THE NEXT MORNING the Pennsylvania train that Sophie and I were riding to Washington, D.C., on our way down to Virginia, suffered a power failure and stalled on the trestle opposite the Wheatena factory in Rahway, New Jersey. During this interruption in our trip—a stop which lasted only fifteen minutes or so—I subsided into a remarkable tranquillity and found myself taking hopeful stock of the future. It still amazes me that I was able to maintain this calm, this almost elegant repose, after our headlong escape from Nathan and the fretful, sleepless night Sophie and I spent in the bowels of Penn Station. My eyes were gritty with fatigue and a part of my mind still dwelt achingly on the catastrophe we had barely avoided. As time had worn on that night it seemed more and more probable to both Sophie and me that Nathan had not been in our vicinity when he made that telephone call; nonetheless his merciless threat had sent us running madly from the Pink Palace with only one large suitcase each to get us down to the farm in Southampton County. We agreed that we would worry about the rest of our belongings later. From that moment on we had both been possessed—and in a sense united—by a single-minded and terrible urge: to flee Nathan and get as far away from him as we could.
Even so, the spell of enervated composure which finally came over me on the train would scarcely have been possible had it not been for the first of two telephone calls I was finally able to complete from the station. This was to Larry, who understood immediately the desperate nature of his brother’s crisis and told me that he would leave Toronto without delay and come down and cope with Nathan in the best way he could. We wished each other luck and said we would keep in touch. So at least I felt I had discharged some final responsibility toward Nathan and had not exactly abandoned him in my scramble to get away; after all, I had been running for my life. The other call was to my father; he of course welcomed with joy my announcement that Sophie and I were on our way south. “You’ve made a splendid decision!” I heard him shout over the distant miles, with obvious emotion. “Leaving that no-good world!”
And so, sitting high above Rahway in the crowded coach with Sophie dozing beside me, munching on a stale Danish pastry bought from the candy butcher along with a lukewarm carton of milk, I began to regard the unfolding years ahead with equanimity and affection. Now that Nathan and Brooklyn were behind me, I was about to turn the page on a new chapter in my life. For one thing, I calculated that my book, which would be a longish one, was nearly one-third completed. By chance the work I had done on it at Jack Brown’s house had brought me to a congenial way station in the narrative, a place where I felt it would be easy to pick up the loose ends once I got settled with Sophie down on the farm. After a week or so of adjusting to our new rural surroundings—getting to know the Negro help, stocking the larder, meeting the neighbors, learning to run the old beat-up truck and tractor which my father had told me came with the place—I would be in a fine way to resume advancing the story, and with honest application I might be lucky enough to have the whole thing wrapped up and ready to hawk to a publisher by the end of 1948.
I looked down at Sophie as I thought these buoyant thoughts. She was fast asleep, her tousled blond head lay against my shoulder, and I very gently surrounded her with my arm, lightly touching her hair with my lips as I did so. A vagrant pang of memory stabbed me but I thrust the ache aside; certainly I could not be a homosexual, could I, feeling for this creature such abiding, heartbreaking desire? We would of course have to get married, once established in Virginia; the ethos of the time and place would certainly permit no casual cohabitation. But despite the nagging problems, which included eradicating the memory of Nathan and the difference in our ages, I had the feeling that Sophie would be willing, and I resolved to nibble around the edges of this proposition with her once she woke up. She stirred and murmured something in her slumber, looking even in her haggard exhaustion so lovely that I wanted to weep. My God, I thought, this woman is soon likely to be my wife.
The train gave a lurch, moved forward, faltered, stopped again, and a low concerted groan went through the car. A sailor standing above me in the aisle swilled at a can of beer. A baby began to squall with hellish abandon behind me, and it occurred to me that in public conveyances fate inevitably positioned the single screaming infant in the seat nearest my own. I hugged Sophie softly and thought of my book; a thrill of pride and contentment went through me when I considered the honest workmanship I had so far put into the story, making its predestined way with grace and beauty toward the blazing denouement which remained to be set down but which I had already foretokened in my mind a thousand times: the tormented, alienated girl going to her lonely death on the indifferent summertime streets of the city I had just left behind. I had a moment of gloom: Would I be able to summon the passion, the insight to portray this young suicide? Could I make it all seem real? I was sorely bothered by the approaching struggle of imagining the girl’s ordeal. Nonetheless I felt so serenely secure in the integrity of this novel that I had already fashioned for it an appropriately melancholy title: Inheritance of Night. This from the Requiescat of Matthew Arnold, an elegy for a woman’s spirit, with its concluding line: “Tonight it doth inherit the vasty hall of Death.” How could a book like this fail to capture the souls of thousands of readers? Gazing out at the grime-encrusted façade of the Wheatena factory—hulking, homely, its blue industrial windows reflecting the morning light—I shivered with happiness and again with pride at the sheer quality of what I had put into my book by dint of so much solitary work and perspiration and, yes, even occasional freshets of grief; and thinking once more of the as yet unwritten climax, I allowed myself to fantasize a line from the review of a dazzled critic of 1949 or 1950: “The most powerful passage of female interior monologue since Molly Bloom’s.” What folly! I thought. What conceit!
Sophie slept. Tenderly I wondered how many days and nights she would be drowsing next to me in the coming years. I speculated on our matrimonial bed at the farm, thought of its size and shape, wondered if its mattress was constructed with sufficient amplitude, bounce and resilience to accommodate the industrious venery it would certainly receive. I thought of our children, the many young towheads skipping around the farm like little Polish buttercups and thistles, and my merry paternal commands: “Time to milk the cow, Jerzy!” “Wanda, feed the chickens!” “Tadeusz! Stefania! Close up the barn!” I thought of the farm itself, which I had not seen outside of my father’s snapshots, tried to visualize it as the abode of a prominent literary figure. Like Faulkner’s Mississippi home, “Rowan Oak,” it would have to be given a name, one possibly appropriate to the peanut crop that provided its reason for being. “Goober Haven” was far and away too facetious, and I abandoned all other changes on the nut motif, playing instead with names more tony, stately, dignified: “Five Elms” perhaps (I hoped the farm had five elms, or even one) or “Rosewood,” or “Great Fields,” or “Sophia,” in tribute to my beloved dame. In my mind’s prism the years like blue hills rolled peacefully away toward the horizon of the far future. Inheritance of Night a remarkable success, gaining laurels rarely shed upon the work of a writer so young. A short novel then, also acclaimed, having to do with my wartime experiences—a taut, searing book eviscerating the military in a tragicomedy of the absurd. Meanwhile, Sophie and I living on the modest plantation in dignified seclusion, my reputation growing, the author himself being increasingly importuned by the media but steadfastly refusing all interviews. “I just farm peanuts,” says he, going about his work. At age thirty or thereabouts another masterpiece, These Blazing Leaves, the chronicle of that tragic Negro firebrand Nat Turner.
The train lurched forward, began to churn with smooth and oily precision as it gained momentum, and my vision evaporated in an effervescent blur against the grimy, receding walls of Rahway.
Sophie awoke abruptly, with a little cry. I glanced down at her. She seemed a bit feverish; her brow and cheeks were flushed, and a fragile, dewy mustache of perspiration hovered above her lip. “Where are we, Stingo?” she said.
“Somewhere in New Jersey,” I replied.
“How long does it take, this trip to Washington?” she asked.
“Oh, between three and four hours,” I said.
“And then to the farm?”
“I don’t know exactly. We’ll get a train to Richmond, then a bus down to Southampton. It’ll be quite a few more hours. It’s practically in North Carolina. That’s why I think we’ve got to spend the night in Washington and then head down to the farm tomorrow morning. We could stop in Richmond for the night, I guess, but this way you’ll get to see a little bit of Washington.”
“Okay, Stingo,” she said, taking my hand. “I’ll do whatever you say.” After a silence she said, “Stingo, would you go get me some water?”
“Sure.” I pressed down the aisle crowded with people, mostly servicemen, and near the vestibule found the fountain, where I trickled warm unsavory-looking water into a paper cup. When I returned, still airily elated by my fanciful pipe dreams, my spirits sank like pig iron at the sight of Sophie clutching a full pint bottle of Four Roses which she had plucked from her suitcase.
“Sophie,” I said gently, “for God’s sake, it’s morning still. You haven’t even had breakfast. You’re going to get cirrhosis of the liver.”
“That’s all right,” she said, sloshing whiskey into the cup. “I had a doughnut at the station. And a Seven-Up.”
I groaned softly, aware from past experience that there was no way of dealing with this problem short of complicating matters and creating a scene. The most I could hope for would be to catch her off guard and swipe the bottle, as I had done once or twice before. I sank back in my seat. The train sped across New Jersey’s satanic industrial barrens, the clickety-clack momentum hurling us past squalid slums, sheet-metal sheds, goofy drive-ins with whirling signs, warehouses, bowling alleys built like crematoriums, crematoriums built like roller rinks, swamps of green chemical slime, parking lots, barbarous oil refineries with their spindly upright nozzles ejaculating flame and mustard-yellow fumes. What would Thomas Jefferson have thought, viewing this? I mused. Sophie, jittery, restless, alternately gazed out at this landscape and poured whiskey into her cup, finally turning to me to say, “Stingo, does this train stop anywhere between here and Washington?”
“Only for a minute or two to take on passengers or let them off. Why?”
“I want to make a telephone call.”
“Who to?”
“I want to call and find out about Nathan. I want to see if he’s all right.”
Ogreish gloom encompassed me in recapitulation of the agony of the night before. I took Sophie’s arm and squeezed it hard, too hard; she winced. “Sophie,” I said, “listen. Listen to me. That part is over. There is nothing you can do. Can’t you realize that he actually was on the point of killing us both? Larry will come down from Toronto and locate Nathan and—well, deal with him. After all, he’s his brother, his closest relative. Nathan is insane, Sophie! He’s got to be... institutionalized.”
She had begun to weep. The tears spilled down around her fingers, which suddenly looked very thin, pink and emaciated as she clutched her cup. And once again I was conscious of that pitiless blue toothbite of a tattoo on her forearm. “I just don’t know how I’m going to face things, I mean, without him.” She paused, sobbing. “I could call Larry.”
“You couldn’t reach him now,” I insisted, “he must be on a train somewhere near Buffalo.”
“Then I could call Morris Fink. He might be able to tell me if Nathan came back to the house. Sometimes, you know, he would do that when he was on a high. He would come back and take some Nembutal and sleep it off. Then when he woke up he would be all right. Or almost all right. Morris would know if he did that this time.” She blew her nose, continuing to make little hiccupy sobs.
“Oh, Sophie, Sophie,” I whispered, wanting to say but unable to say, “It’s all over.”
Thundering into the station in Philadelphia, the train screeched and shuddered to a stop amid the sunless cavern, touching me with a pang of nostalgia I could scarcely have foreseen. In the window I caught a glimpse of my reflected face, pale from too much indoor literary endeavor, and behind that face I thought for an instant I saw a younger replica—my little-boy self over ten years before. I laughed out loud at the remembrance, and suddenly invigorated and inspired, resolved both to distract Sophie from her gathering disquiet and to cheer her up, or try to.
“This is Philadelphia,” I said.
“Is it a big place?” she asked. Her curiosity, though lachrymal, encouraged me.
“Mmm, medium big. Not a huge metropolis like New York, but big enough. I would think about the size of Warsaw maybe, before the Nazis got to it. It was the first truly big city I ever saw in my life.”
“When was that?”
