Sophie's Choice - William Styron [239]
But at last I got her dressed and we took a bus back to Brooklyn and the Pink Palace. With the help of coffee she sobered up finally and slept through the late afternoon and early evening. When she awoke she was still very much on edge—the memory of that lonely swim to nowhere had plainly unnerved her—but even so, she seemed relatively composed for one who had gone so far out toward the brink. As for any physical damage, she appeared to have suffered little, although her engorgement with salt water gave her the hiccups and caused her for hours afterward to erupt in sizable, unladylike belches.
And then—well, God knows she had already taken me with her to some of the nethermost reaches of her past. But she had also left me with unanswered questions. Perhaps she felt that there was really no returning to the present unless she could come clean, as they say, and shed light on what she had still concealed from me as well as (who knows?) from herself. And so during the remainder of that rain-soaked weekend she told me much more about her season in hell. (Much more, but not everything. There was one matter that remained entombed in her, in the realm of the unspeakable.) And I came at last to discern the outlines of that “badness” which had tracked her down remorselessly from Warsaw to Auschwitz and thence to these pleasant bourgeois streets of Brooklyn, pursuing her like a demon.
Sophie was taken prisoner sometime during the middle of March, 1943. This was several days after Jozef had been killed by the Ukrainian guards. A gray day with wind in gusts and lowering clouds still touched with the raw look of winter. She remembered that it was late in the afternoon. When the speedy little three-car electric train in which she was riding screeched to a halt somewhere in the outskirts of Warsaw she had something more powerful than a mere premonition. It was a certainty—certainty that she would be sent to one of the camps. This deranging flash came to her even before the Gestapo agents—half a dozen or more—clambered onto the car and ordered everyone down to the street. She knew it was the łapanka—a roundup—which she had dreaded and anticipated even as the tramway-style car came to its shuddering halt; something in that suddenness and quick deceleration spelled doom. There was doom, too, in the acrid, metallic stench of the wheels braking against the rails and the way in which, simultaneously, the seated and standing passengers in the jammed train all lurched forward, clutching wildly and aimlessly for support. This is no accident, she thought, it’s the German police. And then she heard the bellowed command: “Raus!”
They found the twelve-kilo cut of ham almost immediately. Her stratagem—fastening the newspaper-wrapped package to her body beneath her dress in a way that would make her appear corpulently pregnant—was shopworn enough by now almost to call attention to itself rather than work as a ruse; she had tried it anyway, urged on by the farm woman who had sold her the precious meat. “You can at least give it a try,” the woman had said. “They’ll surely catch you if they see you carrying it in the open. Also, you look and dress like an intellectual, not one of our country babas. That will help.” But Sophie had not foreseen either the łapanka or its thoroughness. And so the Gestapo goon, pressing Sophie up against a damp brick wall, made no effort to conceal