Sophie's Choice - William Styron [271]
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