“Back around 1936, when I was eleven. I’d never been to the North before. And I remember the funniest damn story about the day I arrived. I had an aunt and uncle living in Philadelphia, and my mother—this was about two years before she died—decided to send me up here for a week’s visit in the summer. She sent me by myself, on a Greyhound bus. Little kids traveled alone a lot in those days, it was perfectly safe. Anyway, it was an all-day trip on the bus—it went the long way around from the Tidewater to Richmond, then up to Washington and through Baltimore. My mother had the colored cook—her name was Florence, I remember—fix me a big paper bag full of fried chicken and I had a thermos of cold milk—very gourmet travel cuisine, you understand, and I gobbled my lunch somewhere between Richmond and Washington, and then along about midafternoon the bus stopped in Havre de Grace—”
“Like the French, you mean?” Sophie said. “Harbor...”
“Yes, it’s a small town in Maryland. We’ll be going through it. Anyway, we all trooped out at a rest stop, a tacky little restaurant where you could take a pee and where they sold soda pop and such, and I saw this horse-racing machine. In Maryland, you see, unlike Virginia, they had a certain amount of legal gambling and you could put a nickel in this machine and bet on one of, oh, say a dozen tiny metal horses running down a track. I remember my mother had given me exactly four dollars spending money—that was a lot of money in the Depression—and I got very excited at the idea of betting on a horse, so I put in my nickel. Well, Sophie, you can’t imagine. That goddamned machine hit the jackpot—you know what jackpot means? Everything lit up and out came an absolute torrent of nickels—dozens of them, scores of them. I couldn’t believe it! I must have won fifteen dollars’ worth of nickels. They were all over the floor. I was out of my mind with happiness. But the problem was, you see, how to transport all this loot. I remember I was wearing these little white linen short pants and I stuffed all these nickels into the pockets, but even so, there were so many of them that they just kept spilling out all over everywhere. And the worst part was this: there was this mean-looking woman who ran the place, and when I asked her to please exchange my nickels for dollar bills she flew into a terrible rage, screaming at me that you had to be eighteen to play the horse-race machine and that I was obviously still wet behind the ears and that she’d lose her license and if I didn’t get the hell out of there, she’d call the police.”
“You were eleven,” said Sophie, taking my hand. “I can’t believe Stingo at eleven. You must have been a cute little boy in your white linen short pants.” Sophie was still pink-nosed, but the tears had momentarily stopped and in her eyes I thought I saw a sparkle of something like amusement.
“So I got back on this bus for the rest of the drive to Philadelphia. It was a long way. Every time I made the slightest move a nickel or several of them would slip out of these bulging pockets of mine and roll down the aisle. And when I’d get up to retrieve them it would make it only worse, because more nickels would fall out and roll away. The driver was half crazy by the time we got to Wilmington and all through the trip the passengers were looking down at this trickle of money.” I paused, gazing out at the faceless shadow figures on the station platform, which moved away in soundless retrograde as the train pulled out now, gently vibrating. “Anyway,” I said, returning the squeeze Sophie gave my hand, “the final tragedy happened at the bus station, which must be not far from here. That evening my aunt and uncle were waiting for me and when I ran toward them I tripped and fell down flat on my little ass, my pockets split, and almost every goddamned one of those nickels poured out off the ramp and underneath the buses into this dark parking bay far down below, and I think when my uncle picked me up and brushed me off, there were about five nickels left in my pockets. The others were gone forever.” I halted, tickled at this sweetly absurd fable which I had told Sophie truthfully, with no need for embroidery. “It is a cautionary tale,” I added, “about the destructive nature of greed.”
Sophie held one hand to her face, obscuring her expression, but since her shoulders were trembling I thought she had succumbed to laughter. I was mistaken. There were tears again, tears of anguish from which she simply could not seem to free herself. Suddenly I realized that I must have inadvertently summoned up memories of her little boy. I let her cry in silence for a while. Then the weeping became less. Finally she turned to me and said, “Down in Virginia where we’re going, Stingo, do you think there will be a Berlitz school, a school for language?”
“What on earth would you want that for?” I said. “You already know more languages than anyone I know.”
“It would be for English,” she replied. “Oh, I know I speak it good now, and even read it, but what I must learn to do is to write it. I’m so poor at writing English. The spelling is so very strange.”
“Well, I don’t know, Sophie,” I said, “there are probably language schools in Richmond or Norfolk. But they are both pretty far away from Southampton. Why do you ask?”
“I want to write about Auschwitz,” she said, “I want to write about my experiences there. I suppose I could write in Polish or German or maybe French, but I’d so much rather be able to write in English...”
Auschwitz. It was a place which, amid the events of the past few days, I had thrust so far in the back of my mind that I had almost forgotten its existence; now it returned like a blow at the back of my skull, and it hurt. I looked at Sophie as she took a swig from her cup and then gave a small burp. Her speech had taken on the swollen-tongued quality which I had learned was a presentiment of unruly thinking and difficult behavior. I longed to dump that cup on the floor. And I cursed myself for the weakness or indecisiveness or spinelessness, or whatever it was, that still prevented my dealing more firmly with Sophie at such moments. Wait until we’re married, I thought.
“There are so many things that people still don’t know about that place!” she said fiercely. “There are so many things I haven’t even told you, Stingo, and I’ve told you so much. You know, about how the whole place was covered with the smell of burning Jews, day and night. I’ve told you that. But I never even told you hardly anything about Birkenau, when they begun to starve me to death and I got so sick I almost died. Or about the time I saw a guard take the clothes off a nun and then make his dog attack her and bite her so bad on the body and the face that she died a few hours later. Or...” And here she paused, gazed into space, then said, “There are so many terrible things I could tell. But maybe I could write it as a novel, you see, if I learned to write English good, and then I could make people understood how the Nazis made you do things you never believed you could. Like Höss, for instance. I never would have tried to make him fuck me if it hadn’t been for Jan. And I never would have pretended that I hated Jews so much, or that I wrote my father’s pamphlet. All that was for Jan. And that radio that I didn’t take. It still almost kills me that I didn’t steal it, but don’t you see, Stingo, how that would have ruined everything for my little boy? And at that same time I just couldn’t open my mouth, just couldn’t report to the Resistance people, couldn’t say a word about all the things I’d learned working for Höss, because I was afraid...” She faltered. Her hands were trembling. “I was so afraid! They made me afraid of everything! Why don’t I tell the truth about myself? Why don’t I write it down in a book that I was a terrible coward, that I was a filthy collaboratrice, that I done everything that was bad just to save myself?” She made a savage moan, so loud above the racket of the train that heads turned nearby and eyes rolled. “Oh, Stingo, I can’t stand living with these things!”
“Hush, Sophie!” I commanded. “You know you weren’t a collaborator. You’re contradicting yourself! You know you were just a victim. You told me yourself this summer that a place like that camp made you behave in a different way than in the ordinary world. You told me yourself that you just couldn’t judge what you did or what anyone else did in terms of accepted conduct. So please, Sophie, please, please leave yourself alone! You’re just eating your guts out about things that weren’t your fault—and it’s going to make you ill! Please stop it.” I lowered my voice, and I used a word of endearment I had never used before, the word itself surprising me. “Please stop this now, darling, for your own sake.” It sounded pompous with the “darling”—already I was talking in a husbandly way—but I somehow had to say it.
I was also on the verge of speaking those words which had been on my tongue a hundred times that summer—“I love you, Sophie.” The prospect of uttering that plain phrase made my heart pound and skip beats, but before I could open my mouth Sophie announced that she had to go to the bathroom. She finished off the cup before she went. I watched anxiously as she began to shove her way toward the rear of the car, the blond head bobbing, the pretty legs unsteady. Then I turned back to reading Life magazine. I must have dozed off then, or rather, slept, sunk as if drowned after the exhaustion of a wide-awake night and its tension and chaos, for when the conductor’s nearby voice woke me by bellowing “All aboard!” I jumped straight up out of my seat and then realized that an hour or more had passed. Sophie had not returned to her place next to me, and sudden fear wrapped itself around me like a quilt fashioned of many wet hands. I glanced into the darkness outside, saw the passing sparkle of tunnel lights, and knew that we were leaving Baltimore. It might have been a normal two-minute struggle to the other end of the car, pressing and shoving past the bellies and rumps of fifty standees, but I made it in a few seconds, actually knocking a small child down. In senseless dread I pounded at the door of the women’s lavatory—what made me think she was still in there? A fat Negro woman with wild wiglike hair and bright marigold powder on her jowls stuck her face out and shrilled, “Git outa here! You crazy?” I plunged on.
In the swanker regions of the train I was enveloped by moist Muzak. The elderly-auntie strains of Percy Grainger’s Country Gardens followed me as I frantically peered into roomette after roomette, hoping that Sophie had strayed into one and perhaps gone to sleep. I was now alternately obsessed by the notion that she had gotten off in Baltimore and that—Oh shit, the other was even more unthinkable. I opened the doors of more lavatories, stalked the funereal plush reaches of four or five parlor cars, hopefully scanned the diner where white-aproned colored waiters flapped their way up and down the aisle through fumes fragrant with stale cooking oil. At last: the club car. A little desk, a cash register—its custodian a pleasant gray-haired middle-aged woman who gazed up from her work with mournful eyes.
“Yes, poor dear,” she said after I had blurted the queasy question, “she was hunting for a telephone. Imagine, on a train! She wanted to call Brooklyn. Poor dear, she was crying. She seemed, well, a little drunk. She went that way.”
I found Sophie at the end of the car, which was a bleak cage of a vestibule, clangingly noisy, that was also the end of the train. A padlocked glass door crisscrossed by wire mesh looked down on the receding rails that glittered in the late-morning sun and converged at a point marking infinity amid the green pinewoods of Maryland. She was sitting on the floor slumped against the wall, her yellow hair adrift in the windy draft, and in one hand she clutched the bottle. As in that swim to oblivion weeks before—when exhaustion had so unmanned her, and guilt, and grief—she had gone as far as she could go. She gazed up and said something to me, but I couldn’t hear. I bent down closer, and now—partly reading her lips, partly responding to that infinitely sorrowful voice—heard her say, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”
Hotel employees certainly must come face to face with a lot of weird ones. But I still wonder what went through the mind of the grandfatherly desk clerk at the Hotel Congress, not far from our nation’s Capitol, when he confronted the young Reverend Wilbur Entwistle, wearing a distinctly unecclesiastical seersucker suit but conspicuously carrying a Bible, and his violently rumpled fair-haired wife, who muttered disconnectedly in a foreign accent during the registration process, her face potty with train soot and tears, and clearly blotto. In the end he doubtless took it in his stride, for I had worked out a camouflage. Despite my informal dress, the masquerade I had contrived seemed as effective as one could imagine. In the 1940s unmarried people were not permitted to check into the same hotel room together; in addition, it was a felonious risk to falsely register as man and wife. The hazard increased if the lady was drunk. Desperate, I knew I was taking a risk, but it was one that seemed minimized if I could cast over it a modest halo of sanctimony. Therefore, there was the black leather Bible which I fished out of my suitcase just before the train pulled into Union Station, and also there was the address I inscribed in a large hand on the register, as if to decisively validate my dulcet-voiced and unguentary ministerial bearing: Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia. I was relieved to see that my ruse served to distract the clerk’s attention from Sophie; the dewlapped old gentleman, being Southern (like so many Washington hirelings), was impressed by my credentials and also had a Southerner’s genial garrulousness: “Have a nice stay, Reverend, you and the missus. What denomination you a preacher in?”
