Sophie's Choice (29 page)

biting the inside of my lip so hard that the blood came, and I could taste it like seawater on my tongue. He turned to talk to Kazik then. And it happened, this sharp stab of hatred. It went through me with this surprising quick pain and I got dizzy and I thought I might fall to the floor. I was hot all over, in a blaze. I said to myself: I hate him--with a kind of terrible wonder at the hatred which entered into me. It was incredible, the surprise of this hatred, only with awful pain--like a butcher knife in my heart." Poland is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, soul-split country which in many ways (I came to see through Sophie's eyes and memory that summer, and through my own eyes in later years) resembles or conjures up images of the American South--or at least the South of other, not-so-distant times. It is not alone that forlornly lovely, nostalgic landscape which creates the frequent likeness--the quagmiry but haunting monochrome of the Narew River swampland, for example, with its look and feel of a murky savanna village of Galicia, where by only the smallest eyewink of the imagination one might see whisked to a lonesome crossroads hamlet in Arkansas these ramshackle, weather-bleached little houses, crookedly carpentered, set upon shrubless plots of clay where scrawny chickens fuss and peck--but in the spirit of the nation, her indwellingly ravaged and melancholy heart, tormented into its shape like that of the Old South out of adversity, penury and defeat. Imagine, if you will, a land in which carpetbaggers swarmed not for a decade or so but for millennia and you will come to understand just one aspect of a Poland stomped upon with metronomic tedium and regularity by the French, the Swedes, the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and possessed by even such greedy incubuses as the Turks. Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories. Pride in ancestry and family name, and also, one must remember, in a largely factitious aristocracy, or nobility. The names Radziwill and Ravenel are pronounced with the same intense albeit slightly hollow hauteur. In defeat both Poland and the American South bred a frenzied nationalism. Yet, indeed, even leaving aside these most powerful resemblances, which are very real and which find their origin in similar historical fountains (there should be added: an entrenched religious hegemony, authoritarian and puritanical in spirit), one discovers more superficial yet sparkling cultural correspondences: the passion for horseflesh and military titles, domination over women (along with a sulky-sly lechery), a tradition of storytelling, addiction to the blessings of firewater. And being the butt of mean jokes. Finally there is a sinister zone of likeness between Poland and the American South which, although anything but superficial, causes the two cultures to blend so perfectly together as to seem almost one in their shared extravagance--and that has to do with the matter of race, which in both worlds has produced centuries-long, all-encompassing nightmare spells of schizophrenia. In Poland and the South the abiding presence of race has created at the same instant cruelty and compassion, bigotry and understanding, enmity and fellowship, exploitation and sacrifice, searing hatred and hopeless love. While it may be said that the darker and uglier of these opposing conditions has usually carried the day, there must also be recorded in the name of truth a long chronicle in which decency and honor were at moments able to controvert the absolute dominion of the reigning evil, more often than not against rather large odds, whether in Poznan or Yazoo City. Thus when Sophie originally spun out her fairy tale regarding her father's hazardous mission to protect some Jews of Lublin, she surely must have known that she was not asking me to believe the impossible; that Poles on numberless occasions in the near and distant past risked their lives to save Jews from whatever oppressor is a simple matter of fact beyond argument, and even though at that time I had small information about such things, I was not inclined to doubt Sophie, who, struggling with the demon of her own schizoid conscience, chose to throw upon the Professor a falsely beneficent, even heroic light. But if Poles by the thousands have sheltered Jews, hidden Jews, laid down their lives for Jews, they have also at times, in the agony of their conjugate discord, persecuted them with undeviating savagery; it was within this continuum of the Polish spirit that Professor Biegañski properly belonged, and it was there that Sophie had eventually to reinstate him for my benefit, in order to interpret the happenings