Sophie's Choice - William Styron [233]
I took a deep breath. “Look, Sophie, you’re confusing me. Straighten me out. Please.”
“Okay. Look, Stingo. Nathan would not believe anything good about Polish people when it come to the Jews. I couldn’t convince him that there were decent Polish people who had risked their lives to save Jews. My father—” She broke off for an instant; there was a catch in the back of her throat, then a long hesitation before she said, “My father. Oh, goddamnit, I’ve already told you—I lied to Nathan about him just like I lied to you. But I finally told you the truth, you see, I just couldn’t have told Nathan because... I couldn’t have told him because... because I was a coward. I had come to see that my father was so big a monster that I had to hide the truth about him, even though what he was and what he done was not my fault. Was not anything I should feel any blame about.” Again she hesitated. “It was so frustrating. I lied about my father and Nathan refused to believe it. After that I knew I would never be able to tell him about Jozef. Who was good and brave. And that would have been the truth. I remember this quotation that Nathan had which always sounded so American. ‘You win one and you lose one.’ But I couldn’t win anything.”
“What about Jozef?” I persisted, a little impatiently.
“We lived in this building in Warsaw that was bombed but fixed up. You could live in it. But only barely. It was a terrible place. You can’t imagine how terrible Warsaw was then during the occupation. So little food, often just a little water, and in the winter it was so cold. I worked in a factory that made tar paper. I worked ten, eleven hours a day. The tar paper made my hands bleed. They bled all the time. I didn’t work for money, really, but to keep a work card. A work card would keep me from being sent off to Germany to a camp for slave labor. I lived in a tiny little place on the fourth floor of the building and Jozef lived with his half sister downstairs. His half sister was named Wanda, she was a little over my age. They were both involved with the underground, the Home Army it would be called in English. I wish I could describe Jozef good but I can’t, don’t have the words. I was fond of him so very much. But there was no true romance, really. He was small, muscular, very intense and nervous. He was pretty dark for a Pole. Strange, we didn’t make love together very often. Though we slept in the same bed. He said he have to preserve his energies for the fight going on. He wasn’t very educated, you know, in a formal way. He was like me—the war destroyed our education chances. But he had read a lot, he was very bright. He wasn’t even a Communist, he was an anarchist. He worshipped the memory of Bakunin and was a complete atheist, which was a little strange too, because at that time I was still a very devout Catholic girl and I sometimes wondered how I could fall in love with this young man who don’t believe in God. But we made this agreement not ever to talk about religion, and so we didn’t.
“Jozef was a murder—” She paused, then reconstructed the thought and said, “Killer. He was a killer. That was what he done for the underground. He killed Polish people that was betraying Jews, betraying where Jews were hiding. There were Jews hiding out all over Warsaw, not ghetto Jews, naturellement, but better-class Jews—assimiles, many intellectuals. There were many Polish people who would betray the Jews to the Nazis, sometimes for a price, sometimes for nothing. Jozef was one of those which the underground had to kill those who were betraying. He would strangle them with the wire from a piano. He would try to get to know them in some way and then strangle them. Each time he killed someone he would vomit. He killed over six or seven people. Jozef and Wanda and I had a friend in the next building that we were all very fond of—a beautiful girl named Irena, about thirty-five, so beautiful. She had been a teacher before the war. Strange, she taught American literature and I remember she had this expertise in a poet