Sophie's Choice - William Styron [135]
If Sophie had been just a victim—helpless as a blown leaf, a human speck, volitionless, like so many multitudes of her fellow damned—she would have seemed merely pathetic, another wretched waif of the storm cast up in Brooklyn with no secrets which had to be unlocked. But the fact of the matter is that at Auschwitz (and this she came gradually to confess to me that summer) she had been a victim, yes, but both victim and accomplice, accessory—however haphazard and ambiguous and uncalculating her design—to the mass slaughter whose sickening vaporous residue spiraled skyward from the chimneys of Birkenau whenever she peered out across the parched autumnal meadows from the windows of the mansard roof of the house of her captor, Rudolf Höss. And therein lay one (although not the only one) of the prime causes of her devastating guilt—the guilt she concealed from Nathan and which, with no inkling of its nature or its actuality, he so often cruelly inflamed. For she could not wriggle out from beneath the suffocating knowledge that there had been this time in her life when she had played out the role, to its limit, of a fellow conspirator in crime. And this was the role of an obsessed and poisonous anti-Semite—a passionate, avid, tediously single-minded hater of Jews.
There were only two major events that took place during her stay at Auschwitz which Sophie ever spoke to me about, and neither of these did she ever mention to Nathan. The first of these—the day of her arrival at the camp—I have already referred to, but she did not speak to me of that until our final hours together. The second event, concerning her very brief relationship with Rudolf Höss that same year, and the circumstances leading up to it, she described to me during the hours of a rainy August afternoon at the Maple Court. Or, I should say, a rainy afternoon and an evening. For although she blurted out to me the episode with Höss in such feverish yet careful detail that it acquired for me the graphic, cinematic quality of something immediately observed, the memory and the emotional fatigue and strain it caused her made her break off in helpless tears, and I had to piece together the rest of the tale later. The date of that encounter in Höss’s joyless attic was—like her April Fools’ Day debut—instantly memorable, and remains so still, for it was the birthday of three of my heroes: of my father, of the autumn-haunted Thomas Wolfe, and of wild Nat Turner, that fanatical black demon whose ghost had seared my imagination throughout my boyhood and youth. It was the third of October, and it was embedded in Sophie’s own memory by virtue of the fact that it was the anniversary of her marriage to Casimir Zawistowski in Cracow.
And what, I have asked myself (pursuing George Steiner’s speculation upon the existence of some sinister metaphysical time warp), were the activities of old Stingo, buck private in the United States Marine Corps, at the moment when the terrible last dust—in a translucent curtain of powdery siftings so thick that, in Sophie’s words, “you could taste it on the lips like sand”—of some 2,100 Jews from Athens and the Greek islands billowed across the vista upon which she had earlier fixed her gaze, obscuring the pastoral figures of serenely grazing sheep as completely as if a towering fogbank had swept in from the Vistula marshes? The answer is remarkably simple. I was writing a letter of birthday felicitations—the letter itself easily obtainable not so long ago from a father who has cherished my most vapid jottings (even when I was very young) in the assurance that I was destined for some future literary luminosity. I extract here the central paragraph, which followed an affectionate expression of greetings. I am profoundly appalled now by its collegiate silliness, but I think it worth quoting in order to further emphasize the glaring and even, perhaps, terrifying incongruity. If one is historically minded enough, one can be charitable. Also, I was eighteen years old.