Sophie's Choice (42 page)

hairy shoulder, her head no bigger than a golden dot far out on the green petroleum waves. I did not think half a second before plunging in after her. I am a fairly good swimmer, but on that day I possessed truly Olympic bravura, aware even as I thrashed my way through the sluggish brine that sheer fright and desperation were animating the muscles of my legs and arms, propelling me outward and outward with a ferocity of strength I did not know was within me. I made brisk progress through the gently slopping sea; even so, I was amazed at how far out she had managed to get, and when I stopped briefly to tread water and find my bearings and locate her, I saw to my awful distress that she was still slicing her way through the ocean, bound for Venezuela. I shouted once, twice, but she kept on swimming. "Sophie, come back!" I cried, but I may as well have been beseeching the air. I filled my lungs, prayed a small regressive prayer to the Christian deity--my first in years--and resumed my heroic crawl southward toward that receding wet mop of yellow hair. Then all of a sudden I could tell that I was gaining with dramatic speed; through the salty blur of my eyes I saw Sophie's head grow larger, nearer. I realized that she had stopped swimming and within seconds I was on top of her. Submerged nearly to her eyes, she was not yet quite on the verge of drowning; but her gaze looked as wild as a cornered cat's, she was gulping water and was plainly at the edge of exhaustion. "Don't! Don't!" she gasped, warding me off with feeble little thrusts of her hand. But I lunged for her, grabbed her firmly around the waist from behind and roared "Shut up!" with hysteric necessity. I could have wept with relief at the immediate discovery that once in my embrace, she did not put up the struggle that I had foreseen but relaxed against me and let me swim with her slowly shoreward, uttering little desolate sobs that bubbled against my cheek and into my ear. As soon as I dragged her up onto the beach she fell on all fours and regurgitated half a gallon of seawater onto the sand. Then, choking and spluttering, she sprawled out face down at the water's edge and like someone in a fit of epilepsy began to shudder uncontrollably, smitten by a convulsion of ragged grief such as I had never before witnessed in a human being. "Oh God," she moaned, "why didn't you let me die? Why didn't you let me drown? I've been so bad--I've been so awful bad! Why didn't you let me drown?" I stood above her naked form, helpless. The solitary beach walker whom I had accosted stood idly by watching us. I noted a smear of ketchup on his lips; he was offering gloomy, barely audible advice in Spanish. Suddenly I slumped down next to Sophie, aware of how utterly pooped I was, and I ran a limp hand down her bare back. A tactile impression still registers from that moment: the skeletal outline of her spine, each vertebra discrete, the whole serpentine length moving up and down with her tortured breathing. It had begun to drizzle a warm misty rain, which collected in droplets against my face. I put my head against her shoulder. Then I heard her say, "You should have let me drown, Stingo. No one is filled with such badness. No one! No one has such badness." 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 tapanka--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 four-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 tapanka or its thoroughness. And so the Gestapo goon, pressing Sophie up against a damp brick wall, made no effort to conceal his contempt for her doltish Polack dodge, extracting a penknife from the pocket of his jacket and inserting the blade with relaxed, almost informal delicacy into that bulgingly bogus placenta, leering as he did so. Sophie recalled the smell of cheese on the Nazi's breath and his remark as the knife sank into the haunch of what had been, until recently, contented pig. "Can't you say ouch, Liebchen?" She was unable, in her terror, to utter anything more than some desperate common-place, but for her small pains, received a compliment on the felicity of her German. She felt sure that she was going to be tortured, but she somehow escaped this. The Germans seemed to be caught up in an enormous hullaballoo that particular day; all over the streets hundreds of Poles were being corralled and taken into custody, and thus the crime she had committed (a grave one, smuggling meat), which at another time would certainly have caused her to be subjected to the most detailed scrutiny, got overlooked or forgotten in the general confusion. But by no means did she go unnoticed, nor did her ham. At the infamous Gestapo headquarters--that terrible Warsaw simulacrum of Satan's antechamber--the ham lay unwrapped and pinkly glistening on the desk between herself, handcuffed, and a hyperactive, monocled zealot who almost exactly resembled Otto Kruger and who demanded to know where she had obtained this contraband. His interpreter, a Polish girl, had a coughing fit. "You be a smuggler!" he said loudly in clumsy Polish, and when Sophie replied in German she received her second compliment of the day. A big molar-filled greasy Nazi smile, right out of a 1938 Hollywood movie. But it was barely even a pleasantry. Did she not know the seriousness of her act, did she not know that meat of any kind but especially of this quality was designated for the Reich? With a long fingernail he pried loose a fat sliver of the ham and conveyed it to his mouth. He nibbled. Hochqualitätsfleisch. His voice suddenly became tough, a snarl. Where did she get such meat? Who supplied her with this? Sophie thought of the poor farm woman, knew of the vengeance awaiting her too, and temporizing now, replied, "It was not for me, sir, this meat. It was for my mother who lives on the other side of the city. She is seriously ill from tuberculosis." As if such an altruistic sentiment could