William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (265 page)

She says that she would love to go to Germany again, to see Bach’s grave in Leipzig—and she halts, embarrassed, wondering why on earth she has said this, although indeed to place flowers on Bach’s grave has long been a secret wish. Yet in his gentle laugh there is understanding. Leipzig, my home! He says why of course we could do that if you came. We could go to all the great musical shrines. She gasps inwardly—the “we,” the “if you came.” Is she to construe this is an invitation? Delicate, even devious—but an invitation? She feels the pulse twitch at her brow and flees the subject, or warily moves away. We have much good music in Cracow, she says, Poland is filled with wonderful music. Yes, he says, but not like Germany. If she were to come, he would take her to Bayreuth—does she like Wagner?—or to the great Bach festivals, or to hear Lotte Lehmann, Kleiber, Gieseking, Furtwängler, Backhaus, Fischer, Kempff... His voice seems to be an amorous melodic murmur, cajoling, politely but outrageously flirtatious, irresistible and (to her utter distress now) wickedly exciting. If she loves Bach, then she must love Telemann.
We
shall toast
his
memory in Hamburg! And Beethoven’s in Bonn! Just at this moment a splashing of feet through gravel announces the return of the Professor. He babbles delightedly, saying “Open Sesame.” Sophie can almost hear the sound her heart makes as it deflates, sickly pounding. My father, she thinks, is everything that music cannot be...

And that (as it evolved in her recollection) is nearly all. The prodigious subterranean castle of salt which she has visited often and which may or may not be, as the Professor claims, one of Europe’s seven man-made wonders, is less an anticlimax in itself than a spectacle which simply fails to register on her awareness, so agitated has she been made by this indefinable whatever-it-is—this infatuation—which has struck her with the random heat of a lightning bolt, making her weak and a little ill. She dares not let her eyes meet Dürrfeld’s again, although once more she glances at his hands: why do they fascinate her so? And now as they descend in the elevator and then embark on a stroll through this glittering white kingdom of vaulted caverns and labyrinthine passageways and soaring transepts—an upended anti-cathedral, buried memorial to ages of human toil, plunging giddily toward the underworld—Sophie blots out both Dürrfeld’s presence and her father’s perambulating lecture, which anyway she has heard a dozen times before. She wonders despondently how she can truly be the victim of an emotion at once so silly and so devastating. She will just have to put this man firmly out of her mind. Yes, put him out of her mind...
Allez!

And this she did. She recounted later how she so firmly obliterated Dürrfeld from her thoughts that after he and his wife left Cracow—only an hour or so following their visit to the Wieliczka mine—he never troubled her memory again, did not dwell on the farthest margin of her consciousness even as a romantic figment. Perhaps this was the result of some unconscious force of will, perhaps it was only because of the futility she felt at entertaining the hope of seeing him again. Like a rock falling into one of those bottomless Wieliczka grottoes, he plummeted from her remembrance—another innocuous flirtation consigned to the dusty unopened scrapbook. Yet six years later she did see him again, when the creature of Dürrfeld’s passion and desire—synthetic rubber—and its place in the matrix of history had caused this corporate prince to become master of Farben’s huge industrial complex known as IG-Auschwitz. When they met each other there at the camp the encounter was even briefer and less personal than their meeting in Cracow. Yet from the separate encounters, Sophie carried away two significantly linked and powerful impressions. And they were these: During that spring afternoon’s jaunt in the company of one of Poland’s most influential anti-Semites, her admirer Walter Dürrfeld, like his host, uttered not a word about Jews. Six years later almost all that she heard from Dürrfeld’s lips concerned Jews and their consignment to oblivion.

During that long weekend in Flatbush, Sophie did not speak to me about Eva except to tell me in a few words what I have already set down: that the child was killed at Birkenau on the day of their arrival. “Eva was taken away,” she said, “and I never saw her again.” She offered no embroidery on this and I plainly could not and did not press the point; it was—in a word—terrible, and this information, which she imparted to me in such a listless, offhand way, left me beyond speech. I still marvel at Sophie’s composure. She returned quickly to speak of Jan, who had survived the selection and who, she learned through the grapevine after a number of days, had been thrown into that desperate enclave known as the Children’s Camp. I could only surmise from what she said about her first six months at Auschwitz that the shock and grief caused by Eva’s death created a bereavement which might have destroyed her, too, had it not been for Jan and
his
survival; the very fact that the little boy still lived, even though beyond her reach, and that she might somehow eventually get to see him was enough to sustain her through the initial phases of the nightmare. Almost every thought she had concerned the child, and the few grains of information she collected about him from time to time—that he was healthy enough, that he still
lived
—brought her the kind of mild, numb solace which enabled her to get through the infernal existence she woke to every morning.

