William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (241 page)

The hold of mortal flesh, and of mortal love, is bewilderingly strong, never so fierce as when love is lodged in childhood memory: strolling along beside her, running his fingers through the tangles of her yellow hair, he had once taken her for a ride in a pony cart amid the summery morning fragrance and birdsong of the gardens below Wawel Castle. Sophie remembered this and could not smother a moment of scalding anguish when the news of his death came and she saw him falling, falling—protesting to the last that they had the wrong man—in a fusillade of hot bullets against a wall in Sachsenhausen.

D
EEP IN THE GROUND
and surrounded by thick stone walls, the basement of Höss’s house where Sophie slept was one of the very few places in the camp into which there never penetrated the smell of burning human flesh. This was one of the reasons that she sought its shelter as often as she could, despite the fact that the part of the basement reserved for her straw pallet was damp and ill-lit and stank of rot and mold. Somewhere behind the walls there was an incessant trickle of water in the pipes from the drains and toilets upstairs, and occasionally she was disturbed at night by the furry, shadowy visit of a rat. But all in all this dim purgatory was a far better place to be than any of the barracks—even the one where for the previous six months she had lived with several dozen other relatively privileged female prisoners who worked in the camp offices. Although spared in those confines most of the brutality and destitution which was the lot of the common inmate throughout the rest of the camp, there had been constant noise and no privacy, and she had suffered most from an almost continual lack of sleep. In addition, she had never been able to keep herself clean. Here, however, she shared her quarters with only a handful of prisoners. And of the several seraphic luxuries afforded by the basement, one was its proximity to a laundry room. Sophie made grateful use of these facilities; indeed, she would have been required to use them, since the mistress of the mansion, Hedwig Höss, possessed a Westphalian hausfrau’s phobia about dirt and made certain that any of the prisoners lodged beneath her roof keep clothing and person not merely clean but hygienic: potent antiseptics were prescribed for the laundry water and the prisoners domiciled in Haus Höss went around smelling of germicide. There was still another reason for this: Frau Kommandant was deathly, afraid of the camp’s contagions.

Another precious amenity which Sophie found and embraced in the cellar was sleep, or at least its possibility. Next to food and privacy, the lack of sleep was one of the camp’s leading and universal deficiencies; sought by all with a greed that approached lust, sleep allowed the only sure escape from ever-abiding torment, and strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely) usually brought pleasant dreams, for as Sophie observed to me once, people so close to madness would be driven utterly mad if, escaping a nightmare, they confronted still another in their slumber. So because of the quiet and isolation in the Höss basement Sophie had been able for the first time in months to sleep and to immerse herself in the tidal ebb and flow of dreams.

The basement had been partitioned into two parts roughly down the center. Seven or eight male prisoners were quartered on the other side of the wooden wall; mostly Polish, they worked upstairs as handymen or as dishwashers in the kitchen, and a couple were gardeners. Except in passing, the men and women rarely mingled. Besides herself, there were three female prisoners on Sophie’s side of the partition. Two of these were Jewish dressmakers, middle-aged sisters from Liege. Living testimony of the easy expediency in which the Germans often indulged, the sisters had been spared the gas solely because of their energetic yet delicate artistry with needle and thread. They were the special favorites of Frau Höss, who together with her three daughters was the beneficiary of their talents; all day long they stitched and hemmed and refurbished much of the fancier clothing taken from Jews who had gone to the gas chambers. They had been in the house for many months and had grown complacent and plump, their sedentary labor allowing them to acquire a suetlike avoirdupois bizarre-looking amid this fellowship of emaciated flesh. Under Hedwig’s patronage they seemed to have lost all fear of the future, and appeared to Sophie perfectly good-humored and composed as they stitched away in a second-floor sunroom, peeling off labels and markers stamped Cohen and Lowenstein and Adamowitz from expensive furs and fabric freshly cleaned and only hours removed from the boxcars. They spoke little, and in a Belgian cadence Sophie found harsh and odd to the ear.

