Sophie's Choice - William Styron [306]
Just as I turned back to Sophie, she looked up at me from the bed and said, “Stingo, I must tell you something now that I’ve never told anyone before. Never before.”
“Tell me, then.”
“Without knowing this, you wouldn’t understood anything about me at all. And I realize I must tell someone at last.”
“Tell me, Sophie.”
“You must get me a drink first.”
With no hesitation I went to her suitcase and plucked from the slippery jumble of linen and silk the second pint bottle of whiskey which I knew she had hidden there. Sophie, get drunk, I thought, you earned it. Then I walked to the tiny bathroom and half filled a sickly-green plastic glass with water and brought it to the bed. Sophie poured whiskey into the glass until it was full.
“Do you want some?” she said.
I shook my head and returned to the window, inhaling the brown chemical, acrid breaths of the distant blaze.
“On the day I arrived at Auschwitz,” I heard her say behind me, “it was beautiful. The forsythia was in bloom.”
I was eating bananas in Raleigh, North Carolina, I thought, thinking this not for the first time since I had known Sophie, yet perhaps for the first time in my life aware of the meaning of the Absurd, and its conclusive, unrevocable horror.
“But you see, Stingo, in Warsaw one night that winter Wanda had foretold her own death and also my death and the death of my children.”
I don’t recall precisely when, during Sophie’s description of those happenings, the Reverend Entwistle began to hear himself whisper, “Oh God, oh my God.” But I did seem to be aware, during the time of the telling of her story, while the smoke churned up over the nearby roofs and the fire erupted at last toward the sky in fierce incandescence, that those words which had commenced in pious Presbyterian entreaty became finally meaningless. By which I mean that the “Oh God” or “Oh my God” or even “Jesus Christ” that were whispered again and again were as empty as any idiot’s dream of God, or the idea that there could be such a Thing.
“I sometimes got to think that everything bad on earth, every evil that was ever invented had to do with my father. That winter in Warsaw, I didn’t feel any guilt about my father and what he had written. But I did feel often this terrible shame, which is not the same as guilt. Shame is a dirty feeling that is even more hard to take than guilt, and I could barely live with the idea that my father’s dreams were coming true right in front of my eyes. I got to know a lot of other things because I was living with Wanda, or very close to her. She got so much information about what was going on everywhere, and I knew already about how they were transporting thousands of Jews to Treblinka and Auschwitz. At first it was thought that they were just being sent for labor, but the Resistance had good intelligence and pretty soon we knew the truth, knew about the gassings and cremations and everything. It was what my father had wanted—and it made me ill.
“When I went to my job at the tar-paper factory I would go on foot or sometimes by streetcar past the ghetto. The Germans had not bled dry the ghetto yet, but they were in the process. Often I could see these lines of Jews with their arms upraised being pushed along like cattle, the Nazis pointing guns at them. The Jews looked so gray and helpless; once I had to get off the streetcar and get sick. And all through this my father seemed to... authorize this horror, not only authorize it but create it in some way. I couldn’t keep it bottled up any longer and I knew I had to tell someone. No one in Warsaw knew much about my background, I was living under my married name. I decided to tell Wanda about this... about this badness.
“And yet... and yet, you know, Stingo, I had to admit something else to myself. And this was that I was fascinated by this unbelievable thing that was happening to the Jews. I couldn’t put my finger on it, this feeling. It was not at all pleasure. It was the opposite, if anything—sickening. And yet when I’d walk past the ghetto at a distance I would stop