Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  I was groggy with worry and despair. Nor did I have any idea how to deal with the situation as it now stood, with its overtone of irreconcilable strife. Obviously I had to ponder what to do, had to figure out how to try to set things straight—somehow calm Nathan down and in the process remove Sophie from the target area of his blind and baleful rage—but I was so completely rattled that my brain had become almost amnesic; I was virtually unable to think. In order to collect my senses I decided to stay there at the Maple Court for a while, during which time I hoped to lay out a bright and rational plan of action. I knew that when my father arrived at Penn Station and did not see me, he would go straight to the hotel—the McAlpin on Broadway at Thirty-fourth Street. (In those days everyone from the Tidewater of my father’s middle social station stayed either at the McAlpin or the Taft; the very few who were more affluent always frequented the Waldorf-Astoria.) I called the McAlpin and left a message saying I would see him there late in the evening. Then I returned to the table (it was another evil sign, I thought, that in their swift exit either Nathan or Sophie had overturned the bottle of Chablis, which, though unbroken, lay on its side dripping its dregs onto the floor) and sat for two full hours brooding over the way in which I must collect and put back together the shards of our fragmented friendship. I suspected it would be no easy task, given the colossal dimensions of Nathan’s fury.

  On the other hand, recalling how on that Sunday following a similar “tempest” he had made overtures of friendship so warm and eager as to be almost embarrassing, and had actually apologized to me for his misbehavior, it occurred to me that he might welcome any gestures of pacification I would make. God knows, I thought, it was something I hated to do; scenes such as I had just been a participant in fractured my spirit, exhausted me; all I really wanted to do was to curl up and take a nap. Confronting Nathan again this soon was an idea intimidating and fraught with potential menace; queasy, I felt myself perspiring as Nathan had done. To screw up courage I took my time and drank four or five or, maybe, six medium-sized glasses of Rheingold. Visions of Sophie’s pathetic and disheveled agony, her total disarray, kept flashing on and off in my mind, causing my stomach to heave. Finally, though, as dark fell over Flatbush, I wandered a little drunkenly back through the sultry dusk to the Pink Palace, gazing up with tangled apprehension and hope at the soft glow, the color of rose wine, that blossomed out from beneath Sophie’s window blind, indicating that she was there. I heard music; it was either her radio or her phonograph playing. I don’t know why I was at the same time so buoyed up and saddened by the lovely and plaintive sound of the Haydn concerto for cello, washing down soft on the summer evening when I approached the house. Children called through the twilight from the Parade Grounds at the park’s edge, and their cries, sweet as the piping of birds, mingled with the cello’s gentle meditation and pierced me with some profound, aching, all but unrecapturable remembrance.

  I caught my breath in anguish at the sight which greeted me on the second floor. Had a typhoon swept through the Pink Palace, there could not have been a more horrendous effect of havoc and shambles. Sophie’s room looked as if it had been turned upside down; dresser drawers had been pulled out and emptied, the bed had been stripped, the closet ransacked. A litter of newspapers was strewn on the floor. The shelves had been emptied of books. The phonograph records were gone. Save for the paper debris, nothing was left. There was a single exception to the general look of plunder—the radio-phonograph. Doubtless too large and bulky to have been lugged off, it remained on the table, and the sound of the Haydn emanating from its gorge caused me an eerie chill, as if I were listening to music in a concert hall from which the audience had mysteriously fled. Only steps away, in Nathan’s room, the effect was the same: everything had been removed or, if not taken away, had been packed in cardboard boxes that looked ready for immediate transfer. The heat hung close and sticky in the hallway; it was heat unreasonably intense even for the summer evening—adding bafflement to the chagrin with which I was already overwhelmed—and for an instant I thought there must be a conflagration lurking behind the pink walls until I suddenly spied Morris Fink crouched in one corner, laboring over a steaming radiator.

  “It must of got turned on by accident,” he explained, standing up as I approached. “Nathan must of turned it on by accident a little while ago when he was running around with his suitcase and things. There, you cocksucker,” he snarled at the radiator, giving it a kick, “that’ll fix your guts.” The steam expired with a little hiss and Morris Fink regarded me with his lugubrious lackluster eyes. An overbite I had not really noticed before made him look pronouncedly like a rodent. “This place for a while, it was like a cuckoo ranch.”

  “What happened?” I said, cold with apprehension. “Where’s Sophie? Where’s Nathan?”

  “They’re gone, both of them. They finally cut out for good.”

  “What do you mean, for good?”

  “Just what I said,” he replied. “Finished. For good. Gone for good, and fuckin’ good riddance, I say. There was something creepy, I mean sick about this house with that fuckin’ golem Nathan. All that fightin’ and screamin’. Fuckin’ good riddance, if you want to know.”

  I felt desperation edging my voice as I demanded, “But where did they go? Did they tell you where they were going?”

  “No,” he said, “they went in two directions.”

  “Two directions? Do you mean...”

