Sophie's Choice - William Styron [216]
“When Nathan finally waked up I was beside him on the bed. He smiled and said a few words and I felt he hardly knew what had happened all these last hours. We said one or two ordinary things to each other, you know, sleepy waking-up things, and then I bent down close to him and said, ‘’Darling, I have something I must say to you.’ And he begun to come back with a laugh. ‘Don’t look so—’ Stopping like that, and then he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘You thought I have been some kind of unattached woman from Poland who was never married and so on, with no family or anything in the past.’ I said, ‘It has been easier for me to make it look like that, for I’ve not wanted to dig up the past. I know it has been easier for you, maybe, too.’ He looked painful and then I said, ‘But I must tell you. It is just this. I was married a number of years ago and I had a child, a little boy named Jan who was with me at Auschwitz.’ I stopped speaking then, looking away, and he was silent for a long, long time, and then I heard him say, ‘Oh good God, oh good God.’ He kept saying this over and over. Then he was quiet again, and finally he said, ‘What happened to him? What happened to your little boy?’ And I said to him, ‘I don’t know. He was lost.’ And he said, ‘You mean dead?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. It don’t matter. Just lost. Lost.’
“And that’s all I could say, except for one thing. I said, ‘Now that I’ve told you I must make you promise this. I must make you promise never to ask about my child ever again. Or speak of him. Nor will I ever speak of him either.’ And he promised with one word—‘Yes,’ he said—but the look on his face was filled with such sorrow that I had to turn away.
“Don’t ask me, Stingo, don’t ask me why—after all this—I was still ready for Nathan to piss on me, rape me, stab me, beat me, blind me, do anything with me that he desired. Anyway, a long time passed before he spoke to me again. Then he said, ‘Sophielove, I’m insane, you know. I want to apologize for my insanity.’ And after a bit he said, ‘Want to fuck?’ And I said right away without even thinking twice, ‘Yes. Oh yes.’ And we made love all afternoon, which made me forget the pain but forget God too, and Jan, and all the other things I had lost. And I knew Nathan and me would live for a while more together.”
Chapter Twelve
IN THE SMALL HOURS of that morning, after her long soliloquy, I had to put Sophie into bed—pour her into bed, as we used to say in those days. I was amazed that after all the booze she had guzzled she could remain so coherent throughout the evening; but by the time the bar closed at four o’cock I saw that she was pretty well smashed. I splurged and we took a taxi the mile or so back to the Pink Palace; on the way she dozed heavily against my shoulder. I maneuvered her up the stairs, pushing at her waist from behind, and her legs wobbled dangerously. She uttered only the smallest of sighs when I eased her down into her bed, fully clothed, and watched her pass instantly away into a pale coma. I was drunk and exhausted myself. I threw a coverlet over Sophie. Then I went downstairs to my own room and after undressing slithered between the sheets, falling into the blank slumber of a cretin.
I woke up with the late-morning sunlight ablaze in my face, and the sound in my ears of birds squabbling among the maples and sycamores, and the distant froggy noise of boys’ adolescent voices—all refracted through an aching skull and the pulsating consciousness of the worst hangover I had experienced in a year or two. Needless to say, beer too can undermine body and soul, if downed in enough quantity. I succumbed to an abrupt and terrible magnification of all sensations: the nap of the sheet beneath my naked back felt like cornfield stubble, the chitter of a sparrow outside seemed the squawk of a pterodactyl, a truck