Sophie's Choice - William Styron [160]
“And then I realized that almost the one single thing on earth that I did not want to be forced to do was to be impliquée any more with that pamphlet. And it make me revolted to think that I must go around the university with a stack of these things, giving them to the professors. But just as my father said this—‘Sophie will help you pass them out’—I knew that I would be there with Kazik, passing out these sheets just like I done everything he told me to do since I was a little girl, running these errands, bringing him things, learning to use the typewriter and knowing shorthand just so he could use me whenever he wanted. And this terrible emptiness come over me when I realize just then there was nothing I could do about it, no way of saying no, no way possible to say, ‘Papa, I’m not going to help you spread this thing.’ But you see, Stingo, there is a truth I must tell you that even now I can’t understood or truly make clear. Because maybe it look much better if I said I would not help pass out this thing of my father’s just because I finally see he is saying in it: Murder Jews. That was bad I knew, terrible, and even then I couldn’t hardly believe this was actually what he’d written.
“But to be truthful, it was something else. It was at last coming clear to me that this man, this father, this man which give me breath and flesh have no more feeling for me than a servant, some peasant or slave, and now with not a word of thanks for all my work was going to make me... grovel?—yes, grovel through the halls of the university like some newspaper vendor, once more doing what he said just because he said I must do it. And I was a grown woman and I wanted to play Bach, and at that moment I just thought I must die—I mean, to die not so much for what he was making me do but because I had no way of saying no. No way of saying—oh, you know, Stingo—‘Fuck you, Papa.’ Just then he said, ‘Zosia,’ and I looked up and he was smiling at me a little, I could see his two false teeth shining, and the smile was pleasant and he said, ‘Zosia, wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?’ And I said, ‘No, thank you, Papa.’ Then he said, ‘Come, Zosia, you must have some tea, you look pale and cold.’ I wanted to fly away on wings. I said, ‘No, thank you, Papa, I really don’t want any tea.’ And at that time to keep control I was biting the inside of my lip so hard that the blood came, and I could taste it like seawater on my tongue. He turned to talk to Kazik then. And it happened, this sharp stab of hatred. It went through me with this surprising quick pain and I got dizzy and I thought I might fall to the floor. I was hot all over, in a blaze. I said to myself: I hate him—with a kind of terrible wonder at the hatred which entered into me. It was incredible, the surprise of this hatred, only with awful pain—like a butcher knife in my heart.”
Poland is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, soul-split country which in many ways (I came to see through Sophie’s eyes and memory that summer, and through my own eyes in later years) resembles or conjures up images of the American South—or at least the South of other, not-so-distant times. It is not alone that forlornly lovely, nostalgic landscape which creates the frequent likeness—the quagmiry but haunting monochrome of the Narew River swampland, for example, with its look and feel of a murky savanna on the Carolina coast, or the Sunday hush on a muddy back street in a village of Galicia, where by only the smallest eyewink of the imagination one might see whisked to a lonesome crossroads hamlet in Arkansas these ramshackle, weather-bleached little houses, crookedly carpentered, set upon shrubless plots of clay where scrawny