Sophie gave a small giggle. “Americans are so funny. I thought Poland was so very puritanical, but imagine...”
I realize now that it was the siren, or choir of sirens, and the drumming pandemonium that accompanied their shrieks, that ruptured the fragile membrane of Sophie’s mood, which thanks in part to my own attentive ministrations had become peaceful, even luminous around the edges, if hardly sunny. City sirens even at a distance generate a hateful noise, almost always set loose in a soul-damaging, unnecessary frenzy. This one, rising from the narrow street only three floors directly below us, was amplified as if by canyon walls, bouncing from the grimy building opposite and entering the window next to us like an elongated snout, a solidified scream. It maddened the eardrum, pure sadistic torment made aural, and I jumped from the bed to pull the window down. At the end of the dark street a smudge of smoke plumed away from what looked like a warehouse, but the fire trucks just below, stalled by some nameless impediment, kept releasing skyward their unbelievable blasts.
I slammed down the window, which was of some relief, but it appeared not to have helped Sophie at all; she lay sprawled on the bed kicking her heels and with a pillow jammed down over her head. Recent city dwellers, we were both used to this common enough intrusion, but rarely so loud or so close. The pokey town of Washington had produced a racket I had never heard in New York. But slowly now the fire engines moved past their obstruction, the noise diminished, and I turned my attention to Sophie on the bed. She looked up at me. Where the horrible clamor had merely set my nerves ajangle, it had plainly lacerated her like some evil bullwhip. Her face was pink and contorted and she rolled over toward the wall, shuddering and once more in tears. I sat down beside her. I watched in silence for a long minute or so until finally her sobs gradually ceased and I heard her say, “I’m so sorry, Stingo. I don’t seem to be able to control myself.”
“You’re doing fine,” I said without much conviction.
For a while she was completely silent where she lay, contemplating the wall. At last she said, “Stingo, did you ever have dreams in your life that came back over and over again? Isn’t it called recurring dreams?”
“Yes,” I replied, recalling the dream I had as a young boy after my mother’s death—her open coffin in the garden, her rain-damp ravaged face gazing at me in agony. “Yes,” I said again, “I had one that came back constantly after my mother died.”
“Do you think they have to do with parents? The one I’ve had all my life is about my father.”
“It’s strange,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t know. Mothers and fathers—they’re at the core of one’s own life somehow. Or they can be.”
“When I was asleep a while ago I had this dream about my father that I’ve had many times. But I must have forgotten it when I woke up. Then that fire engine just now—that siren. It was awful but it had a strange musical sound. Could that be it—the music? It shocked me and made me think of the dream again.”
“What was it about?”
“You see, it has to do with something that happened to me when I was a child.”
“What was that, Sophie?”
“Well, first you would have to understand something, before the dream. It was when I was eleven, like you. It was in the summer when we spent vacations in the Dolomites, like I’ve already told you. You remember I told you my father each summer rented a chalet there above Bolzano—in a little village called Oberbozen, which was German-speaking, of course. There was a small colony of Polish people there, professors from Cracow and Warsaw and some Polish—well, I suppose you would call them Polish aristocrats, at least they had money. I remember one of the professors was the famous anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. My father tried to cultivate Malinowski, but Malinowski detested my father. Once, in Cracow, I overheard a grownup say that Professor Malinowski thought my father, Professor Biegański, was a parvenu and hopelessly vulgar. Anyway, there was a rich Polish woman at Oberbozen named Princess Czartoryska, whom my father had come to know well, and he saw quite a bit of her during these summers. She was from a very old, very noble Polish family and my father liked her because she was rich and, well, she shared his feelings about Jews.
