Sophie's Choice - William Styron [48]
“Neither of my parents come from Cracow in the beginning. My mother was from Lodz and my father was from Lublin. They met in Vienna when they were students. My father was studying the law at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and my mother was studying music in the city. They were both very religious Catholics, so I was brought up very devout and went to Mass always and church school, but I don’t mean I was, you know, fanatic, nut. I believed very much in God, but my mother and father they were not, you know, I don’t know what the exact word is in English, like dur—yes, hard, harsh. They were not like that. They were very liberal—even, you could say, almost socialist—and always voted with labor or the democrats. My father hated Pilsudski. He said he was a worse terror for Poland than Hitler, and drunk a whole lot of schnapps to celebrate the night Pilsudski died. He was a pacifist, my father, and even though he would talk about these sunny times for Poland, I knew that au fond he was gloomy and worried. Once I heard him talking to my mother—it must have been around 1932—and I heard him say in this gloomy voice, ‘This cannot truly last. There will be a war. Fate has never allowed Poland to be happy for very long.’ This he spoke in German, I remember. In our house we spoke in German more often than we spoke in Polish. Français I learned to speak almost perfect in school but I spoke German even more easier than French. It was the influence of Vienna, you see, where my father and mother had spend so much time, and then my father was a professor of law and German was so much the language of scholars in those days. My mother was a wonderful cook in the Viennese style. Oh, there were a few good Polish things she cooked, but Polish cooking is not exactly haute cuisine, and so I remember the food she cooked in this big kitchen we had in Cracow—Wiener Gulash Suppe and Schnitzel, and oh! especially I remember this wonderful dessert she made called Metternich pudding that was all filled with chestnuts and butter and orange skin.
“I know maybe it sound tiresome to say so all the time, but my mother and father was wonderful people. Nathan, you know, is okay now, he is calm, he is in one of his good times—periods, you say? But when he is in one of the bad times like the time when you first saw him—when he is in one of his tempêtes, I call them, he start to scream at me and always then call me an anti-Semitic Polish pig. Oh, his language, and what he calls me, words I’ve never heard before, in English, then Yiddish, everything! But always like ‘You filthy Polish pig, crummy nafka, kurveh, you’re killing me, you’re killing me like you filthy Polish pigs have always killed the Jews!’ And I try to talk to him, but he won’t listen, he just stays crazy with this rage, and I have always knew it was no good at such a time to tell him about the good Poles like my father. Papa was born in Lublin when it belonged to the Russians and there were many, many Jews there who suffered from those terrible pogroms against them. Once my mother told me—because my father would never talk about such a thing—that when he was a young man he and his brother, who was a priest, risked their lives by hiding three Jewish families from the pogrom, from the Cossack soldiers. But I know that if I tried to tell this to Nathan during one of these tempêtes, he would only yell at me some more and call me a dirty pig Polack liar. Oh, I have to be so patient with Nathan then—I know then that he is becoming very sick, that he is not all right—and just turn away and keep silent and think of other things, waiting for the tempête to go away, when he will be kind and so sweet to me again, so full of tendresse and loving.
“It must be about ten years ago, a year or two before the war began, that I first heard my father say Massenmord. It was after the stories in the newspapers about the terrible destruction the Nazis had done in Germany on the synagogues and the Jewish stores. I remember my father first said something about Lublin and the pogroms he seen there, and then he said,