Sophie's Choice (30 page)

breasts urgently, manhandled her buttocks, drew back with an expression of lust so intense that it was like some terminal anguish, then set about her serious labors, slumping earthward in genuflection and squeezing Sophie's hips roundabout with her arms. Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen... "Swedish kittycat... beautiful thing," she mumbled. "Ah, bitte... higher!" Having made her decision moments before, Sophie was not about to resist or protest--in a kind of headlong autohypnosis she had placed herself beyond revulsion, realizing in any case that she was as helpless as a crippled moth--and let her thighs, submissively, be spread apart as the brutish muzzle and the bullethead of a tongue probed into what, with some dull distant satisfaction, she realized was her obdurate dryness, as parched and without juice as desert sand. She rocked on her heels and raised her arms lazily and resistlessly akimbo, mainly aware now of the woman frantically fingering herself, the flaming becurlered mop of hair bobbing beneath like a huge shredded poppy. Then there was a booming noise from the other end of the huge room, a door was flung open and Höss's voice called, "Wilhelmine! Where are you? Frau Höss wants you in the bedroom." The Commandant, who should have been in his attic office, had become briefly unpinned from his schedule, and the fear which his unexpected presence caused down below was transmitted instantly to Sophie, who thought that Wilhelmine's sudden spasmodic and agonizing clutch around her thighs might cause the two of them to topple and fall. Tongue and head slipped away. For moments her stricken adorer remained motionless as if paralyzed, the face rigid with fright. Then came blessed relief. Höss called again once, paused, cursed under his breath and quickly departed, stamping across the floor to the attic stairway. And the housekeeper fell apart from her, limp, flopped down in the shadows like a rag doll. It was not until Sophie was on the stairs to the attic, moments later, that the reaction smote her, and she felt her legs go elastic and weak and she was forced to sit down. The mere fact of the assault was not what left her unstrung--it was nothing new, she had been nearly raped by a woman guard months before, shortly after her arrival--nor was it Wilhelmine's response in her mad scramble for safety after Höss had gone upstairs ("You must not tell the Commandant," she had said with a snarl, then repeated the same words as if imploring Sophie in abject fear, before scuttling out of the room. "He would kill us both!"). For a moment Sophie felt this compromising situation had in an obscure way given her an advantage over the housekeeper. Unless--unless (and the second thought caught her up short and made her sit tremblingly on the stairs) this convicted forger, who wielded so much power in the house, should seize upon that moment of thwarted venery as a way to get back at Sophie, work out her frustration by turning love into vengeance, run to the Commandant with some tale of wrongdoing (specifically, that it was the other prisoner who had initiated the seduction), and in this way shatter to bits the framework of Sophie's all-too-unsubstantial future. She knew, in the light of Höss's detestation of homosexuality, what would happen to her if such a scandal were fabricated, and suddenly felt--as had all her fellow trusty prisoners smothering in their fear-drenched limbo--the phantom needle squirting death into the center of her heart. Squatting on the stairs, she bent forward and thrust her head into her hands. The confusion of thoughts roiling about in her mind caused her an anxiety she felt she could hardly bear. Was she better off now, after the episode with Wilhelmine, or was she in greater peril? She didn't know. The clarion camp whistle--reedy, harmonic, more or less in B minor and reminding her always of some partly recaptured, sorrow-sick, blowzy chord from Tannhäuser--shattered the morning, signaling eight o'clock. She had never been late before to the attic but now she was going to be, and the thought of her tardiness and of the waiting Höss--who measured his days in milliseconds--filled her with terror. She rose to her feet and continued the climb upward, feeling feverish and unstrung. Too many things crushing down upon her all at once. Too many thoughts to sort out, too many swift shocks and apprehensions. If she didn't take hold of herself, make every effort to keep her composure, she knew she might simply collapse today like a puppet that has performed its jerky dance on strings, then, abandoned by its master, falls into a lifeless heap. A small nagging soreness across her pubic bone reminded her of the housekeeper's rummaging head. Winded by the climb, she reached the landing on the floor beneath the Commandant's attic, where a partly opened window gave out once more upon the westward view with its barren drill field sloping toward the melancholy