William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (210 page)

Then the erotic glow that bathed my daydream faded, vanished, and other words echoed in my ears and caused me to sit up with a start. For at some point yesterday in that pandemonium of frenzied advice and deafening demand, amid the shouts and muffled murmurs and randy exhortations, had I
really
heard from Nathan the words I now so chillingly recalled? No, it was later, I realized, during one moment of what seemed now their unending conflict, that his voice had come down through the ceiling, booming, with the ponderous, measured cadence of booted footfalls, and cried out in a tone that might have been deemed a parody of existential anguish had it not possessed the resonances of complete, unfeigned terror: “Don’t... you... see... Sophie... we... are... dying!
Dying!”

I shivered violently, as if someone had thrown open at my back in the dead of winter a portal on the Arctic wastes. It was nothing so grand as what might be called a premonition—this clammy feeling which overtook me, in which the day darkened swiftly, along with my contentment—but I was suddenly ill-at-ease enough to long desperately to escape, to rush from the train. If, in my anxiety, I had done so, hopping off at the next stop and hurrying back to Yetta Zimmerman’s to pack my bags and flee, this would be another story, or rather, there would be no story at all to tell. But I allowed myself to plunge on toward Coney Island, thus making sure to help fulfill Sophie’s prophecy about the three of us: that we would become “the best of friends.”

“
I
N
C
RACOW,
when I was a little girl,” Sophie told me, “we lived in a very old house on an old winding street not far from the university. It was a very ancient house, I’m sure some of it must have been built centuries ago. Strange, you know, that house and Yetta Zimmerman’s house are the only houses I ever lived in—real
houses,
I mean—in my life. Because, you see, I was born there and spend all my childhood there and then when I was married I lived there still, before the Germans came and I had to go live for a while in Warsaw. I adored that house, it was quiet and full of shadows high up on the fourth floor when I was very little, and I had my own room. Across the street there was another old house, with these crooked chimneys, and the storks had builded their nests on top of these. Storks, isn’t that it? Funny, I used to get that word mixed up with ‘stilts’ in English. Anyway, I remember the storks on the chimney across the street and how they looked just like the storks in my book of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm that I read in German. I remember that so very, very plainly, those books, and the color of the outside and the pictures of the animals and birds and people on the cover. I could read German before I read Polish, and do you know, I even spoke German before I spoke Polish, so that when I first went to the convent school I would get teased for my German accent.

“You know, Cracow is a very ancient city, and our house was not far from the central square, where in the middle is this beautiful building that was made in medieval times—the
Sukiennice
it is called in Polish, which I believe translated in English means the cloth-hall, where they would have a market in all types of cloths and fabrics. Then there is a clock tower there on the church of St. Mary’s, very high, and instead of bells they have actual live men who come out on a kind of balustrade, these men who come out and blow trumpets to announce the hour. It makes a very beautiful sound in the night. Kind of distant and sad, you know, like the trumpets in one of the suites for orchestra of Bach, that make me think always of very ancient times, and how mysterious is this thing of time. When I was a little girl I would lie in the dark of my room and listen to the sound of the horses’ feet on the street below—they did not have too many motorcars in Poland then—and when I would go off to sleep I would hear the men blow the trumpets on the clock tower, very sad and distant, and I would wonder about time—this mystery, you know. Or I would lie there and think about clocks. In the hallway there was a very old clock on a kind of stand that had belonged to my grandparents, and once I opened the back of it and looked into it while it was running and saw a whole lot of levers and wheels and jewels—I think they were mostly rubies—shining in the reflection from the sun. So at night lying there I would think of myself
inside
the clock—imagine anything so crazy from a child!—where I would just float around on a spring and watch the levers moving and the various wheels turning and see the rubies, red and bright and as big as my head. And I would go to sleep finally with this clock in my dreams.

