On another day she might not even have been caught. The irony of this smote her over and over while she waited in an almost totally dark detention cell with a dozen other Warsovians of both sexes, all strangers. Most of these—although not all—were young, in their twenties and thirties. Something about their manner—perhaps it was only the stolid, stony communion of their silence—told her that they were members of the Resistance. The AK—Armia Krajowa. Home Army. Here it suddenly occurred to her that had she waited only another day (as she had planned) to journey out toward Nowy Dwór to procure the meat, she would not have been on the railroad car, which she now realized may have been ambushed in order to trap certain members of the AK who had been passengers. By casting a wide net for as many exceptional fish as possible, as they sometimes did, the Nazis came up with all sorts of minor but interesting minnows, and this day Sophie was one of them. Sitting there on the stone floor (it was midnight now), she was smothered by despair, thinking of Jan and Eva at home with no one to look after them. In the corridors outside the cell there was a constant jabber and hubbub, a shuffling of feet and a jostling of bodies as the jail continued to fill up with the victims of the day’s roundup. Once through the grilled aperture of the door above her she caught a quick glimpse of a familiar face, and her heart turned to lead. The face was streaming with blood. It belonged to a young man whom she had known only by his first name, Wladyslaw; the editor of an underground newspaper, he had spoken to her several times briefly at Wanda and Jozef’s apartment on the floor beneath her own. She did not know why, but she was at that moment certain that this meant that Wanda had been arrested too. Then something else occurred to her. Mother of God, she breathed in an instinctive prayer, and felt herself go limp as a wet leaf with this realization: that the ham (quite aside from the fact of its having been devoured by the Gestapo) had doubtless been forgotten, and that her own fate—whatever it might be—was tied up with the fate of these members of the Resistance. And such a fate swooped down on her with a black foreboding overwhelming enough to make stale the word “terror.”
Sophie spent the night without sleep. It was cold and tomb-dark in the cell and she could only distinguish the fact that the human form—hurled in next to her during the early hours of the morning—was female. And as dawn seeped in through the grating she was shocked though not really surprised to see that the dozing woman beside her was Wanda. In the pale light she could slowly make out the huge bruise on Wanda’s cheek; it was repulsive, reminding Sophie of mashed purple grapes. She started to wake her, thought better of it, hesitated, withdrew her hand; just then Wanda awoke and groaned, blinked, staring Sophie in the eye. She would never forget the look of astonishment on Wanda’s battered face. “Zosia!” she exclaimed, embracing her. “Zosia! What in God’s name are you doing here?”
Sophie burst into tears, weeping with such desperation and wretchedness against Wanda’s shoulder that it was long minutes before she could even begin to mumble a word. Wanda’s patient strength was consoling, as usual; her soothing whispers and pats between the shoulder blades were at once sisterly, maternal and like the attentions of a nurse; Sophie could have fallen fast asleep in her arms. But she was tortured with too much anxiety, and after taking hold of herself she blurted out the tale of her arrest on the train. It took her only seconds. She heard her words spilling over one another in a rush, conscious of the haste and abbreviation and her consuming need to arrive at the answer to the question which had been literally twisting her intestines for twelve hours: “The children, Wanda! Jan and Eva. Are they safe?”
“Yes, they’re safe. They’re here somewhere, in this place. The Nazis didn’t hurt them. They arrested everyone in our building—everyone, including your kids. They made a clean sweep of it.” A tormented look passed over her wide strong features, ravaged now by the appalling bruise. “Oh God, they picked up so many people in the movement today. I knew we wouldn’t have long after they killed Jozef. It’s a catastrophe!”
At least the children had not been harmed. She blessed Wanda, feeling exquisite relief. Then she could not restrain the impulse; she let her fingers hover over the disfigured cheek, the empurpled spongy outraged flesh, but did not touch it, finally drew her hand away. As she did so she found herself weeping again. “What did they do to you, Wanda darling?” she whispered.