at Auschwitz... The subsequent history of the Professor's pamphlet is well worth recording. Obeying her father to the end, Sophie together with Kazik did spread the pamphlet around in the university hallways, but it turned out to be a decisive flop. In the first place, the members of the faculty, like everyone else in Cracow, were too preoccupied with their apprehension over the coming war--then only months away--to be much concerned with the Biegañski message. Hell was beginning to erupt. The Germans were demanding the annexation of Gdansk, agitating for a "corridor"; while Neville Chamberlain still dithered, the Huns were clamoring in the west, shaking the flimsy Polish gates. The cobbled, ancient streets of Cracow became filled daily with the hum of a subdued panic. Under the circumstances, how could even the most committed racists among the faculty be diverted by the Professor's cunning dialectics? There was too much in the air of a sense of onrushing doom for anyone to be diverted by such a shopworn crotchet as the oppression of Jews. At the moment all Poland felt potentially oppressed. Moreover, the Professor had made some basic miscalculations, so grossly off kilter as to call into question his guiding judgment. It was not only his sordid insertion of the issue of Vernichtung--even the most hidebound of the teachers had no stomach for such a notion, presented in whatever Swiftian mode of corrosive ridicule--but it was that Third Reich worship and pan-Germanic rapture of his which at this late date would make him blind and deaf to his colleagues' own throbbing, heartfelt patriotism. Sophie eventually saw that only a few years before, during Poland's Fascist resurgence, her father might have gained some converts; now with the Wehrmacht edging ponderously eastward, these Teutonic screams for Gdansk, the Germans provoking incidents along all the borders, how could it be other than a sublime foolishness to ask whether National Socialism had the answer to anything except Polish destruction? The upshot of the matter was that while the Professor and his pamphlet were generally ignored in the accelerating chaos, he also received a couple of unexpected nasty licks. Two young graduate students, members of the Polish army reserve, roughed him up badly in a university vestibule, breaking a finger, and one night Sophie recalled something shattering the dining-room window--a large paving block painted with a spidery black swastika. But as a patriot he hardly deserved that, and at least one small thing might be said on the Professor's behalf. He did not (and of this Sophie said she was certain) create his sermon with the idea in mind specifically to curry favor with the Nazis. The piece had been written from the particular viewpoint of Polish culture, and besides, the Professor was by his own lights too principled a thinker, a man too committed to the broader philosophical truths for it to have entered his mind that he might eventually try to make the pamphlet serve as an instrument of his personal advancement, not to speak of his corporeal salvation. (As a matter of fact, the exigencies of the approaching conflict prevented the essay from appearing in Germany in any form.) Nor was Professor Biegañski a true quisling, a collaborator in the now accepted sense of the word, since when the country was invaded that September and Cracow, virtually unharmed, became the seat of government for all Poland, it was not with the intent to betray his fatherland that he sought to offer his services to the Governor General, Hitler's friend Hans Frank, but only as an advisor and expert in a field where Poles and Germans had a mutual adversary and a profound common interest--die Judenfrage. There was doubtless even a certain idealism in his effort. Loathing her father now, loathing his lackey--her husband--almost as much, Sophie would slip by their murmuring shapes in the house hallway as the Professor, suavely tailored in his frock coat, his glamorous graying locks beautifully barbered and fragrant of Kölnischwasser, prepared to sally forth on his morning supplicatory rounds. But he must not have washed his scalp. She recalled the dandruff on his splendid shoulders. His murmurings combined fretfulness and hope. His voice had an odd hiss. Surely today, even though the Governor General had refused to see him the day before--surely today (especially with his exquisite command of German) he would be greeted cordially by the head of the Einsatzgruppe der Sicherheitspolizei, with whom he had an entrée in the form of a letter from a mutual friend in Erfurt (a sociologist, a leading Nazi theoretician on the Jewish problem), and who could not fail to be further impressed by these credentials, these