And at that exact instant—as he said the last words—Sophie saw the fearful headache attack Höss with prodigious speed, like a stroke of lightning that had found a conduit through the gravel merchant’s letter down to that crypt or labyrinth where migraine sets its fiery toxins loose beneath the cranium. The sweat poured forth, he pushed his hand to the side of his brow in a helpless fluttering little ballet of white-knuckled fingers, and his lips curled outward to reveal a phalanx of teeth grinding together in a fugue of pain. Sophie had observed this a few days before, a much milder attack; now it was his migraine again and a full-scale siege. In his pain Höss gave a thin whistle. “My pills,” he said, “for God’s sake, where are my pills!” Sophie went swiftly to the chair next to Höss’s cot upon which he kept the bottle of ergotamine he used to alleviate these attacks. She poured out a glass of water from a carafe and handed it and two tablets of ergotamine to the Commandant, who, gulping the medicine down, rolled his eyes at her with a queer half-wild gaze as if he were trying to express with those eyes alone the dimensions of his anguish. Then with a groan and with his hand clapped to his brow he sank down on the cot and lay sprawled out gazing at the white ceiling.
“Shall I call the doctor?” Sophie said. “The last time I remember he said to you—”
“Just be quiet,” he retorted. “I can’t bear anything now.” The voice was edged with a cowed, whimpering tone, rather like that of a hurt puppy.
During his last attack, five or six days before, he had ordered her quickly away to the cellar, as if he wanted no one, not even a prisoner, to be witness to his affliction. Now, however, he rolled over on his flank and lay there rigid and motionless except for the rise and fall of his chest beneath his shirt. Since he made no further sign to her, she went to work: she commenced typing a free translation from the contractor’s letter on her German machine, once more aware without shock or even much interest that the gravel dealer’s complaint (could a single such annoyance, she wondered idly, have triggered in itself the Commandant’s cataclysmic migraine?) meant another critical pause in the construction of the new crematorium at Birkenau. The work stoppage, or slowdown—that is, Höss’s apparent inability to orchestrate to his own satisfaction all the elements of supply and design and labor concerning this new oven-and-gas-chamber complex, the completion of which was two months overdue—remained the chief thorn in his side, and now was the obvious cause for all the nervousness and anxiety she had observed in him these past days. And if it was the reason, as she suspected, for his headache, could it be possible too that his failure to get the crematorium built on schedule was in some way linked to his sudden transfer back to Germany? She was typing the last line of the letter and at the same time puzzling over these questions when his voice broke in abruptly, startling her. And when she turned her eyes in his direction she realized with a curious mixture of hope and apprehension that he must have been eying her for many minutes from the cot where he lay. He beckoned to her and she rose and went to his side, but since he made no motion for her to sit down, she remained standing.
“It’s better,” he said in a subdued voice. “That ergotamine is a miracle. It not only reduces the pain but it subdues the nausea.”
“I’m glad, mein Kommandant,” Sophie replied. She felt her knees trembling and for some reason dared not look down into his face. Instead, she fixed her eyes on the most obvious and immediate object within view: the heroic Führer in scintillant steel armor, his gaze confident and serene beneath his falling forelock as he looked toward Valhalla and a thousand years’ questionless futurity. He seemed irreproachably benign. Suddenly remembering the figs she had thrown up hours before on the stairs, Sophie felt a stab of hunger in her stomach, and the weakness and trembling in her legs increased. For long moments Höss did not speak. She could not look at him. Was he now, in his silence, measuring her, appraising her? We’ll have a barrel of funfunfun, the voices clamorously chorused from below, the dreadful ersatz polka stuck now in its groove, repeating over and over a faint fat chord from an accordion.
“How did you come here?” Höss said finally.
She blurted the words out. “It was because of a łapanka, or as we German-speaking people say, ein Zusammentreiben—a roundup in Warsaw. It was early spring. I was on a railroad car in Warsaw when the Gestapo staged a roundup. They found me with some illegal meat, part of a ham—”
“No, no,” he interrupted, “not how you came to the camp. But how you got out of the women’s barracks. I mean, how you were placed in the stenographic pool. So many of the typists are civilians. Polish civilians. Not many prisoners are so fortunate as to find a stenographic billet. You may sit down.”