stand of poplars, beyond which stood the countless boxcars in drab file, smeared with the dust of Serbia and the Hungarian plains. Since her encounter with Wilhelmine the boxcar doors had been thrown open by the guards, and now hundreds more of the condemned voyagers from Greece milled about on the platform. Despite her haste, Sophie was compelled to halt and watch for an instant, drawn by morbidity and dread in equal measure. The poplar trees and the horde of SS guards obscured most of the scene. She could not clearly see the faces of the Greek Jews. Nor could she tell what they wore: mostly she saw a dull gray. But the platform did give off glints and flickers of multicolored garments, greens and blues and reds, a swirl and flourish here and there of bright Mediterranean hue, piercing her with vivid longing for that land she had never seen except in books and in her fancy and summoning up instantly the child's verse she remembered from the convent school--skinny Sister Barbara chanting in her comic pebbly Slavic French: Ô que les îles de la Grèce sont belles! Ô contempler la mer à l'ombre d'un haut figuier et écouter tout autour les cris des hirondelles voltigeant dans l'azur parmi les oliviers! She thought she had long ago become used to the smell, at least resigned to it. But for the first time that day the sweet, pestilential stench of flesh consumed by fire assailed her nostrils with the ripe bluntness of an abattoir, so violently taking command of her senses that her eyes went out of focus and the throng on the distant platform--seeming for one last moment like some country festival viewed from afar--swam away from her vision. And involuntarily, with creeping horror and disgust, she raised her fingertips to her lips. ... la mer à l'ombre d'un haut figuier... Thus, simultaneously with her awareness of where Bronek had obtained the fruit, the liquefied figs themselves came flooding up sourly in her throat, pouring out and spattering onto the floor between her feet. With a groan she thrust her head against the wall. She stood heaving and retching for long moments by the window. Then upon limp weak legs she sidled away from the mess she had made and fell to her hands and knees on the tiles, writhing in misery and riven by a feeling of strangeness and loss such as she had never known. I'll never forget what she told me about this: she realized that she could not remember her own name. "Oh God, help me!" she called aloud. "I don't know what I am!" She remained for a while in that crouch, trembling as if in arctic cold. Insanely, a cuckoo clock from the moon-faced daughter Emmi's bedroom scant steps away sounded the hour in eight cuckoo cries. They were at least five minutes late, Sophie observed with grave interest, and odd satisfaction. And slowly she rose erect and proceeded to climb the last steps upward, into the lower vestibule where the framed photographs of Goebbels and Himmler were the only adornments on the wall, and upward further to the attic door, ajar, with the brotherhood's holy motto engraved on the lintel: My Honor Is My Loyalty--beyond which Höss in his eyrie waited beneath the image of his lord and savior, waited in that celibate retreat of a calcimine purity so immaculate that even as Sophie approached, unsteadily, the very walls, it seemed, in the resplendent autumn morning were washed by a blindingly incandescent, almost sacramental light. "Guten Morgen, Herr Kommandant," she said. Later during that day Sophie could not shake from her mind Bronek's distressing news that Höss was to be transferred back to Berlin. It really meant that she would have to move with haste if she was to accomplish what she had set out to do. And so in the afternoon she resolved to make her advance and prayed silently for the poise--the necessary sang-froid--to carry it off. At one point--waiting for Höss to return to the attic, feeling her emotions subside to something like normal after the tumult provoked in her breast by that brief passage from Haydn's Creation--she had been encouraged by some interesting new changes in the Commandant. His relaxed manner, for one thing, then his rather awkward but real attempt at conversation, followed by the insinuating touch of his hand on her shoulder (or was she reading too much into this?) when they had both gazed at the Arabian stallion: these seemed to her to signal cracks in that impregnable mask. Then, too, there was the letter to Himmler he had dictated to her, regarding the condition of the Greek Jews. Never before had she transcribed any correspondence which was not somehow connected with Polish affairs and Polish language--those official letters to Berlin usually being the province of a poker-faced clerk Scharführer on the floor below who clumped upstairs at regular intervals to hammer out Höss's messages to the various SS chief engineers and proconsuls. Now she reflected on the Himmler letter with mild belated wonder. Wouldn't the mere fact that he had made her