Sophie's Choice - William Styron [133]
“To the death of Bilbo,” Nathan persisted, “to the sounds of the screams of his last agony.”
I sensed the blood flashing scarlet somewhere behind my eyes and my heart began a clumsy thumping. It was an effort to control my voice. “Nathan,” I said, “not long ago at one point I paid you a slight compliment. I said that despite your profound animosity toward the South, you at least retained a little sense of humor about it, unlike many people. Unlike the standard New York liberal jackass. But now I’m beginning to see that I was wrong. I’ve got no use for Bilbo and never did, but if you think there’s any comedy in this ham-handed bit about his death, you’re wrong. I refuse to toast the death of any man—”
“You would not toast the death of Hitler?” he put in quickly, with a mean glint in his eye.
It brought me up short. “Of course I would toast the death of Hitler. But that’s a fucking different matter! Bilbo’s not Hitler!” Even while I was replying to Nathan I realized with despair how we were duplicating the substance if not the same words of the enraged colloquy in which we had gotten so wildly embroiled that first afternoon in Sophie’s room. In the time since that deafening quarrel, which had so nearly become a fight, I mistakenly thought he had relinquished his murky idee fixe about the South. At this moment there was in his manner all the identical bottled-up surge of fury and venom which had truly scared me on that radiant Sunday, a day that for so long had seemed comfortably remote. I was scared once more, now to an even greater degree, for I had a grim augury that this time our struggle would not find sweet reconciliation in apologies, jokes and the jolly embrace of friendship. “Bilbo is not Hitler, Nathan,” I repeated. I heard my voice trembling. “Let me tell you something. For as long as I have known you—although it is admittedly not long, so I may have gotten the wrong impression—you have honestly impressed me as being one of the most sophisticated, savvy people I’ve ever known—”
“Don’t embarrass me,” he broke in. “Flattery will get you nowhere.” His voice was rasping, ugly.
“This is not flattery,” I went on, “only the truth. But what I’m getting at is this. Your hatred of the South—which often is clearly tantamount to expressing hatred, or at least dislike, for me—is appalling in anyone who like yourself is so knowing and judicious in so many other ways. It is downright primitive of you, Nathan, to be so blind about the nature of evil...”
In debate, especially when the dispute is hot and supercharged and freighted with ill will, I have always been the flabbiest of contenders. My voice breaks, becomes shrill; I sweat. I get a sloppy half-grin on my face. Worse, my mind wanders and then takes flight while the logic I possess in fair measure under more placid circumstances abandons my brain like an ungrateful urchin. (For a time I thought I might be a lawyer. The profession of law, and the courtrooms in which I once briefly entertained fantasies of playing out dramas like Clarence Darrow, lost only an incompetent stick when I turned to the literary trade.) “You seem to have no sense of history at all,” I went on rapidly, my voice scaling up an octave, “none at all! Could it be because you Jews, having so recently arrived here and living mostly in big Northern cities, are really purblind, and just have no interest in or awareness or any kind of comprehension whatever of the tragic concatenation of events that have produced the racial madness down there? You’ve read Faulkner, Nathan, and you still have this assy and intolerable attitude of superiority toward the place, and are unable to see how Bilbo is less a villain than a wretched offshoot of the whole benighted system?” I paused, drew a breath and said, “I pity you your blindness.” And here had I