“Yes, I was most fortunate,” she said, seating herself. She sensed the relaxation in her own voice and she gazed at him. She noticed that he was still sweating desperately. Supine now, eyes half closed, he lay rigid and wet in a pool of sunlight. There was something oddly helpless-looking about the Commandant awash in ooze. His khaki shirt was drenched in sweat, a multitude of tiny sweat blisters adorned his face. But in truth he seemed no longer to be suffering such pain, although the initial torment had saturated him everywhere—even the damp blond spirals of belly-hair curling upward through a space between his shirt buttons—his neck, the blond hairs of his wrists. “I was really most fortunate. I think it must have been a stroke of fate.”
After a silence Höss said, “How do you mean, a stroke of fate?”
She decided instantly to risk it, to exploit the opening he had given her no matter how absurdly insinuating and reckless the words might sound. After these months and the momentary advantage she had been given, it would be more self-defeating to continue to play the torpid tongue-tied slave than to appear presumptuous, even if it involved the serious additional hazard of being thought actually insolent. So: Out with it, she thought. She said it then, although she tried to avoid any intensity, keeping the plaintive edge in her voice of one who has been unjustly abused. “Fate brought me to you,” she went on, not unaware of the melodrama of the utterance, “because I knew only you would understand.”
Again he said nothing. Below, “The Beer Barrel Polka” was replaced by a Liederkranz of Tyrolean yodelers. His silence disturbed her, and suddenly she felt that she was the subject of his most suspicious scrutiny. Maybe she was making a horrible mistake. The queasiness grew within her. Through Bronek (and her own observation) she knew that he hated Poles. What on earth made her think she might be an exception? Insulated by the closed windows from Birkenau’s smoldering stench, the warm room had a musty attic’s odor of plaster, brickdust and waterlogged timber. It was the first time she had really noticed the smell, and it was like a fungus in the nostrils. Amid the awkward silence between the two of them she heard the stitch and buzz of the imprisoned bluebottle flies, the soft popping sound as they bumped the ceiling. The noise of the shunting boxcars was dull, dim, almost inaudible.
“Understand what?” he said finally in a distant tone, giving her yet another small aperture through which she might try to implant a hook.
“That you would understand that a mistake has been made. That I am guilty of nothing. That is, I mean, that I am guilty of nothing truly serious. And that I should be set immediately free.”
There, she had done it, said it, swiftly and smoothly; with fiery fervor surprising even to her she had uttered the words which for days upon end she had rehearsed incessantly, wondering if she could muster the courage to get them past her lips. Now her heartbeat was so violent and wild that it pained her breastbone, but she took bright pride in the way in which she had managed to govern her voice. She also felt secure in the easy mellifluousness of her accent, attractively Viennese. The small triumph impelled her to go on. “I know you might think this foolish of me, mein Kommandant. I must admit that on the surface it sounds implausible. But I think that you will concede that in a place like this—so vast, involving such great numbers of people—there can be certain errors, certain grave mistakes.” She pa
used, listening to her heartbeat, wondering if he could hear it, yet conscious that her voice still had not broken. “Sir,” she continued, pressing a little on the note of entreaty, “I do hope you will believe me when I say that my imprisonment here is a terrible miscarriage of justice. As you see, I am Polish and indeed I was guilty of the crime I was charged with in Warsaw—smuggling food. But it was a small crime, don’t you see, I was trying only to feed my mother, who was very sick. I urge you to try to understand that this was nothing when measured against the nature of my background, my upbringing.” She hesitated, tumultuously agitated. Was she pushing too hard? Should she halt now and let him make the next move, or should she go on? She instantly decided: Get to the point, be brief but go on. “You see, sir, it is like this. I am originally from Cracow, where my family were passionate German partisans, for many years in the vanguard of those countless lovers of the Third Reich who admire National Socialism and the principles of the Fuhrer. My father was to the depths of his soul Judenfeindlich—”
Höss stopped her with a small groan. “Judenfeindlich,” he whispered in a drowsy voice. "Judenfeindlich. When will I cease hearing that word ‘anti-Semitic’? My God, I’m tired of that!” He let out a hoarse sigh. “Jews. Jews! Will I ever be done with Jews!”