honorary degrees (on authentic parchment) from Heidelberg and Leipzig, this bound volume of collected essays published in Mainz, Die polnische Judenfrage, et cetera and so on. Surely today... Alas for the Professor, although he petitioned and canvassed and hustled, presenting himself to a dozen offices in as many days, his increasingly frenzied efforts came to naught. It must have been a wicked blow to him to get not a moment's attention, to gain no bureaucratic ear. But the Professor had grievously miscalculated in still another way. Emotionally and intellectually he was the romantic inheritor of the Germanic culture of another century, of a time irreparably gone and fallen away, and thus he had no inkling of how impossible it would be to try to ingratiate himself in his antiquated costumery within the corridors of this stainless-steel, jackbooted, mammoth modern power, the first technocratic state, with its Regulierungen und Gesetzverordnungen, its electrified filing-card systems and classification procedures, its faceless chains of command and mechanical methods of data processing, decoding devices, telephonic scrambling, hot line to Berlin--all working with blinding speed and with no accommodation whatever for an obscure Polish teacher of law and his sheaf of documents, his snowfall of dandruff, flashing bicuspids, dopey-looking spats and a carnation in his lapel. The Professor was one of the first victims of the Nazi war machine to become a victim simply because he was not "programmed"--it was almost as uncomplicated as that. Almost, one might say, yet not quite, for the other important reason for his rejection was the fact that he was a Polack, a German word which has the same sneeringly contemptuous meaning in German as it has in English. Since he was a Polack and at the same time an academic, his overly anxious, beaming, avidly suppliant face was hardly more welcome around Gestapo headquarters than that of a typhoid carrier, but the Professor clearly did not know how far he was behind the times. And although he could not have realized it as he scuttled about during those days of early fall, the clock was ticking remorselessly away toward his end. Under the indifferent eye of the Nazi Moloch he was another doomed cipher. So on the wet gray morning in November when Sophie, kneeling alone in St. Mary's church, had that premonition she earlier described and leaped up and rushed back to the university--there to discover the glorious medieval courtyard cordoned off by German troops who held one hundred and eighty faculty members captive beneath their rifles and machine guns--the Professor and Kazik were among the unlucky ones shivering in the cold, hands clawing at the heavens. But she never laid eyes on them again. In the later, emended (and, I am convinced, truthful) version of her story she told me she felt no real bereavement over the seizure of her father and husband--she was by this time too alienated from both of them for it to affect her deeply--but she was forced to feel on another level shock that hammered at her bones, glacial fear and a devastating sense of loss. Her entire sense of self--of her identity--was unfastened. For if the Germans could commit this obscene assault on score upon score of defenseless and unsuspecting teachers, it was the forerunner of God only knew what horrors awaiting Poland in the coming years. And it was for that reason alone if for nothing else that she hurled herself sobbing into her mother's arms. Her mother was genuinely shattered. A sweet, unthinking, submissive woman, she had retained a faithful love for her husband to the very end; through the dumbshow of the sorrow Sophie simulated for her benefit she could not help but grieve for her mother's grief. As for the Professor--sucked like a mere larva into the burial mound of KL Sachsenhausen, dismal clone of the insensate leviathan of human affliction spawned years before at KL Dachau--his efforts to extricate himself were in vain. And it becomes all the more ironic since it is plain that the Germans had unwittingly imprisoned and doomed a man whom later they might have considered a major prophet--the eccentric Slavic philosopher whose vision of the "final solution" antedated that of Eichmann and his confederates (even perhaps of Adolf Hitler, the dreamer and conceiver of it all), and who had the message tangibly in his possession. "Ich habe meine Flugschrift," he wrote piteously to Sophie's mother in a smuggled note, the only communication they ever received, "I have my pamphlet. Ich verstehe nicht, warum... I cannot understand why I am unable to get through to the authorities here and make them see..." 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.