“A Gestapo ape threw me down the stairs, then stomped on me. Oh, these...” She raised her eyes upward, but the imprecation she was plainly about to utter faded on her lips. The Germans had been cursed without cessation and for so long that the dirtiest anathema, no matter how novel, sounded vapid; better to let the tongue fall dumb. “It’s not so bad, I don’t think he broke anything. I’ll bet it looks worse than it feels.” She put her arms around Sophie again, making little tut-tut sounds. “Poor Zosia. Imagine you falling into their filthy trap.”
Wanda! How could Sophie ever fathom or define her ultimate feeling about Wanda—composed as that emotion was of love, envy, distrust, dependence, hostility and admiration? They were so much alike in certain ways, yet so different. In the beginning it had been their mutual bewitchment with music that had drawn them together. Wanda had come to Warsaw to study voice at the Conservatory, but the war had blasted those aspirations, as it had Sophie’s. When by chance Sophie came to live in the same building as Wanda and Jozef, it had been Bach and Buxtehude, Mozart and Rameau who had glued together their friendship. Wanda was a tall, athletically built young woman with boyish, graceful arms and legs and flaming red hair. Her eyes were of the most arrestingly clear sapphire-blue that Sophie had ever seen. Her face was a cloud of tiny amber freckles. A somewhat too prominent chin marred the suggestion of real beauty, but she had a vivacity, a luminous intensity which sometimes transformed her in a spectacular way; she glowed, she became all sparks and fire (Sophie often thought of the word fougueuse) like her hair.
There was at least one strong similarity about Sophie’s and Wanda’s background: they had both been brought up in an ambience of rapturous Germanism. Indeed, Wanda had a transcendentally German surname, Muck-Horch von Kretschmann—this being the result of her birth to a German father and a Polish mother in Lodz, where the influence of Germany upon commerce and industry, mainly textiles, had been pervasive if not almost complete. Her father, a manufacturer of cheap woolens, had made her learn German early; like Sophie, she spoke the language with accentless fluency, but her heart and soul were Polish. Sophie never believed that such violent patriotism could dwell within a human breast, even in a land of throbbing patriots. Wanda was the reincarnation of the young Rosa Luxemburg, whom she worshipped. She seldom mentioned her father, nor did she ever try to explain why she had rejected so completely the German part of her heritage; Sophie only knew that Wanda breathed, drank and dreamed the idea of a free Poland—most radiantly, a liberated Polish proletariat after the war—and such a passion had turned her into one of the most unbudgingly committed members of the Resistance. She was sleepless, fearless, clever—a firebrand. Her perfection in the language of the conquering hordes made her, of course, exceedingly valuable to the underground movement, quite aside from her zeal and her other capabilities. And it was her knowledge that Sophie, too, had an inbred command of German but refused to place this gift at the service of the Resistance that at first caused Wanda to lose patience with her and then later brought the two friends to the edge of ruinous discord. For Sophie was deeply, agonizingly, mortally afraid of getting herself involved in the underground fight against the Nazis, and such disengagement seemed to Wanda not only unpatriotic but an act of moral cowardice.
A few weeks before Jozef’s murder and the roundup, some members of the Home Army had made off with a Gestapo van in the town of Pruszków, not far from Warsaw. The van contained a treasure trove of documents and plans, and Wanda was able to tell at a glance that the thick, voluminous files contained items of the highest level of secrecy. But there were many of them and it was urgent that they be translated. When Wanda approached Sophie, asking her
to help with these papers, Sophie once again was unable to say yes, and they resumed their old, painful argument.
“I am a socialist,” Wanda had said, “and you have no politics at all. Furthermore, you are something of a Christer. That is all right with me. In the old days I would have had nothing but contempt for you, Zosia, contempt and dislike. There are still friends of mine who will have nothing to do with a person like you. But I suppose I’ve outgrown such a point of view. I hate the stupid rigidity of some of my comrades. Also, I’m simply so fond of you, as you certainly realize. So I’m not trying to appeal to you on political grounds or even ideological grounds. You wouldn’t want to get mixed up with a lot of them anyway. I’m not typical, but they are not your type at all—something you already know. Anyway, not everyone in the movement is political. I am appealing to you in the name of humanity. I am trying to appeal to your sense of decency, to a sense of yourself as a human being and a Pole.”