Sophie retreated before his impatience, aware that her tactical maneuvering had rather misfired: she had gotten ahead of herself. Höss’s thought process, far from inept, was also as exhaustive and as unimaginatively single-minded as the snout of an anteater and brooked few deviations. When only a moment before he had asked “How did you come here?” and then specified that she explain just how, he meant precisely that, and now wanted no talk about fate, miscarriages of justice and matters Judenfeindlich. As if his words had blown down upon her like a north wind, she shifted her tack, thinking: Do as he says, then, tell him the absolute truth. Be brief, but tell the truth. He could find out easily enough anyway, if he wanted to.
“Then, sir, I will explain how I was put into the stenographic pool. It was because of an altercation I had with a Vertreterin in the women’s barracks when I first arrived last April. She was the assistant to the block leader. Quite honestly, I was terrified of her because...” She hesitated, a little wary of elaborating upon a sexual possibility which the shading of her voice, she knew, had already suggested. But Höss, eyes wide open now and level upon hers, anticipated what she was trying to say.
“Doubtless she was a lesbian,” he put in. His tone was tired, but acid and exasperated. “One of those whores—one of those scummy pigs from the Hamburg slums they stuck in Ravensbrück and that Headquarters got hold of and sent here in the mistaken idea that they would exercise discipline over you—over the female inmates. What a farce!” He paused. “She was a lesbian, wasn’t she? And she made advances toward you, am I right? It would be expected. You are a very beautiful young woman.” Again he paused while she absorbed this last observation. (Did it mean anything?) “I despise homosexuals,” he went on. “Imagining people performing those acts—animalistic practices—makes me sick. I could never stand even to look at one, male or female. But it is something which must be faced when people are in confinement.” Sophie blinked. Like a strip of film run at antic jerky speed through the projector, she saw that morning’s mad charade, saw Wilhelmine’s mop of flaming hair draw back from her groin, the famished damp lips parted in a petrified perfect O, eyes sparkling with terror; looking at the revulsion on Höss’s face, thinking of the housekeeper, she felt herself begin to suppress either a scream or a peal of laughter. “Unspeakable!” the Commandant added, curling his lips as if on some loathsome mouthful.
“They were not just advances, sir.” She felt herself flush. “She tried to rape me.” She could not recall ever having said the word “rape” in front of a man, and the flush grew warmer, then began to fade. “It was most unpleasant. I had not realized that a woman’s”—she hesitated—“a woman’s desire for another woman could be so—so violent. But I learned.”
“In confinement people behave differently, strangely. Tell me about it.” But before she could reply he had reached into the pocket of his jacket, draped over the other chair at the side of the cot, and took from it a tinfoil-wrapped chocolate bar. “It’s curious,” he said, the voice clinical, abstract, “these headaches. At first they fill me with terrible nausea. Then as soon as the medicine begins to take effect I find myself very hungry.” Stripping the foil from the chocolate, he extended the bar toward her. Hesitant at the outset, surprised—for it was the first such gesture on his part—she nervously broke off a piece and popped it into her mouth, knowing that she betrayed a greedy eagerness in the midst of her effort to be casual. No matter.
