Sophie's Choice - William Styron [147]
It was not easy for her to tell all this, she confessed to me, biting her lips and nervously fingering her drawn and ashen cheek; it was especially difficult to reveal one’s lies after having so artfully created a perfect little cameo of paternal rectitude and decency: the fine socialist paterfamilias fretting over the coming terror, a man haloed with goodness in her portrait of a brave libertarian who had risked his life to save Jews in the ferocious Russian pogroms. When she told me this her voice had a touch of the distraught. Her lies! She realized how it undermined her credibility in other matters when she now was forced out of conscience to admit that all that stuff about her father was a simple fabrication. But there it was—a fabrication, a wretched lie, another fantasy served up to provide a frail barrier, a hopeless and crumbly line of defense between those she cared for, like myself, and her smothering guilt. Would I not forgive her, she said, now that I saw both the truth and her necessity for telling the lie? I stroked the back of her hand and, naturally, said of course I would.
For I would not be able to understand this thing with Rudolf Höss, she went on, unless I knew the truth about her father. She had not completely lied to me earlier, she insisted, when she described the idyllic years of her childhood. The house she had lived in, there in peaceful Cracow, had been in most ways a place of surpassing warmth and security in those years between the wars. There was a sweet domestic serenity, largely supplied by her mother, a bosomy, expansive, loving woman whose memory Sophie would cherish if only for the passion for music she had passed on to her only daughter. Try to imagine the leisurely paced life of almost any academic family in the Western world during those years of the twenties and the thirties—with ritual teas and evening musicales and summer outings to the rolling drowsy countryside, dinners with students and mid-year trips to Italy, sabbatical years in Berlin and Salzburg—and one will have an idea of the nature of Sophie’s life in those days, and its civilized odor, its equable, even jovial cast. Over this scene, however, lay an abidingly somber cloud, a presence oppressive and stifling which polluted the very wellsprings of her childhood and youth. This was the constant, overwhelming reality of her father, a man who had exercised over his household, and especially Sophie, a tyrannical domination so inflexible yet so cunningly subtle that she was a grown woman, fully come of age, before she realized that she loathed him past all telling.
There are rare moments in life when the intensity of a buried emotion one has felt toward another person—a repressed animus or a wild love—comes heaving to the surface of consciousness with immediate clarity; sometimes it is like a bodily cataclysm, ever unforgettable. Sophie said she would never forget the exact moment when the revelation of the hatred she felt for her father enveloped her in a horrible hot radiance, and she could find no voice, and thought she might faint dead away...
He was a tall robust-looking man, usually garbed in a frock coat and a shirt with wing collar and a broad foulard tie. Old-fashioned dress, but not at all grotesque in Poland for that time. His face was classically Polish: high wide cheekbones, blue eyes, rather full lips, the broad nose tilting up, large elfin ears. He wore sideburns and his light fine hair was swept back evenly, always nicely coiffed. A couple of artificial teeth made of silver slightly marred his good looks, but only when he opened his mouth wide. Among his colleagues he was considered something of a dandy, though not absurdly so; his considerable academic reputation was a safeguard against ridicule. He was respected despite his extreme views