I was about to reply “Presbyterian,” but he had begun to ramble on like a beagle hound softly barking down the ravines of godly fellowship. “Me, I’m a Baptist, fifteen years I’ve attended the Second Baptist Church of Washington, mighty fine preacher we’ve got there now, Reverend Wilcox, maybe you’ve heard of him. Comes from Fluvanna County, Virginia, where I was born and raised, though of course he’s a much younger man.” As I began to edge away, with Sophie clinging heavily to my arm, the clerk rang for the single sleepy Negro bellboy and handed me a card. “You like good seafood, Reverend? Try this restaurant down on the waterfront. It’s called Herzog’s. Best crab cakes in town.” And when we approached the aged elevator with its stained pea-green doors, he persisted: “Entwistle. You wouldn’t be related to the Entwistles down around Powhatan County, would you, Reverend?” I was back in the South.
The Hotel Congress breathed an air of troisième classe. The cubbyhole of a room we took for seven dollars was drab and stifling, and its exposure on a nondescript back street let in feeble light from the midday sun. Sophie, wobbling and desperate for sleep, plunged onto the bed even before the bellboy had deposited our bags on a rickety stand and accepted my twenty-five cents. I opened a window upon a ledge calcimine with pigeon droppings, and a warm October breeze suddenly freshened the room. Far off I could hear the clangor and muffled hoots of the trains at Union Station, while from some nearer source there came ruffles and flourishes, trumpets, cymbals, the piping self-esteem of a military band. A couple of flies made a bloated buzzing in the shadows near the ceiling.
I lay down next to Sophie on the bed, which had become unsprung in the middle, not so much allowing me as forcing me to roll toward her, as in the bosom of some shallow hammock, and on top of threadbare bedclothes that exuded a faint musky chlorinated smell either of laundry bleach or semen, perhaps both. Almost total exhaustion and worry over Sophie’s condition had dampened the cruder urgencies of the desire I had continually felt for her, but the fragrance and slope of the bed—seminal, erotic, sagging with ten thousand fornications—and her simple touch and proximity made me stir, squirm, fidget, unable to sleep. I heard a distant bell chime the noon hour. Sophie slept against me with lips apart, her breath faintly odorous of whiskey. The low-cut silk dress she wore had allowed most of one breast to become exposed, causing me such an irresistible hunger to touch it that I did just that, stroking the blue-veined skin at first lightly with my fingertips, then beginning to press and fondle the creamy fullness more elaborately with palm and thumb. The seizure of pure lust which accompanied this tender manipulation was accompanied in turn by a twinge of shame; there was something sneaky, almost necrophiliac in the act; molesting even the epidermal surface of Sophie in the privacy of her drugged slumber—and so I stopped, withdrew my hand.
Still I could not sleep. My brain swam with images, sounds, voices, the past and the future trading places, sometimes commingled: Nathan’s howl of rage, so cruel and mad that I had to thrust it from my thoughts; recently written scenes from my novel, the characters babbling their dialogue in my ear like actors on a stage; my father’s voice on the telephone, generous, welcoming (was the old man not right? shouldn’t I now make the South forever my home?); Sophie on the mossy shore of some imaginary pond or pool deep within the woods beyond “Five Elms’ ” spring fields, her lithe restored body glorious and long-legged in a Lastex bathing suit, our grinning elf of a first-born perched on her knee; that hideous gunshot swarming in my ear; sunsets, abandoned love-crazed midnights, magnanimous dawns, vanished children, triumph, grief, Mozart, rain, September green, repose, death. Love. The distant band, fading away on the “Colonel Bogey March,” made me ache with a hungry nostalgia and I recalled the war years not so long before, when on leave from some camp in Carolina or Virginia, I would lie awake (womanless) in a hotel in this same city—one of the few American cities stalked by the revenants of history—and think of the streets below and how they must have looked only three-quarters of a century ago, in the midst of the most grief-blasted war that ever set brother to murdering brother, when the sidewalks teemed with soldiers in blue and with gamblers and whores, sharp swindlers in stovepipe hats, splashy Zouaves, hustling journalists, businessmen on the make, pretty flirts in flowered hats, shadowy Confederate spies, pickpockets and coffin-makers—these last ever-hurrying to their ceaseless labor, awaiting those tens of thousands of martyrs, mostly boys, who were being slaughtered on the desperate earth south of the Potomac and who lay piled up like cordwood thick in the bloody fields and woods just beyond that sleeping river. It was always strange to me—awesome even—that the cleanly modern capital of Washington, so impersonal and official in its expansive beauty, should be one of the few cities in the nation disturbed by authentic ghosts. The band vanished into the far distance, its brazen diminishing harmony soft, heartbreaking on my hearing like a lullaby. I slept.
When I awoke, Sophie was sitting crouched on the bed on her knees, looking down at me. I had slept like one in a coma, and I could tell from the alteration of light in the room—it had been like twilight even at noon but was now nearly dark—that several hours had passed. How long Sophie had been gazing down I could not tell, of course, but I had the uneasy feeling that it had been for quite a spell; the expression she wore was sweet, speculative, not without humor. There was the same wan haggardness in her face, and beneath her eyes there were dark patches, but she seemed revived and reasonably sober. She appeared to have recovered, at least for the moment, from that awful fit on the train. When I blinked up at her she said, in the exaggerated accent she sometimes affected in fun, “Well, Reverend En-weestle, deed you ’ave a good sleep?”
“Christ, Sophie,” I said in vague panic, “what time is it? I slept like a corpse.”
“I heard the bell ring in the church outside just now. I think it rang three o’clock.”
I stirred drowsily, stroking her arm. “We’ve got to move out, as they used to say in the service. We can’t hang around here all afternoon. I want you to see the White House, the Capitol, the Washington Monument. Also Ford’s Theatre, you know, where Lincoln was shot. And the Lincoln Memorial. There’s so many damned things. And we might think of getting a bite to eat...”
“I’m not at all hungry,” she replied. “But I do want to see the city. I feel so much better after that sleep.”
“You went out like a light,” I said.
“So did you. When I woke up, there you were with your mouth open, snoring.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, feeling a touch of real consternation. “I don’t snore. I’ve never snored in my life! No one ever told me that before.”
“It’s because you haven’t ever slept with anybody,” she retorted in a teasing voice. And then she bent down and glued upon my lips a wonderful moist rubbery kiss, replete with a surprising tongue which made a quick playful foray in my mouth, then vanished. She returned to her propped-up position above me before I could even begin to respond, though my heart had begun a runaway thudding. “God, Sophie,” I began, “don’t do that unless—” I reached up and wiped my lips.
“Stingo,” she interrupted me, “where are we going?”
A little puzzled, I said, “I just told you. We’re going out to see the Washington sights. We’ll go by the White House, we might even get a look at Harry Truman—“
“No, Stingo,” she put in, more seriously now, “I mean, where are we really going? Last night after Nathan—Well, last night after he done what he done and we were packing our bags so fast, all you kept saying was ‘We’ve got to get back home, back home!’ Over and over you said ‘Back home!’ And I just followed you like this because I was so scared, and here we are together in this strange city and I really don’t know why. Where are we truly going? What home?”
“Well, you know, Sophie, I told you. We’re going to that farm I told you about down in southern Virginia. There’s nothing much I can add to what I’ve already described to you about the place. It’s a peanut farm mainly. I’ve never seen it, but my father has said it’s very comfortable, with all the modern American conveniences. You know—washing machine, refrigerator, telephone, indoor plumbing, radio and everything. The works. After we get settled I’m sure we’ll be able to drive up to Richmond and invest in a fine phonograph and lots of records. All the music we both love. There’s a department store there called Miller and Rhoads that has an excellent record department, at least it did when I was going to school down in Middlesex—“
Now again she interrupted, saying gently but probingly, “ ‘Once we get settled’? What’s going to happen then? How do you mean ‘get settled,’ Stingo dear?”
There was a huge and troubling vacuum created by this question which I could not possibly fill with an immediate answer, so freighted with ponderous meaning did I realize that the answer now had to be, and I gave a sort of foolish gulp and was silent for a long moment, aware of the blood flowing in rapid arrhythmic pulse at my temples, and of the desolate tomblike quietude of that shabby little room. Finally I said slowly, but with more ease and boldness than I thought I could ever muster, “Sophie, I’m in love with you. I want to marry you. I want us to live down on that farm together. I want to write my books there, maybe for the rest of my life, and I want you to be there with me and help me and raise a family.” I hesitated for an instant, then said, “I need you very much. So very, very much. Is it too much to hope that you need me too?” Even as I pronounced these words I was aware that they had the exact timbre and quavering resonance of a proposal I had once seen and heard George Brent, of all the solemn assholes, make to Olivia de Havilland on the promenade deck of some preposterous Hollywood ocean liner, but having said what I had to say so decisively, I let the bathos pass, thinking in a flash that perhaps all first protestations of love had to sound like movie crud.
Sophie put her head down next to mine so that I felt her faintly fevered cheek, and she spoke into my ear with a muffled voice while I watched her silk-clad hips swaying lightly above me. “Oh, sweet Stingo, you’re such a love. You’ve taken care of me in so many ways. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” A pause, her lips brushing my neck. “Do you know something, Stingo, I’m beyond thirty. What would you do with an old lady like me?”
“I’d manage,” I said. “I’d manage somehow.”
“You would want someone closer to your age to have children with, not someone like me. Besides...” She fell silent.
“Besides what?”
“Well, the doctors have said I must be very careful about having children after...” There was another silence.
“You mean after what you went through?”
“Yes. But it’s not just that. Someday I’ll just be old and ugly and you’ll still be quite young and I won’t blame you if you go chasing after all the young and pretty mademoiselles.”
“Oh, Sophie, Sophie,” I protested in a whisper, thinking despairingly: She hasn’t said “I love you” in return. “Don’t talk like that. You’ll always be my—well, my...” I groped for a phrase that was properly tender, could say only, “Number One.” It sounded hopelessly banal.
She sat erect again. “I do want to go with you to this farm. I so much want to see the South after all you’ve said and after reading Faulkner. Why don’t we just go to this place for a little while and I could stay with you without us being married, and we could decide—”
“Sophie, Sophie,” I put in, “I’d love that. There’s nothing I’d like better. I’m not a maniac for marriage. But you don’t realize what kind of people live down there. I mean, they’re decent, generous, good-hearted Southern folks, but in a little country place like we’d be living in, it would be impossible not to be married. Jesus Christ, Sophie, it’s full of Christians! Once it got around that we were living in sin, as it’s called, those good Virginia people would cover us with tar and feathers and tie us to a long two-by-four and dump us over the Carolina line. God’s truth, that’s what would happen.”
Sophie gave a small giggle. “Americans are so funny. I thought Poland was so very puritanical, but imagine...”
I realize now that it was the siren, or choir of sirens, and the drumming pandemonium that accompanied their shrieks, that ruptured the fragile membrane of Sophie’s mood, which thanks in part to my own attentive ministrations had become peaceful, even luminous around the edges, if hardly sunny. City sirens even at a distance generate a hateful noise, almost always set loose in a soul-damaging, unnecessary frenzy. This one, rising from the narrow street only three floors directly below us, was amplified as if by canyon walls, bouncing from the grimy building opposite and entering the window next to us like an elongated snout, a solidified scream. It maddened the eardrum, pure sadistic torment made aural, and I jumped from the bed to pull the window down. At the end of the dark street a smudge of smoke plumed away from what looked like a warehouse, but the fire trucks just below, stalled by some nameless impediment, kept releasing skyward their unbelievable blasts.
