Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  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 pompons, 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 breasts urgently, manhandled her buttocks, drew back with an expression of lust so intense that it was like some terminal anguish, then set about her serious labors, slumping earthward in genuflection and squeezing Sophie’s hips roundabout with her arms. Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen... “Swedish kittycat... beautiful thing,” she mumbled. “Ah, bitte... higher!” Having made her decision moments before, Sophie was not about to resist or protest—in a kind of headlong autohypnosis she had placed herself beyond revulsion, realizing in any case that she was as helpless as a crippled moth—and let her thighs, submissively, be spread apart as the brutish muzzle and the bullethead of a tongue probed into what, with some dull distant satisfaction, she realized was her obdurate dryness, as parched and without juice as desert sand. She rocked on her heels and raised her arms lazily and resistlessly akimbo, mainly aware now of the woman frantically fin
gering herself, the flaming becurlered mop of hair bobbing beneath like a huge shredded poppy. Then there was a booming noise from the other end of the huge room, a door was flung open and Höss’s voice called, “Wilhelmine! Where are you? Frau Höss wants you in the bedroom.”

  The Commandant, who should have been in his attic office, had become briefly unpinned from his schedule, and the fear which his unexpected presence caused down below was transmitted instantly to Sophie, who thought that Wilhelmine’s sudden spasmodic and agonizing clutch around her thighs might cause the two of them to topple and fall. Tongue and head slipped away. For moments her stricken adorer remained motionless as if paralyzed, the face rigid with fright. Then came blessed relief. Höss called again once, paused, cursed under his breath and quickly departed, stamping across the floor to the attic stairway. And the housekeeper fell apart from her, limp, flopped down in the shadows like a rag doll.

  It was not until Sophie was on the stairs to the attic, moments later, that the reaction smote her, and she felt her legs go elastic and weak and she was forced to sit down. The mere fact of the assault was not what left her unstrung—it was nothing new, she had been nearly raped by a woman guard months before, shortly after her arrival—nor was it Wilhelmine’s response in her mad scramble for safety after Höss had gone upstairs (“You must not tell the Commandant,” she had said with a snarl, then repeated the same words as if imploring Sophie in abject fear, before scuttling out of the room. “He would kill us both!”). For a moment Sophie felt this compromising situation had in an obscure way given her an advantage over the housekeeper. Unless—unless (and the second thought caught her up short and made her sit tremblingly on the stairs) this convicted forger, who wielded so much power in the house, should seize upon that moment of thwarted venery as a way to get back at Sophie, work out her frustration by turning love into vengeance, run to the Commandant with some tale of wrongdoing (specifically, that it was the other prisoner who had initiated the seduction), and in this way shatter to bits the framework of Sophie’s all-too-unsubstantial future. She knew, in the light of Höss’s detestation of homosexuality, what would happen to her if such a scandal were fabricated, and suddenly felt—as had all her fellow trusty prisoners smothering in their fear-drenched limbo—the phantom needle squirting death into the center of her heart.

  Squatting on the stairs, she bent forward and thrust her head into her hands. The confusion of thoughts roiling about in her mind caused her an anxiety she felt she could hardly bear. Was she better off now, after the episode with Wilhelmine, or was she in greater peril? She didn’t know. The clarion camp whistle—reedy, harmonic, more or less in B minor and reminding her always of some partly recaptured, sorrow-sick, blowzy chord from Tannhäuser—shattered the morning, signaling eight o’clock. She had never been late before to the attic but now she was going to be, and the thought of her tardiness and of the waiting Höss—who measured his days in milliseconds—filled her with terror. She rose to her feet and continued the climb upward, feeling feverish and unstrung. Too many things crushing down upon her all at once. Too many thoughts to sort out, too many swift shocks and apprehensions. If she didn’t take hold of herself, make every effort to keep her composure, she knew she might simply collapse today like a puppet that has performed its jerky dance on strings, then, abandoned by its master, falls into a lifeless heap. A small nagging soreness across her pubic bone reminded her of the housekeeper’s rummaging head.

  Winded by the climb, she reached the landing on the floor beneath the Commandant’s attic, where a partly opened window gave out once more upon the westward view with its barren drill field sloping toward the melancholy stand of poplars, beyond which stood the countless boxcars in drab file, smeared with the dust of Serbia and the Hungarian plains. Since her encounter with Wilhelmine the boxcar doors had been thrown open by the guards, and now hundreds more of the condemned voyagers from Greece milled about on the platform. Despite her haste, Sophie was compelled to halt and watch for an instant, drawn by morbidity and dread in equal measure. The poplar trees and the horde of SS guards obscured most of the scene. She could not clearly see the faces of the Greek Jews. Nor could she tell what they wore: mostly she saw a dull gray. But the platform did give off glints and flickers of multicolored garments, greens and blues and reds, a swirl and flourish here and there of bright Mediterranean hue, piercing her with vivid longing for that land she had never seen except in books and in her fancy and summoning up instantly the child’s verse she remembered from the convent school—skinny Sister Barbara chanting in her comic pebbly Slavic French:

  Ôque les îies de la Grèce sont belles!

  Ô contempler la mer à l’ombre d’un haut figuier

  et écouter tout autour les cris des hirondelles

  voltigeant dans l’azur parmi les oliviers!

