William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (267 page)

“Tell me,” Sophie said in a gentle solicitous voice, aimlessly exploiting the lull, “tell me, what’s that design sewn onto your robe? It’s so attractive.”

“It’s the insignia of my swimming championship. I was the champion in my class. The beginners. I was only eight. I wish we had swimming competition here, but we don’t. It’s the war. I have had to swim in the Sola, which I don’t like. The river’s filled with muck. I was a very fast swimmer in the beginners’ competition.”

“Where was that, Emmi?”

“At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.”

Into her dresser drawer she pounced and filled the crook of one arm with a huge album that spilled out photographs and clippings. She lugged it to Sophie’s side, pausing only to switch on the radio. Cracklings and peeps disturbed the air. She made an adjustment and the static vanished, replaced by a far faint chorus of horns and trumpets, exultant, victorious, Handelian: a shiver flowed down Sophie’s backbone like a benediction of ice.
“Das bin ich,”
the girl began to say over and over again, pointing to herself in endlessly repeated postures of bathing costume encasing juvenile adipose flesh, mushroom-pale. Had the sun never shone in Dachau? Sophie wondered in somnolent sickish despair.
“Das bin ich
...
und das bin ich,”
Emmi continued in her childish drone, stabbing at the photographs with her button thumb, the rapt
“me me me”
uttered again and again in a half-whisper like an incantation. “I also began to learn diving,” she said. “Look here, this is me.”

Sophie ceased looking at the pictures—all became a blur—and her eyes sought instead the window flung open against the October sky where the evening star hung, astonishingly, as bright as a blob of crystal. An agitation in the air, a sudden thickening of the light around the planet, heralded the onset of smoke, borne earthward by the circulation of cool night wind. For the first time since the morning Sophie smelled, ineluctable as a smotherer’s hand, the odor of burning human beings. Birkenau was consuming the last of the voyagers from Greece. Trumpets! The brazen triumphant hymnody poured out of the ether, hosannas, bleats of rams, angelic annunciations—making Sophie think of all the unborn mornings of her life. She began to weep and said, half aloud, “At least tomorrow I will see Jan. At least that.”

“Why are you crying?” Emmi demanded.

“I don’t know,” Sophie replied. And then she was about to say this: “Because I have a little boy in Camp D. And because your father, tomorrow, is going to let me see him. He is almost your age.” But instead she was brought up short by an abrupt voice on the radio, interrupting the choir of brass:
“Ici Londres!”
She listened to the voice, remote, spoken as if through tinfoil but for the moment clear, a transmission meant for the French but vaulting the Carpathians to make itself heard here on the twilit rim of this
anus mundi.
She blessed the unknown announcer as she would a cherished sweetheart, smitten with wonder at the tumbling rush of words:
“L’ltalie a déclaré qu’un état de guerre existe contre l’Allemagne
...” Though exactly how, or why, Sophie could not fathom, her instinct combined with a certain subtle jubilation in the voice from London (which, gazing straight at Emmi now, she knew the child could not understand) told her that this news spelled for the Reich real and lasting woe. It mattered not that Italy itself lay wasted. It was as if she had heard tidings of the Nazis’ sure, eventual ruin. And as she strained to hear the voice, fading out now into a fogbank of static, she continued to weep, aware that she wept for Jan, yes, but also for other things, mainly herself: for her failure to steal the radio and her certain knowledge that she could never retrieve the courage to try to steal it again. That preservative and maternal passion of hers which in Warsaw, only months before, Wanda had deemed so selfish, so indecent, was something that, brought to its cruelest trial, Sophie could not overcome—and she wept now, helplessly, in the shame of her dereliction. She placed quivering fingers in front of her eyes. “I’m crying because I’m so hungry,” she said to Emmi in a murmur, and this was at least in part the truth. She thought she might faint again.

The stench became more powerful. A dim fire-glow was reflected from the night’s horizon. Emmi went to the window to close out either the cold or the pestilential air, or both. Following her with her eyes, Sophie caught sight of a sampler on the wall (the embroidery as florid as the German words), framed in shellacked and curlicued pine.