I slammed down the window, which was of some relief, but it appeared not to have helped Sophie at all; she lay sprawled on the bed kicking her heels and with a pillow jammed down over her head. Recent city dwellers, we were both used to this common enough intrusion, but rarely so loud or so close. The pokey town of Washington had produced a racket I had never heard in New York. But slowly now the fire engines moved past their obstruction, the noise diminished, and I turned my attention to Sophie on the bed. She looked up at me. Where the horrible clamor had merely set my nerves ajangle, it had plainly lacerated her like some evil bullwhip. Her face was pink and contorted and she rolled over toward the wall, shuddering and once more in tears. I sat down beside her. I watched in silence for a long minute or so until finally her sobs gradually ceased and I heard her say, “I’m so sorry, Stingo. I don’t seem to be able to control myself.”
“You’re doing fine,” I said without much conviction.
For a while she was completely silent where she lay, contemplating the wall. At last she said, “Stingo, did you ever have dreams in your life that came back over and over again? Isn’t it called recurring dreams?”
“Yes,” I replied, recalling the dream I had as a young boy after my mother’s death—her open coffin in the garden, her rain-damp ravaged face gazing at me in agony. “Yes,” I said again, “I had one that came back constantly after my mother died.”
“Do you think they have to do with parents? The one I’ve had all my life is about my father.”
“It’s strange,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t know. Mothers and fathers—they’re at the core of one’s own life somehow. Or they can be.”
“When I was asleep a while ago I had this dream about my father that I’ve had many times. But I must have forgotten it when I woke up. Then that fire engine just now—that siren. It was awful but it had a strange musical sound. Could that be it—the music? It shocked me and made me think of the dream again.”
“What was it about?”
“You see, it has to do with something that happened to me when I was a child.”
“What was that, Sophie?”
“Well, first you would have to understand something, before the dream. It was when I was eleven, like you. It was in the summer when we spent vacations in the Dolomites, like I’ve already told you. You remember I told you my father each summer rented a chalet there above Bolzano—in a little village called Oberbozen, which was German-speaking, of course. There was a small colony of Polish people there, professors from Cracow and Warsaw and some Polish—well, I suppose you would call them Polish aristocrats, at least they had money. I remember one of the professors was the famous anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. My father tried to cultivate Malinowski, but Malinowski detested my father. Once, in Cracow, I overheard a grownup say that Professor Malinowski thought my father, Professor Biegański, was a parvenu and hopelessly vulgar. Anyway, there was a rich Polish woman at Oberbozen named Princess Czartoryska, whom my father had come to know well, and he saw quite a bit of her during these summers. She was from a very old, very noble Polish family and my father liked her because she was rich and, well, she shared his feelings about Jews.
“This was the time of Pilsudski, you see, when the Polish Jews were protected and having, I guess you would call, a fairly decent life, and my father and Princess Czartoryska would get together and talk about the Jewish problem and the necessity of getting rid of the Jews someday. It is strange, you know, Stingo, because my father when he was in Cracow was always discreet about talking about Jews and his hatred of them in front of me or my mother or anyone like that. At least when I was a child. But in Italy, you see, at Oberbozen with Princess Czartoryska it was different. She was an eighty-year-old woman who always wore fine long gowns even in the middle of the summer, and wore jewelry—she had an immense emerald brooch, I remember—and she and my father would have tea in her very elegant Sennhütte, chalet, that is, and talk about the Jews. They always spoke in German. She had a beautiful Bernese mountain dog and I would play with the dog and overhear their conversation, almost always about the Jews. About sending them off somewhere, all of them, getting rid of them. The Princess even wanted to establish a fund for it. They were always talking about islands—Ceylon and Sumatra and Cuba but mostly Madagascar, where they would send the Jews. I would half listen while I played some game with Princess Czartoryska’s little grandson, who was English, or played with the big dog or listened to the music on this phonograph. It was the music, you see, Stingo, that has to do with my dream.”
Sophie fell silent again, and she pressed her fingers against her closed eyes. Something quickened in the monotone of her voice. She turned to me, as if she had become diverted from her remembrance. “We will have music where we’re going, then, Stingo. I wouldn’t be able to last long without music.”
“Well, I’ll be honest, Sophie. Out in the sticks—outside New York, that is—there’s nothing on the radio. No WQXR, no WNYC. Only Milton Cross and the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon. The rest is hillbilly. Some of it’s terrific. Maybe I’ll make you a Roy Acuff fan. But like I say, the first thing we’ll do after we move in is to buy a record player and records—”
“I’ve been so spoiled,” she put in, “after all the music Nathan bought me. But it’s my blood, my life’s blood, you know, and I can’t help it.” She paused, once again collecting the strands of her memory. Then she said, “Princess Czartoryska had a phonograph. It was one of those early machines, not very good, but it was the first one I had ever seen or heard. Strange, isn’t it, this old Polish Jew-hater with her love of music. She had a lot of records and it almost drove me mad with pleasure when she’d put them on for our benefit—my mother and my father and me and maybe some other guests—and we’d listen to these recordings. Most of them were arias from Italian and French operas—Verdi and Rossini and Gounod—but there was one record that I remember just made me nearly swoon, I loved it so. It must have been a rare and precious record. It’s hard to believe now, because it was very old and filled with noise, but I just adored it. It was Madame Schumann-Heink singing Brahms Lieder. On one side there was ‘Der Schmied,’ I remember, and on the other was ‘Von ewige Liebe,’ and when I first heard it I sat there in a trance listening to that wonderful voice coming through all those scratches, thinking all the while that it was the most gorgeous singing I had ever heard, that it was an angel come down to earth. Strange, I heard those two songs only once during all the times I went with my father to visit the Princess. I longed to hear them again. Oh God, I felt I would do almost anything—do something very naughty, even—to hear them once more, and I was just so hungry to ask that they be played again, but I was too shy, and besides, my father would have punished me if I had ever been so... so bold...
“So in the dream that has returned to me over and over I see Princess Czartoryska in her handsome gown go to the phonograph and she turns and always says, as if she were talking to me, ‘Would you like to hear the Brahms Lieder?’ And I always try to say yes. But just before I can say anything my father interrupts. He is standing next to the Princess and he is looking directly at me, and he says, ‘Please don’t play that music for the child. She is much too stupid to understand.’ And then I wake up with this pain... Only this time it was even worse, Stingo. Because in the dream I had just now he seemed to be talking to the Princess not about the music but about...” Sophie hesitated, then murmured, “About my death. He wanted me to die, I think.”
I turned away from Sophie. I walked the few steps to the window, filled with a disquietude and unhappiness that was like a deep, twisting, visceral pain. A faint and bitter odor of combustion had seeped into the room, but despite this I opened the window and saw where smoke drifted down the street in fragile bluish veils. In the distance over the burning building a cloud rose in dingy turbulence but I saw no flame. The stench, growing stronger, was of scorched paint or tar or varnish mingled with hot rubber. More sirens sounded, but this time dimly, from the opposite direction, and I glimpsed a plume of water that gushed skyward toward hidden windows, met some hidden inferno and then evaporated in a nimbus of steam. Along the sidewalks below gawkers in shirt sleeves sidled tentatively toward the fire, and I saw two policemen begin to block the street with wooden barricades. There was no threat to the hotel, or to us, but I found myself shivering with anxiety.
Just as I turned back to Sophie, she looked up at me from the bed and said, “Stingo, I must tell you something now that I’ve never told anyone before. Never before.”
“Tell me, then.”
“Without knowing this, you wouldn’t understood anything about me at all. And I realize I must tell someone at last.”
“Tell me, Sophie.”
“You must get me a drink first.”
With no hesitation I went to her suitcase and plucked from the slippery jumble of linen and silk the second pint bottle of whiskey which I knew she had hidden there. Sophie, get drunk, I thought, you earned it. Then I walked to the tiny bathroom and half filled a sickly-green plastic glass with water and brought it to the bed. Sophie poured whiskey into the glass until it was full.
“Do you want some?” she said.
I shook my head and returned to the window, inhaling the brown chemical, acrid breaths of the distant blaze.
“On the day I arrived at Auschwitz,” I heard her say behind me, “it was beautiful. The forsythia was in bloom.”
I was eating bananas in Raleigh, North Carolina, I thought, thinking this not for the first time since I had known Sophie, yet perhaps for the first time in my life aware of the meaning of the Absurd, and its conclusive, unrevocable horror.
“But you see, Stingo, in Warsaw one night that winter Wanda had foretold her own death and also my death and the death of my children.”
I don’t recall precisely when, during Sophie’s description of those happenings, the Reverend Entwistle began to hear himself whisper, “Oh God, oh my God.” But I did seem to be aware, during the time of the telling of her story, while the smoke churned up over the nearby roofs and the fire erupted at last toward the sky in fierce incandescence, that those words which had commenced in pious Presbyterian entreaty became finally meaningless. By which I mean that the “Oh God” or “Oh my God” or even “Jesus Christ” that were whispered again and again were as empty as any idiot’s dream of God, or the idea that there could be such a Thing.
“I sometimes got to think that everything bad on earth, every evil that was ever invented had to do with my father. That winter in Warsaw, I didn’t feel any guilt about my father and what he had written. But I did feel often this terrible shame, which is not the same as guilt. Shame is a dirty feeling that is even more hard to take than guilt, and I could barely live with the idea that my father’s dreams were coming true right in front of my eyes. I got to know a lot of other things because I was living with Wanda, or very close to her. She got so much information about what was going on everywhere, and I knew already about how they were transporting thousands of Jews to Treblinka and Auschwitz. At first it was thought that they were just being sent for labor, but the Resistance had good intelligence and pretty soon we knew the truth, knew about the gassings and cremations and everything. It was what my father had wanted—and it made me ill.
“When I went to my job at the tar-paper factory I would go on foot or sometimes by streetcar past the ghetto. The Germans had not bled dry the ghetto yet, but they were in the process. Often I could see these lines of Jews with their arms upraised being pushed along like cattle, the Nazis pointing guns at them. The Jews looked so gray and helpless; once I had to get off the streetcar and get sick. And all through this my father seemed to... authorize this horror, not only authorize it but create it in some way. I couldn’t keep it bottled up any longer and I knew I had to tell someone. No one in Warsaw knew much about my background, I was living under my married name. I decided to tell Wanda about this... about this badness.
“And yet... and yet, you know, Stingo, I had to admit something else to myself. And this was that I was fascinated by this unbelievable thing that was happening to the Jews. I couldn’t put my finger on it, this feeling. It was not at all pleasure. It was the opposite, if anything—sickening. And yet when I’d walk past the ghetto at a distance I would stop and really be entranced by certain sights, by seeing them rounding up the Jews. And I knew then the reason for this fascination, and it stunned me. I could barely breathe with the knowledge. It was just that I suddenly knew that as long as the Germans could use up all this incredible energy destroying the Jews—superhuman energy, really—I was safe. No, not really safe, but safer. Bad as things were, we were oh so much safer than these trapped, helpless Jews. And so as long as the Germans were draining off so much power destroying the Jews, I felt safer for myself and for Jan and Eva. And even Wanda and Jozef, with all the dangerous things they were doing. But this just made me feel more ashamed, and so, on this night I am talking about, I decided to tell Wanda.
“We were finishing this very poor meal, I remember—beans and turnip soup and a kind of joke sausage. We had been talking about all the music we’d missed hearing. I had delayed all during the dinner to say what I really wanted, then I finally got the courage, saying, ’Wanda, did you ever hear the name Biegański? Zbigniew Biegański?’