have the vaguest effect on this caricature of a Nazi, who was already being besieged by knocks at the door and an irruptive jangle of the telephone. What a wild day for the Germans and their tapanka. "I don't give a damn for your mother!" he roared. "I want to know where you got this meat! Tell me now or I'll have it beaten out of you!" But the hammering at the door continued, another telephone began ringing; the little office became the cell of a madman. The Gestapo officer shrieked to a subordinate to have this Polish bitch taken away--and that was the last Sophie ever saw of him, or the ham. On another day she might not even have been caught. The irony of this smote her over and over while she waited in an almost totally dark detention cell with a dozen other Warsovians of both sexes, all strangers. Most of these--although not all--were young, in their twenties and thirties. Something about their manner--perhaps it was only the stolid, stony communion of their silence--told her that they were members of the Resistance. The AK--Armia Krajowa. Home Army. Here it suddenly occurred to her that had she waited only another day (as she had planned) to journey out toward Nowy Dwór to procure the meat, she would not have been on the railroad car, which she now realized may have been ambushed in order to trap certain members of the AK who had been passengers. By casting a wide net for as many exceptional fish as possible, as they sometimes did, the Nazis came up with all sorts of minor but interesting minnows, and this day Sophie was one of them. Sitting there on the stone floor (it was midnight now), she was smothered by despair, thinking of Jan and Eva at home with no one to look after them. In the corridors outside the cell there was a constant jabber and hubbub, a shuffling of feet and a jostling of bodies as the jail continued to fill up with the victims of the day's roundup. Once through the grilled aperture of the door above her she caught a quick glimpse of a familiar face, and her heart turned to lead. The face was streaming with blood. It belonged to a young man whom she had known only by his first name, Wladyslaw; the editor of an underground newspaper, he had spoken to her several times briefly at Wanda and Jozef's apartment on the floor beneath her own. She did not know why, but she was at that moment certain that this meant that Wanda had been arrested too. Then something else occurred to her. Mother of God, she breathed in an instinctive prayer, and felt herself go limp as a wet leaf with this realization: that the ham (quite aside from the fact of its having been devoured by the Gestapo) had doubtless been forgotten, and that her own fate--whatever it might be--was tied up with the fate of these members of the Resistance. And such a fate swooped down on her with a black foreboding overwhelming enough to make stale the word "terror." Sophie spent the night without sleep. It was cold and tombdark in the cell and she could only distinguish the fact that the human form--hurled in next to her during the early hours of the morning--was female. And as dawn seeped in through the grating she was shocked though not really surprised to see that the dozing woman beside her was Wanda. In the pale light she could slowly make out the huge bruise on Wanda's cheek; it was repulsive, reminding Sophie of mashed purple grapes. She started to wake her, thought better of it, hesitated, withdrew her hand; just then Wanda awoke and groaned, blinked, staring Sophie in the eye. She would never forget the look of astonishment on Wanda's battered face. "Zosia!" she exclaimed, embracing her. "Zosia! What in God's name are you doing here?" Sophie burst into tears, weeping with such desperation and wretchedness against Wanda's shoulder that it was long minutes before she could even begin to mumble a word. Wanda's patient strength was consoling, as usual; her soothing whispers and pats between the shoulder blades were at once sisterly, maternal and like the attentions of a nurse; Sophie could have fallen fast asleep in her arms. But she was tortured with too much anxiety, and after taking hold of herself she blurted out the tale of her arrest on the train. It took her only seconds. She heard her words spilling over one another in a rush, conscious of the haste and abbreviation and her consuming need to arrive at the answer to the question which had been literally twisting her intestines for twelve hours: "The children, Wanda! Jan and Eva. Are they safe?" "Yes, they're safe. They're here somewhere, in this place. The Nazis didn't hurt them. They arrested everyone in our building--everyone, including your kids. They made a clean sweep of it." A tormented look passed over her wide strong features, ravaged now by the appalling bruise. "Oh God, they picked up so many people in the movement today. I knew we wouldn't have long after they killed Jozef. It's a catastrophe!" At least the children had not been harmed. She blessed Wanda, feeling exquisite relief. Then she could not restrain the impulse: she let her fingers hover over the disfigured cheek, the empurpled spongy outraged flesh, but did not touch it, finally drew her hand away. As she did so she found herself weeping again. "What did they do to you, Wanda darling?" she whispered. "A Gestapo ape threw me down the stairs, then stomped on me. Oh, these..." She raised her eyes upward, but the imprecation she was plainly about to utter faded on her lips. The Germans had been cursed without cessation and for so long that the dirtiest anathema, no matter how novel, sounded vapid; better to let the tongue fall dumb. "It's not so bad, I don't think he broke anything. I'll bet it looks worse than it feels." She put her arms around Sophie again, making little tut-tut sounds. "Poor Zosia. Imagine you falling into their filthy trap." Wanda! How could Sophie ever fathom or define her ultimate feeling about Wanda--composed as that