William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (266 page)

On the floor just underneath the landing which served as the antechamber to Höss’s attic was the small room occupied by Emmi, age eleven, middle member of the Commandant’s five offspring. Sophie had passed the room many times on her way up to and down from the office, and had noted that the door was often left open—not a remarkable fact really, she had reflected, when one realized that petty theft in this despotically well-regulated stronghold was nearly as unthinkable as murder. Sophie had paused for a glimpse more than once and had seen the orderly, dustless child’s bedchamber which would have been unexceptional in Augsburg or Münster: a sturdy single bed with a flowered coverlet, stuffed animals heaped on a chair, some silver trophies, a cuckoo clock, a wall with gingerbread picture frames enclosing photographs (an alpine scene, marching Hitler Youth, a seascape, the child herself in a swimsuit, ponies at play, portraits of the Führer, “Onkel Heini” Himmler, smiling Mummy, smiling Daddy in civvies), a dresser with a cluster of boxes for jewelry and trinkets, and next to these a portable radio. It was the radio that always captured her attention. Only rarely had Sophie seen or heard the radio in operation, no doubt because its charms had been superseded by the huge phonograph downstairs which blared forth night and day.

Once when passing by the room she had noticed the radio on—dreamy, modern ersatz-Strauss waltzes strained through a voice which identified the source as a Wehrmacht station, possibly Vienna, perhaps Prague. The limpid, muted strings were stunningly clear. But the radio itself bewitched her not by its music but by its very being—ravished her by its size, its shape, its adorable shrunken self, its cuteness, its miniatureness, its incredible portability. Never had it occurred to Sophie that technology could achieve such marvelous compactness, but then, she had overlooked what the Third Reich and its newborn science of electronics had been up to all these exploding years. The radio was no bigger than a medium-sized book. The name Siemens was written across a side panel in intaglio script. Deep maroon in color, its plastic front cover sprang up on hinges to form the antenna, standing sentinel over the little tube-and-battery-filled chassis small enough to be balanced easily in the palm of a man’s hand. The radio afflicted Sophie with terror and desire. And at dusk on that October day after her confrontation with Höss, when she descended to her dank quarters in the basement, she caught sight of the radio through the open door and felt her bowels give way with fear at the very idea that at last, with no more hesitations or delays, she must manage somehow to steal it.

She stood in the shadows of the hallway, only a few feet from the bottom of the attic stairs. The radio was playing soft murmurous schmaltz. Above, there was a sound of the booted feet of Höss’s adjutant, thumping about on the landing. Höss himself had left the house on an inspection tour. She stood still for a moment, feeling strengthless, hungry, chill-swept and on the edge of illness or collapse. No day in her life had been longer than this one, wherein all that she had hoped to achieve had come to an ugly, gaping naught. No, not absolutely nothing: Höss’s promise to at least let her see Jan was something salvaged out of the wreckage. But to have mismanaged things so utterly, to have returned virtually to where she had started, faced with the oncoming night of the camp’s perdition—all this was beyond her acceptance or comprehension. She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall in a dizzy siege of nausea, brought on by hunger. That morning on this very spot she had puked up those figs: the mess had long since been scrubbed away by some Polish or SS minion, but in her fancy there lingered a ghostly sour-sweet fragrance, and hunger suddenly clamped down upon her stomach in a spasm of aching colic. Unseeing, she reached up with wandering fingers, suddenly touched fur. It felt like the hairy balls of the devil. She uttered a foreshortened scream, a squeaky gasp, realizing as her eyes popped open that her hand had grazed the chin of an antlered stag, shot in 1938—as Höss had told an SS visitor within her hearing—squarely behind the brain at three hundred meters, “open sight,” on the slopes above the Königssee so deep within the very shadow of Berchtesgaden that the Führer, had he been in residence (and who knows, perhaps he had been!), might have heard the fatal
crack!
...