  “I seen them come back in the house about two hours ago just when I was walkin’ up the street. I’d went out to a movie. Already he was howlin’ at her like a gorilla. I said to myself: Oh shit, another fight already, after all these weeks when it was quiet. Now I got to maybe try to save her again from this meshuggener. But then when I get to the house here I see that he’s makin’ her pack up. I mean, he’s in his room, see, packin’ his own things, and she’s in the other room packin’ hers. And all the time he’s hollerin’ at her like a madman—oy, what dirty things he calls her!”

  “And Sophie...”

  “And she—she’s cryin’ her eyes out the whole time, the two of them packin’ their things and him screamin’ and callin’ her a whore and a cunt and Sophie bawlin’ like a baby. It made me sick!” He paused, took a swallow of air, then resumed more slowly. “I didn’t realize that they were packin’ to leave for good. Then he looked down over the railing and seen me and asked where Yetta was. I said she was over in Staten Island visitin’ her sister. He threw me down thirty dollars for the rent, Sophie’s and his. Then I realized they were gettin’ out for good.”

  “When did they finally go?” I asked. A sense of loss that was as suffocatingly painful as actual bereavement welled up in me; I gagged on a wet heave of nausea. “Didn’t they leave an address?“

  “I tell you they went in two different directions,” he said impatiently. “They get their stuff all packed finally and go downstairs. This was only about twenty minutes ago. Nathan gives me a buck to help bring the baggage down, also to take care of the phonograph. Says he’ll come back and get it later, along with some boxes. Then when the baggage is all out on the sidewalk he gets me to go up to the corner and flag down a couple of taxis. When I come back with the taxis he’s still hollerin’ at her, and I say to myself: Well, at least this time he didn’t hit her or nothin’. But he’s still hollerin’ at her, about Owswitch mainly. Something like Owswitch.”

  “About... what?”

  “About Owswitch, that’s what he says. Called her a cunt again and asked her this weirdo question over and over. Asked her how come she lived through Owswitch. What did he mean by that?”

  “Called her...” I faltered helplessly, nearly bereft of speech. “Then what...”

  “Then he gave her fifty bucks—it looked like about that—and told the driver to take her someplace in New York, Manhattan, some hotel I think, I can’t remember where. He said somethin’ about how happy he’d be never to have to see her again. I’ve never heard anyone cry like that Sophie was cr
yin’ then. Anyway, after she was gone he put his own things in the other cab and left in the opposite direction, up toward Flatbush Avenue. I think he must of went to his brother’s in Queens.”

  “Gone then,” I whispered, evilly stricken now.

  “Gone for good,” he replied, “and good fuckin’ riddance I say. That guy was a golem! But Sophie—Sophie I feel sorry for. Sophie was a real nice broad, you know?”

  For a moment I could say nothing. The gentle Haydn, murmurous with longing, filled the abandoned room nearby with its sweet, symmetrical, pensive cadences, adding to my feeling of some absolute void, and of irretrievable loss.

  “Yes,” I said finally, “I know.”

  “What’s Owswitch?” said Morris Fink.

  Chapter Nine

  OF THE MANY COMMENTATORS on the Nazi concentration camps, few have written with greater insight and passion than the critic George Steiner. I came across Steiner’s book of essays Language and Silence in the year of its publication, 1967—a year which had considerable significance for me, aside from the fairly trivial fact that it marked exactly two decades since that summer of mine in Brooklyn. God, how the time had passed since Sophie, and Nathan, and Leslie Lapidus! The domestic tragedy which I had struggled so to bring to parturition at Yetta Zimmerman’s had long before been published (to a general acclaim far beyond my youthful hopes); I had written other works of fiction and a certain vaguely unenthusiastic and uncommitted amount of trendy sixties’ journalism. However, my heart was still with the art of the novel—said to be moribund or even, Lord help us, dead as a smelt—and I was pleased that year of 1967 to be able to disprove its demise (to my personal satisfaction at least) by publishing a work which, in addition to fulfilling my own philosophical and aesthetic requirements as a novelist, found hundreds of thousands of readers—not all of them, as it turned out later, completely happy about the event. But this is another matter, and if I may be forgiven the indulgence, I will simply say that that year was, in general, a rewarding one for me.

  The small note of qualification arises out of the fact that—as is usual after a number of years spent hard at work on a complex creation—there was a gray spiritless letdown, a doldrum-heavy crisis of the will over what one should do next. Many writers feel this way after completing an ambitious work; it is like a little death, one wants to crawl back into some wet womb and become an egg. But duty called, and again, as I had so many times before, I thought of Sophie. For twenty years Sophie and Sophie’s life—past life and of our time together—and Nathan and his and Sophie’s appalling troubles and all the interconnected and progressively worsening circumstances which led that poor straw-haired Polish darling headlong into destruction had preyed on my memory like a repetitive and ineradicable tic. The landscape and the living figures of that summer, as in some umber-smeared snapshot found in the brittle black pages of an old album, had become more dusty and indistinct as time for me unspooled with negligent haste into my own middle age, yet that summer’s agony still cried out for explanation. Thus in the last months of 1967 I began thinking in earnest about Sophie and Nathan’s sorrowful destiny; I knew I would have to deal with it eventually, just as I had dealt those many years before, so successfully and expediently, with another young woman I had loved beyond hope—the doomed Maria Hunt. For various reasons, it turned out that several more years would pass before I began the story of Sophie as it has been set down here. But the preparation I went through at that time required that I torture myself by absorbing as much as I could find of the literature of l’univers concentrationnaire. And in reading George Steiner, I experienced the shock of recognition.