The other occupant of Sophie’s dungeon was an asthmatic woman named Lotte, also of middle years, a Jehovah’s Witness from Koblenz. Like the Jewish seamstresses, she was another of fortune’s darlings and had been saved from death by injection or some slow torture in the “hospital” in order to serve as governess to the Hösses’ two youngest children. A gaunt, slab-shaped creature with a prognathous jaw and enormous hands, she resembled outwardly some of the brutish female guards who had been sent to the camp from KL Ravensbrück, one of whom assaulted Sophie savagely early after her arrival. But Lotte had an amiable, generous disposition that refuted the look of menace. She had acted as a big sister, offering Sophie important advice as to how to behave in the mansion, along with several valuable observations concerning the Commandant and his ménage. She said in particular watch yourself around the housekeeper, Wilhelmine. A mean sort, Wilhelmine was a prisoner herself, a German who had served time for forgery. She lived in two rooms upstairs. Kiss her ass, Lotte advised Sophie, lick her ass good and you won’t have no trouble. As for Höss himself, he, too, liked to be flattered, but you had to be less obvious about it; he wasn’t anybody’s fool.

A simple soul, utterly devout, practically illiterate, Lotte seemed to weather the unholy winds of Auschwitz like a crude, sturdy ship, serene in her terrible faith. She did not try to proselytize, only intimating to Sophie that for the suffering of her own imprisonment she would find ample reward in Jehovah’s Kingdom. The rest, including Sophie, would certainly go to hell. But there was no vindictiveness in this pronouncement, any more than there was in the remarks Lotte made when—short of breath one morning, panting and pausing with Sophie on the first-floor landing as they ascended to their labors—she sniffed that ambient odor of the Birkenau funeral pyre and murmured that those Jews deserved it. They had earned the mess they were in. After all, wasn’t it the Jews who were Jehovah’s first betrayers? “Root of all evil,
die Hebräer,
” she wheezed.

On the brink of waking that morning of the day I have already begun to describe, the tenth day she had worked for the Commandant in his attic and the one upon which she had made up her mind to try to seduce him—or if not precisely to seduce him (ambiguous thought), then otherwise to bend him to her will and scheme—just before her eyes fluttered open in the cobwebbed gloom of the cellar, she was conscious of the harsh labor of Lotte’s asthmatic breathing from her pallet against the opposite wall. Then Sophie came awake with a jolt, through heavy eyelids perceiving the great heap of a body three feet away, recumbent beneath a moth-eaten woolen blanket. Sophie would have reached out to poke Lotte in the ribs as she had more than once before, but although the scrape of shuffling feet on the floor of the kitchen above told her it was morning, nearly time for all of them to be up and about, she thought: Let her sleep. Then like a swimmer plunging toward benevolent, amniotic depths, Sophie tried to fall back into that dream she had had just before she awakened.

She had been a little girl climbing, a dozen years before, in the Dolomites with her cousin Krystyna; chattering in French, they had been searching for edelweiss. Dark and misty peaks soared up around them. Baffling, like all dreams, touched with shadowy peril, the vision had also been almost unbearably sweet. Above them the milky-white flower had beckoned from the rocks and Krystyna, preceding her up a dizzying path, had called back, “Zosia, I’ll bring it down!” Then Krystyna seemed to slip and, in a shower of pebbles, to be on the edge of falling: the dream became murky with terror. Sophie prayed for Krystyna as she would for herself: Angel of God, guardian angel, stay by her side... She uttered the prayer over and over again. Angel, don’t let her fall! Suddenly the dream was flooded with alpine sunlight and Sophie looked up. Serene and triumphant, framed in a golden aureole of light, the child smiled down at Sophie, securely perched on a mossy promontory, clutching the sprig of edelweiss.
“Zosia, je l’ai trouvé!”
Krystyna cried. And in the dream her feeling of averted evil, of safety, of answered prayer and jubilant resurrection was so piercingly hurtful that when she came awake, hearing Lotte’s noise, her eyes stung with salty tears. Then her eyelids had closed again and her head had fallen back in a futile attempt to recapture her phantasmal joy when she felt Bronek roughly shaking her shoulder.

“I’ve got good grub for you ladies this morning,” Bronek said. Cued to the Germanic punctiliousness of the manse, he had arrived exactly on schedule. In a battered copper pan he carried the food, almost invariably leftovers from the Höss dinner table of the night before. It was always cold, this morning provender (as if to feed pets, the female cook left it in the pan each night by the kitchen door, from whence Bronek fetched it at daybreak), and usually consisted of a greasy potpourri of bones with bits of meat and gristle attached, crusts of bread (on propitious days smeared with a little margarine), vegetable remnants and sometimes a half-eaten apple or pear. By comparison with the food fed to the prisoners in the camp at large, this was a sumptuous meal; indeed, it was a banquet in terms of mere quantity, and since this breakfast was occasionally augmented, inexplicably, by such tidbits as canned sardines or a hunk of Polish sausage, it simply was assumed that the Commandant had seen to it that his household staff would not starve. Furthermore, although Sophie had to share her pan with Lotte, and the two Jewish sisters ate in the same way, face to face as over a kennel pail, they were each supplied with an aluminum spoon—an almost unheard-of daintiness for inmates anywhere else behind the wires.

