Sophie's Choice - William Styron [89]
But now it again becomes necessary to mention that Sophie was not quite straightforward in her recital of past events, even granted that it was her intention to present a very abbreviated account. I would learn this later, when she confessed to me that she left out many crucial facts in the story she told Nathan. She did not actually lie (as she did about one or two important aspects of her life in the account she gave me concerning the early years in Cracow). Nor did she fabricate something or distort anything important; it is easy to substantiate nearly everything she told Nathan that evening. Her brief observation on the function of Auschwitz-Birkenau—while of course greatly oversimplified—is basically an accurate one, and she neither exaggerated nor underestimated the nature of her various diseases. About all the rest, there is no reason to doubt anything: her mother and her mother’s illness and death, the sequence about the smuggled meat and her own arrest by the Germans followed by her swift deportation to Auschwitz. Why, then, did she leave out certain elements and details that anyone might reasonably have expected her to include? Fatigue and depression that night, certainly. Then in the long run there may have been multiple reasons, but the word “guilt,” I discovered that summer, was often dominant in her vocabulary, and it is now clear to me that a hideous sense of guilt always chiefly governed the reassessments she was forced to make of her past. I also came to see that she tended to view her own recent history through a filter of self-loathing—apparently not a rare phenomenon among those who had undergone her particular ordeal. Simone Weil wrote about this kind of suffering: “Affliction stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.” Thus with Sophie it may have been this complex of emotions that caused her to be silent about certain things—this corrosive guilt together with a simple but passionately motivated reticence. Sophie was in general always secretive about her sojourn in the bowels of hell—secretive to the point of obsession—and if that is the way she wanted it, it was, God knows, a position one had to honor.
It should be made plain now, however—although the fact will surely be revealed as this account goes on—that Sophie was able to divulge things to me which she could never in her life tell Nathan. There was an uncomplicated reason for this. She was so chaotically in love with Nathan that it was like dementia, and it is more often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one’s self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain. But at the same time there were circumstances and happenings in her past which had to be spoken; I think that quite unbeknownst to herself she was questing for someone to serve in place of those religious confessors she had coldly renounced. I, Stingo, handily filled the bill. In retrospect I can see that imperiling her mind had she kept certain things bottled up; this was especially true as the summer wore on, with its foul weather of brutal emotions, and as the situation between Sophie and Nathan neared collapse. Then, when she was the most vulnerable, her need to give voice to her agony and guilt was so urgent as to be like the beginning of a scream, and I was always ready and waiting to listen with my canine idolatry and inexhaustible ear. Also, I began to see how if the worst parts of the nightmare she had lived through were at once so incomprehensible and absurd as to tax