William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (242 page)

The two dressmakers stirred in the shadows across the floor.
“Bonjour, mesdames,”
Bronek called cheerily. “Your breakfast is coming.” He turned back to Sophie. “I also got you some figs,” he said, “real figs, imagine that!”

“Where did you get
figs?
” Sophie said. She felt startled delight as Bronek handed her this indescribable treasure; although dried and wrapped in cellophane, they had a marvelous warm heft in her palm, and lifting the package to her face, she saw the streaks of delectable juice congealed on the grayish-green skin, inhaled the distant voluptuous aroma, faded but still sweet, phantom fragrance of the mellow fruit. She had once tasted real figs years before in Italy. Her stomach responded with a joyous noise. She had never had the remotest prospect of any such luxury in months—no, years.
Figs!
“Bronek, I don’t believe it!” she exclaimed.

“Save them for later,” he said, giving another package to Lotte, “don’t eat them all at once. Eat this shit from up above first. It’s swill, but it’s the best swill you’ll have for a long time. Fit for the pigs I used to raise in Pomorze.”

Bronek was a non-stop talker. Sophie listened to the stream of chitchat while she greedily gnawed at the chill and stringy stump of pork. It was scorched, cartilaginous and vile. But her taste buds responded, as if slaked with ambrosia, to the small bursting pods and pockets of fat which her body clamored for. She could have gorged herself on any grease. Fancifully, her mind’s eye re-created the feast at which Bronek last night had scurried about as busboy: the lordly suckling pig, the dumplings, the steaming potatoes, cabbage with chestnuts, the jams and jellies and gravies, a rich custard for dessert, all sluiced down the SS gullets with the help of portly bottles of Bull’s Blood wine from Hungary, and served (when a dignitary as lofty as an Obergruppenführer was present) upon a superb Czarist silver service shipped back from some museum ransacked on the eastern front. Apropos of which, Sophie realized, Bronek was now speaking in the tones of one proud to be privy to portentous tidings. “They keep trying to look happy,” he said, “and for a while they seem to be. But then they get on the war, and it’s all misery. Like last night Schmauser said the Russians were getting ready to recapture Kiev. Lots of other bad news from the Russian front. Then it’s rotten news in Italy too, so said Schmauser. The British and the Americans are moving up there, everyone dying like lice.” Bronek rose from his crouch, moving with his other pan toward the two sisters. “But the real big news, ladies, is something you may not hardly believe, but it’s the truth—
Rudi
is
leaving!
Rudi is being transferred back to Berlin!”

In mid-swallow, gulping down the gristly meat, Sophie nearly choked on these words.
Leaving?
Höss leaving the camp! It couldn’t be true! She rose to a sitting position and clutched at Bronek’s sleeve. “Are you sure?” she demanded. “Bronek, are you sure of that?”

“All I’m telling you is what I heard Schmauser say to Rudi after the other officers had left. Said he’d done a fine job but that he was needed at Berlin Central Office. So he could get himself ready for immediate transfer.”

“What do you mean—
immediate?
” she persisted. “Today, next month, what?”

“I don’t know,” Bronek replied, “he just plainly meant soon.” His voice became tinged with foreboding. “Me, I’m not happy about it, I’ll tell you.” He paused somberly. “I mean, who knows who’ll take his place? Some
sadist
maybe, you know. Some
gorilla!
Then maybe Bronek too... ?” He rolled his eyes and drew his forefinger across his throat. “He could have had me put away, he could have given me a little gas, like the Jews—they were doing that then, you know—but he brought me here and treated me like a human being. Don’t think I won’t be sorry to see Rudi go.”

But Sophie, preoccupied, paid no more attention to Bronek. She was panicked by this news of Höss’s departure. It made her realize that she must act with urgency and dispatch if she was to persuade him to take notice of her and thus try to accomplish through him what she had set out to do. For the following hour or so, toiling alongside Lotte over the Höss household laundry (the prisoners in the house were spared the lethally grueling and interminable roll calls of the rest of the camp; luckily, Sophie was compelled only to wash the vast heaps of soiled clothing from upstairs—abnormally plenteous because of Frau Höss’s fixation about germs and filth), she fantasized all manner of little skits and playlets in which she and the Commandant had finally been drawn into some intimate connection whereby she was able to pour out the story that would lead to her redemption. But time had begun to work against her. Unless she moved immediately and perhaps even a little recklessly, he might be gone and all she planned to accomplish would come to nothing. Her anxiety was excruciating, and it was somehow irrationally mixed up with hunger.

