Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  Sophie rose from her chair and drew near him. She sensed another aperture chinking open ever so slightly. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “and forgive me for suggesting this if I am mistaken. But it may be a tribute to you instead. It may be that they fully understand your difficulties, your hardships, and how exhausted you have been made by your work. Forgive me again, but during these few days here in the office I could not help but notice the extraordinary strain you are constantly under, the amazing pressure...” How careful was her obsequious solicitude. She heard her voice trail off but meanwhile kept her eyes fixed on the back of his neck. “It may be that this is really in the nature of a reward for all your... your devotion.”

  She fell silent and followed Höss’s gaze to the field below. On the capriciously changing wind the smoke from Birkenau had blown off and away, at least momentarily, and in the clear sunlight the great glorious white stallion romped again around the fenced rim of the paddock, tossing tail and mane in a small windstorm of dust. Even through the window they could hear the thudding collision of his galloping hoofs. From the Commandant’s throat came an aspirated whistle of air; he fumbled at his pocket for another cigarette.

  “I wish you were right,” he said, “but I doubt it. If they just understood the magnitude, the complexity! They seem to have no knowledge of the incredible numbers involved in these Special Actions. The endless multitudes! These Jews, they come on and on from all the countries of Europe, countless thousands, millions, like the herring in the spring that swarm into Mecklenburg Bay. I never dreamed the earth contained so many of das Erwählte Volk.”

  The Chosen People. His use of the phrase allowed her to press her initiative a little further, enlarging the opening where she was confident now she had secured a fragile but real hold. “Das Erwählte Volk—” her voice was edged with scorn as she echoed the Commandant—“the Chosen People, if you’ll permit me to say so, sir, may only at last be paying the just price for having arrogantly set themselves apart from the rest of the human race—for having posed as the only people worthy of salvation. I honestly do not see how they could expect to escape retribution when they have commited such a blasphemy for so many years in the sight of Christians.” (Suddenly the image of her father loomed, monstrous.) With anxiety she hesitated, then resumed, spinning out another of her lies, impelled forward like a splinter bobbingly afloat upon a rushing stream of fabrication and falsehood. “I am no longer Christian. Like you, sir, I have abandoned that pathetic faith with its pretexts and evasions. Yet it is easy to see why the Jews have inspired such hatred in Christians as well as in people like yourself—Gottgläubiger, as you said to me just this morning—righteous and idealistic people who are only striving for a new order in a new world. Jews have threatened this order, and it is only just now that they finally suffer for it. Good riddance, I say.”

  He still remained standing with his back to her when he replied evenly, “You speak with a great deal of feeling in this matter. For a woman, you talk like one who has a certain amount of knowledge of the crimes of which Jews are capable. I’m curious about this. So few women have any informed knowledge or understanding about anything.”

  “Yes, but I do, sir!” she said, watching him swivel his shoulders ever so slightly and look at her—now for the first time—with truly attentive concern. “I have had personal knowledge, also personal experience—”

  “Such as what?”

  Impetuously then—she knew it was a risk, a gamble—she bent down and fumblingly plucked the worn and faded pamphlet from the little crevice in her boot. “There!” she said, flourishing it in front of him, spreading out the title page. “I’ve kept this against the rules, I know I’ve taken a chance. But I want you to know that these few pages represent everything I stand for. I know from working with you that the ‘final solution’ has been a secret. But this is one of the earliest Polish documents suggesting a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem. I collaborated with my father—whom I mentioned to you before—in writing it. Naturally, I don’t expect you to read it in detail, filled with so many new worries and concerns as you are. But I do earnestly beg you at least to consider it... I know my difficulties are of no importance to you... but if you could only give it a glance... perhaps you could begin to see the entire injustice of my imprisonment here... I could also tell you more about my work in Warsaw on behalf of the Reich, when I revealed the hiding place of a number of Jews, intellectual Jews who had long been sought...”

  She had begun to babble a bit; there was a disconnected quality in her speech which warned her to stop, and she did. She prayed that she would not become unstrung. Sweltering beneath her prisoner’s smock with the sweat of mingled hope and trepidation, she was aware that she had made a breach in his consciousness at last, implanted herself as fleshed reality within the scope of his perception. However imperfectly and momentarily, she had made contact; this she could tell by the look of absolute concentrated penetration he gave her when he took the pamphlet from between her fingers. Self-conscious, coquettish, she averted her eyes. And in fatuous recollection a Galician peasants’ saying came back to her: I am crawling into his ear.

  “You maintain, then,” he said, “that you are innocent.” There was a distant amiability in his tone that filled her with encouragement.

  “Sir, to repeat,” she answered quickly, “I freely admit my guilt of the minor charge which caused me to be sent here—the business about the little piece of meat. I am only asking that this misdemeanor be weighed against my record not only as a Polish sympathizer with National Socialism but as an active and involved campaigner in the sacred war against Jews and Jewry. That pamphlet in your hand, mein Kommandant, can easily be authenticated and will prove my point. I implore you—you who have the power to give clemency and freedom—to reconsider my imprisonment in the light of my past good works, and to return me to my life in Warsaw. It is such a little thing to ask of you, a fine and just man who possesses the power of mercy.”