Sophie heard Lotte wake with a groan, muttering disconnected syllabics, perhaps some matutinal invocation to Jehovah, in a sepulchral Rhenish accent. Bronek, thrusting the pan down between them, said, “Look there—what’s left of a pig’s shank, with meat on it still. Plenty of bread. Also some fine bits of cabbage. I knew you girls would get fed good the minute I heard yesterday that Schmauser was coming to dinner.” The handyman, pale and bald in the silvery filtering light, all angular limbs and joints like a mantis, switched from Polish to his crippled clownish German—this for Lotte’s benefit as he goosed her with his elbow.
“Aufwecken, Lotte!”
he whispered hoarsely.
“Aufwecken, mein schöne Blume, mein kleine Engel!”
Were Sophie ever disposed to laughter, this running by-play between Bronek and the elephantine governess, who plainly enjoyed his attentions, would have come as close as anything to providing her with comic relief.

“Come awake, my little Bible-worm,” Bronek persisted, and at this moment Lotte roused herself and sat up. Bleared with sleep, her slab of a face looked monstrous yet ethereally placid and benign, like one of those Easter Island effigies. Then without a moment’s hesitation she began to slurp up the food.

Sophie held back for a moment. She knew that Lotte, a godly soul, would take only her share, and so luxuriated in the space of time before she would eat her own portion. She salivated with pleasure at the sight of the slimy mess in the pan and blessed the name Schmauser. He was an SS Obergruppenführer, the equivalent of a lieutenant general and Höss’s superior from Wroclaw; his visit had been bruited about the house for days. And thus Bronek’s theory had proved to be accurate: get a real bigwig in the house, he had kept saying, and Höss will lay on such a fine feed that there will be enough left over so even the cockroaches will get sick.

“What’s it like out, Bronek?” said Lotte between mouthfuls of food. Like Sophie, she knew that he had a farmer’s nose for weather.

“Cool. Wind from the west. Sunny now and then. But lots of low clouds. They keep the air down. The air stinks now but it might get better. A lot of Jews going up the chimney. My darling Sophie, please eat.” He spoke the last in Polish, grinning, revealing pink gums in which the stubs of three or four teeth protruded like raw white slivers.

Bronek’s career at Auschwitz coincided with the history of the camp itself. By happenstance, he was one of its early novitiates, and had begun working in Haus Höss shortly after his incarceration. He was an ex-farmer from the vicinity of Miastko, in the far north. Most of his teeth had fallen out as a result of his involvement in a vitamin-deficiency experiment; like a rat or guinea pig, he had been systematically deprived of ascorbic acid and other essentials until the expected ruination in his mouth: it may have also made him a little daft. Whatever, he had been struck by the preternatural luck that came down on certain prisoners for no good reason at all, like a lightning bolt. Ordinarily, he would have been put away after such a trial, a useless husk sped into the night by a quick injection in the heart. But he possessed a farmer’s resilience and a really extraordinary vigor. Save for his destroyed teeth, he displayed almost none of the symptoms of scurvy—lassitude, weakness, weight loss, and so on—which were predicted under the circumstances. He remained as hardy as a billygoat, which brought him under the bemused scrutiny of the SS doctors and, in a roundabout way, to the attention of Höss. Asked to take a look at this phenomenon, Höss did so, and in their fleeting encounter something about Bronek—perhaps only the language he spoke, the droll garbled German of an uneducated Pole from Pomerania—caught the Commandant’s fancy. He moved Bronek into the protection of his house, where he had worked ever since, enjoying certain small privileges, leeway to wander through the premises picking up gossip, and that general exemption from constant surveillance that is granted a pet or favorite—and there are such favorites in all slave societies. He was an expert scrounger, and from time to time came up with the most remarkable surprises in the way of food, usually from mysterious sources. More important, Sophie learned, Bronek, despite his outward simple-mindedness, was in day-to-day touch with the camp itself, and was a trusted informant of one of the strongest Polish Resistance groups.