“Oh, there are so many memories of Cracow, so many, I can’t begin to describe them! They were wonderful times, those years between those wars, even for Poland, which is a poor country and suffer from, you know, an inferiority complex. Nathan thinks I’m exaggerating about the good times we had—he makes so many jokes about Poland—but I tell him about my family and how we lived in a wonderful civilized way, the
best
kind of life you can imagine, really. ‘What did you do for fun on Sunday?’ he says to me. ‘Throw rotten potatoes at Jews?’ You see, all he can think of about Poland is how anti-Semitic it is being and make those jokes about it, which cause me to feel so bad. Because it is true, I mean it is famous that Poland has this strong anti-Semitism and that make me so terribly ashamed in many ways, like you, Stingo, when you have this
misère
over the colored people down in the South. But I told Nathan that yes, it is true, quite true about this bad history in Poland, but he must understood—
vraiment,
he must comprehend that not all Polish people was like that, there are good decent people like my family who... Oh, it is such an ugly thing to talk about. It makes me think sadly about Nathan, he is... obsessed, so I think I must change the subject...

“Yes, my family. My mother and father was both professors at the university, which is why almost all my memories have this connection with the university. It is one of the oldest universities in Europe, it was started far back in the fourteenth century. I didn’t know no other kind of life except being the daughter of teachers, and maybe that is why my memories of all those times are so gentle and civilized. Stingo, someday you must go to Poland and see it and write about it. It is so beautiful. And so sad. Imagine, those twenty years when I was growing up there was the only twenty years that Poland was ever free. I mean after
centuries!
I suppose that is why I used to hear my father say so often, ‘These are sunny times for Poland.’ Because everything was free for the first time, you see, in the universities and schools—you could study anything which you wished to study. And I suppose that is one of the reasons why people was able to enjoy life so much, studying and learning, and listening to music, and going away to the country on Sundays in the spring and summer. Sometime I have thought that I love music almost as much as life, really. We were at concerts always. When I was a little girl in this house, this ancient house, I would lie awake at night in my bed and listen to my mother play downstairs on the piano—Schumann or Chopin she would play, or Beethoven or Scarlatti or Bach, she was a wonderful pianist—I would lie awake and hear the music faint and beautiful rising up through the house and I would feel so warm and comfortable and secure. I would think that no one had a more wonderful mother and father or a better life than me. And I would think of growing up and what I would become when I was not a child any more, perhaps become married and become a teacher of music like my mother. This would be such a fine life to live, I thought, to be able to play beautiful music, and teach and be married to a fine professor like my father.

“Neither of my parents come from Cracow in the beginning. My mother was from Lodz and my father was from Lublin. They met in Vienna when they were students. My father was studying the law at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and my mother was studying music in the city. They were both very religious Catholics, so I was brought up very devout and went to Mass always and church school, but I don’t mean I was, you know, fanatic, nut. I believed very much in God, but my mother and father they were not, you know, I don’t know what the exact word is in English, like
dur
—yes, hard,
harsh.
They were not like that. They were very liberal—even, you could say, almost socialist—and always voted with labor or the democrats. My father hated Pilsudski. He said he was a worse terror for Poland than Hitler, and drunk a whole lot of schnapps to celebrate the night Pilsudski died. He was a pacifist, my father, and even though he would talk about these sunny times for Poland, I knew that
au fond
he was gloomy and worried. Once I heard him talking to my mother—it must have been around 1932—and I heard him say in this gloomy voice, ‘This cannot truly last. There will be a war. Fate has never allowed Poland to be happy for very long.’ This he spoke in German, I remember. In our house we spoke in German more often than we spoke in Polish.
Français
I learned to speak almost perfect in school but I spoke German even more easier than French. It was the influence of Vienna, you see, where my father and mother had spend so much time, and then my father was a professor of law and German was so much the language of scholars in those days. My mother was a wonderful cook in the Viennese style. Oh, there were a few good Polish things she cooked, but Polish cooking is not exactly
haute cuisine,
and so I remember the food she cooked in this big kitchen we had in Cracow—
Wiener Gulash Suppe
and
Schnitzel,
and oh! especially I remember this wonderful dessert she made called Metternich pudding that was all filled with chestnuts and butter and orange skin.