Just as the Heavenly Father saved people

from sin and from Hell,

Hitler saves the German Volk

from destruction.

The window slammed shut. “That stink is of Jews burning,” Emmi said, turning back to her. “But I guess you know that. It’s forbidden to ever speak of it in this house, but you—you’re just a prisoner. The Jews are the chief enemy of our people. My sister Iphigenie and I have a jingle we made up about the Yids. It begins
‘Der Itzig—’
”

Sophie stifled a cry and blinded her sight with her hands. “Emmi, Emmi... ” she whispered. In her blindness she was overtaken, again, with the mad vision of the child as a fetus, yet fully grown, gigantic, a leviathan brainless and serene, silently stroking its way through the black, incomprehensible waters of Dachau and Auschwitz.

“Emmi, Emmi!” she managed to say. “Why is the name of the Heavenly Father in this room?”

It was, she said a long time after, one of the last religious thoughts she ever had.

After that night—her final night as a prisoner-resident in the Commandant’s house—Sophie spent nearly fifteen more months at Auschwitz. As I have said before, because of her silence this long period of her incarceration remained (and still remains) largely a blank to me. But there are one or two things I can say for a certainty. When she left Haus Höss she was lucky enough to regain her status as a translator and typist in the general stenographic pool, and so remained among the small group of the relatively privileged; thus, while her life was wretched and her privations were often severe, she was for a long time spared the slow and inevitable sentence of death which was the lot of the multitude of prisoners. It was only during the last five months of her imprisonment, when the Russian forces approached from the east and the camp underwent a gradual dissolution, that Sophie endured the worst of her physical sufferings. It was then that she was transferred to the women’s camp at Birkenau and it was there that she experienced the starvation and diseases that brought her very close to death.

During those long months she was almost completely untroubled or untouched by sexual desire. Illness and debilitation would account for this state, of course—especially during the unspeakable months at Birkenau—but she was certain it was also psychological: the pervasive smell and presence of death caused any generative urge to seem literally obscene, a travesty, and thus—as in the depths of illness—to remain at so low an ebb as to be virtually snuffed out. At least that was Sophie’s personal reaction, and she told me that she had sometimes wondered whether it might not have been this total absence of amorous feeling which threw into even sharper focus the dream she had that last night while sleeping in the basement of the Commandant’s house. Or perhaps, she thought, it was the dream that helped dampen all further desire. Like most people, Sophie rarely remembered dreams for long in vivid or significant detail, but this dream was so violently, unequivocally and pleasurably erotic, so blasphemous and frightening, and so altogether memorable, that much later she was able to believe (with a touch of facetiousness which only the passage of time could permit) that it might have scared her away from thoughts of sex all by itself, quite aside from bad health and mortal despair...

After leaving Emmi’s room she had made her way downstairs and then fallen into a heap on her pallet. She had sunk into almost instantaneous sleep, with only a moment’s anticipation of the coming day when she would finally see her son. And she was soon walking alone along a beach—a beach, in the manner of dreams, both familiar and strange. It was a sandy shore of the Baltic Sea, and something told her that it was the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. To the right of her was the shallow wind-swept Kiel Bay, dotted with sailing craft; on her left as she strolled north toward the distant coastal barrens of Denmark were sand dunes, and behind these a forest of pinetrees and evergreen shimmered in the noonday sun. Although she was clothed she sensed a nakedness, as if she were enveloped in a fabric of seductive transparency. She felt unashamedly provocative, conscious of her backside swaying amid the folds of her transparent skirt, attracting the eyes of the bathers umbrella-shrouded along the beach. Immediately the bathers were left behind. A path through the marsh grass made a junction with the beach; she continued past this place, aware now that a man was following her, and that his eyes were fastened on her hips and the extravagant swaying motion she felt compelled to make. The man came abreast of her, looked at her, and she returned his gaze. She could not possibly recognize the face, which was middle-aged, jovial, fair, very German, attractive—no, it was more than attractive, it made her melt with desire. But the man himself! Who was he? She struggled for an instant’s recognition (the voice, so familiar, purred
“Guten Tag”
) and in a flash she thought him to be a famous singer, a
Heldentenor
from the Berlin Opera. He smiled at her with clean white teeth, stroked her on the buttocks, uttered a few words that were at once barely comprehensible and flagrantly lewd, then disappeared. She smelled the warm sea breeze.