She had secreted the package of figs in the loose inside hem of her striped smock. At a little before eight o’clock, nearly the time when she had to make her way up the four flights of stairs to the office in the attic, she could resist no longer the urge to eat some of the figs. She stole away to a large cubbyhole underneath the stairs where she would be out of sight of the other prisoners. And there she frantically broke open the cellophane. A film of tears misted her eyes as the tender small globes of fruit (slightly moist and deliciously textured in their chewy sweetness that mingled with archipelagos of minute seeds) slid richly down her throat, one by one; wild with delight, unashamed at her piggishness and the sugary saliva drooling over fingers and chin, she devoured them all. Her eyes were still misted over and she heard herself panting with pleasure. Then after standing there for a moment in the shadows to let the figs settle on her stomach and to compose her expression, she began to ascend slowly to the upper levels of the house. It was a climb of no more than a few minutes’ duration but one which was interrupted by two singularly memorable occurrences that seemed to fit with ghastly appropriateness into the hallucinatory fabric of her mornings, afternoons and nights at Haus Höss...

On separate landings—one on the floor above the basement and the other just below the attic—there were dormer windows that gave off on a western exposure, from which Sophie usually tried to avert her eyes, though not always successfully. This view contained some nondescript subjects—in the foreground a brown grassless drill field, a small wooden barracks, the electrified wires hemming in an incongruous stand of graceful poplars—but it also presented a glimpse of the railroad platform where the selections were made. Invariably, lines of boxcars stood waiting there, dun-colored backdrop to blurred, confounding tableaux of cruelty, mayhem and madness. The platform dwelt in the middle distance, too near to be ignored, too far away to be seen with clarity. It may have been, she later recounted, her own arrival there on that concrete
quai
and its associations for her, that caused her to shun the scene, to turn her eyes away, to blot out of her sight the fragmentary and flickering apparitions which from this vantage point registered only imperfectly, like the grainy shadow-shapes in an antique silent newsreel: a rifle butt raised skyward, dead bodies being yanked from boxcar doors, a papier-mâché human being bullied to the earth.

Sometimes she sensed that there was no violence at all, and got only a terrible impression of order, throngs of people moving in shambling docile parade out of sight. The platform was too distant for sound; the music of the loony-bin prisoner band which greeted each arriving train, the shouts of the guards, the barking of the dogs—all these were mute, though upon occasion it was impossible not to hear the crack of a pistol shot. Thus the drama seemed to be enacted in a charitable vacuum, from which were excluded the wails of grief, cries of terror and other noises of that infernal initiation. It was for this reason perhaps, Sophie thought as she climbed the steps, that she succumbed from time to time to an occasional irresistible peek—doing so now, seeing only the string of boxcars newly arrived, as yet unloaded. SS guards in swirls of steam surrounded the train. She knew from manifests which had been received by Höss the day before that this was the second of two trainloads containing 2,100 Jews from Greece.

Then, her curiosity satisfied, she turned away and opened the door to the salon through which she had to pass to reach the upper stairway. From the Stromberg Carlson phonograph a contralto voice enveloped the room in a lover’s hectic grievance, while Wilhelmine, the housekeeper, stood listening to it, audibly humming as she pawed through a stack of silken female underwear. She was alone. The room was flooded with sunlight.

Wilhelmine (Sophie noticed, trying to hurry through) was wearing one of her mistress’s hand-me-down robes, pink slippers with huge pink pompons, and her henna-dyed hair was in curlers. The face seemed aflame with rouge. The humming was extravagantly off-key. She turned as Sophie edged past, fixing her with a look that seemed not at all unpleasant, which was a difficult trick, since the face itself was the most unpleasant she had ever beheld. (Intrusive as it may appear now, and possibly lacking in graphic persuasion, I cannot resist repeating Sophie’s Manichean reflection of that summer and let it go at that: “If you ever write about this, Stingo, just say that this Wilhelmine was the only beautiful woman I ever saw—no, she was not beautiful really, but good-looking with these hard good looks that some streetwalkers have—the only good-looking woman that the evil inside her had caused this absolute ugliness. I can’t describe her any more than that. It was some kind of total ugliness. I look at her and the blood turn to ice inside me.”)
“Guten Morgen,”
Sophie whispered, pressing on. But Wilhelmine suddenly arrested her with a sharp “Wait!” German is a loud language anyway, the voice was like a shout.