“This was the time of Pilsudski, you see, when the Polish Jews were protected and having, I guess you would call, a fairly decent life, and my father and Princess Czartoryska would get together and talk about the Jewish problem and the necessity of getting rid of the Jews someday. It is strange, you know, Stingo, because my father when he was in Cracow was always discreet about talking about Jews and his hatred of them in front of me or my mother or anyone like that. At least when I was a child. But in Italy, you see, at Oberbozen with Princess Czartoryska it was different. She was an eighty-year-old woman who always wore fine long gowns even in the middle of the summer, and wore jewelry—she had an immense emerald brooch, I remember—and she and my father would have tea in her very elegant Sennhütte, chalet, that is, and talk about the Jews. They always spoke in German. She had a beautiful Bernese mountain dog and I would play with the dog and overhear their conversation, almost always about the Jews. About sending them off somewhere, all of them, getting rid of them. The Princess even wanted to establish a fund for it. They were always talking about islands—Ceylon and Sumatra and Cuba but mostly Madagascar, where they would send the Jews. I would half listen while I played some game with Princess Czartoryska’s little grandson, who was English, or played with the big dog or listened to the music on this phonograph. It was the music, you see, Stingo, that has to do with my dream.”
Sophie fell silent again, and she pressed her fingers against her closed eyes. Something quickened in the monotone of her voice. She turned to me, as if she had become diverted from her remembrance. “We will have music where we’re going, then, Stingo. I wouldn’t be able to last long without music.”
“Well, I’ll be honest, Sophie. Out in the sticks—outside New York, that is—there’s nothing on the radio. No WQXR, no WNYC. Only Milton Cross and the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon. The rest is hillbilly. Some of it’s terrific. Maybe I’ll make you a Roy Acuff fan. But like I say, the first thing we’ll do after we move in is to buy a record player and records—”
“I’ve been so spoiled,” she put in, “after all the music Nathan bought me. But it’s my blood, my life’s blood, you know, and I can’t help it.” She paused, once again collecting the strands of her memory. Then she said, “Princess Czartoryska had a phonograph. It was one of those early machines, not very good, but it was the first one I had ever seen or heard. Strange, isn’t it, this old Polish Jew-hater with her love of music. She had a lot of records and it almost drove me mad with pleasure when she’d put them on for our benefit—my mother and my father and me and maybe some other guests—and we’d listen to these recordings. Most of them were arias from Italian and French operas—Verdi and Rossini and Gounod—but there was one record that I remember just made me nearly swoon, I loved it so. It must have been a rare and precious record. It’s hard to believe now, because it was very old and filled with noise, but I just adored it. It was Madame Schumann-Heink singing Brahms Lieder. On one side there was ‘Der Schmied,’ I remember, and on the other was ‘Von ewige Liebe,’ and when I first heard it I sat there in a trance listening to that wonderful voice coming through all those scratches, thinking all the while that it was the most gorgeous singing I had ever heard, that it was an angel come down to earth. Strange, I heard those two songs only once during all the times I went with my father to visit the Princess. I longed to hear them again. Oh God, I felt I would do almost anything—do something very naughty, even—to hear them once more, and I was just so hungry to ask that they be played again, but I was too shy, and besides, my father would have punished me if I had ever been so... so bold...
“So in the dream that has returned to me over and over I see Princess Czartoryska in her handsome gown go to the phonograph and she turns and always says, as if she were talking to me, ‘Would you like to hear the Brahm
s Lieder?’ And I always try to say yes. But just before I can say anything my father interrupts. He is standing next to the Princess and he is looking directly at me, and he says, ‘Please don’t play that music for the child. She is much too stupid to understand.’ And then I wake up with this pain... Only this time it was even worse, Stingo. Because in the dream I had just now he seemed to be talking to the Princess not about the music but about...” Sophie hesitated, then murmured, “About my death. He wanted me to die, I think.”
I turned away from Sophie. I walked the few steps to the window, filled with a disquietude and unhappiness that was like a deep, twisting, visceral pain. A faint and bitter odor of combustion had seeped into the room, but despite this I opened the window and saw where smoke drifted down the street in fragile bluish veils. In the distance over the burning building a cloud rose in dingy turbulence but I saw no flame. The stench, growing stronger, was of scorched paint or tar or varnish mingled with hot rubber. More sirens sounded, but this time dimly, from the opposite direction, and I glimpsed a plume of water that gushed skyward toward hidden windows, met some hidden inferno and then evaporated in a nimbus of steam. Along the sidewalks below gawkers in shirt sleeves sidled tentatively toward the fire, and I saw two policemen begin to block the street with wooden barricades. There was no threat to the hotel, or to us, but I found myself shivering with anxiety.
