Уильям Стайрон «Sophie's Choice (Vintage War) Exp»

Читать онлайн «Sophie's Choice (Vintage War) Exp»

Автор Уильям Стайрон

Sophie's Choice

William Styron

Wer zeigt ein Kind, so wie es steht? Wer stellt es ins Gestirn und gibt das Ma? des Abstands ihm in die Hand? Wer macht den Kindertod aus grauem Brot, das hart wird,—oder läβtihn drin im runden Mund so wie den Gröps von einem schönen Apfel?… Mörder sind leicht einzusehen. Aber dies: den Tod, den ganzen Tod, noch vor dem Leben so sanft zu enthalten und nicht bös zu sein, ist unbeschreiblich.

Von der vierten Duineser Elegie

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Who’ll show a child just as it is? Who’ll place it within its constellation, with the measure of distance in its hand? Who’ll make its death from grey bread, that grows hard,—or leave it there, within the round mouth, like the choking core of a sweet apple?… Minds of murderers are easily divined. But this, though: death, the whole of death,—even before life’s begun, to hold it all so gently, and be good: this is beyond description!

From the fourth Duino Elegy

—translated by J. B. Leishman

and Stephen Spender

… je cherche la region cruciale de I’âme,

où le Mal absolu s’oppose à la fraternité.

—André Malraux, Lazare, 1974

… I seek that essential region of the soul

where absolute evil confronts brotherhood

To the Memory of My Father

(1889-1978)

Chapter

IN THOSE DAYS cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. This was in 1947, and one of the pleasant features of that summer which I so vividly remember was the weather, which was sunny and mild, flower-fragrant, almost as if the days had been arrested in a seemingly perpetual springtime. I was grateful for that if for nothing else, since my youth, I felt, was at its lowest ebb. At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer, I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once resided. It was not that I no longer wanted to write, I still yearned passionately to produce the novel which had been for so long captive in my brain. It was only that, having written down the first few fine paragraphs, I could not produce any others, or—to approximate Gertrude Stein’s remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation—I had the syrup but it wouldn’t pour.

To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush—like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome young Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.

Call me Stingo, which was the nickname I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all. The name derives from my prep-school days down in my native state of Virginia. This school was a pleasant institution to which I was sent at fourteen by my distraught father, who found me difficult to handle after my mother died. Among my other disheveled qualities was apparently an inattention to personal hygiene, hence I soon became known as Stinky. But the years passed. The abrasive labor of time, together with a radical change of habits (I was in fact shamed into becoming almost obsessively clean), gradually wore down the harsh syllabic brusqueness of the name, slurring off into the more attractive, or less unattractive, certainly sportier Stingo. Sometime during my thirties the nickname and I mysteriously parted company, Stingo merely evaporating like a wan ghost out of my existence, leaving me indifferent to the loss. But Stingo I still was during this time about which I write. If, however, it is perplexing that the name is absent from the earlier part of this narrative, it may be understood that I am describing a morbid and solitary period in my life when, like the crazy hermit in the cave on the hill, I was rarely called by any name at all.