Sophie's Choice - William Styron [52]
“So, Stingo, I have lived long with this very, very strong guilt which I can’t lose, even though I know it has no reason, like that Jewish woman in Sweden said, when she try to make me see that the love we had was the most important thing, not the silly fight. But I still have this strong guilt. Funny, Stingo, you know I have learned to cry again, and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of a human being, but yes, a human being. Often I cry alone when I listen to music, which remind me of Cracow and those years past. And you know, there is one piece of music that I cannot listen to, it makes me cry so much my nose stops up, I cannot breathe, my eyes run like streams. It is in these Handel records I got for Christmas, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ that make me cry because of all my guilt, and also because I know that my Redeemer don’t live and my body will be destroyed by worms and my eyes will never, never again see God...”
At the time of which I write, that hectic summer of 1947, when she told me so many things about her past and when I was fated to get ensnared, like some hapless June bug, in the incredible spider’s nest of emotions that made up the relation between Sophie and Nathan, she was working in an out-of-the-way corner of Flatbush as a part-time receptionist in the office of Dr. Hyman Blackstock (né Bialystok). At this point Sophie had been in America a little less than a year and a half. Dr. Blackstock was a chiropractor and a long-ago immigrant from Poland. His patients included many old-time immigrants or more recent Jewish refugees. Sophie had obtained her job with the doctor not long after her arrival in New York in the early months of the previous year, when she had been brought to America under the auspices of an international relief organization. At first Blackstock (who spoke fluent Polish aside from his mamaloshen Yiddish) was rather distressed that the agency had sent him a young woman who was a goy and who had only a smattering of Yiddish learned in a prison camp. But, a warm-hearted man who was doubtless impressed by her beauty, by her plight and by the fact that she spoke flawless German, he hired her for this job which she sorely needed, possessing as she did little more than the flimsy clothes that had been given to her at the D.P. center in Sweden. Blackstock need not have worried; within days Sophie was chattering with the patients in Yiddish as if she had sprung from the ghetto. She rented the cheap room at Yetta Zimmerman’s—her first true home in seven years—at about the same time she took the job. Working only three days a week allowed Sophie to keep body and soul together, in a manner of speaking, while also granting her extra days to improve her English at a free class at Brooklyn College and in general to become assimilated into the life of that vivid, vast and bustling borough.
She told me that she had never been bored. She was determined to put behind her the madness of the past—or as much as a vulnerable and memory-racked mind permitted—and so for her the huge city became the New World in spirit as well as fact. Physically she sensed that she was still badly run-down, but this did not prevent her from partaking of the pleasures around her like a child turned loose in an ice cream parlor. Music, for one thing; just the availability of music alone, she said, filled her insides with a sense of delectation, as one feels just before what one knows will be a sumptuous meal. Until she met Nathan she could not afford a phonograph, but no matter; on the inexpensive little portable radio she bought there was splendid music emanating from these stations with weird initials she could never get straight—WQXR, WNYC, WEVD—and men with silken voices announcing the enchanted names of all the musical potentates and princes whose harmonies she had been deprived of so long; even a shopworn composition like Schubert