Chapter 10

Deep 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, sheshared 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 of 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, middleaged sisters from Liège. 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 of 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 byplay 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. The two dressmakers stirred in the shadows across the floor. "Bonjour, mesdames," Bronek called cheerily. "Your breakfast is coming." He turned back to Sophie. "I also got you some figs," he said, "real figs, imagine that!" "Where did you get figs?" Sophie said. She felt startled delight as Bronek handed her this
indescribable treasure; although dried and wrapped in cellophane, they had a marvelous warm heft in her palm, and lifting the package to her face, she saw the streaks of delectable juice congealed on the grayish-green skin, inhaled the distant voluptuous aroma, faded but still sweet, phantom fragrance of the mellow fruit. She had once tasted real figs years before in Italy. Her stomach responded with a joyous noise. She had never had the remotest prospect of any such luxury in months--no, years. Figs! "Bronek, I don't believe it!" she exclaimed. "Save them for later," he said, giving another package to Lotte, "don't eat them all at once. Eat this shit from up above first. It's swill, but it's the best swill you'll have for a long time. Fit for the pigs I used to raise in Pomorze." Bronek was a non-stop talker. Sophie listened to the stream of chitchat while she greedily gnawed at the chill and stringy stump of pork. It was scorched, cartilaginous and vile. But her taste buds responded, as if slaked with ambrosia, to the small bursting pods and pockets of fat which her body clamored for. She could have gorged herself on any grease. Fancifully, her mind's eye re-created the feast at which Bronek last night had scurried about as busboy: the lordly suckling pig, the dumplings, the steaming potatoes, cabbage with chestnuts, the jams and jellies and gravies, a rich custard for desert, all sluiced down the SS gullets with the help of portly bottles of Bull's Blood wine from Hungary, and served (when a dignitary as lofty as an Obergruppenführer was present) upon a superb Czarist silver service shipped back from some museum ran-sacked on the eastern front. Apropos of which, Sophie realized, Bronek was now speaking in the tones of one proud to be privy to portentous tidings. "They keep trying to look happy," he said, "and for a while they seem to be. But then they get on the war, and it's all misery. Like last night Schmauser said the Russians were getting ready to recapture Kiev. Lots of other bad news from the Russian front. Then it's rotten news in Italy too, so said Schmauser. The British and the Americans are moving up there, everyone dying like lice." Bronek rose from his crouch, moving with his other pan toward the two sisters. "But the real big news, ladies, is something you may not hardly believe, but it's the truth--Rudi is leaving! Rudi is being transferred back to Berlin!" In mid-swallow, gulping down the gristly meat, Sophie nearly choked on these words. Leaving? Höss leaving the camp! It couldn't be true! She rose to a sitting position and clutched at Bronek's sleeve. "Are you sure?" she demanded. "Bronek, are you sure of that?" "All I'm telling you is what I heard Schmauser say to Rudi after the other officers had left. Said he'd done a fine job but that he was needed at Berlin Central Office. So he could get himself ready for immediate transfer." "What do you mean--immediate?" she persisted. "Today, next month, what?" "I don't know," Bronek replied, "he just plainly meant soon." His voice became tinged with foreboding. "Me, I'm not happy about it, I'll tell you." He paused somberly. "I mean, who knows who'll take his place? Some sadist maybe, you know. Some gorilla! Then maybe Bronek too...?" He rolled his eyes and drew his forefinger across his throat. "He could have had me put away, he could have given me a little gas, like the Jews--they were doing that then, you know--but he brought me here and treated me like a human being. Don't think I won't be sorry to see Rudi go." But Sophie, preoccupied, paid no more attention to Bronek. She was panicked by this news of Höss's departure. It made her realize that she must act with urgency and dispatch if she was to persuade him to take notice of her and thus try to accomplish through him what she had set out to do. For the following hour or so, toiling alongside Lotte over the Höss household laundry (the prisoners in the house were spared the lethally grueling and interminable roll calls of the rest of the camp; luckily, Sophie was compelled only to wash the vast heaps of soiled clothing from upstairs--abnormally plenteous because of Frau Höss's fixation about germs and filth), she fantasized all manner of little skits and playlets in which she and the Commandant had finally been drawn into some intimate connection whereby she was able to pour out the story that would lead to her redemption. But time had begun to work against her. Unless she moved immediately and perhaps even a little recklessly, he