privy to such a sensitive matter indicate.. . what? Certainly, at least, that he had allowed her, for whatever reason, a confidentiality that few prisoners--even prisoners of her undoubted privileged status--could ever dream of, and her assurance of reaching through to him before the day was over grew stronger and stronger. She felt she might not even have to avail herself of the pamphlet (like father, like daughter) tucked away in one of her boots ever since the day she left Warsaw. He ignored what she feared might be a distraction--her eyes, raw with weeping--as he stormed through the door. She heard "The Beer Barrel Polka" pounding rhythmically below. He was holding a letter, apparently delivered to his aide downstairs. The Commandant's face was flushed with anger, a wormlike vein pulsed just below his cropped pate. "They know it's compulsory that they write in German, these blasted people. But they constantly break the rules! Damn them to hell these Polish half-wits!" He handed her the letter. "What does it say?" " 'Honored Commandant...' " she began. In rapid translation Sophie told him that the message (characteristically sycophantic) was from a local subcontractor, a supplier of gravel to the German operators of the camp concrete factory, who said that he would be unable to transport the required amount of gravel in the required time, begging the Commandant's indulgence, due to the extremely soggy condition of the ground around his quarry that had not only caused several cave-ins but also hampered and slowed down the operation of his equipment. Therefore, if the honored Commandant would have the forbearance (Sophie continued to read), the schedule of delivery would necessarily be altered in the following manner--But Höss broke in suddenly, fiercely impatient, lighting a cigarette from another in his fingers, coughing his croupy cough as he blurted out a hoarse "Enough!" The letter had plainly unstrung the Commandant. He pursed his lips in a caricature of a mouth drawn and puckered with tension, muttered "Verwünscht!"--then quickly ordered Sophie to make a translation of the letter for SS Hauptsturmführer Weitzmann, head of the camp building section, with this typed comment attached: "Builder Weitzmann: Build a fire under this piddler and get him moving." And at that exact instant--as he said the last words--Sophie saw the fearful headache attack Höss with prodigious speed, like a stroke of lightning that had found a conduit through the gravel merchant's letter down to that crypt or labyrinth where migraine sets its fiery toxins loose beneath the cranium. The sweat poured forth, he pushed his hand to the side of his brow in a helpless fluttering little ballet of white-knuckled fingers, and his lips curled outward to reveal a phalanx of teeth grinding together in a fugue of pain. Sophie had observed this a few days before, a much milder attack; now it was his migraine again and a full-scale siege. In his pain Höss gave a thin whistle. "My pills," he said, "for God's sake, where are my pills!" Sophie went swiftly to the chair next to Höss's cot upon which he kept the bottle of ergotamine he used to alleviate these attacks. She poured out a glass of water from a carafe and handed it and two tablets of ergotamine to the Commandant, who, gulping the medicine down, rolled his eyes at her with a queer half-wild gaze as if he were trying to express with those eyes alone the dimensions of his anguish. Then with a groan and with his hand clapped to his brow he sank down on the cot and lay sprawled out gazing at the white ceiling. "Shall I call the doctor?" Sophie said. "The last time I remember he said to you--" "Just be quiet," he retorted. "I can't bear anything now." The voice was edged with a cowed, whimpering tone, rather like that of a hurt puppy. During his last attack, five or six days before, he had ordered her quickly away to the cellar, as if he wanted no one, not even a prisoner, to be witness to his affliction. Now, however, he rolled over on his flank and lay there rigid and motionless except for the rise and fall of his chest beneath his shirt. Since he made no further sign to her, she went to work: she commenced typing a free translation from the contractor's letter on her German machine, once more aware without shock or even much interest that the gravel dealer's complaint (could a single such annoyance, she wondered idly, have triggered in itself the Commandant's cataclysmic migraine?) meant another critical pause in the construction of the new crematorium at Birkenau. The work stoppage, or slowdown--that is, Höss's apparent inability to orchestrate to his own satisfaction all the elements of supply and design and labor concerning this new oven-and-gas-chamber complex, the completion of which was two months overdue--remained the chief thorn in his side, and now was the obvious cause for all the nervousness and anxiety she had observed in him these past days. And if it was the reason, as she suspected, for his headache,