At this point Sophie had, as usual after one of Wanda’s fervent come-ons, turned away, saying nothing. She had gazed out the window at the wintry Warsaw desolation, bomb-shattered buildings and rubble heaps shrouded (there was no other word) by the sulphurous soot-blackened snow—a landscape which had once brought tears of sorrow but now only evoked sickish apathy, so much a dingy part did it seem of the day-to-day dreariness and misery of a city ransacked, fearful, hungry, dying. If hell had suburbs, they would look like this wasteland. She sucked at the ends of her ragged fingers. She could not keep herself in even cheap gloves. Gloveless toil at the tar-paper factory had wrecked her hands; one thumb had become badly infected and it hurt. She replied to Wanda, “I’ve told you and I’ll tell you again, my dear, I can’t. I won’t. That’s that.”
“And for the same reason, I suppose?”
“Yes.” Why couldn’t Wanda accept her decision as final, lay off, leave her alone? Her persistence was maddening. “Wanda,” she said softly, “I don’t want to press the point any more than I have to. It’s embarrassing for me to repeat what should be evident to you, because I know you’re basically a sensitive person. But in my position—I say it again—I can’t risk it, with children—”
“Other women in the Home Army have children,” Wanda put in abruptly. “Why can’t you get that through your head?”
“I told you before. I’m not ‘other women’ and I’m not in the Home Army,” Sophie retorted, this time with exasperation. “I’m myself! I have to act according to my conscience. You don’t have children. It’s easy for you to talk like this. I cannot jeopardize the lives of my children. They’re having a hard enough time as it is.”
“I’m afraid I find it very offensive of you, Zosia, placing yourself on a level different from the others. Unable to sacrifice—”
“I’ve sacrificed,” Sophie said bitterly. “I’ve lost a husband and a father already, and my mother is dying of tuberculosis. How much do I have to sacrifice, in the name of God?” Wanda could scarcely be expected to know of the antipathy—call it indifference—which Sophie harbored toward husband and father, dead in their graves these past three years at Sachsenhausen; nonetheless, what she had said comprised a telling point of sorts, and Sophie detected in Wanda a consequent moderation of tone. A quality that was almost wheedling entered her voice.
“You wouldn’t necessarily be in a very vulnerable position, you understand, Zosia. You wouldn’t be required to do anything truly risky—nothing remotely like what some of the comrades have been doing, even myself. It’s a matter of your brain, your head. There are so many things that you can do that would be invaluable, with your knowledge of the language. Monitoring, their shortwave broadcasts, translating. Those documents that were stolen yesterday from that Gestapo van in Pruszków. Let’s get to the point about this right now. They’re worth their weight in gold, I’m certain! It’s something I could help do, certainly, but there are so many of them and I have a thousand other things on my mind. Don’t you see, Zosia, how incredibly useful you could be if we could just have some of those documents delivered to you here, quite safely—no one would suspect.” She paused, then said in an insistent voice, “You must reconsider, Zosia. This is becoming indecent of you. Consider what you can do for all of us. Consider your country! Consider Poland!”
Dusk was coming on. From the ceiling a tiny lightbulb pulsed spiritlessly—lucky tonight, often there was no light. Since dawn Sophie had been shifting piles of tar paper, and she was aware now that her back was hurting her more even than her swollen and infected thumb. As usual she felt unclean, begrimed. With tired, gritty eyes she brooded out across the desolate cityscape, over which the sun never seemed to cast a glimmer. She yawned an exhausted yawn, no longer listening to Wanda’s voice, or rather, no longer hearing the actual words, which had become strident, singsong, hectoring, inspirational. She wondered where Jozef was, wondered if he was safe. She knew only that he was stalking someone in another part of the city, his piano wire in a lethal coil beneath his jacket—a boy of nineteen bent upon his mission of death and retribution. She was not in love with him but she, well—cared for him intensely; she liked the warmth of him in bed beside her, and she would be anxious until he returned. Mary Mother of God, she thought, what an existence! On the ugly street below—gray and grainy and featureless like the worn sole of a shoe—a platoon of German soldiers tramped into the gusty wind, the collars of their tunics blowing, rifles slung at the shoulder; listlessly she watched them pass the corner, turn, disappear up a street where but for an intervening bombed-out building she knew she could have seen the steel-and-iron curbside public gallows: it was as functional as a rack upon which secondhand dealers displayed used clothes, and from its horizontal bar citizens of Warsaw beyond counting had twisted and hung. And still hung and twisted. Christ, would it never end?
