Sophie's Choice - William Styron [152]
“And oh, Stingo, the shame! Because my father, he is so crazy for perfection that this mistake he can’t fermer les yeux... overlook, but he have to make a big thing out of it then and there, and I heard him say in front of Kazik and Sienkiewicz this, I’ll never forget it, it was so filled with contempt, ‘Your intelligence is pulp, like your mother’s. I don’t know where you got your body, but you did not get your brains from me.’ And I hear Sienkiewicz make a chuckle, more in embarrassment than anything, I guess, and I look up at Kazik and he is giving this little smile, only I was not surprised that this look on his face seemed to share my father’s contempt. You may as well know now, Stingo, about another lie I told you weeks ago. I really had no love for Kazik either at that time, I had no more love for my husband than for a stone-faced stranger I had never seen before in my life. Such an abundance of lies I have given you, Stingo! I am the avatar of menteuses...
“On and on my father go about my intelligence, or failure of it, and I felt my face burning, but I shut up my ears, turned my hearing off. Papa, Papa, I remember saying to myself, please, all I want is a cup of tea! Then my father stopped attacking me and went back to reading the manuscript. And I was suddenly very frightened sitting there, looking down at my hands. It was cold. This café, it was like a premonition of hell. I heard people murmuring on all sides of me, and it all seemed to be in this hurtful key of a profound minor, like one of Beethoven’s final quarters, you know, like grief, and there was this... this clammy wind sighing outside on the streets, and I suddenly realized that around me everyone was whispering about the coming war. I thought I could almost hear guns somewhere far-off, on the horizon past the city. I felt a deep fright and I wanted to get up and run away, but all I could do was sit there. Finally I heard my father ask Sienkiewicz how long it would be for the printing, rush job, and Sienkiewicz said the day after tomorrow. Then I realized that my father was talking to Kazik about the distribution of the pamphlets to the faculty of the university. Most of the pamphlets he was planning to send to places in Poland and in Germany and Austria, but he wanted a few hundred of the pamphlets which was in Polish to be passed around among the faculty—passed around by hand. And I realized that he was telling Kazik—telling I say, because he have him under the thumb just like me—that he wanted him to distribute the pamphlets personally at the university as soon as they were printed. Only he would of course need help. And I heard my father say, ‘Sophie will help you pass them out.’
“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