But quickly Himmler’s orders were countermanded. There was a need for flesh to fill IG Farben’s insatiable maw; it was back to the ramps again for the tormented doctor. Selections would begin again. Soon only Jews would go to the gas chambers. But until final orders came, Jews and “Aryans” alike would undergo the selection process. (There would be occasional capricious exceptions, such as the shipment of Jews from Malkinia.) The renewed horror scraped like steel files at the doctor’s soul, threatened to shred his reason. He began to drink, to acquire sloppy eating habits, and to mis God. Wo, wo ist der lebende Gott? Where is the God of my fathers?
But of course the answer finally dawned on him, and one day I suspect the revelation made him radiant with hope. It had to do with the matter of sin, or rather, it had to do with the absence of sin, and his own realization that the absence of sin and the absence of God were inseparably intertwined. No sin! He had suffered boredom and anxiety, and even revulsion, but no sense of sin from the bestial crimes he had been party to, nor had he felt that in sending thousands of the wretched innocent to oblivion he had transgressed against divine law. All had been unutterable monotony. All of his depravity had been enacted in a vacuum of sinless and businesslike godlessness, while his soul thirsted for beatitude.
Was it not supremely simple, then, to restore his belief in God, and at the same time to affirm his human capacity for evil, by committing the most intolerable sin that he was able to conceive? Goodness could come later. But first a great sin. One whose glory lay in its subtle magnanimity—a choice. After all, he had the power to take both. This is the only way I have been able to explain what Dr. Jemand von Niemand did to Sophie when she appeared with her two little children on April Fools’ Day, while the wild tango beat of “La Cumparsita” drummed and rattled insistently off-key in the gathering dusk.
Chapter Sixteen
ALL MY LIFE I have retained a streak of uncontrolled didacticism. God knows into what suffocating depths of discomfort I have, over the years, plunged family and friends, who out of love have tolerated my frequent seizures and have more or less successfully concealed yawns, the faint crack of jaw muscles and those telltale drops at the tear ducts signaling a death struggle with tedium. But on rare occasions, when the moment is exactly right and the audience is utterly responsive, my encyclopedic ability to run on and on about a subject has served me in good stead; at a time when the situation demands the blessed release of witless diversion, nothing can be more soothing than useless facts and empty statistics. I employed all my knowledge about—of all things—peanuts to try to captivate Sophie that evening in Washington, as we ambled past the floodlight-drenched White House and then made our roundabout way toward Herzog’s restaurant and “the best crab cakes in town.” After what she had told me, peanuts seemed the appropriate commonplace out of which to refashion new conduits of communication. For during the two hours or so following her story I don’t think I had been able to say more than three or four words to her. Nor had she been able to say much to me. But peanuts allowed me at last to breach our silence, to try to break out of the cloud of depression hovering over us.
“The peanut’s not a nut,” I explained, “but a pea. It’s a cousin of the pea and the bean but different in an important way—it develops its pods under the ground. The peanut’s an annual, growing low over the soil. There are three major types of peanut grown in the United States—the large-seeded Virginia, the runner and the Spanish. Peanuts have to have a lot of sunshine and a long frost-free growing period. That’s why they grow in the South. The major peanut-growing states are, in order, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Texas. There was an incredibly gifted Negro scientist named George Washington Carver who developed dozens of uses for peanuts. Aside from just food, they’re used in cosmetics, plastics, insulation, explosives, certain medicines, lots of other things. Peanuts are a booming crop, Sophie, and I think that this little farm of ours will grow and grow, and pretty soon we’ll not only be self-sufficient but maybe even rich—at least, very well-off. We won’t have to depend on Alfred Knopf or Harper and Brothers for our daily bread. The reason I want you to know something about peanuts as a crop is simply because if you’re going to be the chatelaine of the manor, there are times when you’ll have to have a hand in the running of the operations. Now, as for the actual growing, peanuts are planted after the last frost by seeding three to ten inches apart in rows about two feet apart. The pods usually mature about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and forty days after planting...”