She was too weary to attempt even a bad joke, but it did occur to her, almost, to break in on Wanda, to reply to her by saying something that was outrageously lodged in her heart: The one and only thing which might lure me into your world would be that radio. Would be to listen to London. But not to war news. Not to news of Allied victories, nor word of the Polish army fighting, nor to orders from the government of Poland in exile. Not to any of these. No, quite simply I think I would risk my life as you do and also give an arm or a hand to listen just once again to Sir Thomas Beecham conducting Cosí fan tutte. What a shocking, selfish idea it was—she was aware of its infinite ignobility even as the thought crossed her mind—but she could not help it, it was what she felt.
For a moment shame washed over her for thinking the thought, shame at entertaining the notion in the same habitation where she shared room with Wanda and Jozef, these two selfless, courageous people whose allegiance to humanity and their fellow Poles and concern for the hunted Jews were a repudiation of all that her father had stood for. Despite her own actual blamelessness, she had felt dirtied, defiled by her association with her father in his last obsessed year, and with his atrocious pamphlet, and so her brief relationship with this consecrated sister and her brother had brought her moments of cleansing grace. She gave a small shudder and the fever of shame worsened, became hotter. What would they think if they knew about Professor Biegański, or knew that for three years she had carried on her person a copy of that pamphlet? And for what reason? For what unspeakable reason? To use it as a small wedge, an instrument of possible negotiation with the Nazis, should the loathsome occasion ever arise? Yes, she replied to herself, yes—there was no way out of that vile and disgraceful fact. And now as Wanda rambled on about duty and sacrifice she became so troubled by her secret that simply to save her composure she thrust it from her mind like some foul leaving. She listened again.
“There comes a point in life where every human being must stand up and be counted,” Wanda was saying. “You know what a beautiful person I think you are. And Jozef would die for you!” Her voice rose, now began to scrape her raw. “But you can no longer treat us this way. You have to assume responsibility, Zosia. You’ve com
e to the place where you can no longer fool around like this, you have to make a choice!”
Just then on the street below she caught sight of her children. They moved slowly up the sidewalk, talking earnestly, dallying as little children do. A few pedestrians straggled past them, homeward bound in the dusk; one, an elderly man bundled up against the wind, clumsily bumped Jan, who made an impudent gesture with his hand, then strolled on with his sister, deep in his chat, explaining... explaining. He had gone to fetch Eva from her flute lesson—a haphazard, sometimes quite sudden and impromptu affair (depending on daily pressures) held in a gutted basement a dozen blocks away. The teacher, a man named Stefan Zaorski, had been a flutist with the Warsaw Symphony, and Sophie had had to cajole and flatter and plead in order to get him to take Eva as a student; aside from the money that Sophie could pay, a pitiful amount, there was little incentive for a dispossessed musician to give lessons in that stark and cheerless city—there were better (although mainly illegal) ways to earn one’s bread. He was seriously crippled with arthritis in both knees, which didn’t help things. But Zaorski, a man still youngish and a bachelor, had a crush on Sophie (as did so many men who saw her and became instantly moonstruck), and doubtless agreed in order to be able to delight in her fair beauty from time to time. Also, Sophie had been energetically, quietly insistent, ultimately persuasive, convincing Zaorski that she could not consider raising Eva without giving her a knowledge of music. One might as well just say no to life itself.
Sophie's Choice (Open Road) Page 52