might be gone and all she planned to accomplish would come to nothing. Her anxiety was excruciating, and it was somehow irrationally mixed up with hunger. She had secreted the package of figs in the loose inside hem of her striped smock. At a little before eight o'clock, nearly the time when she had to make her way up the four flights of stairs to the office in the attic, she could resist no longer the urge to eat some of the figs. She stole away to a large cubbyhole underneath the stairs where she would be out of sight of the other prisoners. And there she frantically broke open the cellophane. A film of tears misted her eyes as the tender small globes of fruit (slightly moist and deliciously textured in their chewy sweetness that mingled with archipelagos of minute seeds) slid richly down her throat, one by one; wild with delight, unashamed at her piggishness and the sugary saliva drooling over fingers and chin, she devoured them all. Her eyes were still misted over and she heard herself panting with pleasure. Then after standing there for a moment in the shadows to let the figs settle on her stomach and to compose her expression, she began to ascend slowly to the upper levels of the house. It was a climb of no more than a few minutes' duration but one which was interrupted by two singularly memorable occurrences that seemed to fit with ghastly appropriateness into the hallucinatory fabric of her mornings, afternoons and nights at Haus Höss... On separate landing--one on the floor above the basement and the other just below the attic--there were dormer windows that gave off on a western exposure, from which Sophie usually tried to avert her eyes, though not always successfully. This view contained some nondescript subjects--in the foreground a brown grassless drill field, a small wooden barracks, the electrified wires hemming in an incongruous stand of graceful poplars--but it also presented a glimpse of the railroad platform where the selections were made. Invariably, lines of boxcars stood waiting there, duncolored backdrop to blurred, confounding tableaux of cruelty, mayhem and madness. The platform dwelt in the middle distance, too near to be ignored, too far away to be seen with clarity. It may have been, she later recounted, her own arrival there on that concrete quai, and its associations for her, that caused her to shun the scene, to turn her eyes away, to blot out of her sight the fragmentary and flickering apparitions which from this vantage point registered only imperfectly, like the grainy shadow-shapes in an antique silent newsreel: a rifle butt raised skyward, dead bodies being yanked from boxcar doors, a papier-mâché human being bullied to the earth. Sometimes she sensed that there was no violence at all, and got only a terrible impression of order, throngs of people moving in shambling docile parade out of sight. The platform was too distant for sound; the music of the loony-bin prisoner band which greeted each arriving train, the shouts of the guards, the barking of the dogs--all these were mute, though upon occasion it was impossible not to hear the crack of a pistol shot. Thus the drama seemed to be enacted in a charitable vacuum, from which were excluded the wails of grief, cries of terror and other noises of that infernal initiation. It was for this reason perhaps, Sophie thought as she climbed the steps, that she succumbed from time to time to an occasional irresistible peek--doing so now, seeing only the string of boxcars newly arrived, as yet unloaded. SS guards in swirls of steam surrounded the train. She knew from manifests which had been received by Höss the day before that this was the second of two trainloads containing 2,100 Jews from Greece. Then, her curiosity satisfied, she turned away and opened the door to the salon through which she had to pass to reach the upper stairway. From the Stromberg Carlson phonograph a contralto voice enveloped the room in a lover's hectic grievance, while Wilhelmine, the housekeeper, stood listening to it, audibly humming as she pawed through a stack of silken female underwear. She was alone. The room was flooded with sunlight. Wilhelmine (Sophie noticed, trying to hurry through) was wearing one of her mistress's hand-me-down robes, pink slippers with huge pink pom-pons, and her henna-dyed hair was in curlers. The face seemed aflame with rouge. The humming was extravagantly off-key. She turned as Sophie edged past, fixing her with a look that seemed not at all unpleasant, which was a difficult trick, since the face itself was the most unpleasant she had ever beheld. (Intrusive as it may appear now, and possibly lacking in graphic persuasion, I cannot resist repeating Sophie's Manichean reflection of that summer and let it go at that: "If you ever write about this, Stingo, just say that this Wilhelmine was the only beautiful woman I ever saw--no, she was not beautiful really, but good-looking with these hard good looks that some streetwalkers have--the only good-looking woman that the evil inside her had caused this absolute ugliness. I can't describe her any more than that. It was some kind of total ugliness. I look at her and the blood turn to ice inside me.") "Guten