  “One of the things I cannot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective,” Steiner writes, “is the time relation.” Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. “Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox—Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be—that I puzzle over time. Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, ‘good time’ and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?”

  Until I read this passage I had rather simple-mindedly thought that only I had entertained such speculation, that only I had become obsessed about the time relation—to the extent, for example, that I had attempted more or less successfully to pinpoint my own activities on the first day of April, 1943, the day when Sophie, entering Auschwitz, fell into the “slow hands of the living damnation.” At some point late in 1947—only a relatively brief number of years removed from the beginning of Sophie’s ordeal—I rummaged through my memory in an attempt to locate myself in time on the same day that Sophie walked through the gates of hell. The first day of April, 1943—April Fools’ Day—had a mnemonic urgency for me, and after going through some of my father’s letters to me, which handily corroborated my movements, I was able to come up with the absurd fact that on that afternoon, as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas. I was eating myself nearly sick with bananas, the reason being that in the coming hour I was to take a physical examination for entrance into the Marine Corps. At the age of seventeen, already over six feet tall but weighing only 122 pounds, I knew I had to put on three more pounds to satisfy the minimum weight requirement. Stomach grossly bulging like that of a starveling, naked on a set of scales in front of a brawny old recruiting sergeant who stared at my emaciated adolescent beanpole of a frame and uttered a sneering “Jesus Christ” (there was also a snotty joke about April Fools’ Day), I squeaked past by scant ounces.

  On that day I had not heard of Auschwitz, nor of any concentration camp, nor of the mass destruction of the European Jews, nor even much about the Nazis. For me the enemy in that global war was the Japanese, and my ignorance of the anguish hovering like a noxious gray smog over places with names like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen was complete. But wasn’t this true for most Americans, indeed most human beings who dwelt beyond the perimeter of the Nazi horror? “This notion of different orders of time simultaneous but in no effective analogy or communication,” Steiner continues, “may be necessary to the rest of us, who were not there, who lived as if on another planet.” Quite so—especially when (and the fact is often forgotten) for millions of Americans the embodiment of evil during that time was not the Nazis, despised and feared as they were, but the legions of Japanese soldiers who swarmed the jungles of the Pacific like astigmatic and rabid little apes and whose threat to the American mainland seemed far more dangerous, not to say more repulsive, given their yellowness and their filthy habits. But even if such narrowly focused animosity against an Oriental foe had not been real, most people could scarcely have known about the Nazi death camps, and this makes Steiner’s ruminations all the more instructive. The nexus between these “different orders of time” is, of course—for those of us who were not there—someone who was there, and this brings me back to Sophie. To Sophie and, in particular, to Sophie’s relation with SS Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Franz Höss.

  I have spoken several times about Sophie’s reticence concerning Auschwitz, her firm and generally unyielding silence about that fetid sinkhole of her past. Since she herself (as she once admitted to me) had so successfully anesthetized her mind against recurring images of her encampment in the abyss, it is small wonder that neither Nathan nor I ever gained much knowledge of what happened to her on a
day-to-day basis (especially during the last months) aside from the quite obvious fact that she had come close to death from malnutrition and more than one contagion. Thus the jaded reader surfeited with our century’s perdurable feast of atrocities will be spared here a detailed chronicle of the killings, gassings, beatings, tortures, criminal medical experiments, slow deprivations, excremental outrages, screaming madnesses and other entries into the historical account which have already been made by Tadeusz Borowski, Jean-Francois Steiner, Olga Lengyel, Eugen Kogon, André Schwarz-Bart, Elie Wiesel and Bruno Bettelheim, to name but a few of the most eloquent who have tried to limn the totally infernal in their heart’s blood. My vision of Sophie’s stay at Auschwitz is necessarily particularized, and perhaps a little distorted, though honestly so. Even if she had decided to reveal either to Nathan or me the gruesome minutiae of her twenty months at Auschwitz, I might be constrained to draw down the veil, for, as George Steiner remarks, it is not clear “that those who were not themselves fully involved should touch upon these agonies unscathed.” I have been haunted, I must confess, by an element of presumption in the sense of being an intruder upon the terrain of an experience so bestial, so inexplicable, so undetachably and rightfully the possession alone of those who suffered and died, or survived it. A survivor, Elie Wiesel, has written: “Novelists made free use of [the Holocaust] in their work... In so doing they cheapened [it], drained it of its substance. The Holocaust was now a hot topic, fashionable, guaranteed to gain attention and to achieve instant success...” I do not know how ultimately valid any of this is, but I am aware of the risk.