Sophie's Choice - William Styron [306]
But of course the answer finally dawned on him, and one day I suspect the revelation made him radiant with hope. It had to do with the matter of sin, or rather, it had to do with the absence of sin, and his own realization that the absence of sin and the absence of God were inseparably intertwined. No sin! He had suffered boredom and anxiety, and even revulsion, but no sense of sin from the bestial crimes he had been party to, nor had he felt that in sending thousands of the wretched innocent to oblivion he had transgressed against divine law. All had been unutterable monotony. All of his depravity had been enacted in a vacuum of sinless and businesslike godlessness, while his soul thirsted for beatitude.
Was it not supremely simple, then, to restore his belief in God, and at the same time to affirm his human capacity for evil, by committing the most intolerable sin that he was able to conceive? Goodness could come later. But first a great sin. One whose glory lay in its subtle magnanimity—a choice. After all, he had the power to take both. This is the only way I have been able to explain what Dr. Jemand von Niemand did to Sophie when she appeared with her two little children on April Fools’ Day, while the wild tango beat of “La Cumparsita” drummed and rattled insistently off-key in the gathering dusk.
Chapter Sixteen
ALL MY LIFE I have retained a streak of uncontrolled didacticism. God knows into what suffocating depths of discomfort I have, over the years, plunged family and friends, who out of love have tolerated my frequent seizures and have more or less successfully concealed yawns, the faint crack of jaw muscles and those telltale drops at the tear ducts signaling a death struggle with tedium. But on rare occasions, when the moment is exactly right and the audience is utterly responsive, my encyclopedic ability to run on and on about a subject has served me in good stead; at a time when the situation demands the blessed release of witless diversion, nothing can be more soothing than useless facts and empty statistics. I employed all my knowledge about—of all things—peanuts to try to captivate Sophie that evening in Washington, as we ambled past the floodlight-drenched White House and then made our roundabout way toward Herzog’s restaurant and “the best crab cakes in town.” After what she had told me, peanuts seemed the appropriate commonplace out of which to refashion new conduits of communication. For during the two hours or so following her story I don’t think I had been able to say more than three or four words to her. Nor had she been able to say much to me. But peanuts allowed me at last to breach our silence, to try to break out of the cloud of depression hovering over us.
“The peanut’s not a nut,” I explained, “but a pea. It’s a cousin of the pea and the bean but different in an important way—it develops its pods under the ground. The peanut’s an annual, growing low over the soil. There are three major types of peanut grown in the United States—the large-seeded Virginia, the runner and the Spanish. Peanuts have to have a lot of sunshine and a long frost-free growing period. That’s why they grow in the South. The major peanut-growing states are, in order, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Texas. There was an incredibly gifted Negro scientist named George Washington Carver who developed dozens of uses for peanuts. Aside from just food, they’re used in cosmetics, plastics, insulation, explosives, certain medicines, lots of other things. Peanuts are a booming crop, Sophie, and I think that this little farm of ours will grow and grow, and pretty soon we’ll not only be self-sufficient but maybe even rich—at least, very well-off. We won’t have to depend on Alfred Knopf or Harper and Brothers for our daily bread. The reason I want you to know something about peanuts as a crop is simply because if you’re going to be the chatelaine of the manor, there are times when you