Morgen," Sophie whispered, pressing on. But Wilhelmine suddenly arrested her with a sharp "Wait!" German is a loud language anyway, the voice was like a shout. Sophie turned to confront the housekeeper; oddly, although they had often seen each other, it was the first time they had ever spoken. Despite her unthreatening countenance now, the woman inspired apprehension; Sophie felt the pulse racing in both wrists, her mouth dried up instantly. "Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen," mourned the querulous, lachrymal voice, the scratches on the shellac amplified, echoing from wall to wall. A sparkling galaxy of dust motes swam through the slanting early light, shimmering up and down across the lofty room crowded with its armoires and desks, its gilt sofas and cabinets and chairs. It's not even a museum, thought Sophie, it's a monstrous warehouse. Suddenly Sophie realized that the salon reeked heavily of disinfectant, like her own smock. The housekeeper was weirdly abrupt. "I want to give you something," she cooed, smiling, fingering the stack of underwear. The filmy mound of silken underpants, looking freshly cleaned, rested on the surface of a marble-top commode inlaid with colored wood and ornamented in strips and scrolls of bronze; a huge and hulking thing, it would have grossly obtruded at Versailles, where in fact it may have been stolen from. "Bronek brought them last night straight from the cleaning unit," she continued in her strident singsong. "Frau Höss likes to give a lot of them to the prisoners. I know you're not issued underwear, and Lotte's been complaining that those uniforms scratch so around the bottom." Sophie let out her breath. With no chagrin, no shock, not even with revelation, the thought flew through her mind like a sparrow: They're all from dead Jews. "They're very, very clean. Some of these are made of marvelous sheer silk, I've seen nothing like them since the war began. What size do you wear? I'll bet you don't even know." The eyes flashed indecently. It had all happened too fast, this sudden gratuitous charity, for Sophie to make immediate sense of it, but soon she had an inkling and she was truly alarmed--alarmed as much by the way Wilhelmine had all but pounced upon her (for now she realized this is what she had done), lurking like a tarantula while she waited for her to emerge from the cellar, as by the precipitate offering of the rather ridiculous largess itself. "Doesn't that fabric chafe around your bottom?" she heard Wilhelmine ask her now, mezza voce and with a slight quaver that made everything more insinuating and flirtatious than her suggestive eyes, or the words that had caused her at first to take warning: I'll bet you don't even know. "Yes..." said Sophie, fiercely uneasy. "No! I don't know." "Come," she murmured, beckoning toward an alcove. It was a shadowy space sheltered behind a Pleyel concert grand piano. "Come, let's try a pair on." Sophie moved unresistingly forward, and felt the light touch of Wilhelmine's fingers on the edge of her smock. "I've been so interested in you. I've heard you speaking to the Commandant. You speak marvelous German, just like a native. The Commandant says you are Polish, but I don't really believe him, ha! You're too beautiful to be Polish." The words, vaguely feverish, spilled over one another as she maneuvered Sophie toward the nook in the wall, ominously filled with darkness. "All the Polish women here are so ordinary and plain, so lumpig, so trashy-looking. But you--you must be Swedish, aren't you? Of Swedish blood? You look more Swedish than anything, and I hear there are many people of Swedish blood in the north of Poland. Here we are now, where no one can see us and we can try on a pair of these undies. So your nice bottom will stay all white and soft." Until this instant, hoping against hope, Sophie had said to herself that the woman's advances just might be innocuous, but now, so close, the signs of her voracious letch--first her rapid breathing and then the ripe rosiness spreading like a rash over the bestially handsome face, half Valkyrie, half gutter trull--left no doubt about her intentions. They were clumsy bait, those silk panties. And in a spasm of strange mirth it flashed across Sophie's mind that in this psychotically ordered and scheduled household the wretched woman could only have sex on the fly, so to speak, vertically in an alcove behind a mammoth grand piano during these fleetingly few, precious and unprogrammed minutes after breakfast when the children were just off to the garrison school and before the beginning of daily routine. All other hours of the day, down to the last clock-tick, were accounted for: voilà! for the desperate challenges, beneath a regulated SS roof, of a taste of Sapphic amour. "Schnell, schnell, meine Süsse!" Wilhelmine whispered, more insistently now. "Lift up your skirt a bit, darling. .. no, higher!" The ogress lunged forward then and Sophie felt herself engulfed in pink flannel, rouged cheeks, henna hair--a reddish miasma stinking of French perfume. The housekeeper worked with the frenzy of a madwoman. She was busy with her hard sticky lupine tongue for only a second or two around Sophie's ear, fondled her