“Wanda’s eyes looked vacant for a moment. ‘Oh yes, you mean the Fascist professor from Cracow. He was well known for a while before the war. He made hysterical speeches here in the city against the Jews. I had forgotten all about him. I wonder what ever happened to him. He’s probably working for the Germans.’
“ ‘He’s dead,’ I said. ‘He was my father.’
“I could see Wanda shiver. It was so cold outside and inside. There was this spitting sound of sleet against the window. The children were in bed in the next room. I’d put them there because I’d run out of fuel, coal or wood, in my own apartment downstairs, and Wanda had at least a big comforter on the bed to keep them warm. I kept looking at Wanda, but there was no emotion on her face. She said after a bit, ‘So he was your father. It must have been strange to have had such a man for a father. What was he like?’
“I was surprised at this reaction, she seemed to take it so calmly, so naturally. I mean, of all the people in the Resistance in Warsaw, she was the one who maybe done the most to help the Jews—or to try to help the Jews, it was so difficult. I suppose you could call it her specialty, trying to get aid to the ghetto. She felt, too, that anyone who betrayed the Jews, or a single Jew, was betraying Poland. It was Wanda who started Jozef on this way of murdering Poles who betrayed Jews. She was so militant about this, so dedicated, a socialist. But she didn’t seem to be at all shocked or anything that my father had been who he had been, and she obviously didn’t feel that I was—well, contaminated. I said, ‘I find it very difficult to talk about him.’ And she said back to me very gently, ‘Well, don’t, dear heart. I don’t care who your father was. You can’t be blamed for his miserable sins.’
“Then I said, ‘It’s so strange, you know. He was killed by the Germans inside the Reich. At Sachsenhausen.’
“But even this—well, even this irony didn’t seem to impress her. She just blinked and ran her hand through her hair. Her hair was red and wispy, with no gleam in it at all—so drab and wispy because of the bad food. She just said, ‘He must have been one of those faculty members at the Jagiellonian who caught it right after the occupation began.’
“I said, ‘Yes, and my husband too. I never told you about that. He was a disciple of my father’s. I hated him. I’ve lied to you. I hope you’ll forgive me for once telling you that he died fighting during the invasion.’
“And I started to finish what I was saying—this apology—but Wanda cut me off. She lit a cigarette, I remember she smoked like a fiend whenever she could get cigarettes. And she said, ‘Zosia sweetheart, it don’t matter. For God’s sake, do you think I care what they were? It’s you that matters. Your husband could have been a gorilla and your father Joseph Goebbels and you’d still be my dearest friend.’ She went to the window then and pulled down the blind. She only did this when there was some danger coming. The apartment was five floors up, but it was in this building that stuck up out of some bombed-out lots and anything that went on could perhaps be spotted by the Germans. So Wanda never took any chances. I remember she looked at her watch and said, ‘We’re going to have visitors in a minute. Two Jewish leaders from the ghetto. They’re coming to collect a bundle of pistols.’
“I remember thinking: Christ in heaven! My heart always gave a terrible jump and I’d feel this nausea go through me whenever Wanda mentioned guns, or secret rendezvous, or anything having to do with danger or the possibility of being ambushed by the Germans. To get caught helping Jews meant death, you know. I would get all clammy and weak—oh, I was such a coward! I would hope Wanda had not noticed these symptoms, and whenever I had them I would sometimes wonder if cowardice wasn’t another bad thing I inherited from my father. But Wanda was saying, ‘I’ve heard of one of these Jews through the grapevine. He’s supposed to be a very brave type, very competent. He’s desperate, though. There’s some resistance now, but it’s disorganized. He sent a message to our group saying that there’s bound to be a full-scale revolt in the ghetto soon. We’ve had some dealings with others, but this man’s a powerhouse—a mover. I think his name is Feldshon.’
“We waited for a while for the two Jews, but they didn’t come. Wanda told me the guns were hidden in the basement of the building. I went into the bedroom to look at the children. Even in the bedroom the air was so cold it was like a knife, and there was this little cloud of vapor over Jan’s and Eva’s heads. I could hear the wind whistling through the cracks around the window. But this comforter was a huge old Polish comforter filled with goose down and it protected the children in place of heating. I remember praying, though, that I would be able to get some coal or wood for my own place the next day. Outside the window it was so incredibly black, a whole city in darkness. I was just shuddering with the cold. That evening Eva had had a cold and a very bad earache and she had taken a long time to go to sleep. She had been in such pain. But Wanda had found some aspirin, which was very scarce—Wanda could find almost anything—and Eva was asleep. I gave another prayer that in the morning her infection would be gone, and the pain. Then I heard a knock at the door and I went back to the living room.
“I don’t remember the other Jew too well—he didn’t say much—but I do remember Feldshon. He was stocky and sandy-haired and in, I guess, his mid-forties and had these piercing, intelligent eyes. They pierced through you even though they came through these thick glasses, and I remember one lens was cracked and had been glued back. I remember how angry he seemed, beneath the politeness. He just seemed to be seething with anger and resentment, even though his manners were okay. He said right away to Wanda, ‘I won’t be able to pay you now, to reimburse you right away for the weapons.’ I couldn’t understand his Polish too well, it was rather, you know, groping and difficult. ‘Certainly I’ll be able to pay you soon,’ he said in this clumsy, angry voice, ‘but not now.’
“Wanda told him and the other Jew to sit down, and began speaking in German. What she first said was very crude. ‘Your accent is German. You may talk German with us, or Yiddish if you’d care to—’
“But he interrupted her in this angry, irritated way, in perfect German, ‘I don’t need to speak Yiddish! I was speaking German before you were born—’
“Then Wanda very quickly interrupted him. ‘There’s no need for elaborate explanations. Speak German. My friend and I both speak German. You won’t be required to pay us for weapons at any time, particularly not now. These were stolen from the SS, and we wouldn’t want your money under such circumstances. We can use funds, though. We’ll talk about money some other time.’ We sat down. She sat next to Feldshon underneath this dim bulb. The light was yellow and pulsing, we never knew how long it would last. She offered Feldshon and the other Jew cigarettes, which they took. She said, ‘They’re Yugoslav cigarettes, also stolen from the Germans. This light may go out at any minute now, so let’s talk business. But first I want to know something. What’s your background, Feldshon? I want to know whom I’m dealing with and I have the right to know. So spit it out. We might be doing business for some time.’
“It was remarkable, you know, this way that Wanda had, this absolutely direct way she had of dealing with people—anybody, strangers. It was almost—The word would be brazen, I guess, and she was like a tough man that way, but there was enough in her that was young and female, a certain softness too, that allowed her to get by with it. I remember looking at her. She looked very... haggard, I guess you would say. She hadn’t had any sleep for two nights, always working, moving, always in some danger. She spent much time working on an underground newspaper; this was so dangerous. I think I told you, she was not really beautiful—she had this milky-pale freckled face with a large jaw—but there was such magnetism in her that it transformed her, made her strangely attractive. I kept looking at her—her face was as harsh and impatient as the Jew’s—and this intensity was just very remarkable to see. Hypnotic.
“Feldshon said, ‘I was born in Bydgoszcz, but my parents took me to Germany when I was a small child.’ Then his voice became angry and sarcastic: ‘That’s the reason for my poor Polish. I confess that some of us speak it as little as possible in the ghetto. It would be pleasant to speak a language other than that of an oppressor. Tibetan? Eskimo?’ Then he said more softly, ‘Pardon the diversion. I grew up in Hamburg and was educated there. I was one of the first students at the new university. Later I became a teacher in a gymnasium. In Würzburg. I taught French and English literature. I was teaching there when I was arrested. When it was discovered that I was born in Poland, I was deported here, in 1938, with my wife and daughter, along with quite a few other Jews of Polish birth.’ He stopped, then said bitterly, ‘We escaped the Nazis and now they’re hammering down the walls. But whom should I fear more, the Nazis or the Poles—the Poles whom I suppose I should consider my compatriots? At least I know what the Nazis are capable of.’
“Wanda ignored this. She began talking about the guns. She said that at the moment they were in the basement of the building, wrapped in heavy paper. There was also a box of ammunition. She looked at her watch and said that in exactly fifteen minutes two Home Army members would be in the basement ready to transfer the boxes to the hallway. There was a prearranged signal. When she heard it she said she would give a sign to Feldshon and the other Jew. They would leave the apartment immediately and go down the stairs to the hallway, where the parcels would be waiting. Then they would get out of the building as fast as possible. I remember she said she wanted to point one thing out. One of the pistols—they were Lugers, I remember—had a broken firing pin or a broken something or other, but she would try to get a replacement as soon as she was able.
“Feldshon then said, ‘There’s one thing you haven’t told us. How many weapons are there?’
“Wanda looked at him. ‘I thought you had been told. Three Luger automatics.’
“This face of Feldshon went white, it actually went white. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said in a whisper. ‘I was told that there would be a dozen pistols, perhaps fifteen. Also some grenades. I can’t believe it!’ I could see how filled with rage he was, but it was also despair. He shook his head. ‘Three Lugers, one with a broken firing pin. My God!’
“Wanda said in this very businesslike way—trying to control her own feelings, I could tell, ‘It’s the best we could do at the moment. We are going to try to get more. I think we will. There are four hundred rounds of ammunition. You’ll need more and we’ll try to get that too.’
“Feldshon suddenly said in this softer voice, a little apologetic, ‘You’ll forgive my reaction, I hope. I had just been led to believe more, and it’s a disappointment. Also, earlier today I was trying to deal with another partisan group, trying to see whether we might be confident of help.’ And he paused and looked at Wanda with this furious expression. ‘It was horrible—it was unbelievable! Drunken bastards! They actually laughed at us, they sneered at us—and they enjoyed laughing and sneering. They called us kikes! These were Poles.’
“Wanda asked in this matter-of-fact way, ‘Who were these people?’
“ ‘The O.N.R. they call themselves. But I had the same difficulty yesterday with another Polish Resistance group.’ He looked at Wanda, filled with this rage and despair, and said, ‘Three pistols I get, and sneers and laughter, to hold off twenty thousand Nazi troops. In the name of God, what is happening?’
“Wanda was getting very agitated at Feldshon, I could tell, just enraged at everything—at life. ‘The O.N.R., that bunch of collaborators. Fanatics, Fascists. As a Jew, you could have received more sympathy from the Ukrainians or Hans Frank. But let me give you a further word of warning. The Communists are just as bad. Worse. If you ever meet the Red partisans under General Korczynski, you risk being shot on sight.’
“ ‘It’s unspeakable!’ Feldshon said. ‘I’m grateful for the three pistols, but can’t you see how it makes me want to laugh? There is something beyond belief going on here! Did you ever read Lord Jim? About the officer who deserts the sinking ship, taking to a lifeboat while the helpless passengers are left to their fate? Forgive me this reference, but I can’t help seeing the same thing here. We are being left to drown by our countrymen!’