Just as I turned back to Sophie, she looked up at me from the bed and said, “Stingo, I must tell you something now that I’ve never told anyone before. Never before.”
“Tell me, then.”
“Without knowing this, you wouldn’t understood anything about me at all. And I realize I must tell someone at last.”
“Tell me, Sophie.”
“You must get me a drink first.”
With no hesitation I went to her suitcase and plucked from the slippery jumble of linen and silk the second pint bottle of whiskey which I knew she had hidden there. Sophie, get drunk, I thought, you earned it. Then I walked to the tiny bathroom and half filled a sickly-green plastic glass with water and brought it to the bed. Sophie poured whiskey into the glass until it was full.
“Do you want some?” she said.
I shook my head and returned to the window, inhaling the brown chemical, acrid breaths of the distant blaze.
“On the day I arrived at Auschwitz,” I heard her say behind me, “it was beautiful. The forsythia was in bloom.”
I was eating bananas in Raleigh, North Carolina, I thought, thinking this not for the first time since I had known Sophie, yet perhaps for the first time in my life aware of the meaning of the Absurd, and its conclusive, unrevocable horror.
“But you see, Stingo, in Warsaw one night that winter Wanda had foretold her own death and also my death and the death of my children.”
I don’t recall precisely when, during Sophie’s description of those happenings, the Reverend Entwistle began to hear himself whisper, “Oh God, oh my God.” But I did seem to be aware, during the time of the telling of her story, while the smoke churned up over the nearby roofs and the fire erupted at last toward the sky in fierce incandescence, that those words which had commenced in pious Presbyterian entreaty became finally meaningless. By which I mean that the “Oh God” or “Oh my God” or even “Jesus Christ” that were whispered again and again were as empty as any idiot’s dream of God, or the idea that there could be such a Thing.
“I sometimes got to think that everything bad on earth, every evil that was ever invented had to do with my father. That winter in Warsaw, I didn’t feel any guilt about my father and what he had written. But I did feel often this terrible shame, which is not the same as guilt. Shame is a dirty feeling that is even more hard to take than guilt, and I could barely live with the idea that my father’s dreams were coming true right in front of my eyes. I got to know a lot of other things because I was living with Wanda, or very close to her. She got so much information about what was going on everywhere, and I knew already about how they were transporting thousands of Jews to Treblinka and Auschwitz. At first it was thought that they were just being sent for labor, but the Resistance had good intelligence and pretty soon we knew the truth, knew about the gassings and cremations and everything. It was what my father had wanted—and it made me ill.
“When I went to my job at the tar-paper factory I would go on foot or sometimes by streetcar past the ghetto. The Germans had not bled dry the ghetto yet, but they were in the process. Often I could see these lines of Jews with their arms upraised being pushed along like cattle, the Nazis pointing guns at them. The Jews looked so gray and helpless; once I had to get off the streetcar and get sick. And all through this my father seemed to... authorize this horror, not only authorize it but create it in some way. I couldn’t keep it bottled up any longer and I knew I had to tell someone. No one in Warsaw knew much about my background, I was living under my married name. I decided to tell Wanda about this... about this badness.
“And yet... and yet, you know, Stingo, I had to admit something else to myself. And this was that I was fascinated by this unbelievable thing that was happening to the Jews. I couldn’t put my finger on it, this feeling. It was not at all pleasure. It was the opposite, if anything—sickening. And yet when I’d walk past the ghetto at a distance I would stop and really be entranced by certain sights, by seeing them rounding up the Jews. And I knew then the reason for this fascination, and it stunned me. I could barely breathe with the knowledge. It was just that I suddenly knew that as long as the Germans could use up all this incredible energy destroying the Jews—superhuman energy, really—I was safe. No, not really safe, but safer. Bad as things were, we were oh so much safer than these trapped, helpless Jews. And so as long as the Germans were draining off so much power destroying the Jews, I felt safer for myself and for Jan and Eva. And even Wanda and Jozef, with all the dangerous things they were doing. But this just made me feel more ashamed, and so, on this night I am talking about, I decided to tell Wanda.