could it be possible too that his failure to get the crematorium built on schedule was in some way linked to his sudden transfer back to Germany? She was typing the last line of the letter and at the same time puzzling over these questions when his voice broke in abruptly, startling her. And when she turned her eyes in his direction she realized with a curious mixture of hope and apprehension that he must have been eying her for many minutes from the cot where he lay. He beckoned to her and she rose and went to his side, but since he made no motion for her to sit down, she remained standing. "It's better," he said in a subdued voice. "That ergotamine is a miracle. It not only reduces the pain but it subdues the nausea." "I'm glad, mein Kommandant," Sophie replied. She felt her knees trembling and for some reason dared not look down into his face. Instead, she fixed her eyes on the most obvious and immediate object within view: the heroic Führer in scintillant steel armor, his gaze confident and serene beneath his falling forelock as he looked toward Valhalla and a thousand years' questionless futurity. He seemed irreproachably benign. Suddenly remembering the figs she had thrown up hours before on the stairs, Sophie felt a stab of hunger in her stomach, and the weakness and trembling in her legs increased. For long moments Höss did not speak. She could not look at him. Was he now, in his silence, measuring her, appraising her? We'll have a barrel of funfunfun, the voices clamorously chorused from below, the dreadful ersatz polka stuck now in its groove, repeating over and over a faint fat chord from an accordion. "How did you come here?" Höss said finally. She blurted the words out. "It was because of a tapanka, or as we German-speaking people say, ein Zusammentreiben--a roundup in Warsaw. It was early last spring. I was on a railroad car in Warsaw when the Gestapo staged a roundup. They found me with some illegal meat, part of a ham--" "No, no," he interrupted, "not how you came to the camp. But how you got out of the women's barracks. I mean, how you were placed in the stenographic pool. So many of the typists are civilians. Polish civilians. Not many prisoners are so fortunate as to find a stenographic billet. You may sit down." "Yes, I was most fortunate," she said, seating herself. She sensed the relaxation in her own voice and she gazed at him. She noticed that he was still sweating desperately. Supine now, eyes half closed, he lay rigid and wet in a pool of sunlight. There was something oddly helpless-looking about the Commandant awash in ooze. His khaki shirt was drenched in sweat, a multitude of tiny sweat blisters adorned his face. But in truth he seemed no longer to be suffering such pain, although the initial torment had saturated him everywhere--even the damp blond spirals of belly-hair curling upward through a space between his shirt buttons--his neck, the blond hairs of his wrists. "I was really most fortunate. I think it must have been a stroke of fate." After a silence Höss said, "How do you mean, a stroke of fate?" She decided instantly to risk it, to exploit the opening he had given her no matter how absurdly insinuating and reckless the words might sound. After these months and the momentary advantage she had been given, it would be more self-defeating to continue to play the torpid tongue-tied slave than to appear presumptuous, even if it involved the serious additional hazard of being thought actually insolent. So: Out with it, she thought. She said it then, although she tried to avoid any intensity, keeping the plaintive edge in her voice of one who has been unjustly abused. "Fate brought me to you," she went on, not unaware of the melodrama of the utterance, "because I knew only you would understand." Again he said nothing. Below, "The Beer Barrel Polka" was replaced by a Liederkranz of Tyrolean yodelers. His silence disturbed her, and suddenly she felt that she was the subject of his most suspicious scrutiny. Maybe she was making a horrible mistake. The queasiness grew within her. Through Bronek (and her own observation) she knew that he hated Poles. What on earth made her think she might be an exception? Insulated by the closed windows from Birkenau's smoldering stench, the warm room had a musty attic's odor of plaster, brickdust and waterlogged timber. It was the first time she had really noticed the smell, and it was like a fungus in the nostrils. Amid the awkward silence between the two of them she heard the stitch and buzz of the imprisoned blue-bottle flies, the soft popping sound as they bumped the ceiling. The noise of the shunting boxcars was dull, dim, almost inaudible. "Understand what?" he said finally in a distant tone, giving her yet another small aperture through which she might try to implant a hook. "That you would understand that a mistake has been made. That I am guilty of nothing. That is, I mean, that I am guilty of nothing truly serious. And