“You know, Stingo, I just thought of something,” Sophie said, breaking in at some point on my soliloquy. “It’s something very important.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“I don’t know how to drive. I don’t know how to drive a car.”
“So?”
“But we’ll be living on this farm. From what you say, so far away from things. I’ll have to be able to drive a car, won’t I? I never learned in Poland—so few people had cars. At least, you never learned to drive until you were so much older. And here—Nathan said he was going to teach me but he never did. Surely I’ll have to learn how to drive.”
“Easy,” I replied. “I’ll teach you. There’s a pickup truck already there. Anyway, in Virginia they’re very lax about driver’s licenses. Jesus”—I had a sudden fit of recollection—“I remember I got my license on my fourteenth birthday. I mean, it was legal!”
“Fourteen?” said Sophie.
“Christ, I weighed about ninety pounds and could barely see over the steering wheel. I remember the state trooper who was giving the test looked at my father and said, ‘Is he your son or a midget?’ But I got the license. That’s the South... There’s something that’s so different about the South even in trivial ways. Take the matter of youth, for instance. In the North you’d never be allowed to get a driver’s license so young. It’s as if you got older much younger in the South. Something about the lushness, the ripeness maybe. Like that joke about what’s the Mississippi definition of a virgin. The answer is: a twelve-year-old girl who can run faster than her daddy.” I heard myself giggle self-indulgently, in the first spell of what could even remotely be called good humor I had experienced in hours. And suddenly the hunger in me to get down to Southampton County, to start planting roots, was nearly as intense as the real need I had by this time to consume some of Herzog’s celebrated crab cakes. I began jabbering at Sophie with brainless unrestraint, not so much actually forgetful of what she had just finished telling me as, I think, thoughtlessly oblivious of the fragile mood her confessional had created within herself.
“Now then,” I said in my best pastor’s counseling voice, “I have a feeling from some of the things you mentioned that you think you’re going to be out of place down there. But listen, nothing’s further from the truth. They might be a little stand-offish at first—and you’ll worry about your accent and your foreignness, and so on—but let me tell you something, Sophie darling, Southerners are the warmest and most accepting people in America, once they get to know you. They’re not like big-city hooligans and shysters. So don’t worry. Of course, we’ll have to do a little adjusting. As I said before, I think the wedding ceremony will have to come pretty soon—you know, to avoid ugly gossip if nothing else. So after we get the feel of the place and introduce ourselves around—this’ll take several days, that’s all—we’ll make out a big shopping list and take the truck and drive up to Richmond. There’ll be thousands of things we’ll need. The place is filled with all the basics, but we’ll need so many other things. Like I told you, a phonograph and a bunch of records. Then there’s the little matter of your wedding clothes. You’ll naturally want to be dressed nice for the ceremony, and so we’ll shop around in Richmond. You won’t find Paris couture there but there are some excellent stores—”
“Stingo!” she cut in sharply. “Please! Please! Don’t run on like that, about wedding clothes and such as that. What do you think I have in my suitcase right now? Just what
!” Her voice had risen, cross and quavering, touched with an anger she had rarely ever aimed at me.
We stopped walking, and I turned to look at her face in the shadows of the cool evening. Her eyes were clouded with murky unhappiness and I knew then, with a painful catch in my chest, that I had said the wrong thing, or things. “What?” I stupidly asked.
“Wedding clothes,” she said somberly, “the wedding clothes from Saks that Nathan bought me. I don’t need any wedding clothes. Don’t you see...”