“We were finishing this very poor meal, I remember—beans and turnip soup and a kind of joke sausage. We had been talking about all the music we’d missed hearing. I had delayed all during the dinner to say what I really wanted, then I finally got the courage, saying, ’Wanda, did you ever hear the name Biegański? Zbigniew Biegański?’
“Wanda’s eyes looked vacant for a moment. ‘Oh yes, you mean the Fascist professor from Cracow. He was well known for a while before the war. He made hysterical speeches here in the city against the Jews. I had forgotten all about him. I wonder what ever happened to him. He’s probably working for the Germans.’
“ ‘He’s dead,’ I said. ‘He was my father.’
“I could see Wanda shiver. It was so cold outside and inside. There was this spitting sound of sleet against the window. The children were in bed in the next room. I’d put them there because I’d run out of fuel, coal or wood, in my own apartment downstairs, and Wanda had at least a big comforter on the bed to keep them warm. I kept looking at Wanda, but there was no emotion on her face. She said after a bit, ‘So he was your father. It must have been strange to have had such a man for a father. What was he like?’
“I was surprised at this reaction, she seemed to take it so calmly, so naturally. I mean, of all the people in the Resistance in Warsaw, she was the one who maybe done the most to help the Jews—or to try to help the Jews, it was so difficult. I suppose you could call it her specialty, trying to get aid to the ghetto. She felt, too, that anyone who betrayed the Jews, or a single Jew, was betraying Poland. It was Wanda who started Jozef on this way of murdering Poles who betrayed Jews. She was so militant about this, so dedicated, a socialist. But she didn’t seem to be at all shocked or anything that my father had been who he had been, and she obviously didn’t feel that I was—well, contaminated. I said, ‘I find it very difficult to talk about him.’ And she said back to me very gently, ‘Well, don’t, dear heart. I don’t care who your father was. You can’t be blamed for his miserable sins.’
“Then I said, ‘It’s so strange, you know. He was killed by the Germans inside the Reich. At Sachsenhausen.’
“But even this—well, even this irony didn’t seem to impress her. She just blinked and ran her hand through her hair. Her hair was red and wispy, with no gleam in it at all—so drab and wispy because of the bad food. She just said, ‘He must have been one of those faculty members at the Jagiellonian who caught it right after the occupation began.’
“I said, ‘Yes, and my husband too. I never told you about that. He was a disciple of my father’s. I hated him. I’ve lied to you. I hope you’ll forgive me for once telling you that he died fighting during the invasion.’
“And I started to finish what I was saying—this apology—but Wanda cut me off. She lit a cigarette, I remember she smoked like a fiend whenever she could get cigarettes. And she said, ‘Zosia sweetheart, it don’t matter. For God’s sake, do you think I care what they were? It’s you that matters. Your husband could have been a gorilla and your father Joseph Goebbels and you’d still be my dearest friend.’ She went to the window then and pulled down the blind. She only did this when there was some danger coming. The apartment was five floors up, but it was in this building that stuck up out of some bombed-out lots and anything that went on could perhaps be spotted by the Germans. So Wanda never took any chances. I remember she looked at her watch and said, ‘We’re going to have visitors in a minute. Two Jewish leaders from the ghetto. They’re coming to collect a bundle of pistols.’
“I remember thinking: Christ in heaven! My heart always gave a terrible jump and I’d feel this nausea go through me whenever Wanda mentioned guns, or secret rendezvous, or anything having to do with danger or the possibility of being ambushed by the Germans. To get caught helping Jews meant death, you know. I would get all clammy and weak—oh, I was such a coward! I would hope Wanda had not noticed these symptoms, and whenever I had them I would sometimes wonder if cowardice wasn’t another bad thing I inherited from my father. But Wanda was saying, ‘I’ve heard of one of these Jews through the grapevine. He’s supposed to be a very brave type, very competent. He’s desperate, though. There’s some resistance now, but it’s disorganized. He sent a message to our group saying that there’s bound to be a full-scale revolt in the ghetto soon. We’ve had some dealings with others, but this man’s a powerhouse—a mover. I think his name is Feldshon.’
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 222