But Sophie, as I pointed out before and as she elaborated to Höss on that strange day of their aborted intimacy, was one of the chosen elite and therefore had been “lucky” by comparison with most of the others newly arrived at the camp. She had first been assigned to a barracks, where in the ordinary course of events she would doubtless have endured that precisely calculated, abbreviated death-in-life which was the lot of nearly all her fellow sufferers. (It was at this point that Sophie told me about the welcoming statement of SS Hauptsturmführer Fritzch, and it might be well to repeat what they both said, verbatim. “I remember his exact words. He said, ‘You have come to a concentration camp, not to a sanatorium, and there is only one way out—up the chimney.’ He said, ‘Anyone who don’t like this can try hanging himself on the wires. If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.’ Then he said, ‘Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.’ ” Sophie had been aware of her death sentence within twenty-four hours of her arrival, it only took Fritzch to validate the fact in SS language.) But as she later explained to Höss in an episode I have earlier narrated, an odd cluster of little events—the attack on her in the barracks by a lesbian, a fight, intercession by a friendly block leader—had led her to a translator-stenographer’s job and lodging in another barracks, where she was sheltered for the time being from the camp’s mortal attrition. And of course at the end of six months another stroke of good fortune brought her the protective comforts and advantages of Haus Höss itself. Yet first came a critical meeting. It was only a few days before she was to take up residence under the Commandant’s roof that Wanda—who had been immured in one of the unspeakable kennels at Birkenau this entire time and whom Sophie had not seen since that April day of their arrival—made her way to Sophie’s side and through a tumultuous outpouring filled her with hope about Jan and the possibility of his salvation, but also terrified her with demands upon her courage which she felt certain she could not meet.

“You will have to be working for us every moment you’re in that insect’s nest,” Wanda had whispered to her in a corner of the barracks. “You can’t imagine what kind of an opportunity this is. It’s what the underground has been waiting for, praying for, to have somebody like you in a situation like this! You’ll have to use your eyes and ears every minute. Listen, darling, it’s so important for you to get word out about what’s going on. Shifts of personnel, changes of policy, transfers of the top SS pigs—anything is priceless information. It’s the lifeblood of the camp. War news! Anything to counter their filthy propaganda. Don’t you see, our morale is the only thing we have left in this hellhole. A radio, for instance—that would be priceless! Your chances of getting one would be practically nil, but if you could smuggle out a radio just so we could listen to London, it would be nearly the same as saving thousands and thousands of lives.”

Wanda was sick. The dreadful bruise inflicted on her face in Warsaw had never really gone away. Conditions in the women’s compound at Birkenau were hideous and a chronic bronchial ailment to which she had always been prone had flared up, bringing to her cheeks a hectic and alarming flush so bright that it almost matched her brick-red hair, or the grotesque frizzles that were left of it. With mingled horror, grief and guilt Sophie had a swift intuition that the present moment would be the last time she would ever lay eyes on this brave, resolute, luminous flame of a girl. “I can only stay a few more minutes,” Wanda said. She suddenly switched from Polish to a rapid, breezy colloquial German, murmuring to Sophie that the nasty-faced assistant block leader lingering nearby, a Warsaw whore, looked like a stool pigeon and a traitorous rat, which she was. Quickly then she outlined to Sophie her scheme about Lebensborn, trying to make her see that the plan—however quixotic it might appear—was perhaps the only way of assuring Jan’s deliverance from the camp.

It would require a lot of conniving, she said, would require a lot of things which she knew Sophie would instinctively shrink from. She paused, coughed in painful racking spasms, then resumed. “I knew I had to see you when I heard about you through the grapevine. We hear everything. I’ve so wanted to see you anyway all these months, but this new job of yours made it absolutely necessary. I’ve risked everything to get here to see you—if I’m caught I’m done for! But nothing risked, nothing gained in this snakepit. Yes, I’ll tell you again and believe me: Jan is well, he’s as well as can be expected. Yes, not once—three times I saw him through the fence. I won’t fool you, he’s skinny, skinny as I am. It’s lousy in the Children’s Camp—everything’s lousy at Birkenau—but I’ll tell you another thing. They’re not starving the children as badly as some of the rest. Why, I don’t know, it can’t be their conscience. Once I managed to take him some apples. He’s doing well. He can make it. Go ahead and cry, darling, I know it’s awful but you mustn’t give up hope. And you’ve got to try to get him out of here before winter comes. Now, this Lebensborn idea may sound bizarre but the thing really exists—we saw it happening in Warsaw, remember the Rydzón child?—and I’m telling you that you simply must make a stab at using it to get Jan shipped out of here. All right, I know there’s a good chance that he might get lost if he’s sent to Germany, but at least he’ll be alive and well, don’t you see? There’s a good chance that you’ll be able to keep track of him, this war can’t last forever.

