William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (246 page)

Then, relaxing his grasp, he blurted out something which, in its overlay of ethnic anxiety, she perceived to be a ludicrous replica of Wilhelmine’s own squeamish concern that morning. “It’s hard to believe you’re Polish, with your superb German and the way you look—the fair complexion of your skin and the lines of your face, so typically Aryan. It’s a finer face than that of most Slavic women. And yet you are what you say you are—a Pole.” Sophie now detected a tone both discontinuous and rambling enter his speech, as if his mind were prowling in evasive circles around the threatful core of whatever it was he was trying to express. “I don’t like flirts, you see, it is only a way of trying to insinuate yourself into my favor, to try and seek out a few rewards. I have always detested this quality in women, this crude use of sex—so dishonest, so transparent. You have made it very difficult for me, making me think foolish thoughts, distracting me from my proper duties. This flirtatiousness has been damnably annoying, and yet—and yet it can’t be all your fault, you’re an extremely attractive woman.

“A number of years ago when I would go from my farm up to Lübeck—I was quite young at the time—I saw a silent film version of
Faust
in which the woman who played Gretchen was unbelievably beautiful and made a deep impression on me. So fair, such a perfect fair face and lovely figure—I thought about her for days, weeks afterwards. She visited me in my dreams, obsessing me. Her name was Margarete Something, this actress, her last name escapes me now. I always thought of her simply as Margarete. Her voice too: I could only believe that if I could hear her speak, there would be such a purity in her German. Very much like yours. I saw the film a dozen times. I learned later that she died very young—of tuberculosis, I believe—and it saddened me terribly. Time passed and eventually I forgot about her—or at least she no longer obsessed me. I could never completely forget her.” Höss paused and squeezed her shoulder once more, hard, hurting her, and she thought with shock: Strange, with that pain he is really trying to express some tenderness... The yodelers below had fallen silent. Involuntarily she closed her eyes tightly, trying not to flinch from the pain and aware now—in the dark hollow of her consciousness—of the camp’s symphonic death sounds: of metal clangor, of the boxcars’ remote colliding booms and the faint keening of a locomotive whistle, mournful and shrill.

“I am very much conscious that in many ways I am not like most men of my calling—of men brought up in a military environment. I was never one of the fellows. I have always been aloof. Solitary. I never consorted with prostitutes. I went to a brothel only once in my life, when I was very young, in Constantinople. It was an experience that left me disgusted; I am made sick by the lewdness of whores. There is something about the pure and radiant beauty of a certain kind of woman—fair of skin and of hair, although if truly Aryan she can of course also be somewhat darker—that inspires me to idolize that beauty, to idolize it almost to the point of worship. That actress Margarete was one of these—then also a woman I knew in Munich for some years, a splendid person with whom I had a passionate relationship and a child out of wedlock. Basically I believe in monogamy. I’ve been unfaithful to my wife on very few occasions. But this woman, she... she was the most glorious example of this beauty—exquisite of feature and of pure Nordic blood. My attraction to her was of an intensity beyond anything so crude as mere sex, and its so-called pleasures. It had to do with a grander scheme of procreation. It was an exalted thing to deposit my seed within such a beautiful vessel. You inspire in me much the same desire.”

Sophie kept her eyes shut as the flow of his weird Nazi grammar, with its outlandishly overheated images and clumps of succulent Teutonic wordbloat, moved its way up through the tributaries of her mind, nearly drowning her reason. Then suddenly the mist from his sweaty torso reeked in her nostrils like rancid meat and she heard herself give a gasp at the very instant that he yanked her body up against his own. She had a sense of elbows, knees and a scratchy cheese-grater of stubble. As insistent in his ardor as his housekeeper, he was incomparably more awkward and his arms around her seemed multitudinous, like those of a huge mechanical fly. She held her breath while his hands at her back tried out some sort of massage. And his
heart
—his rampaging galloping heart! Never had she conceived that a single heart was capable of the riotous romantic thumping which moved against her like a drumbeat through the Commandant’s damp shirt. Trembling like a very sick man, he essayed nothing so bold as a kiss, although she was certain she sensed some protuberance—his tongue or nose—mooning restlessly around her bekerchiefed ear. Then an abrupt knock at the door caused him to break apart from her swiftly and he uttered a soft, miserable
“Scheiss!”

