Sophie's Choice - William Styron [323]
“Yes,” I replied. And of course I did, although with thick-witted belatedness. I held her close. “Of course I do, Sophie.”
“Oh, we’ll go to the farm tomorrow,” she said, squeezing me, “we really will. Just don’t talk about marriage. Please.”
At that moment I also realized that something not quite genuine had attended my little spasm of euphoria. There had been an ingredient of escapism in my trying so doggedly to lay out the attractions of this garden of terrestrial happiness hard by the Dismal Swamp, where no blowflies buzzed, no pumps broke down, no crops failed, no underpaid darkies ever sulked in the cotton patch, no pig shit stank; for all I knew, despite the trust I had in my father’s opinion, dear old “Five Elms” might be a squalid demesne and a gone-to-seed wreck, and to booby-trap Sophie, so to speak, by enticing her into some tumbledown Tobacco Road would be an indefensible disgrace. But I dismissed all this from my mind, it was something I could not even consider. And there was a more troubling matter. What now had become hideously apparent was that our brief bubble bath of good spirits was flat, finished, dead. When we resumed strolling along, the gloom hovering around Sophie seemed almost visible, touchable, like a fog from which one, after reaching out to her, would withdraw a hand damp with despair. “Oh, Stingo, I need a drink so bad,” she said.
We walked through the evening in total silence. I gave up pointing out the landmarks of the capital, abandoning the tour-guide approach I had used to try to perk up Sophie during the beginning of our meander. It was clear to me that try as she might, she could not shake off the horror which she had felt compelled to spill forth in our little hotel room. Nor indeed could I. Here on Fourteenth Street in the frosty cider air of an early autumn night, with L’Enfant’s stylish oblong spaces luminescent all around us, it was plain that Sophie and I could appreciate neither the symmetry of the city nor its air of wholesome and benevolent peace. Washington suddenly appeared paradigmatically American, sterile, geometrical, unreal. I had identified so completely with Sophie that I felt Polish, with Europe’s putrid blood rushing through my arteries and veins. Auschwitz still stalked my soul as well as hers. Was there no end to this? No end?
And finally, seated at a table overlooking the sparkling moon-flecked Potomac, I asked Sophie about her little boy. I watched Sophie take a gulp of whiskey before she said, “I’m glad you asked that question, Stingo. I thought you would and I wanted you to, because for some reason I couldn’t bring it up myself. Yes, you’re right. I’ve often thought to myself: If I only knew what happened to Jan, if I could only find him, that might truly save me from all this sadness that comes over me. If I found Jan, I might be—oh, rescued from all these terrible feelings I still have, this desire I have had and still have to be... finished with life. To say adieu to this place which is so mysterious and strange and... and so wrong. If I could just find my little boy, I think that could save me.
“It might even save me from the guilt I have felt over Eva. In some way I know I should feel no badness over something I done like that. I see that it was—oh, you know—beyond my control, but it is still so terrible to wake up these many mornings with a memory of that, having to live with it. When you add it to all the other bad things I done, it makes everything unbearable. Just unbearable.
“Many, many times I have wondered whether the chances are possible that Jan is still alive somewhere. If Höss done what he said he would do, then maybe he still is alive, somewhere in Germany. But I don’t think I could ever find him, after these years. They took away the identities of those children in Lebensborn, changed their names so fast, turned them so quickly into