Sophie's Choice - William Styron [256]
“Why shouldn’t you keep them?” I said. “He gave them to you, for heaven’s sake. Keep them!”
“It would make me think of him all the time,” she replied wearily. “I still love him.”
“Then sell them,” I said, a little irritably, “he deserves it. Take them to a pawnshop.”
“Don’t say that, Stingo,” she said without resentment. Then she added, “Someday you will know what it is to be in love.” A sullen Slavic pronouncement, infinitely boring.
We were both silent for a while, and I pondered the profound failure of sensibility embedded in this last statement, which—aside from its boringness—expressed such oblivious unconcern for the lovelorn fool to whom it was addressed. In silence I cursed her with all the force of my preposterous love. Suddenly I felt the presence of the real world again, I was no longer in Poland but in Brooklyn. And even aside from my heartache over Sophie, I stirred inside with a fretful, unhappy malaise. Self-lacerating worries began to dog me. I had been so caught up in Sophie’s story that I had utterly lost sight of the unshakable fact that I was nearly destitute as a result of yesterday’s robbery. This, combined with the knowledge of Sophie’s imminent departure from the Pink Palace—and my consequent solitude there, floundering pennilessly around Flatbush with the fragments of an uncompleted novel—gave me a real wrench of despair. I dreaded the loneliness I faced without Sophie and Nathan; it was far worse than my lack of money.
I continued to writhe inwardly, gazing at Sophie’s pensive and downcast face. She had assumed that reflective pose I had become so accustomed to, hands cupped lightly over her eyes in an attitude that contained an inexpressible combination of emotions (What would she be thinking about now? I wondered): perplexity, amazement, recollected terror, recaptured grief, rage, hatred, loss, love, resignation—all these dwelt there for an instant in a dark tangle even as I watched. Then they went away. As they did I realized that she as well as I knew that the dangling threads of the chronicle she had told me, and which had obviously neared its conclusion, still remained to be tied. I also realized that the momentum which had been building up in her memory all evening had not really diminished, and that despite her weariness she was under a compulsion to scrape out the rest of her appalling and inconceivable past to its bottommost dregs.
Even so, a curious evasiveness seemed to prevent her from closing in directly on the matter of what happened to her little boy, and when I persisted once more—saying “And Jan?”—she let herself fall into a moment’s reverie. “I’m so ashamed about what I done, Stingo—when I swam out into the ocean. Making you risk yourself like that—that was so bad of me, so bad. You must forgive me. But I will be truthful with you when I say that there have been many times since those days in the war when I have thought to kill myself. It seems to come and go in this rhythm. In Sweden right after the war was over and I was in this center for displaced persons I tried to kill myself there. And like in that dream I told you about, the chapel—I had this obsession with le blasphème. Outside the center there was a little church, I do not believe it was Catholic, I think it must have been Lutheran, but it don