And yes, I did see. To my awful distress, I did see. It was bad. At this instant I sensed for the first time a distance separating us—an intolerable distance which, in my delusory dreams about a Southern love nest, I had not realized had been keeping us apart as effectively as a wide river in flood, preventing any real communion. At least on the loving level I so craved. Nathan. She was still totally absorbed in Nathan, so much so that even the sad nuptial garments she had transported so far had some huge importance to her that was both tactile and symbolic. And I suddenly grasped another truth: how ludicrous it was of me to think of a wedding and sweet uxorious years down on the old plantation when the mistress of my passion—standing before me now with her tired face so twisted with hurt—was lugging around with her wedding clothes meant to please a man she had loved to the point of death. Christ, my stupidity! My tongue had turned to a lump of concrete, I struggled for words but could say nothing. Over Sophie’s shoulder George Washington’s cenotaph, a blazing stiletto in the night sky, was washed in October mist, and tiny people crawled around its foundation. I felt weak and hopeless, with a central part of me in shambles. Each ticking moment seemed to bear Sophie away from me with the speed of light.
Yet just then she murmured something I didn’t understand. She made a sibilant sound, almost inaudible, and right there on Constitution Avenue, moved toward me in a rush and pressed herself into my arms. “Oh, Stingo dear,” she whispered, “please forgive me. I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I still want to go to Virginia with you. Really I do. And we are going tomorrow together, aren’t we? It’s just that when you mention getting married, I get so... so full of trouble. So uncertain. Don’t you understand?”
“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 Germans—I wouldn’t know where to start to find him. If he’s really there, that is. When I was in the refugee center in Sweden it was all I could think about night and day—to get well and healthy so that I could go to Germany and find my little boy. But then I met this Polish woman—she was from Kielce, I remember—and she had the most tragic, haunted face I ever saw on a person. She had been a prisoner at Ravensbrück. She had lost her child, too, to Lebensborn, a little girl, and for months after the war she’d wandered all through Germany, hunting and hunting. But she never found the little girl. She said no one ever found their children. It was bad enough, she told me, not to find her daughter, but the search was even worse, this agony. Don’t go, she told me, don’t go. Because if you do you’ll see your child everywhere, in those ruined cities, on every street corner, in every crowd of schoolchildren, on buses, passing, in cars, waving at you from playgrounds, everywhere—and you’ll call out and rush toward the child, only he will not be yours. And so your soul will break apart a hundred times a day, and finally it is almost worse than knowing your child is dead...
“But to be quite honest, Stingo, like I told you, I don’t think Höss ever done anything for me, and I think Jan stayed in the camp, and if he did, then I am certain he didn’t live. When I was so sick myself in Birkenau that winter just before the war ended—I didn’t know anything about this, I heard about it later, I was so sick I almost died—the SS wanted to get rid of the children who were left, there were several hundred of them far off, in the Children’s Camp. The Russians were coming and the SS wanted the children destroyed. Most of them were Polish; the Jewish children were already dead. They thought of burning them alive in a pit, or shooting them, but they decided to do something that wouldn’t show too many marks and evidence. So in the freezing cold they marched the children down to the river and made them take off their clothes and soak them in the water as if they were washing them, and then made them put on these wet clothes again. Then they marched them back to the area in front of the barracks where they had been living and had a roll call. Standing in their wet clothes. The roll call lasted for many, many hours while the children stood wet and freezing and night came. All of the children died of
being exposed that day. They died of exposure and pneumonia, very fast. I think Jan must have been among them...
“But I don’t know,” Sophie said at last, gazing at me dry-eyed but sliding into the slurred diction which glass after glass of alcohol lent to her tongue, along with the merciful and grief-deadening anodyne it provided for her battered memory. “Is it best to know about a child’s death, even one so horrible, or to know that the child lives but that you will never, never see him again? I don’t know either for sure. Suppose I had chosen Jan to go... to go to the left instead of Eva. Would that have changed anything?” She paused to look out through the night at the dark shores of the Virginia of our destination, removed by staggering dimensions of time and space from her own benighted, cursed and—to me even at that moment—all but incomprehensible history. “Nothing would have changed anything,” she said. Sophie was not given to actresslike gestures, but for the first time in the months I had known her she did this strange thing: she pointed directly to the center of her bosom, then pulled away with her fingers an invisible veil as if to expose to view a heart outraged as desperately as the mind can conceive. “Only this has changed, I think. It has been hurt so much, it has turned to stone.”
Sophie's Choice (Open Road) Page 69