Sophie's Choice - William Styron [87]
She smiled, aware of the warm blush in her cheeks. “Pas de flatterie, monsieur.”
“But then,” he went on, “all these preposterous contradictions. What in God’s name is a darling Polish shiksa doing working in the office of a chiropractor named Blackstock, and where on earth did you learn Yiddish? And lastly—and goddamnit, you’re going to have to put up with my prying nose again, but I’m concerned about your condition, don’t you see, and I’ve got to know these things!—lastly, how did you get that number on your arm? You don’t want to talk about it, I know. I hate asking, but I think you’ve got to tell me.”
She dropped her head back against the dingy pillow of the pink and creaking chair. Perhaps, she thought with resignation, with mild despair, if she explained the rudimentary part of it to him now, patiently and explicitly, she would get it all over with, and if she was lucky, be spared any further inquisitiveness about more somber and complex matters which she could never describe or reveal to anyone. Perhaps, too, it was absurd or offensive of her to be so enigmatic, so ostentatiously secretive about something which, after all, should be common knowledge by now to almost everybody. Even though that was the strange thing: people here in America, despite all of the published facts, the photographs, the newsreels, still did not seem to know what had happened, except in the most empty, superficial way. Buchenwald, Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz—all stupid catchwords. This inability to comprehend on any real level of awareness was another reason why she so rarely had spoken to anyone about it, totally aside from the lacerating pain it caused her to dwell on that part of the past. As for the pain itself, she knew before speaking that what she was about to say would cause her almost physical anguish—like tearing open a nearly healed sore or trying to hobble on a broken limb incompletely mended; yet Nathan, after all, had by now amply demonstrated that he was only trying to help her; she knew she did in fact need that help—rather desperately so—and thus she owed him at least a sketchy outline of her recent history.
So after a bit she began to speak to him about it, gratified by the emotionless, truly pedestrian tone she was able to sustain. “In April of 1943 I was sent to the concentration camp in the south of Poland called Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was near the town of Oświȩcim. I had been living in Warsaw. I had been living there for three years, ever since the beginning of 1940, which is when I had to leave Cracow. Three years is a long time, but there was still two years more before the war was over. I often have thought that I would have lived through those two years safely if I had not made a terrible méprise—pardon me, mistake. This mistake was really very foolish, I hate myself when I think about it. I had been so careful, you see. I had been so careful that I am a little ashamed to admit it. I mean, up until then I was, you see, well-off. I was not Jewish, I was not in the ghetto, so I could not get caught for that reason. Also, I did not work for the underground. Franchement, it seemed to me to be too dangerous; it was a question of being involved in a situation where—But I don’t wish to talk about that. Anyway, since I was not working for the underground, I did not worry about being caught for that reason either. I got caught for a reason which may seem to you very absurd. I got caught smuggling meat into Warsaw from a place that belonged to a friend in the country just outside the city. It was completely forbidden to possess meat, which was all commanded to go to the German army. But I risked this anyway, and tried to smuggle the meat so as to help make well my mother. My mother was very sick with—how do you say it?—la consomption.”
“Tuberculosis,” Nathan said.
“Yes. She had tuberculosis years before in Cracow, but it went away. Then it come back in Warsaw, you know, with these very cold winters without heat and this terrible thing with almost no food to eat, everything going to the Germans. In fact, she was so sick that everyone thought she was dying. I was not living with her, she lived nearby. I thought if I could get this meat it might improve her condition, so on one Sunday I went out to this village in the country and bought a forbidden ham. Then I come back into the city and I was halted by two police from the Gestapo and they discovered the ham. They make me under arrest and bring me to the Gestapo prison in Warsaw. I was not allowed to go back to the place where I was living, and I never saw my mother again. Much later I learned that she died a few months after that.