Sophie turned to confront the housekeeper; oddly, although they had often seen each other, it was the first time they had ever spoken. Despite her unthreatening countenance now, the woman inspired apprehension; Sophie felt the pulse racing in both wrists, her mouth dried up instantly.
“Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen,”
mourned the querulous, lachrymal voice, the scratches on the shellac amplified, echoing from wall to wall. A sparkling galaxy of dust motes swam through the slanting early light, shimmering up and down across the lofty room crowded with its armoires and desks, its gilt sofas and cabinets and chairs. It’s not even a museum, thought Sophie, it’s a monstrous warehouse. Suddenly Sophie realized that the salon reeked heavily of disinfectant, like her own smock. The housekeeper was weirdly abrupt. “I want to give you something,” she cooed, smiling, fingering the stack of underwear. The filmy mound of silken underpants, looking freshly cleaned, rested on the surface of a marble-top commode inlaid with colored wood and ornamented in strips and scrolls of bronze; a huge and hulking thing, it would have grossly obtruded at Versailles, where in fact it may have been stolen from. “Bronek brought them last night straight from the cleaning unit,” she continued in her strident singsong. “Frau Höss likes to give a lot of them to the prisoners. I know you’re not issued underwear, and Lotte’s been complaining that those uniforms scratch so around the bottom.” Sophie let out her breath. With no chagrin, no shock, not even with revelation, the thought flew through her mind like a sparrow: They’re all from dead Jews. “They’re very, very clean. Some of these are made of marvelous sheer silk, I’ve seen nothing like them since the war began. What size do you wear? I’ll bet you don’t even know.” The eyes flashed indecently.

It had all happened too fast, this sudden gratuitous charity, for Sophie to make immediate sense of it, but soon she had an inkling and she was truly alarmed—alarmed as much by the way Wilhelmine had all but pounced upon her (for now she realized this is what she had done), lurking like a tarantula while she waited for her to emerge from the cellar, as by the precipitate offering of the rather ridiculous largess itself. “Doesn’t that fabric chafe around your bottom?” she heard Wilhelmine ask her now, mezza voce and with a slight quaver that made everything more insinuating and flirtatious than her suggestive eyes, or the words that had caused her at first to take warning:
I’ll bet you don’t even know.

“Yes...” said Sophie, fiercely uneasy.
“No!
I don’t know.”

“Come,” she murmured, beckoning toward an alcove. It was a shadowy space sheltered behind a Pleyel concert grand piano. “Come, let’s try a pair on.” Sophie moved unresistingly forward, and felt the light touch of Wilhelmine’s fingers on the edge of her smock. “I’ve been so interested in you. I’ve heard you speaking to the Commandant. You speak marvelous German, just like a native. The Commandant says you are Polish, but I don’t really believe him, ha! You’re too beautiful to be Polish.” The words, vaguely feverish, spilled over one another as she maneuvered Sophie toward the nook in the wall, ominously filled with darkness. “All the Polish women here are so ordinary and plain, so
lumpig,
so trashy-looking. But you—you must be Swedish, aren’t you? Of Swedish blood? You look more Swedish than anything, and I hear there are many people of Swedish blood in the north of Poland. Here we are now, where no one can see us and we can try on a pair of these undies. So your nice bottom will stay all white and soft.”

Until this instant, hoping against hope, Sophie had said to herself that the woman’s advances just
might
be innocuous, but now, so close, the signs of her voracious letch—first her rapid breathing and then the ripe rosiness spreading like a rash over the bestially handsome face, half Valkyrie, half gutter trull—left no doubt about her intentions. They were clumsy bait, those silk panties. And in a spasm of strange mirth it flashed across Sophie’s mind that in this psychotically ordered and scheduled household the wretched woman could only have sex on the fly, so to speak, vertically in an alcove behind a mammoth grand piano during these fleetingly few, precious and unprogrammed minutes after breakfast when the children were just off to the garrison school and before the beginning of daily routine. All other hours of the day, down to the last clock-tick, were accounted for:
voilà!
for the desperate challenges, beneath a regulated SS roof, of a taste of Sapphic amour.
“Schnell, schnell, meine Süsse!”
Wilhelmine whispered, more insistently now. “Lift up your skirt a bit, darling... no, higher!”