Sophie's Choice - William Styron [304]
“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