“I saw Wanda get up and put her fingertips on the table and lean a little toward Feldshon. Again she was trying to control herself, but I could tell it was hard. She looked so pale and exhausted. And she began to talk in this desperate voice. ‘Feldshon, you’re either stupid or naïve or both. It seems doubtful that someone who appreciates Conrad is stupid, so you must be naïve. Surely you haven’t forgotten the simple fact that Poland is an anti-Semitic country. You yourself just used the word “oppressor.” Living in a nation which practically invented anti-Semitism, living in a ghetto, which we Poles originated, how could you expect any help from your compatriots? How could you expect anything except from a few of us who for whatever reason—idealism, moral conviction, simple human solidarity, whatever—want to do what we can to save some of your lives? My God, Feldshon, your parents probably left Poland with you to get Jew-haters off their backs. Poor creatures, they certainly couldn’t have known that that warm, assimilating, Jew-loving, humanistic bosom of Germany would turn to fire and ice and cast you out. They couldn’t have known that when you returned to Poland, there would be the same Jew-haters waiting for you and your wife and daughter, ready to grind all of you into the dust. This is a cruel country, Feldshon. It has grown so cruel over the years because it has so many times tasted defeat. Despite the Dreck that’s been written in the Gospels, adversity produces not understanding and compassion, but cruelty. And defeated people like the Poles know how to be supremely cruel to other people who have set themselves apart, like you Jews. I’m surprised you got away from that O.N.R. bunch with just being called a kike!’ She stopped for a second, then said, ‘Do you find it strange, then, that I still love this country more than I care to say—more than life itself—and that if I had to I would willingly die for it ten minutes from now?’
“Feldshon glared back at Wanda and said, ‘I’m afraid I want to, but of course I can’t, being ready to die myself.’
“I was getting worried about Wanda. I had never seen her so tired, I guess you would say unstrung. She had been working so hard, eating so little, going without sleep. Her voice would crack every now and then, and I saw her fingers tremble where she had them pressed against the table. She closed her eyes, clenched them shut, and shivered, swaying a little. I thought she might faint. Then she opened her eyes and spoke again. Her voice was hoarse and strained, filled with such grief. ‘You were speaking of Lord Jim, a book I happen to know. I think your comparison is a good one, but you somehow have forgotten the ending. I think you’ve forgotten how in the end the hero redeems himself for his betrayal, redeems himself through his own death. His own suffering and death. Is it too much to think that some of us Poles will be able to redeem the betrayal of you Jews by our countrymen? Even if our struggle doesn’t save you? No matter. Whether it does or doesn’t save you, I for one will be satisfied that we tried—through our suffering, and probably even our own deaths.’
“After a moment Wanda said, ‘I haven’t wanted to offend you, Feldshon. You’re a brave man, that’s plain. You’ve risked your life getting here tonight. I know what your ordeal is. I’ve known ever since last summer when I saw the first photographs smuggled out of Treblinka. I was one of the first to see them, and like everyone else, I didn’t believe them at first. I believe them now. Your ordeal can’t be surpassed in horror. Every time I go near the ghetto I am reminded of rats in a barrel being shot at by a madman with a machine gun. That’s how I see your helplessness. But we Poles are helpless in our own way. We have more freedom than you Jews have—much more, more freedom of movement, more freedom from immediate danger—but we’re still under daily siege. Instead of being like rats in a barrel, we’re like rats in a burning building. We can move away from the flame, find cool spots, get down in the basement where it’s safe. A tiny few can even escape from the building. Every day many of us are burned alive, but it’s a big building and we are also saved by our very numbers. The fire can’t get us all, and then someday—maybe—the fire is going to burn out. If it does, there’ll be plenty of survivors. But the barrel—almost none of the rats in the barrel will live.’ Wanda took a deep breath and looked directly at Feldshon. ‘But let me ask you, Feldshon. How much concern can you expect the terrified rats in the building to have for the rats outside in the barrel—the rats whom they’ve never felt any kinship with, anyway?’
“Feldshon just looked at Wanda. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her in minutes. He didn’t say anything.
“Wanda looked at her watch then. ‘In exactly four minutes we’ll hear a whistle. That means the two of you get out of here and downstairs. The parcels will be waiting at the door.’ Then, after saying that, she went on, ‘Three days ago I was negotiating in the ghetto with one of your compatriots. I won’t mention his name, no need for that. I’ll just say that he’s a leader of one of those factions which violently opposes you and your own group. I think he’s a poet or a novelist. I liked him, all right, but I couldn’t stand a certain thing he said. It sounded so pretentious, this way he was speaking of Jews. He used the phrase “our precious heritage of suffering.” ’
“At this point Feldshon broke in and said something that made us all laugh a little. Even Wanda smiled. He said, ‘That could only be Lewental. Moses Lewental. Such Schmalz.’
“But then Wanda said, ’I despise the idea of suffering being precious. In this war everyone suffers—Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, all the others. Everyone’s a victim. The Jews are also the victims of victims, that’s the main difference. But none of the suffering is precious and all die shitty deaths. Before you go I want to show you some photographs. I was carrying them in my pocket when I was speaking to Lewental. I had just gotten hold of them. I wanted to show them to him, but for some reason I didn’t. I’ll show them to you.’
“Just then the light went out, the little bulb simply flickered out. I felt this stab of fear in the middle of my heart. Sometimes it was just the electricity failing. Other times I knew that when the Germans laid an ambush they would stop the power to a building so they could trap people in their searchlights. We all stayed still for a moment. There was some light in a glow from the little fireplace. Then when Wanda was sure it was just a light failure she got a candle and lit it. I was still shivering, afraid, when Wanda threw several snapshots on the table beneath the candle and said, ‘Look at this.’
“We all bent forward to look. At first I couldn’t make out what it was, just a jumble of sticks—a great mass of sticks like small tree limbs. Then I saw what it was—this unbearable sight, a boxcar full of dead children, scores of them, maybe a hundred, all of them in these stiff and jumbled positions that could only come from being frozen to death. The other photographs were the same—other boxcars with scores of children, all stiff and frozen.
“ ‘These are not Jewish children,’ Wanda said, ‘these are little Polish children, none of them over twelve years old. They’re some of the little rats who didn’t make it in the burning building. These pictures were taken by Home Army members who broke into these boxcars on a siding somewhere between Zamość and Lublin. There are several hundred in these pictures, from one train alone. There were other trains that were put on sidings where the children either starved or froze to death, or both. This is just a sample. The others who died number in the thousands.’
“No one spoke. I could just hear all of us breathing, but no one spoke. Finally Wanda began to talk, and for the first time her voice was truly choked and unsteady—you could almost feel the exhaustion in it, and the grief. ‘We still don’t know exactly where these children came from but we think we know who they are. It is believed that they are the rejected ones from the Germanization program, the Lebensborn program. We think they came from the region around Zamość. I’ve been told that they were among the thousands who were taken from their parents but not considered racially suitable and so consigned for disposal—meaning extermination—at Maidanek or Auschwitz. But they didn’t get there. In due time the train, like a lot of others, was diverted onto sidings where the children were allowed to die in the condition you see here. Others starved to death, still more suffocated in hermetically sealed cars. Thirty thousand Polish children have disappeared from the Zamość region alone. Thousands and thousands of these have died. This is mass murder too, Feldshon.’ She ran her hands over her eyes, then said, ‘I was going to tell you of the adults, the thousands of innocent men and women slaughtered in Zamość alone. But I won’t. I’m very tired, suddenly I feel very dizzy. These children are enough.’
“Wanda was swaying a little. I remember catching her by the elbow and trying to pull her gently down, make her sit down. But she kept talking in the candlelight, in this flat monotonous voice now, as in a trance. ‘The Nazis hate you the most, Feldshon, and you will suffer the most by far, but they’re not going to stop with the Jews. Do you think when they finish with you Jews they’re going to dust off their hands and stop murdering and make their peace with the world? You underestimate their evil if you have such a delusion. Because once they finish you off they’re going to come and get me. Even though I’m half German. I imagine they will not let me off easy, before the end. Then they’re going to seize my pretty blond friend here and do with her what they’ve done to you. At the same time they will not spare her children, any more than they spared these little frozen ones you see right here.’ ”
In the darkening shoebox of a room in Washington, D.C., Sophie and I, almost without our being aware of it, had exchanged places, so that it was I who lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling while she stood by the window where I had first placed myself, brooding over the distant fire. She fell silent for a while and I could see the side of her face, which was deep in remembrance, her gaze resting on the smoky horizon. Amid the silence I heard the clucking and chortling of the pigeons on the ledge outside, a far-off blurred commotion where men struggled with the blaze. The church bell struck again: it was four.
At last Sophie spoke again. “At Auschwitz the next year, as I told you, they seized Wanda and tortured her and they hung her up on a hook and let her strangle to death. After I heard that, I would think about her in so many ways, but mainly I would remember her on that night in Warsaw. I would see her in my mind after Feldshon and the other Jew had left to get the guns, sitting at the table with her face buried in her arms, completely worn-out and weeping. It’s strange, I never saw her cry before. I think she always considered it a weakness. But I remember leaning over next to her with my hand on her shoulder, watching her weep. She was so young, only my age. So brave.
“She was a lesbian, Stingo. It don’t matter any more what she was, it didn’t matter then. But I thought you might want to know, after me telling you so much about everything else. We slept together once or twice—I might as well tell you that too—but it didn’t mean much to either of us, I think. She knew deep down that I—well, I didn’t really respond to her that way and so she never pressed me to go on. Never got angry or anything. I loved her, though, because she was better than me, and so incredibly brave.
“So as I say, she foretold her own death, and my death, and the death of my children. She went to sleep with her head in her arms at the table. I didn’t want to disturb her right then, and I thought of what she had said about the children, and the pictures of those little frozen bodies—I was suddenly haunted and terrified in a way I’d never been before, even in the middle of the gloom that I’d experienced so many times, gloom like the taste of death. I went into the room where my children were sleeping. I was so overcome by what Wanda had said that I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do even as I was doing it—waking Jan and Eva and taking them both up in my arms next to me. So heavy they both were, waking and moaning and whispering, yet strangely light, I guess, because of my frantic desire to hold them both in my arms. And being filled with terror and despair over Wanda’s words about the future, knowing the truth of her words and not being able to deal with anything so monstrous, so immense.
“Beyond the window it was cold and black, no lights in Warsaw, a city cold and black beyond description, with nothing there except the darkness and freezing sleet in it, and the wind. I remember I opened the window and let in the ice and the wind. I can’t tell you how close I came to hurling myself with my children out into that darkness just then—or how many times since then I’ve cursed myself for not doing it.”
The car of the train which conveyed Sophie and her children and Wanda to Auschwitz (together with a mixed bag of Resistance members and other Poles trapped in the most recent roundup) was an unusual one. It was neither a boxcar nor the livestock car which the Germans normally employed in their transports. Amazing to say, it was an ancient but still serviceable wagons-lits carriage complete with carpeted aisle, compartments, lavatories and small lozenge-shaped metallic signs in Polish, French, Russian and German at each window, admonishing the passengers not to lean out. From its fittings—its badly worn but still comfortable seats, the ornate and now tarnished chandeliers—Sophie could tell that the venerable coach had once carried people first-class; save for a singular difference, it might have been one of those cars of her girlhood in which her father—always the stylish voyager—had taken the family to Vienna or Bozen or Berlin.