She was at the doorway of a chapel which itself was situated on a dune overlooking the sea. She could not see him but she felt the presence of the man somewhere. It was a sunny, simple chapel with plain wooden pews on either side of a single aisle; over the altar hung a cross of unpainted pine, almost primitive in its stripped, unadorned angularity, and somehow loomingly central to Sophie’s apprehension of the place, into which she now wandered, feverish with lust. She heard herself giggle. Why? Why should she giggle when the little chapel was suddenly suffused by the grief of a single contralto voice and the strains of that tragic cantata
Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde?
She stood before the altar, unclothed now; the music, pouring forth softly from some source both distant and near, enveloped her body like a benison. She giggled again. The man from the beach reappeared. He was naked, but again she could not name him. He was no longer smiling; a murderous scowl clouded his face and the threat embedded in his countenance excited her, inflaming her lust. He told her sternly to look down. His penis was thick and erect. He commanded her to get down on her knees and suck him. She did so in a frenzy of craving, pulling back the foreskin to expose a spade-shaped glans of a deep blue-black hue and so huge that she knew that she could not surround it with her lips. Yet she was able to do this, with a choking sensation that wilted her with pleasure, while at the same time the Bach chimes, freighted with the noise of death and time, shivered down her spine.
Schlage dock, gewünschte Stunde!
He pushed her away from his belly, told her to turn around, commanded her to kneel at the altar beneath the skeletal cruciform emblem of God’s suffering, glowing like naked bone. She turned at his order, knelt on hands and knees, heard a clattering of hoofs on the floor, smelled smoke, cried out with delight as the hairy belly and groin swarmed around her naked buttocks in a tight cloaklike embrace, the rampaging cylinder deep within her cunt, thrusting from behind again and again...

The dream still hung in her mind hours later when Bronek awakened her, bearing his pail of slops. “I waited for you last night but you didn’t come,” he said. “I waited as long as I could but it got too late. My man at the gate had to leave. What happened to the radio?” He spoke in low tones. The others were still asleep.

That dream! She could not dislodge it from her mind after these many hours. Groggily, she shook her head. Bronek repeated the question.

“Help me, Bronek,” she said listlessly, gazing up at the little man.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen someone...
awful.”
Even as she spoke, she knew she was making no sense. “I mean, Christ, I’m so hungry.”

“Eat this, then,” said Bronek. “It’s what’s left over from their rabbit stew. Lots of meat in it.”

The mess was slippery, greasy and cold but she slurped it up ravenously, watching the rise and fall of Lotte’s breast as she slept on the pallet nearby. Between gulps she informed the handyman that she was leaving. “God, I’ve been so hungry since yesterday,” she murmured. “Bronek, thank you.”

“I waited,” he said. “What happened?”

“The little girl’s door was locked,” she lied. “I tried to get in but the door was locked.”

“And today you’re going back to the barracks. Sophie, I’m going to miss you.”

“I’ll miss you too, Bronek.”

“Maybe you could still get the radio. That is, if you go up to the attic again. I can still pass it on this afternoon, get it through the gate.”

Why didn’t the imbecile shut up? She was finished with that radio—finished! She might easily have escaped suspicion before, but certainly not now. Surely if the radio were to disappear today, that terrible child would blab all about last night’s visit. Anything further having to do with the radio was out of the question, especially on a day like this with its electric certainty of Jan’s appearance—this reunion which she had looked forward to with a suspenseful greed beyond imagining. And so she repeated her lie. “We’ll have to forget that radio, Bronek. There’s no way to get at it. The little monster always keeps her door locked.”

“All right, Sophie,” said Bronek, “but if something happens... if you can get it, just give it to me quickly. Here in the cellar.” He made an empty chuckle. “Rudi would never suspect me. He thinks he’s got me in his pocket. He thinks I’m mentally deficient.” And in the morning shadows, from an orifice filled with cracked teeth, he shed upon Sophie a luminous, enigmatic smile.