It was his adjutant Scheffler again. Begging the Commandant’s pardon, Scheffler said, standing in the doorway, but Frau Höss—now on the landing below—had come upstairs with a question for the Commandant. She was going to the movies at the garrison recreation center and she wanted to know if she might take Iphigenie with her. Iphigenie, the older daughter, was recovering from a week-long case of
die Grippe
and Madame wished to find out whether, in the Commandant’s judgment, the girl was well enough to accompany her to the matinee. Or should she consult Dr. Schmidt? Höss snarled something in return which Sophie could not hear. But it was during this brief exchange that she had a desperate flash of intuition, sensing that the interruption with its jejune domestic flavor could only blot out forever the magic moment into which the Commandant, like some soul-eaten Tristan, had had the infirmity to allow himself to be lured. And when he turned again to face her she knew immediately that her presentiment was an accurate one, and that her cause was in its deepest peril yet.

“When he come back toward me,” Sophie said, “his face was even more twisted up and tormented than before. Again I have this strange feeling that he was going to hit me. But he didn’t. Instead, he come very close to me and said, ‘I long to have intercourse with you’—he used the word
Verkehr,
which have in German the same stupid formal sound as ‘intercourse’; he said, ‘Having intercourse with you would allow me to lose myself, I might find forgetfulness.’ But then suddenly his face changed. It was as if Frau Höss had changed everything around in a moment. His face became very calm and sort of impersonal, you know, and he said, ‘But I cannot and I will not, it is too much of a risk. It would be doomed to disaster.’ He turned away from me then, turned his back to me and walked to the window. I heard him say, ‘Also, pregnancy here would be out of the question.’ Stingo, I thought I might faint. I felt very weak from all my emotion and this tension; also, I guess, from hunger, from not eating anything since those figs I had vomited up that morning, and only the little piece of chocolate he had given me. He turned around again and spoke to me. He said, ‘If I were not leaving here, I would take the risk. Whatever your background is, I feel that in a spiritual way we could meet on common ground. I would risk a great deal to have relations with you.’ I thought he was going to touch or grab me again, but he didn’t. ‘But they have got rid of me,’ he said, ‘and I must go. And so you must go too. I am sending you back to Block Two where you came from. You will go tomorrow.’ Then he turned away again.

“I was terrified,” Sophie went on. “You see, I had tried to get close to him and I had failed, and now he was sending me away and all my hopes were destroyed. I tried to speak to him, but all I could feel was this choking in my throat and the words wouldn’t come. It was like he was going to cast me back into darkness and there was nothing I could do—nothing at all. I kept looking at him and I was trying to speak. That beautiful Arabian horse was still in the field down below and Höss was leaning against the window, gazing down at it. The smoke from Birkenau had lifted up. I heard him whisper something about his transfer to Berlin again. He spoke very bitterly. I remember he used words like ‘failure’ and ‘ingratitude,’ and once he said very clearly, ‘
I
know how well I have performed my duty.’ He didn’t say anything for a long while then, only kept looking at that horse, and finally I heard him say this, I am almost sure they were his exact words, ‘To escape the body of a man yet still dwell in Nature. To
be
that horse, to live within that beast. That would be freedom.’ ” She paused for an instant. “I have always remembered those words. They were just so...” And Sophie stopped speaking, her eyes glazed with memory, staring toward the phantasmagoric past as if in wonderment.

(“They were just so...”)
What?

