most surely since my mother’s death. It was now a thing of mingled bereavement and anxiety, inextricable and bewilderingly intense. The feelings alternated. Gazing out dully at the stroboscopic dazzle-and-dark of the subway tunnel lights streaking past, I felt the combined pain like an immense and oppressive weight thrusting down directly on my shoulders, so heavy that it somehow actually compressed my lungs and made my breath come in harsh erratic gasps. I did not—or could not—weep, but I halfway knew several times that I was on the verge of getting sick. It was as if I had been privy to sudden senseless death, as if Sophie (and Nathan too, for despite the rage, the resentful chagrin and confusion he had made me suffer, he was too intricately bound up in our triadic relationship for me to suddenly abandon the love and loyalty I felt for him) had been wiped out in one of those catastrophic traffic accidents which occur in an eyewink, leaving the survivors too stunned even to curse heaven. All I knew, as the train rumbled up through the dripping catacombs beneath Eighth Avenue, was that with an instantaneousness I still could barely believe, I had been cut off from the two people in life I cared the most about, and that the primitive sensation of loss it produced was causing me anguish similar to that of being buried alive under a ton of cinders.
“I admire your spunk tremendously,” my father had said while we ate a late dinner at a Schrafft’s. “The seventy-two hours I plan to spend in this burg is about all most mortal men from civilized parts can stand. I don’t know how you do it. Your youth, I suppose, that wonderful flexibility of your age that allows you to be beguiled by, rather than devoured by, this octopus of a city. I’ve never been there, but really, is it possibly true that, as you wrote me, there are parts of Brooklyn that remind one of Richmond?”
Despite the long train ride up from the depths of the Tidewater my father was in a splendid mood, which helped me take my mind off my spiritual disarray, at least fitfully. He mentioned that he had not been to New York since the late 1930s and that, if anything, the city appeared more Babylonian in its dissolute wealth than ever. “It’s a product of the war, son,” said this engineer who had helped fabricate such naval behemoths as the aircraft carriers Yorktown and Enterprise, “everything in this country has become richer and richer. It took that war to bail us out of the Depression and in the process to turn us into the most powerful nation on earth. If there’s one single thing that’s going to keep us ahead of the Communists for many years, it’s just that: money, and we’ve got lots of it.” (It should not be assumed from this allusion that my father was even remotely a Red-baiter. As I say, he was notably left-leaning for a Southerner: six or seven years later, at the height of the McCarthy hysteria, he furiously resigned as president-elect of the Virginia chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, to which for largely genealogical reasons he had belonged for a quarter of a century, when that mossback organization issued a manifesto in support of the Senator from Wisconsin.)
Yet no matter how sophisticated they may be in matters of economics, sojourners from the South (or anywhere else in the hinterland) rarely fail to be dumfounded by New York’s tariffs and prices, and my father was no exception, grumbling darkly over the dinner check for two: I think it was around four dollars—imagine!—which was hardly exorbitant by metropolitan standards in that deflated time, and even for Schrafft’s profoundly ordinary fare. “For four dollars at home,” he complained, “you could feast all weekend.” He regained his composure quickly, though, as we strolled through the balmy night up Broadway, north through Times Square—a place which caused the old man to adopt an expression of dazed and pious speculation, although he was never a pious person and his reaction came, I think, less from real disapproval than from the shock, like a slap in the face, of the area’s raunchy weirdness.
It occurs to me that compared to the reptilian Sodom into which it later evolved, Times Square that summer offered scarcely more in the way of carnal corruption than some dull beige plaza in a Christly town like Omaha or Salt Lake City; nonetheless, it had its share of sleazy hustlers and garish freaks strutting through the rainbows and whirlpools of neon, even then, and it helped a little in the way of distracting me from my deep gloom to hear his whispered expletives—he could still utter “Jeru-salem!” with the rustic openness of a character out of Sherwood Anderson—and to watch his gaze, following the iridescent rayon undulations of some chichi mulatto whore, reflect in quick sequence glassy incredulity and a certain ineluctable itch. Did he ever get laid? I wondered. A widower for nine years, he surely deserved to, but like most Southerners (or Americans, for that matter) of his vintage he was reticent, even secretive, about sex, and his life in that sphere was to me a mystery. In truth, I hoped that in his mature state he had not allowed himself to be sacrificed on the altar of Onan, like his hapless offspring; or could it simply be that just now I had misinterpreted his glance and that he was mercifully free of that fever at last?
At Columbus Circle we hailed a taxi and headed back to the McAlpin. I must have fallen into my despondent mood again, for I heard him say, “What’s wrong, son?” I muttered something about a stomach ache—the victuals at Schrafft’s—and let it go at that. As much as I felt the need to unburden myself to someone, I found it impossible to divulge anything about this recent upheaval in my life. How could I ever adequately outline the dimensions of my loss, much less go into the complexities of the situation which led up to that loss: my passion for Sophie, the wonderful comradeship with Nathan, Nathan’s crazy fugue of a few hours ago, and the final, sudden, agonizing abandonment? Not being a reader of Russian novels (which that scenario seemed in certain melodramatic respects to resemble), my father would have found the story totally beyond comprehension. “You’re not having too much money trouble, are you?” he inquired, adding that he well knew that the proceeds from the sale of the young slave Artiste which he had sent me weeks before could hardly be expected to last forever. Then in what I sensed was a gentle, roundabout way he began to broach the possibility of my coming South to live again. He had just barely edged up on the subject, so briefly and tentatively that I had not had time even to reply, when the taxi slid to
a stop in front of the McAlpin. “I wouldn’t think it would be too healthy,” he was saying, “living in a place with people like the ones we just saw.”
It was then that I witnessed an episode which illustrated the sad, schismatic division of North and South more starkly than any conceivable work of art or sociology. And it involved two grievous, mutually unpardonable mistakes, each embedded in a cultural overview which was separated from the other as Saskatoon is from Patagonia. The initial mistake surely was my father’s. Although gratuities in the South—at least up until that time—had been in general eschewed or never taken seriously, he should have known better than to tip Thomas McGuire a nickel—wiser to give no tip at all. McGuire’s mistake was to react by snarling at my father, descriptively: “fucking asshole.” This is not to say that a Southern cabdriver, unaccustomed to tips or at any rate accustomed to receiving few tips and those erratically, might not have felt a little stung; yet however violently he might have bristled inwardly, he would have kept his peace. Nor does it mean that the ears of a New Yorker might not have burned at McGuire’s epithet; but such words are the common coin of the streets and of taxi drivers, and most New York denizens would have swallowed their gall and likewise kept their mouths shut.
Partway out of the cab, my father poked his nose back into the front window and said, in a nearly incredulous voice, “What did I hear you say?” The phrasing is important—not “What did you say?” or “What’s that you said?” but with the emphasis on “hear,” a sense that the auditory apparatus itself had never before experienced such vile obscenities, not even separately, much less uttered in tandem. McGuire was a blur of thick neck and reddish hair in the shadows. I did not get a good look at his face, but the voice was fairly young. If he had sped off into the night, then all might have been well, but although I sensed a slight hesitancy, I also felt an intransigence, a feisty Hibernian umbrage at my father’s nickel that matched the old man’s rage at this indefensible language. When McGuire answered he even supplied a considerably more grammatical shape to his thought: “I said you must be some fucking asshole.”
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 197
