Sophie's Choice - William Styron [298]
Sophie held one hand to her face, obscuring her expression, but since her shoulders were trembling I thought she had succumbed to laughter. I was mistaken. There were tears again, tears of anguish from which she simply could not seem to free herself. Suddenly I realized that I must have inadvertently summoned up memories of her little boy. I let her cry in silence for a while. Then the weeping became less. Finally she turned to me and said, “Down in Virginia where we’re going, Stingo, do you think there will be a Berlitz school, a school for language?”
“What on earth would you want that for?” I said. “You already know more languages than anyone I know.”
“It would be for English,” she replied. “Oh, I know I speak it good now, and even read it, but what I must learn to do is to write it. I’m so poor at writing English. The spelling is so very strange.”
“Well, I don’t know, Sophie,” I said, “there are probably language schools in Richmond or Norfolk. But they are both pretty far away from Southampton. Why do you ask?”
“I want to write about Auschwitz,” she said, “I want to write about my experiences there. I suppose I could write in Polish or German or maybe French, but I’d so much rather be able to write in English...”
Auschwitz. It was a place which, amid the events of the past few days, I had thrust so far in the back of my mind that I had almost forgotten its existence; now it returned like a blow at the back of my skull, and it hurt. I looked at Sophie as she took a swig from her cup and then gave a small burp. Her speech had taken on the swollen-tongued quality which I had learned was a presentiment of unruly thinking and difficult behavior. I longed to dump that cup on the floor. And I cursed myself for the weakness or indecisiveness or spinelessness, or whatever it was, that still prevented my dealing more firmly with Sophie at such moments. Wait until we’re married, I thought.
“There are so many things that people still don’t know about that place!” she said fiercely. “There are so many things I haven’t even told you, Stingo, and I’ve told you so much. You know, about how the whole place was covered with the smell of burning Jews, day and night. I’ve told you that. But I never even told you hardly anything about Birkenau, when they begun to starve me to death and I got so sick I almost died. Or about the time I saw a guard take the clothes off a nun and then make his dog attack her and bite her so bad on the body and the face that she died a few hours later. Or...” And here she paused, gazed into space, then said, “There are so many terrible things I could tell. But maybe I could write it as a novel, you see, if I learned to write English good, and then I could make people understood how the Nazis made you do things you never believed you could. Like Höss, for instance. I never would have tried to make him fuck me if it hadn’t been for Jan. And I never would have pretended that I hated Jews so much, or that I wrote my father’s pamphlet. All that was for Jan. And that radio that I didn’t take. It still almost kills me that I didn’t steal it, but don’t you see, Stingo, how that would have ruined everything for my little boy? And at that same time I just couldn’t open my mouth, just couldn’t report to the Resistance people, couldn’t say a word about all the things I’d learned working for Höss, because I was afraid...” She faltered. Her hands were trembling. “I was so afraid! They made me afraid of everything! Why don’t I tell the truth about myself? Why don’t I write it down in a book that I was a terrible coward, that I was a filthy collaboratrice, that I done everything