After Sophie told me all this, she broke off talking for a long time. She hid her eyes behind her fingers and bent her head downward toward the table, buried in somber reflection. She had throughout the long telling kept a firm grip on herself, but now the glistening wetness between her fingers told me how bitterly she had begun to weep. I let her cry in silence. We had been sitting for hours together that rainy August afternoon, our elbows propped against one of the Formica tables at the Maple Court. It was three days after the cataclysmic breakup between Sophie and Nathan that I described many pages ago. It may be recalled that when the two of them vanished I had been on my way for a visit with my father in Manhattan. (It was an important visit for me—and in fact I had decided to return to Virginia with him—and I want to describe it in some detail later.) From this get-together I had come back unhappily to the Pink Palace, expecting to find the same abandonment and ruination I remembered from that evening—certainly not anticipating the presence of Sophie, whom I discovered, miraculously, in the shambles of her room, stuffing her last odds and ends into a dilapidated suitcase. Meanwhile Nathan was nowhere in sight—I considered this a blessing—and after our rueful and sweet reunion Sophie and I hurried in the midst of an explosive summer downpour to the Maple Court. Needless to say, I was overjoyed to note that Sophie seemed as genuinely happy to see me as I was to be simply breathing her face and body once more. To the best of my knowledge, I had been, aside from Nathan and perhaps Blackstock, the only person in the world who could claim any real closeness to Sophie, and I sensed her clutching at my presence as if it were something actually life-giving.

She was still in what appeared to be a raw condition of shock over Nathan’s desertion of her (she said, not without a touch of grisly humor, that she had contemplated several times hurling herself from the window of the ratty Upper West Side hotel where she had languished those three days), but if grief over his parting had obviously eroded her spirit, it was this same grief, I sensed, that allowed her to open even wider the gates of her memory in a mighty cathartic cataract. But one small impression nags. Should I have become alarmed at something about Sophie which I had never once observed before? She had begun to drink, not heavily—what she drank did not even hesitantly slur her speech—but the three or four mild glasses of whiskey and water she downed during that gray wet afternoon comprised a surprising departure for one who, like Nathan, had been relatively abstemious. Perhaps I should have been more bothered or concerned by those shot glasses of Schenley’s at her elbow. At any rate, I stuck to my customary beer and only casually noted Sophie’s new inclination. I would doubtless have overlooked her drinking anyway, since when Sophie resumed talking (wiping her eyes and—in as straightforward and as emotionless a voice as anyone could manage under the circumstances—starting to wind up the chronicle of that day with Rudolf Franz Höss) she spoke of something which so rocked me with astonishment that I felt the entire outer surface of my face become enveloped by a tingling frost. I drew in my breath and my limbs grew as weak as reeds. And, dear reader, at least then I knew she was not lying...

“Stingo, my child was there at Auschwitz. Yes, I had a child. It was my little boy, Jan, that they have taken away from me on the day I came there. They have put him in this place called the Children’s Camp, he was only ten years old. I know it must be strange to you that all this time you’ve known me I have never told you about my child, but this is something I have never been able to tell to anyone. It is too difficult—too much for me to ever think about. Yes, I did tell Nathan about this once, many months ago. I told him very quickly and then after that I said that we must never once talk about this again. Or tell anyone else. So now I’m telling you only because you will not be able to understand about me and Höss unless you understood about Jan. And after this I will not talk any more about him, and you must never ask me questions. No, never again...

“Anyway, that afternoon when Höss was looking down from the window I spoke to him. I knew that I had to play my last card, reveal to him what
au jour le jour
I had buried even from myself—in my fear of dying of grief of it—do anything, beg, shout, scream for mercy, hoping only that I can somehow touch this man enough so that he would just show a bit of mercy—if not for me, then the only thing I had left on earth to live for. So I put my voice under control and said, ‘
Herr Kommandant,
I know I can’t ask much for myself and you must act according to the rules. But I beg of you to do one thing for me before you send me back. I have a young son in Camp D, where all the other boys are prisoners. His name is Jan Zawistowski, age ten. I have learned his number, I will give it to you. He was with me when I arrived but I have not seen him since six months. I yearn to see him. I am afraid for his health, with winter coming. I beg of you to consider some way in which he might be released. His health is frail and he is so very young.’ Höss didn’t reply to me, just looked straight at me without blinking. I had begun to break down a little and I felt myself going out of control. I reached out and touched his shirt, then clutched at it and said, ‘Please, if you have been impressed only the slightest bit by my presence, by my being, I beg of you to do this for me. Not to release
me,
just to release my little boy. There is a certain way you could do this, which I will tell you about... Please do this for me. Please.
Please!’