“Listen! It all depends on what kind of relationship you strike up with Höss. So much depends on that, Zosia darling, not only what happens to Jan and yourself but to all of us. You’ve got to
use
that man, work on him—you’re going to be living under the same roof. Use him! For once you’ve got to forget that priggish Christer’s morality of yours and use your sex for all it’s worth. Pardon me, Zosia, but give him a good fucking and he’ll be eating out of your hand. Listen, underground intelligence knows all about that man, just as we’ve learned about Lebensborn. Höss is just another susceptible bureaucrat with a blocked-up itch for a female body. Use it! And use him! It won’t be any skin off his nose to take one Polish kid and have him committed to that program—after all, it’ll be another bonus for the Reich. And sleeping with Höss won’t be collaboration, it’ll be espionage—a fifth column! So you’ve got to work this ape over to every possible limit. For God’s sake, Zosia, this is your chance! What you do in that house can mean everything for the rest of us, for every Pole and Jew and misbegotten bundle of misery in this camp—
everything.
I beg of you—don’t let us down!”

Time was running out. Wanda had to go. Before she went, she left Sophie with a few last instructive words. There was the matter of Bronek, for instance. At the Commandant’s house she would encounter a handyman named Bronek. He would be a crucial link between the mansion and the camp underground. Ostensibly a stooge for the SS, he was not quite the bootlicker and Höss’s lackey that a necessity for accommodation would make him appear. Höss trusted him, he was the Commandant’s pet Polack; but within this simple being, superficially servile and obliging, there beat the heart of a patriot who had shown that he could be counted upon for certain missions, provided they were not too mentally taxing or complex. The truth was, he was harebrained but clever—made into such a reliable turnip by the medical experiments which had addled his thought processes. He could initiate nothing on his own but was a willing instrument. Poland forever! In fact, said Wanda, Sophie would soon discover that Bronek was so secure in his role as the submissive, harmless drudge that from Höss’s viewpoint he could only be beyond suspicion—and therein lay both the beauty and the crucial nature of his function as an underground operative and go-between. Trust Bronek, Wanda said, and use him if she could. Now Wanda had to go, and after a long and tearful embrace she was gone—leaving Sophie weak and hopeless, with a sense of inadequacy...

Thus Sophie came to spend her ten days under the Commandant’s roof—a period culminating in that hectic, anxiety-drenched day which she remembered in such detail and which I have already described: a day when her feckless and flat-footed attempt at seducing Höss yielded not the possibility of freedom for Jan but only the bitterly wounding yet sweetly desirable promise of seeing her child in the flesh. (And this might be too brief to bear.) A day on which she had miserably failed, through a combination of panic and forgetfulness, to broach the idea of Lebensborn to the Commandant, thereby losing the richest chance she had of offering him the legitimate means to oversee Jan’s removal from the camp. (
Unless,
she thought, as she descended toward the cellar that evening, unless she collected her wits and was able to outline to him her plan the next morning, when Höss had promised to bring the little boy to his office for the reunion.) It was also the day on which to her other frights and miseries had been added the almost intolerable burden of a challenge and a responsibility. And four years later, in a bar in Brooklyn, she spoke of the desperate shame that still engulfed her at the memory of how such a challenge and a responsibility had frightened her and finally defeated her. This was ultimately one of the darkest parts of her confession to me and the focus of what she called, again and again, her “badness.” And I began to see how this “badness” went far beyond what—it seemed to me—was misplaced guilt over her clumsy effort to seduce Höss or even her equally clumsy attempt to manipulate him through her father’s pamphlet. I began to see how, among its other attributes, absolute evil paralyzes absolutely. In the end, Sophie recalled with anguish, her failure was reduced to such a cheaply trivial yet overwhelmingly important agglomeration of metal, glass and plastic as the radio that Wanda thought Sophie would never have the incredible chance to steal. And she blew her chance to pieces...