Sophie's Choice - William Styron [196]
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