“I know maybe it sound tiresome to say so all the time, but my mother and father was wonderful people. Nathan, you know, is okay now, he is calm, he is in one of his good times—periods, you say? But when he is in one of the bad times like the time when you first saw him—when he is in one of his
tempêtes,
I call them, he start to scream at me and always then call me an anti-Semitic Polish pig. Oh, his language, and what he calls me, words I’ve never heard before, in English, then Yiddish, everything! But always like ‘You filthy Polish pig, crummy
nafka, kurveh,
you’re killing me, you’re killing me like you filthy Polish pigs have always killed the Jews!’ And I try to talk to him, but he won’t listen, he just stays crazy with this rage, and I have always knew it was no good at such a time to tell him about the good Poles like my father. Papa was born in Lublin when it belonged to the Russians and there were many, many Jews there who suffered from those terrible pogroms against them. Once my mother told me—because my father would never talk about such a thing—that when he was a young man he and his brother, who was a priest, risked their lives by hiding three Jewish families from the pogrom, from the Cossack soldiers. But I know that if I tried to tell this to Nathan during one of these
tempêtes,
he would only yell at me some more and call me a dirty pig Polack liar. Oh, I have to be so
patient
with Nathan then—I know then that he is becoming very sick, that he is not all right—and just turn away and keep silent and think of other things, waiting for the
tempête
to go away, when he will be kind and so sweet to me again, so full of
tendresse
and loving.

“It must be about ten years ago, a year or two before the war began, that I first heard my father say
Massenmord.
It was after the stories in the newspapers about the terrible destruction the Nazis had done in Germany on the synagogues and the Jewish stores. I remember my father first said something about Lublin and the pogroms he seen there, and then he said, ‘First from the east, now from the west. This time it will be
ein Massenmord.
’ I didn’t realize completely what he mean then by what he said, I suppose a little bit because in Cracow there was a ghetto but not so many Jews as other places, and anyway, I didn’t think about them being truly different or being victims or being persecuted. I suppose I was ignorant, Stingo. I was married then to Casimir—you know, I was married very, very young and I suppose I was still in this state of being a little girl and thinking that this wonderful life so comfortable and safe and secure would continue forever. Mama and Papa and Casimir and Zosia—Zosia, that is the, you know, nickname for Sophie—all living so happy in the big house, eating
Wiener Gulash Suppe
and studying and learning and listening to Bach—oh, forever. I don’t understood how I might be so stupid. Casimir was an instructor in mathematics that I met when my mother and father had a party for some of the young teachers at the university. When Casimir and I were married we had these plans to go to Vienna like my mother and father did. It was going to be very much like the way
they
done their study. Casimir would get this
supérieur
degree in mathematics at the Austrian Academy and I would study music. I had been playing the piano myself ever since I was eight or nine years old and I was going to study under this very famous teacher, Frau Theimann, who had teached my mother and was still teaching although she was quite old. But that year there came the Anschluss and the Germans went into Vienna. It begun to be very frightening and my father said we were certain to go to war.

“I remember so well that last year when we were all together in Cracow. Somehow I still could not believe that this life we all have together would ever be changed. I was so happy with Casimir—Kazik—and loved him so very much. He was so generous and loving, and so intelligent—you see, Stingo, how I am attracted only to intelligent men. I cannot say whether I loved Kazik more than Nathan—I love Nathan so much that it hurts my heart—and maybe we should not do such a thing as compare one love with another. Well, I loved Kazik deeply, deeply, and I could not bear to think of the war coming so near and this possibility of Kazik being a soldier. So we put it out of our heads and that year we listened to concerts and read many books and went to the theatre and took long walks in the city, and on these walks I begin to learn to speak Russian. Kazik was in the beginning from Brest-Litovsk, which was for so long Russian, and he spoke that language as good as Polish and taught me it pretty good. Not like my father, who had also lived beneath the Russians but hated them so much that he refused to speak that language unless he was compelled to. Anyway, during this time I refused to think of this life ending. Well, I knew there would be some changes, but natural changes, you know, like moving out of the house of my parents and having our own house and family. But this I thought would come after the war, if there was one, because surely the war would be very short and the Germans would be defeated and then soon Kazik and I would go to Vienna and study like we had always planned to.