Sophie's Choice - William Styron [176]
“I was terrified,” Sophie went on. “You see, I had tried to get close to him and I had failed, and now he was sending me away and all my hopes were destroyed. I tried to speak to him, but all I could feel was this choking in my throat and the words wouldn’t come. It was like he was going to cast me back into darkness and there was nothing I could do—nothing at all. I kept looking at him and I was trying to speak. That beautiful Arabian horse was still in the field down below and Höss was leaning against the window, gazing down at it. The smoke from Birkenau had lifted up. I heard him whisper something about his transfer to Berlin again. He spoke very bitterly. I remember he used words like ‘failure’ and ‘ingratitude,’ and once he said very clearly, ‘I know how well I have performed my duty.’ He didn’t say anything for a long while then, only kept looking at that horse, and finally I heard him say this, I am almost sure they were his exact words, ‘To escape the body of a man yet still dwell in Nature. To be that horse, to live within that beast. That would be freedom.’ ” She paused for an instant. “I have always remembered those words. They were just so...” And Sophie stopped speaking, her eyes glazed with memory, staring toward the phantasmagoric past as if in wonderment.
(“They were just so...”) What?
After Sophie told me all this, she broke off talking for a long time. She hid her eyes behind her fingers and bent her head downward toward the table, buried in somber reflection. She had throughout the long telling kept a firm grip on herself, but now the glistening wetness between her fingers told me how bitterly she had begun to weep. I let her cry in silence. We had been sitting for hours together that rainy August afternoon, our elbows propped against one of the Formica tables at the Maple Court. It was three days after the cataclysmic breakup between Sophie and Nathan that I described many pages ago. It may be recalled that when the two of them vanished I had been on my way for a visit with my father in Manhattan. (It was an important visit for me—and in fact I had decided to return to Virginia with him—and I want to describe it in some detail later.) From this get-together I had come back unhappily to the Pink Palace, expecting to find the same abandonment and ruination I remembered from that evening—certainly not anticipating the presence of Sophie, whom I discovered, miraculously, in the shambles of her room, stuffing her last odds and ends into a dilapidated suitcase. Meanwhile Nathan was nowhere in sight—I considered this a blessing—and after our rueful and sweet reunion Sophie and I hurried in the midst of an explosive summer downpour to the Maple Court. Needless to say, I was overjoyed to note that Sophie seemed as genuinely happy to see me as I was to be simply breathing her face and body once more. To the best of my knowledge, I had been, aside from Nathan and perhaps Blackstock, the only person in the world who could claim any real closeness to Sophie, and I sensed her clutching at my presence as if it were something actually life-giving.
She was still in what appeared to be a raw condition of shock over Nathan’s desertion of her (she said, not without a touch of grisly humor, that she had contemplated several times hurling herself from the window of the ratty Upper West Side hotel where she had languished those three days), but if grief over his parting had obviously eroded her spirit, it was this same grief, I sensed, that allowed her to open even wider the gates of her memory in a mighty cathartic cataract. But one small impression nags. Should I have become alarmed at something about Sophie which I had never once observed before? She had begun to drink, not heavily