that I should be set immediately free." There, she had done it, said it, swiftly and smoothly; with fiery fervor surprising even to her she had uttered the words which for days upon end she had rehearsed incessantly, wondering if she could muster the courage to get them past her lips. Now her heartbeat was so violent and wild that it pained her breastbone, but she took bright pride in the way in which she had managed to govern her voice. She also felt secure in the easy mellifluousness of her accent, attractively Viennese. The small triumph impelled her to go on. "I know you might think this foolish of me, mein Kommandant. I must admit that on the surface it sounds implausible. But I think that you will concede that in a place like this--so vast, involving such great numbers of people--there can be certain errors, certain grave mistakes." She paused, listening to her heartbeat, wondering if he could hear it, yet conscious that her voice still had not broken. "Sir," she continued, pressing a little on the note of entreaty, "I do hope you will believe me when I say that my imprisonment here is a terrible miscarriage of justice. As you see, I am Polish and indeed I was guilty of the crime I was charged with in Warsaw--smuggling food. But it was a small crime, don't you see, I was trying only to feed my mother, who was very sick. I urge you to try to understand that this was nothing when measured against the nature of my background, my upbringing." She hesitated, tumultuously agitated. Was she pushing too hard? Should she halt now and let him make the next move, or should she go on? She instantly decided: Get to the point, be brief but go on. "You see, sir, it is like this. I am originally from Cracow, where my family were passionate German partisans, for many years in the vanguard of those countless lovers of the Third Reich who admire National Socialism and the principles of the Führer. My father was to the depths of his soul Judenfeindlich--" Höss stopped her with a small groan. "Judenfeindlich," he whispered in a drowsy voice. "Judenfeindlich. When will I cease hearing that word 'anti-Semitic'? My God, I'm tired of that!" He let out a hoarse sigh. "Jews. Jews! Will I ever be done with Jews!" Sophie retreated before his impatience, aware that her tactical maneuvering had rather misfired: she had gotten ahead of herself. Höss's thought process, far from inept, was also as exhaustive and as unimaginatively single-minded as the snout of an anteater and brooked few deviations. When only a moment before he had asked "How did you come here?" and then specified that she explain just how, he meant precisely that, and now wanted no talk about fate, miscarriages of justice and matters Judenfeindlich. As if his words had blown down upon her like a north wind, she shifted her tack, thinking: Do as he says, then, tell him the absolute truth. Be brief, but tell the truth. He could find out easily enough anyway, if he wanted to. "Then, sir, I will explain how I was put into the stenographic pool. It was because of an altercation I had with a Vertreterin in the women's barracks when I first arrived last April. She was the assistant to the block leader. Quite honestly, I was terrified of her because..." She hesitated, a little wary of elaborating upon a sexual possibility which the shading of her voice, she knew, had already suggested. But Höss, eyes wide open now and level upon hers, anticipated what she was trying to say. "Doubtless she was a lesbian," he put in. His tone was tired, but acid and exasperated. "One of those whores--one of those scummy pigs from the Hamburg slums they stuck in Ravensbrück and that Headquarters got hold of and sent here in the mistaken idea that they would exercise discipline over you--over the female inmates. What a farce!" He paused. "She was a lesbian, wasn't she? And she made advances toward you, am I right? It would be expected. You are a very beautiful young woman." Again he paused while she absorbed this last observation. (Did it mean anything?) "I despise homosexuals," he went on. "Imagining people performing those acts--animalistic practices--makes me sick. I could never stand even to look at one, male or female. But it is something which must be faced when people are in confinement." Sophie blinked. Like a strip of film run at antic jerky speed through the projector, she saw that morning's mad charade, saw Wilhelmine's mop of flaming hair draw back from her groin, the famished damp lips parted in a petrified perfect O, eyes sparkling with terror; looking at the revulsion in Höss's face, thinking of the housekeeper, she felt herself begin to suppress either a scream or a peal of laughter. "Unspeakable!" the Commandant added, curling his lips as if on some loathsome mouthful. "They were not just advances, sir." She felt herself flush. "She tried to rape me." She could not recall ever having said the word "rape" in front of a man, and the flush grew warmer, then began to fade. "It was