Now the protuberant glass eyeballs of the deer, artfully detailed even to its minute bloodshot flecks, gave back twin images of herself; frail, wasted, her face bisected by cadaverous planes, she gazed deeply at her duplicate self, contemplating how, in her exhaustion and in the tension and indecision of the moment, she could possibly hold on to her sanity. During the days Sophie had plodded up and down the stairs past Emmi’s room she had pondered her strategy with increasing dread and anxiety. She was hagridden by the need not to betray Wanda’s trust, but—oh God, the difficulties! The key factor lay in one word: suspicion. The disappearance of such a scarce and valued instrument as a radio would be a matter of appalling gravity, inviting the possibility of reprisal, punishment, torture, even random killing. The prisoners in the house would automatically fall under suspicion; they would be the first to be searched, interrogated, beaten. Even the fat Jewish dressmakers! But there was a saving element upon which Sophie realized she had to depend—this was the fact of the members of the SS themselves. If a few prisoners like Sophie alone had access to the upper regions of the house, any such contrived theft would be completely out of the question. It would be suicide. But SS members by the dozens beat a path up to Höss’s office door day after day—messengers, bearers of orders and memorandums and manifests and transfers, all sorts of enlisted Sturmanns and Rottenführers and Unterscharführers on various missions from every corner of the camp. They, too, would have laid covetous eyes on Emmi’s little radio; there were a few at least who were not beyond larceny and they, too, would scarcely be immune to suspicion. Indeed, because far more SS troops than prisoners had cause to frequent Höss’s roost under the eaves, it seemed logical to Sophie to assume that trusted inmates like herself might escape the burden of the most immediate suspicion—allowing an even better opportunity to get rid of the goods.

It became, then, a question of precision, as she had whispered to Bronek the day before: secreting the radio beneath her smock, she would hurry downstairs and pass it along to him in the darkness of the cellar. Bronek in turn would hustle the little set quickly to his contact on the other side of the mansion gate. Meanwhile there would be an outcry. The cellar would be ransacked. Joining in the search, Bronek would limp about with gobbets of advice, exhibiting the collaborator’s odious zeal. The fury and commotion would yield nothing. The frightened prisoners would gradually relax. Somewhere in the garrison a pimply-faced Unterscharführer, frozen with terror, would hear himself accused of this reckless felony. A minor triumph in itself for the underground. And here in the depths of the camp, huddled dangerously in the dark around the precious little box, men and women would listen to the far faint sound of a Chopin polonaise, and to voices of exhortation and good tidings and support, and would feel the closest thing to a restoration of life.

She knew she had to move swiftly now and take it, or be forever damned. And so she moved, heart rampaging, not shedding her fear—it clung to her like an evil companion—and sidled her way into the room. She had to walk only a few paces, but even as she did so, swaying, she sensed something wrong, sensed a ghastly error in tactics and timing: the moment she placed her hand on the cool plastic surface of the radio she had a premonition of disaster which filled the space of the room like a soundless scream. And she recalled later more than once how at that exact instant of contact with that longed-for little object, knowing her mistake (why was it instantly jumbled with a game of croquet?), she heard her father’s voice in some remote summer garden of her mind, almost exultant in its contempt:
You do everything wrong.
But she had the merest instant to reflect on this before hearing the other voice behind her, so unsurprising in its inevitability that even the cool, didactic, Germanic sense of
Ordnung
in the words themselves were no surprise: “Your business may take you up and down the hallway but you have no business in this room.” Sophie whirled about then and beheld Emmi.

The girl was standing at the closet door. Sophie had never seen her so close at hand. She was clad in pale blue rayon panties; her precocious eleven-year-old breasts bulged in a bra of the same washed-out shade. Her face was very white and astonishingly round, like an underdone biscuit, crowned by a fringe of frizzy yellow hair; her features were both handsome and degenerate; trapped within that spherical frame the puffed prettiness of nose, mouth and eyes appeared to be painted on—at first, Sophie thought, on a doll, then as if on a balloon. On second thought she looked less depraved than...
preinnocent?
Unborn? Speechless, Sophie gazed at her, thinking: Papa was right about my wrongdoing, I mess up everything; here all I had to do was to investigate things first. She stammered, then found speech. “I’m sorry,
gnädiges Fraulein,
I was only—” But Emmi interrupted. “Don’t try to explain. You came in here to steal that radio. I saw you. I saw you almost pick it up.” Emmi’s face wore, or perhaps was incapable of, very little expression. With an aplomb that belied the fact of her near-nudity she slowly reached into her closet and drew on a robe of white terry cloth. Then she turned and said with bland matter-of-factness, “I’m going to report you to my father. He will have you punished.”

“I was only going to look at it!” Sophie improvised. “I swear it! I’ve passed by here so many times. I’ve never seen a radio so... so small. So... so
cunning!
I couldn’t believe it really worked. I just wanted to see—”

“You’re a liar,” said Emmi, “you were going to steal it. I could tell by the look on your face. You had an expression as if you were going to steal it, not just pick it up and look at it.”