She proceeded with the account, talking rapidly as she watched Höss devour the rest of the chocolate, conscious that the so very recent assault on her cunt by the trusted housekeeper of the man to whom she was speaking allowed her a certain freshness of tone, even vivacity. “Yes, the woman was a prostitute and a lesbian. I don’t know where she was from in Germany—I think from the north, she spoke in Plattdeutsch—but she was a huge woman and she tried to rape me. She had had her eyes on me for days. One night in the latrine she approached me. She was not violent at first. She promised me food, soap, clothing, money, anything.” Sophie halted for a moment, her gaze fixed now on Höss’s violet-blue eyes, which were watchful, fascinated. “I was terribly hungry but—like you too, sir, I am repelled by homosexuals—I did not find it difficult to resist, to say no. I tried to push her away. Then this Vertreterin grew enraged and attacked me. I shouted at her loudly and began to plead with her—she had me against the wall and was doing things to me with her hands—and then the block leader came in.
“The block leader put a stop to this,” Sophie went on. “She sent the Vertreterin away and then told me to come to her room at the end of the barracks. She was not a bad sort—another prostitute, like you say, sir, but not a bad sort. Indeed, she was kindly for such... for such a person. She had overheard me shouting at the Vertreterin, she said, and she was surprised because all of us newcomers in the barracks were Polish and she wanted to know where I learned such excellent German. We talked for a while and I could tell that she liked me. I don’t think she was a lesbian. She was from Dortmund. She was charmed by my German. She hinted that she might be able to help me. She gave me a cup of coffee and then sent me away. I saw her several times after that and could tell that she had taken a liking to me. A couple of days later she told me to come to her room again, and one of your noncommissioned officers, sir, was there, Hauptscharführer Günther of the camp administration office. He interrogated me for some time, asking me about my various qualifications, and when I told him I could type and take expert shorthand in Polish and German, he informed me that perhaps I could be of some use at the typing pool. He had heard that there was a shortage of qualified help—certain language specialists. After a few days he came back and told me that I would be transferred. And so that is how I came to the...” Höss had finished eating the chocolate bar and now, stirring, rose up on his elbow, preparing to light one of his cigarettes. “I mean,” she concluded, “I worked in the stenographic section until about ten days ago, when I was told that I was needed for special work here. And here—"
“And here,” he interrupted, “here you are.” He gave a sigh. “You have had good luck.” And what he did then caused her electric amazement. He reached up with his free hand, and using the utmost delicacy, plucked a little something from the edge of her upper lip; it was, she realized, a crumb of the chocolate she had eaten, now held between his thumb and forefinger, and she watched with grave wonder as he moved his tar-stained fingers slowly toward his lips and deposited the tiny chestnut-brown flake into his mouth. She shut her eyes, so disturbed by the peculiar and grotesque communion of the gesture that her heart commenced pounding again and her brain was rocked with vertigo.
“What’s the matter?” she heard him say. “You’re white.”
“
Nothing, mein Kommandant,” she replied. “I’m just a bit faint. It will go away.” She kept her eyes closed.
“What have I done wrong!” The voice was a cry, so loud that it frightened her, and she had barely opened her eyes when she saw him roll himself off the cot, stand abruptly erect and walk the few paces to the window. The sweat plastered the back of his shirt and she thought she saw his whole body tremble as he stood there. Sophie was utterly confounded, watching him, having thought that the by-play with the chocolate might have been the prelude to something more intimate. But perhaps it had been; he was now voicing his complaint as if he had known her for years. He struck his hand into his fist. “I can’t think what they imagine I’ve done wrong. Those people in Berlin, they’re impossible. They ask the superhuman from a mere human who has only done the best he has known how for three years. They’re unreasonable! They don’t know what it’s like to put up with contractors who can’t fulfill their schedules, lazy middlemen, suppliers who fall behind or simply never deliver. They’ve never dealt with idiot Poles! I’ve done my faithful best and this is the thanks I get. This pretense—that it’s a promotion! I get kicked upstairs to Oranienburg and I have to endure the intolerable embarrassment of seeing them put Liebehenschel in my place—Liebehenschel, that insufferable egotist with his bloated reputation for efficiency. The whole thing, it’s sickening. There’s not the slightest bit of gratitude left.” It was strange: there was more petulance in his voice than true anger or resentment.
Sophie's Choice (Open Road) Page 38