most unpleasant. I had not realized that a woman's"--she hesitated--"a woman's desire for another woman could be so--so violent. But I learned." "In confinement people behave differently, strangely. Tell me about it." But before she could reply he had reached into the pocket of his jacket, draped over the other chair at the side of the cot, and took from it a tinfoil-wrapped chocolate bar. "It's curious," he said, the voice clinical, abstract, "these headaches. At first they fill me with terrible nausea. Then as soon as the medicine begins to take effect I find myself very hungry." Stripping the foil from the chocolate, he extended the bar toward her. Hesitant at the outset, surprised--for it was the first such gesture on his part--she nervously broke off a piece and popped it into her mouth, knowing that she betrayed a greedy eagerness in the midst of her effort to be casual. No matter. She proceeded with the account, talking rapidly as she watched Höss devour the rest of the chocolate, conscious that the so very recent assault on her cunt by the trusted housekeeper of the man to whom she was speaking allowed her a certain freshness of tone, even vivacity. "Yes, the woman was a prostitute and a lesbian. I don't know where she was from in Germany--I think from the north, she spoke in Plattdeutsch--but she was a huge woman and she tried to rape me. She had had her eyes on me for days. One night in the latrine she approached me. She was not violent at first. She promised me food, soap, clothing, money, anything." Sophie halted for a moment, her gaze fixed now on Höss's violet-blue eyes, which were watchful, fascinated. "I was terribly hungry but--like you too, sir, I am repelled by homosexuals--I did not find it difficult to resist, to say no. I tried to push her away. Then this Vertreterin grew enraged and attacked me. I shouted at her loudly and began to plead with her--she had me against the wall and was doing things to me with her hands--and then the block leader came in. "The block leader put a stop to this," Sophie went on. "She sent the Vertreterin away and then told me to come to her room at the end of the barracks. She was not a bad sort--another prostitute, like you say, sir, but not a bad sort. Indeed, she was kindly for such... for such a person. She had overheard me shouting at the Vertreterin, she said, and she was surprised because all of us newcomers in the barracks were Polish and she wanted to know where I learned such excellent German. We talked for a while and I could tell that she liked me. I don't think she was a lesbian. She was from Dortmund. She was charmed by my German. She hinted that she might be able to help me. She gave me a cup of coffee and then sent me away. I saw her several times after that and could tell that she had taken a liking to me. A couple of days later she told me to come to her room again, and one of your noncommissioned officers, sir, was there, Hauptscharführer Günther of the camp administration office. He interrogated me for some time, asking me about my various qualifications, and when I told him I could type and take expert shorthand in Polish and German, he informed me that perhaps I could be of some use at the typing pool. He had heard that there was a shortage of qualified help--certain language specialists. After a few days he came back and told me that I would be transferred. And so that is how I came to the..." Höss had finished eating the chocolate bar and now, stirring, rose up on his elbow, preparing to light one of his cigarettes. "I mean," she concluded, "I worked in the stenographic section until about ten days ago, when I was told that I was needed for special work here. And here--" "And here," he interrupted, "here you are." He gave a sigh. "You have had good luck." And what he did then caused her electric amazement. He reached up with his free hand, and using the utmost delicacy, plucked a little something from the edge of her upper lip; it was, she realized, a crumb of the chocolate she had eaten, now held between his thumb and forefinger, and she watched with grave wonder as he moved his tar-stained fingers slowly toward his lips and deposited the tiny chestnut-brown flake into his mouth. She shut her eyes, so disturbed by the peculiar and grotesque communion of the gesture that her heart commenced pounding again and her brain was rocked with vertigo. "What's the matter?" she heard him say. "You're white." "Nothing, mein Kommandant," she replied. "I'm just a bit faint. It will go away." She kept her eyes closed. "What have I done wrong!" The voice was a cry, so loud that it frightened her, and she had barely opened her eyes when she saw him roll himself off the cot, stand abruptly erect and walk the few paces to the window. The sweat plastered the back of his shirt and she thought she saw his whole body tremble as he stood there. Sophie was utterly confounded, watching him, having thought that the by-play with the chocolate might have been the