  She thought she had long ago become used to the smell, at least resigned to it. But for the first time that day the sweet, pestilential stench of flesh consumed by fire assailed her nostrils with the ripe bluntness of an abattoir, so violently taking command of her senses that her eyes went out of focus and the throng on the distant platform—seeming for one last moment like some country festival viewed from afar—swam away from her vision. And involuntarily, with creeping horror and disgust, she raised her fingertips to her lips.

  ...la mer à l’ombre d’un haut figuier...

  Thus, simultaneously with her awareness of where Bronek had obtained the fruit, the liquefied figs themselves came flooding up sourly in her throat, pouring out and spattering onto the floor between her feet. With a groan she thrust her head against the wall. She stood heaving and retching for long moments by the window. Then upon limp weak legs she sidled away from the mess she had made and fell to her hands and knees on the tiles, writhing in misery and riven by a feeling of strangeness and loss such as she had never known.

  I’ll never forget what she told me about this: she realized that she could not remember her own name. “Oh God, help me!” she called aloud. “I don’t know what I am!” She remained for a while in that crouch, trembling as if in arctic cold.

  Insanely, a cuckoo clock from the moon-faced daughter Emmi’s bedroom scant steps away sounded the hour in eight cuckoo cries. They were at least five minutes late, Sophie observed with grave interest, and odd satisfaction. And slowly she rose erect and proceeded to climb the last steps upward, into the lower vestibule where the framed photographs of Goebbels and Himmler were the only adornments on the wall, and upward further to the attic door, ajar, with the brotherhood’s holy motto engraved on the lintel: My Honor Is My Loyalty—beyond which Höss in his eyrie waited beneath the image of his lord and savior, waited in that celibate retreat of a calcimine purity so immaculate that even as Sophie approached, unsteadily, the very walls, it seemed, in the resplendent autumn morning were washed by a blindingly incandescent, almost sacramental light.

  “Guten Morgen, Herr Kommandant,” she said.

  Later during that day Sophie could not shake from her mind Bronek’s distressing news that Höss was to be transferred back to Berlin. It really meant that she would have to move with haste if she was to accomplish what she had set out to do. And so in the afternoon she resolved to make her advance and prayed silently for the poise—the necessary sang-froid—to carry it off. At one point—waiting for Höss to return to the attic, feeling her emotions subside to something like normal after the tumult provoked in her breast by that brief passage from Haydn’s Creation—she had been encouraged by some interesting new changes in the Commandant. His relaxed manner, for one thing, then his rather awkward but real attempt at conversation, followed by the insinuating touch of his hand on her shoulder (or was she reading too much into this?) when they had both gazed at the Arabian stallion: these seemed to her to signal cracks in that impregnable mask.

  Then, too, there was the letter to Himmler he had dictated to her, regarding the condition of the Greek Jews. Never before had she transcribed any correspondence which was not some
how connected with Polish affairs and Polish language—those official letters to Berlin usually being the province of a poker-faced clerk Scharführer on the floor below who clumped upstairs at regular intervals to hammer out Höss’s messages to the various SS chief engineers and proconsuls. Now she reflected on the Himmler letter with mild belated wonder. Wouldn’t the mere fact that he had made her privy to such a sensitive matter indicate... what? Certainly, at least, that he had allowed her, for whatever reason, a confidentiality that few prisoners—even prisoners of her undoubted privileged status—could ever dream of, and her assurance of reaching through to him before the day was over grew stronger and stronger. She felt she might not even have to avail herself of the pamphlet (like father, like daughter) tucked away in one of her boots ever since the day she left Warsaw.

  He ignored what she feared might be a distraction—her eyes, raw with weeping—as he stormed through the door. She heard “The Beer Barrel Polka” pounding rhythmically below. He was holding a letter, apparently delivered to his aide downstairs. The Commandant’s face was flushed with anger, a wormlike vein pulsed just below his cropped pate. “They know it’s compulsory that they write in German, these blasted people. But they constantly break the rules! Damn them to hell these Polish half-wits!” He handed her the letter. “What does it say?”

  “ ‘Honored Commandant... ’ ” she began. In rapid translation Sophie told him that the message (characteristically sycophantic) was from a local subcontractor, a supplier of gravel to the German operators of the camp concrete factory, who said that he would be unable to transport the required amount of gravel in the required time, begging the Commandant’s indulgence, due to the extremely soggy condition of the ground around his quarry that had not only caused several cave-ins but also hampered and slowed down the operation of his equipment. Therefore, if the honored Commandant would have the forbearance (Sophie continued to read), the schedule of delivery would necessarily be altered in the following manner—But Höss broke in suddenly, fiercely impatient, lighting a cigarette from another in his fingers, coughing his croupy cough as he blurted out a hoarse “Enough!” The letter had plainly unstrung the Commandant. He pursed his lips in a caricature of a mouth drawn and puckered with tension, muttered “Verwünscht!”—then quickly ordered Sophie to make a translation of the letter for SS Hauptsturmführer Weitzmann, head of the camp building section, with this typed comment attached: “Builder Weitzmann: Build a fire under this piddler and get him moving.”