“You must believe me,” Sophie said, aware of the sob in the back of her throat, and feeling a hopeless infirm lassitude, legs heavy and cold. “I wouldn’t want to take your...” But she halted, struck by the idea that it didn’t matter. Now that she had so preposterously bungled the job, nothing seemed to matter. It only mattered, still, that on the next day she would see her little boy, and how could Emmi interfere with that?

“You
would
want to take it,” the girl persisted, “it cost seventy Deutschmarks. You could listen to music on it, down in the cellar. You’re a dirty Polack and Polacks are thieves. My mother says that Polacks are worse thieves than Gypsies and dirtier too.” The nose puckered in the circular face. “You smell!”

Sophie sensed darkness surging at the back of her eyes. She heard herself groan. Because of incalculable stress or hunger or grief or terror, or God knew what, her period had been delayed for at least a week (this had happened to her in the camp twice before), but now at her loins the wet warm downward-pulling sensation came in a rush; she felt the huge abnormal flood and at the same time was aware in her eyes of the spreading, irrepressible darkness. Emmi’s face, a lunar blur, became caught up in this web of darkness, and Sophie found herself falling, falling... Lulled as if amid sluggish waves of time she drowsed in a blessed stupor, awoke listlessly to the sound of a distant gathering ululation that blossomed in her ears, grew louder, becoming a savage roar. For the barest instant she dreamed that the roar was the roar of a polar bear and that she was floating on an iceberg, swept by frigid winds. Her nostrils burned.

“Wake up,” said Emmi. The face, white as wax, hovered so close that she felt the child’s breath on her cheek. Sophie then knew that she was lying flat and supine on the floor while the girl crouched next to her, flourishing a phial of ammonia beneath her nose. The casement window had been flung open, letting the frosty wind fill the room. The shriek in her ears had been the camp whistle; she heard its distant voice now, decrescendo. At eye-level, next to Emmi’s bare knee, was a small plastic medical kit embellished with a green cross. “You fainted,” she said. “Don’t move. Keep your head horizontal for a minute so it will get the flow of blood. Sniff deeply. That cold air will help revive you. Meanwhile, remain still.” Recollection came sweeping back, and as it did Sophie had the feeling that she was the performer in a play from which the central act was missing: wasn’t it only a minute or so ago (it could not have been much longer) that the child had been raging at her like an urchin storm trooper, and could this really be the same creature who was now attending to her with what might pass for humane efficiency, if hardly angelic compassion? Had her collapse brought out in this frightening
Mädel
with her face like that of a swollen fetus the stifled impulses of a nurse? The question was answered just then, when Sophie groaned and stirred. “You must keep still!” Emmi commanded her. “I have a certificate in first aid—junior grade, first class. Do as I say, do you understand?”

Sophie lay still. She wore no underwear and she wondered how extensively she had stained herself. The back of her smock felt soaked. Surprised at her own delicacy, under the circumstances, she also wondered if she had not at the same time soiled Emmi’s spotless floor. Something in the child’s manner enlarged her sense of helplessness, the feeling of being simultaneously ministered to and victimized. Sophie began to realize that Emmi had her father’s voice, utterly gelid and remote. And in her officious busy bossiness, so lacking in any quality of the tender as she prattled away (now she was smartly smacking Sophie’s cheeks, saying that the first-aid manual stated that smart smacks might help in reviving a victim of
die Synkope,
as she persisted, with medical precision, in calling a fainting spell), she seemed an Obersturmbannführer in microdimension, the SS spirit and essence—its true hypostasis—embedded in her very genes.

But at last the barrage of slaps on Sophie’s cheeks created, apparently, a satisfactory rosiness, and the child ordered her patient to sit erect and lean against the bed. This Sophie did, slowly, suddenly grateful that she had fainted at the moment and in the way she had. For as she gazed toward the ceiling now through pupils gradually shrinking back to their normal focus, she was aware that Emmi had stood up and was regarding her with an expression resembling benignness, or at least a certain tolerant curiosity, as if there had been expelled from her mind her fury at Sophie for being both a Polack and a thief; the nursing seizure appeared to have been cathartic, allowing her enough in the way of an exercise of authority to satisfy the most frustrated SS dwarfling, after which she now assumed once again the plump round outlines of a little girl. “I will say one thing,” Emmi murmured, “you’re very pretty. Wilhelmine said you must be Swedish.”