The difference—so ominous and oppressive as to make her gasp when she saw it—was that all the windows were securely boarded up. Another difference was that into each compartment made for six or eight persons the Germans had jammed as many as fifteen or sixteen bodies, together with whatever luggage had been brought along. Awash in dim light, thus compressed, half a dozen or more prisoners of both sexes stood upright or partly upright in the meager foot space, clinging together for support against the incessantly braking and accelerating movement of the train and constantly plunging into the laps of the seated ones. One or two quick-witted Resistance leaders took command. A scheme was worked out whereby sitters and standees regularly alternated positions; this helped, but nothing could help the effect of the stifling body heat of so many squeezed-together human beings, or the sour and fetid odor that persisted during the trip. Not quite torture, it was a limbo of desolating discomfort. Jan and Eva were the only children in the compartment; they took turns sitting on Sophie’s lap and the laps of others. At least one person vomited in the nearly lightless cell, and it was a muscular and desperate struggle to wriggle out of the compartment and down the jammed aisle to one of the toilets. “Better a boxcar,” Sophie remembered someone groaning, “at least you could stretch out.” But curiously, by the standards of those other hell-destined transports crisscrossing Europe at that time, stalled and sidetracked and delayed at a thousand inert junctures of space and time, her trip was not inordinately long: what should have been a morning’s journey, from six o’clock until noon, required not days but a mere thirty hours.
Possibly because (as she had confessed to me over and over again) so much of her behavior had always been governed by wishful thinking, she had drawn a certain amount of comfort from the fact that the Germans had thrust her and her fellow prisoners aboard this novel means of transport. It was by now common knowledge that the Nazis used railroad cars meant for freight and animals to ship people to the camps. Thus, once aboard with Jan and Eva, she swiftly rejected the logical idea which flitted through her head that her captors were using this classy if threadbare car simply because it was expedient and available (the makeshift boarded windows should have been evidence of that). Instead, she hit upon a somewhat more soothing notion that these almost loungelike facilities, where comfortable Poles and rich tourists had nodded and drowsed in prewar days, now indicated special privilege, now meant that she would be treated rather better than the 1,800 Jews from Malkinia in the forward part of the train, bottled up tight in their black cattle wagons where they had been sealed for several days. As it turned out, this was as foolish and as fanciful (and as ignoble, really) as the idea she had formed about the ghetto: that the mere presence of the Jews, and the preoccupation the Nazis had with their extermination, would somehow benefit her own security. And the safety of Jan and Eva.
The name Oświȩcim—Auschwitz—which had at first murmured its way through the compartment made her weak with fear, but she had no doubt whatever that that was where the train was going. A minuscule sliver of light, catching her eye, drew her attention to a tiny crack in the plywood board across the window, and during the first hour of the journey she was able to see enough by the dawn’s glow to tell their direction: south. Due south past the country villages that crowd around Warsaw in place of the usual suburban outskirts, due south past greening fields and copses crowded with birch trees, south in the direction of Cracow. Only Auschwitz, of all their plausible destinations, lay south, and she recalled the despair she felt when with her own eyes she verified where they were going. The reputation of Auschwitz was ominous, vile, terrifying. Although in the Gestapo prison rumors had tended to support Auschwitz as the place where they would eventually be shipped, she had hoped incessantly and prayed for a labor camp in Germany, where so many Poles had been transported and where, according to other rumor, conditions were less brutal, less harsh. But as Auschwitz loomed more and more inevitably and now, on the train, made itself inescapable, Sophie was smothered by the realization that she was victim of punishment by association, retribution through chance concurrence. She kept saying to herself: I don’t belong here. If she had not had the misfortune of being taken prisoner at the same time as so many of the Home Army members (a stroke of bad luck further complicated by her connection with Wanda, and their common dwelling place, even though she had not lifted a finger to help the Resistance), she might have been adjudged guilty of the serious crime of meat smuggling but not of the infinitely more grave crime of subversion, and hence might not be headed for a destination so forbiddingly malign. But among other ironies, she realized, was this one: she had not been judged guilty of anything, merely interrogated and forgotten. She had then been thrown in haphazardly among these partisans, where she was victim less of any specific retributive justice than of a general rage—a kind of berserk lust for complete domination and oppression which seized the Nazis whenever they scored a win over the Resistance, and which this time had even extended to the several hundred bedraggled Poles ensnared in that last savage roundup.
Certain things about the trip she remembered with utter clarity. The stench, the airlessness, the endless shifting of positions—stand up, sit down, stand up again. At the moment of a sudden stop a box toppling down on her head, not stunning her, not hurting too much, but raising an egg-size bulge at the top of her skull. The view outside the crack, where spring sunlight darkened into drizzling rain: through the film of rain, birch trees still tormented by the past winter’s crushing snowfall, bent into shapes of white parabolic arches, strongbows, catapults, beautiful broken skeletons, whips. Lemon dots of forsythia everywhere. Delicate green fields blending into distant forests of spruce and larch and pine. Sunshine again. Jan’s books, which he tried to read in the feeble light as he sat on her lap: The Swiss Family Robinson in German; Polish editions of White Fang and Penrod and Sam. Eva’s two possessions, which she refused to park in the luggage rack but clutched fiercely as if any moment they might be wrested from her hands: the flute in its leather case and her mís—the one-eared, one-eyed teddy bear she had kept since the cradle.
More rain outside, a torrent. Now the odor of vomit, pervasive, unextinguishable, cheesy. Fellow passengers: two frightened convent girls of sixteen or so, sobbing, sleeping, waking to murmur prayers to the Holy Virgin; Wiktor, a black-haired, intense, infuriated young Home Army member already plotting revolt or escape, ceaselessly scribbling messages on slips of paper to be passed to Wanda in another compartment; a fear-maddened shriveled old lady claiming to be the niece of Wieniawski, claiming the bundle of parchment she kept pressed close to her to be the original manuscript of his famous Polonaise, claiming some kind of immunity, dissolving into tears like the schoolgirls at Wiktor’s snarled remark that the Nazis would wipe their asses on the worthless Polonaise. Hunger pangs beginning. Nothing at all to eat. Another old woman—quite dead—laid out in the exterior aisle on the spot where her heart attack had felled her, her hands frozen around a crucifix and her chalk-white face already smudged by the boots and shoes of people treading over and around her. Through her crevice once more: Cracow at night, the familiar station, moonlit railroad yards where they lay stranded hour after hour. In the greenish moon-glow an extraordinary sight: a German soldier standing in feldgrau uniform and with slung rifle, masturbating with steady beat in the half-light of the deserted yard, grinningly exhibiting himself to such curious or indifferent or bemused prisoners as might be looking through the peepholes. An hour’s sleep, then the morning’s brightness. Crossing the Vistula, murky and steaming. Two small towns she recognized as the train moved westward through the dusty pollen-gold morning: Skawina, Zator. Eva beginning to cry for the first time, torn by spasms of hunger. Hush, baby. A few more moments’ drowse riven by a sun-flooded, splendid, heart-wrenching, manic dream: herself begowned and bediademed, seated at the keyboard before ten thousand onlookers, yet somehow—astoundingly—flying, flying, soaring to deliverance on the celestial measures of the Emperor Concerto. Eyelids fluttering apart. A slamming, braking stop. Auschwitz.
They waited in the car during most of the rest of the day. At an early moment the generators ceased working; the bulbs went out in the compartment and what remaining light there was cast a milky pallor, filtering through the cracks in the plywood shutters. The distant sound of band music made its way into the compartment. There was a vibration of panic in the car; it was almost palpable, like the prickling of hair all over one’s body, and in the near-darkness there came a surge of anxious whispering—hoarse, rising, but as incomprehensible as the rustle of an army of leaves. The convent girls began to wail in unison, beseeching the Holy Mother. Wiktor loudly told them to shut up, while at the same instant Sophie took courage from Wanda’s voice, faint from the other end of the car, begging Resistance members and deportees alike to stay calm, stay quiet.
It must have been early in the afternoon when word came regarding the hundreds upon hundreds of Jews from Malkinia in the forward cars. All Jews in vans came a note to Wiktor, a note which he read aloud in the gloom and which Sophie, too numb with fright to even clutch Jan and Eva close against her breast for consolation, immediately translated into: All the Jews have gone to the gas. Sophie joined with the convent girls in prayer. It was while she was praying that Eva began to wail loudly. The children had been brave during the trip, but now the little girl’s hunger blossomed into real pain. She squealed in anguish while Sophie tried to rock and soothe her, but nothing seemed to work; the child’s screams were for a moment more terrifying to Sophie than the word about the doomed Jews. But soon they stopped. Oddly, it was Jan who came to the rescue. He had a way with his sister and now he took over—at first shushing her in the words of some private language they shared, then pressing next to her with his book. In the pale light he began reading to her from the story of Penrod, about little boys’ pranks in the leafy Elysian small-town marrow of America; he was able to laugh and giggle, and his thin soprano singsong cast a gentle spell, combining with Eva’s exhaustion to lull her to sleep.
Several hours passed. It was late afternoon. Finally another slip of paper was passed to Wiktor: AK first car in vans. This plainly meant one thing—that, like the Jews, the several hundred Home Army members in the car just forward had been transported to Birkenau and the crematoriums. Sophie stared straight ahead, composed her hands in her lap and prepared for death, feeling inexpressible terror but for the first time, too, tasting faintly the blessed bitter relief of acceptance. The old niece of Wieniawski had fallen into a comalike stupor, the Polonaise in crumpled disarray, rivulets of drool flowing from the corners of her lips. In trying to reconstruct that moment a long time later, Sophie wondered whether she might not then have become unconscious herself, for the next thing she remembered was her own daylight-dazzled presence outside on the ramp with Jan and Eva, and coming face to face with Hauptsturmführer Fritz Jemand von Niemand, doctor of medicine.
Sophie did not know his name then, nor did she ever see him again. I have christened him Fritz Jemand von Niemand because it seems as good a name as any for an SS doctor—for one who appeared to Sophie as if from nowhere and vanished likewise forever from her sight, yet who left a few interesting traces of himself behind. One trace: the recollected impression of relative youth—thirty-five, forty—and the unwelcome good looks of a delicate and disturbing sort. Indeed, traces of Dr. Jemand von Niemand and his appearance and his voice and his manner and other attributes would remain with Sophie forever. The first words he said to her, for example: “Ich möchte mit dir schlafen.” Which means, as bluntly and as unseductively as possible: “I’d like to get you into bed with me.” Dreary loutish words, spoken from an intimidating vantage point, no finesse, no class, callow and cruel, an utterance one might expect from a B-grade movie Nazi Schweinhund. But these, according to Sophie, were the words he first said. Ugly talk for a doctor and a gentleman (perhaps even an aristocrat), although he was visibly, indisputably drunk, which might help explain such coarseness. Why Sophie, at first glance, thought he might be an aristocrat—Prussian perhaps, or of Prussian origin—was because of his extremely close resemblance to a Junker officer, a friend of her father’s, whom she had seen once as a girl of sixteen or so on a summer visit to Berlin. Very “Nordic”-looking, attractive in a thin-lipped, austere, unbending way, the young officer had treated her frostily during their brief meeting, almost to the point of contempt and boorishness; nonetheless, she could not help but be taken by his arresting handsomeness, by—surprisingly—something not really effeminate but rather silkily feminine about his face in repose. He looked a bit like a militarized Leslie Howard, whom she had had a mild crush on ever since The Petrified Forest. Despite the dislike he had inspired in her, and her satisfaction in not having to see this German officer again, she remembered thinking about him later rather disturbingly: If he had been a woman, he would have been a person I think I might have felt drawn to. But now here was his counterpart, almost his replica, standing in his slightly askew SS uniform on the dusty concrete platform at five in the afternoon, flushed with wine or brandy or schnapps and mouthing his unpatrician words in an indolently patrician, Berlin-accented voice: “I’d like to get you into bed with me.”
