Sophie's Choice - William Styron [153]
“But to be truthful, it was something else. It was at last coming clear to me that this man, this father, this man which give me breath and flesh have no more feeling for me than a servant, some peasant or slave, and now with not a word of thanks for all my work was going to make me... grovel?—yes, grovel through the halls of the university like some newspaper vendor, once more doing what he said just because he said I must do it. And I was a grown woman and I wanted to play Bach, and at that moment I just thought I must die—I mean, to die not so much for what he was making me do but because I had no way of saying no. No way of saying—oh, you know, Stingo—‘Fuck you, Papa.’ Just then he said, ‘Zosia,’ and I looked up and he was smiling at me a little, I could see his two false teeth shining, and the smile was pleasant and he said, ‘Zosia, wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?’ And I said, ‘No, thank you, Papa.’ Then he said, ‘Come, Zosia, you must have some tea, you look pale and cold.’ I wanted to fly away on wings. I said, ‘No, thank you, Papa, I really don’t want any tea.’ And at that time to keep control I was biting the inside of my lip so hard that the blood came, and I could taste it like seawater on my tongue. He turned to talk to Kazik then. And it happened, this sharp stab of hatred. It went through me with this surprising quick pain and I got dizzy and I thought I might fall to the floor. I was hot all over, in a blaze. I said to myself: I hate him—with a kind of terrible wonder at the hatred which entered into me. It was incredible, the surprise of this hatred, only with awful pain—like a butcher knife in my heart.”
Poland is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, soul-split country which in many ways (I came to see through Sophie’s eyes and memory that summer, and through my own eyes in later years) resembles or conjures up images of the American South—or at least the South of other, not-so-distant times. It is not alone that forlornly lovely, nostalgic landscape which creates the frequent likeness—the quagmiry but haunting monochrome of the Narew River swampland, for example, with its look and feel of a murky savanna on the Carolina coast, or the Sunday hush on a muddy back street in a village of Galicia, where by only the smallest eyewink of the imagination one might see whisked to a lonesome crossroads hamlet in Arkansas these ramshackle, weather-bleached little houses, crookedly carpentered, set upon shrubless plots of clay where scrawny chickens fuss and peck—but in the spirit of the nation, her indwellingly ravaged and melancholy heart, tormented into its shape like that of the Old South out of adversity, penury and defeat.
Imagine, if you will, a land in which carpetbaggers swarmed not for a decade or so but for millennia and you will come to understand just one aspect of a Poland stomped upon with metronomic tedium and regularity by the French, the Swedes, the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and possessed by even such greedy incubuses as the Turks. Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories. Pride in ancestry and family name, and also, one must remember, in a largely factitious aristocracy, or nobility. The names Radziwill and Ravenel are pronounced with the same intense albeit slightly hollow hauteur. In defeat both Poland and the American South bred a frenzied nationalism. Yet, indeed, even leaving aside these most powerful resemblances, which are very real and which find their origin in similar historical fountains (there should be added: an entrenched religious hegemony, authoritarian and puritanical in spirit), one discovers more superficial yet sparkling cultural correspondences: the passion for horseflesh and military titles, domination over women (along with a sulky-sly lechery), a tradition of storytelling, addiction to the blessings of firewater. And being the butt of mean jokes.