Sophie ignored what he was saying, but as he spoke she glimpsed one of those insignificant but ineffaceable details—another spectral trace of the doctor—that would always spring out in vivid trompe l’oeil from the confused surface of the day: a sprinkling of boiled-rice grains on the lapel of the SS tunic. There were only four or five of these; shiny with moisture still, they looked like maggots. She gave them her dazed scrutiny, and while doing so she realized for the first time that the piece of music being played just then by the welcoming prisoners’ band—hopelessly off-key and disorganized, yet flaying her nerves with its erotic sorrow and turgid beat as it had even in the darkened car—was the Argentine tango “La Cumparsita.” Why had she not been able to name it before? Ba-dum-ba-dum!
“Du bist eine Polack,” said the doctor. “Bist du auch eine Kommunistin?” Sophie placed one arm around Eva’s shoulders, the other arm around Jan’s waist, saying nothing. The doctor belched, then more sharply elaborated: “I know you’re a Polack, but are you also another one of these filthy Communists?” And then in his fog he turned toward the next prisoners, seeming almost to forget Sophie.
Why hadn’t she played dumb? “Nicht sprecht Deutsch.” It could have saved the moment. There was such a press of people. Had she not answered in German he might have let the three of them pass through. But there was the cold fact of her terror, and the terror caused her to behave unwisely. She knew now what blind and merciful ignorance had prevented very few Jews who arrived here from knowing, but which her association with Wanda and the others had caused her to know and to dread with fear beyond utterance: a selection. She and the children were undergoing at this very moment the ordeal she had heard about—rumored in Warsaw a score of times in whispers—but which had seemed at once so unbearable and unlikely to happen to her that she had thrust it out of her mind. But here she was, and here was the doctor. While over there—just beyond the roofs of the boxcars recently vacated by the death-bound Malkinia Jews—was Birkenau, and the doctor could select for its abyssal doors anyone whom he desired. This thought caused her such terror that instead of keeping her mouth shut she said, “Ich bin polnisch! In Krakow geboren!” Then she blurted helplessly, “I’m not Jewish! Or my children—they’re not Jewish either.” And added, “They are racially pure. They speak German.” Finally she announced, “I’m a Christian. I’m a devout Catholic.”
The doctor turned again. His eyebrows arched and he looked at Sophie with inebriate, wet, fugitive eyes, unsmiling. He was now so close to her that she smelled plainly the alcoholic vapor—a rancid fragrance of barley or rye—and she was not strong enough to return his gaze. It was then that she knew she had said something wrong, perhaps fatally wrong. She averted her face for an instant, glancing at an adjoining line of prisoners shambling through the golgotha of their selection, and saw Eva’s flute teacher Zaorski at the precise congealed instant of his doom—dispatched to the left and to Birkenau by an almost imperceptible nod of a doctor’s head. Now, turning back, she heard Dr. Jemand von Niemand say, “So you’re not a Communist. You’re a believer.”
“Ja, mein Hauptmann. I believe in Christ.” What folly! She sensed from his manner, his gaze—the new look in his eye of luminous intensity—that everything she was saying, far from helping her, from protecting her, was leading somehow to her swift undoing. She thought: Let me be struck dumb.
The doctor was a little unsteady on his feet. He leaned over for a moment to an enlisted underling with a clipboard and murmured something, meanwhile absorbedly picking his nose. Eva, pressing heavily against Sophie’s leg, began to cry. “So you believe in Christ the Redeemer?” the doctor said in a thick-tongued but oddly abstract voice, like that of a lecturer examining the delicately shaded facet of a proposition in logic. Then he said something which for an instant was totally mystifying: “Did He not say, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me’?” He turned back to her, moving with the twitchy methodicalness of a drunk.
Sophie, with an inanity poised on her tongue and choked with fear, was about to attempt a reply when the doctor said, “You may keep one of your children.”
“Bitte?” said Sophie.
“You may keep one of your children,” he repeated. “The other one will have to go. Which one will you keep?”
“You mean, I have to choose?”
“You’re a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege—a choice.”
Her thought processes dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. “I can’t choose! I can’t choose!” She began to scream. Oh, how she recalled her own screams! Tormented angels never screeched so loudly above hell’s pandemonium. “Ich kann nicht wählen!” she screamed.
The doctor was aware of unwanted attention. “Shut up!” he ordered. “Hurry now and choose. Choose, god-damnit, or I’ll send them both over there. Quick!”
She could not believe any of this. She could not believe that she was now kneeling on the hurtful, abrading concrete, drawing her children toward her so smotheringly tight that she felt that their flesh might be engrafted to hers even through layers of clothes. Her disbelief was total, deranged. It was disbelief reflected in the eyes of the gaunt, waxy-skinned young Rottenführer, the doctor’s aide, to whom she inexplicably found herself looking upward in supplication. He appeared stunned, and he returned her gaze with a wide-eyed baffled expression, as if to say: I can’t understand this either.
“Don’t make me choose,” she heard herself plead in a whisper, “I can’t choose.”
“Send them both over there, then,” the doctor said to the aide, “nach links.”
“Mama!” She heard Eva’s thin but soaring cry at the instant that she thrust the child away from her and rose from the concrete with a clumsy stumbling motion. “Take the baby!” she called out. “Take my little girl!”
At this point the aide—with a careful gentleness that Sophie would try without success to forget—tugged at Eva’s hand and led her away into the waiting legion of the damned. She would forever retain a dim impression that the child had continued to look back, beseeching. But because she was now almost completely blinded by salty, thick, copious tears she was spared whatever expression Eva wore, and she was always grateful for that. For in the bleakest honesty of her heart she knew that she would never have been able to tolerate it, driven nearly mad as she was by her last glimpse of that vanishing small form.
“She still had her mís—and her flute,” Sophie said as she finished talking to me. “All these years I have never been able to bear those words. Or bear to speak them, in any language.”
Since Sophie told me this I have brooded often upon the enigma of Dr. Jemand von Niemand. At the very least he was a maverick, a sport; surely what he made Sophie do could not have been in the SS manual of regulations. The young Rottenführer’s incredulity attested to that. The doctor must have waited a long time to come face to face with Sophie and her children, hoping to perpetrate his ingenious deed. And what, in the private misery of his heart, I think he most intensely lusted to do was to inflict upon Sophie, or someone like her—some tender and perishable Christian—a totally unpardonable sin. It is precisely because he had yearned with such passion to commit this terrible sin that I believe that the doctor was exceptional, perhaps unique, among his fellow SS automata: if he was not a good man or a bad man, he still retained a potential capacity for goodness, as well as evil, and his strivings were essentially religious.
Why do I say religious? For one thing, perhaps because he was so attentive to Sophie’s profession of faith. But I would risk speculating further on this because of a vignette which Sophie added to her story a short while later. She said that during the chaotic days immediately after her arrival she was in such shock—so torn to fragments by what happened on the ramp, and by Jan’s disappearance into the Children’s Camp—that she was barely able to hold on to her reason. But in her barracks one day she could not help paying attention to a conversation between two German Jewish women, new prisoners who had managed to live through the selection. It was plain from their physical description that the doctor of whom they were speaking—the one who had been responsible for their own survival—was the one who had sent Eva to the gas chamber. What Sophie had remembered most vividly was this: one of the women, who was from the Charlottenburg part of Berlin, said that she distinctly remembered the doctor from her youth. He had not recognized her on the ramp. She in turn had not known him well, although he had been a neighbor. The two related things she did recall about him—aside from his striking good looks—the two things she had not been able to forget about him, for some reason, were that he was a steadfast churchgoer and that he had always planned to enter the ministry. A mercenary father forced him into medicine.
Other of Sophie’s recollections point to the doctor as a religious person. Or at least as a failed believer seeking redemption, groping for renewed faith. For example, as a hint—his drunkenness. All that we can deduce from the record indicates that in the pursuit of their jobs SS officers, including doctors, were almost monkish in their decorum, sobriety and devotion to the rules. While the demands of butchery at its most primitive level—mainly in the neighborhood of the crematoriums—caused a great deal of alcohol to be consumed, this bloody work was in general the job of enlisted men, who were allowed (and indeed often needed) to numb themselves to their activities. Besides being spared these particular chores, officers in the SS, like officers everywhere, were expected to maintain a dignified comportment, especially when going about their duties. Why, then, did Sophie have the rare experience of meeting a doctor like Jemand von Niemand in his plastered condition, cross-eyed with booze and so unkempt that he still bore on his lapel grains of greasy rice from a probably long and sodden repast? This must have been for the doctor a very dangerous posture.
I have always assumed that when he encountered Sophie, Dr. Jemand von Niemand was undergoing the crisis of his life: cracking apart like bamboo, disintegrating at the very moment that he was reaching out for spiritual salvation. One can only speculate upon Von Niemand’s later career, but if he was at all like his chief, Rudolf Höss, and the SS in general, he had styled himself Gottgläubiger—which is to say, he had rejected Christianity while still outwardly professing faith in God. But how could one believe in God after practicing one’s science for months in such a loathsome environment? Awaiting the arrival of countless trains from every corner of Europe, then winnowing out the fit and the healthy from the pathetic horde of cripples and the toothless and the blind, the feebleminded and the spastic and the unending droves of helpless aged and helpless little children, he surely knew that the slave enterprise he served (itself a mammoth killing machine regurgitating once-human husks) was a mockery and a denial of God. Besides, he was at bottom a vassal of IG Farben. Surely he could not retain belief while passing time in such a place. He had to replace God with a sense of the omnipotence of business. Since the overwhelming number of those upon whom he stood in judgment were Jews, he must have been relieved when once again Himmler’s order arrived directing that all Jews without exception would be exterminated. There would no longer be any need for his selective eye. This would take him away from the horrible ramps, allowing him to pursue more normal medical activities. (It may be hard to believe, but the vastness and complexity of Auschwitz permitted some benign medical work as well as the unspeakable experiments which—given the assumption that Dr. von Niemand was a man of some sensibility—he would have shunned.)
But quickly Himmler’s orders were countermanded. There was a need for flesh to fill IG Farben’s insatiable maw; it was back to the ramps again for the tormented doctor. Selections would begin again. Soon only Jews would go to the gas chambers. But until final orders came, Jews and “Aryans” alike would undergo the selection process. (There would be occasional capricious exceptions, such as the shipment of Jews from Malkinia.) The renewed horror scraped like steel files at the doctor’s soul, threatened to shred his reason. He began to drink, to acquire sloppy eating habits, and to mis God. Wo, wo ist der lebende Gott? Where is the God of my fathers?
But of course the answer finally dawned on him, and one day I suspect the revelation made him radiant with hope. It had to do with the matter of sin, or rather, it had to do with the absence of sin, and his own realization that the absence of sin and the absence of God were inseparably intertwined. No sin! He had suffered boredom and anxiety, and even revulsion, but no sense of sin from the bestial crimes he had been party to, nor had he felt that in sending thousands of the wretched innocent to oblivion he had transgressed against divine law. All had been unutterable monotony. All of his depravity had been enacted in a vacuum of sinless and businesslike godlessness, while his soul thirsted for beatitude.
Was it not supremely simple, then, to restore his belief in God, and at the same time to affirm his human capacity for evil, by committing the most intolerable sin that he was able to conceive? Goodness could come later. But first a great sin. One whose glory lay in its subtle magnanimity—a choice. After all, he had the power to take both. This is the only way I have been able to explain what Dr. Jemand von Niemand did to Sophie when she appeared with her two little children on April Fools’ Day, while the wild tango beat of “La Cumparsita” drummed and rattled insistently off-key in the gathering dusk.