  Lotte had told Sophie that Höss was vulnerable to flattery, but she wondered now if she hadn’t overdone it—especially when she saw his eyes narrowing slightly and heard him say, “I’m curious about your passion. Your rage. Just what is it that causes you to hate the Jews with such... such intensity?”

  This story, too, she had squirreled away for such a moment, relying on the theory that while a pragmatic mind like that of Höss might appreciate the venom of her Antisemitismus in the abstract, that same mind’s more primitive side would likely relish a touch of melodrama. “That document there, sir, contains my philosophical reasons—the ones I developed with my father at the university in Cracow. I want to emphasize that we would have expressed our enmity toward Jews even if our family had not suffered a terrible calamity.”

  Impassively Höss smoked and waited for her to continue.

  “The sexual profligacy of Jews is well known, one of their ugliest traits. My father, before he met an unfortunate accident... my father was a great admirer of Julius Streicher for this reason—he applauded the way in which Herr Streicher has satirized so instructively this degenerate trait in the Jewish character. And our family had a cruel reason to be able to accept the truth of Herr Streicher’s insights.” She stopped and glanced as if in wretched remembrance toward the floor. “I had a younger sister who went to the convent school in Cracow, she was just a grade behind my own. One evening about ten winters ago she was walking near the ghetto and was sexually assaulted by a Jew—it turned out that he was a butcher—who dragged her into an alley and ravished her repeatedly. Physically, my sister survived the attack by this Jew, but mentally she was destroyed. Two years later she committed suicide by drowning, the tragic child. Certainly this terrible deed validated once and for all the profundity of Julius Streicher’s understanding of what atrocities Jews are capable of.”

  “Kompletter Unsinn!” Höss spat out the words. “That sounds to me like so much hogwash! Rot!"

  Sophie had the sensation of one who, walking alon
g a serene woodland path, feels herself suddenly without underpinnings, plunged into a murky hole. What had she said wrong? Inadvertently she gave a small wail. “I mean—” she began.

  “Hogwash!” Höss repeated. “Streicher’s theories are the sheerest rot. I loathe his pornographic garbage. More than any single person he has done a disservice to the Party and the Reich, and to world opinion, with his rantings about Jews and their sexual proclivities. He knows nothing about such matters. Anyone who is acquainted with Jews will attest that, if anything, in the sexual area they are meek and inhibited, unaggressive, even pathologically repressed. What happened to your sister was doubtless an aberration.”

  “It happened!” she lied, dismayed at her unforeseen little predicament. “I swear—”

  He cut her off. “I don’t doubt that it took place, but it was a freak, an aberration. Jews are perpetrators of many forms of gross evil but they are not rapists. What Streicher has done in his newspaper all these years has brought only the greatest ridicule. Had he told the truth in a persistent way, portraying Jews as they really are—bent upon monopolizing and dominating the world economy, poisoning morality and culture, attempting through Bolshevism and other means to bring down civilized governments—he might have performed a necessary function. But this portrayal of the Yid as a diabolical debaucher with an enormous prick”—he used the colloquial Schwanz, which rather startled her, as did the gesture he made with his hands, measuring a meter-long organ in air—“is an unwarranted compliment to Jewish masculinity. Most Jewish males I have observed are contemptibly neuter. Sexless. Soft. Weichlich. And more disgusting for all of that.”

  She had made a dumb tactical error in regard to Streicher (she knew she was dumb about National Socialism, but how could she have been expected to be able to gauge the extent of the jealousies and resentments, the squabbles and in-fighting and disaccord which reigned among the Party members of all ranks and categories?), yet actually, now it did not seem to matter: Höss, shrouded in the lavender fumes of his fortieth Ibar cigarette of that day, suddenly broke off his tirade against the Gauleiter of Nuremberg, gave the pamphlet a flat little tap with his fingertips and said something which made her heart feel like a hot ball of lead. “This document means nothing to me. Even if you were able to demonstrate in a convincing way your collaboration in the writing, it would prove very little. Only that you despise Jews. That does not impress me, inasmuch as it seems to me a very widespread sentiment.” His eyes became frosty and faraway, as if he were gazing at a point yards beyond the back of her bescarfed and frizzled skull. “Also, you seem to forget that you are a Pole, and therefore an enemy of the Reich who would remain an enemy even if you were not also judged guilty of a criminal act. Indeed, there are some in highest authority—the Reichsführer, for one—who consider you and your kind and your nation on a par with the Jews, Menschentiere, equally worthless, equally polluted in the racial sense, equally justifying righteous hatred. Poles living in the Fatherland are beginning to be marked with a P—an ominous sign for you people.” He hesitated for an instant. “I myself do not wholeheartedly share this specific view; however, to be honest, some of my dealings with your countrymen have caused me such bitterness and frustration that I have often felt that there is real cause for this absolute loathing. In the men especially. There is in them an ingrained loutishness. Most of the women are merely ugly.”

  Sophie burst into tears, although it had nothing to do with his denunciations. She had not planned to weep—it was the last thing from her mind, a display of mawkish weakness—but she could not help it. The tears spilled forth and she thrust her face into her hands. All—all!—had failed; her precarious handhold had crumbled, and she felt as if she had been hurled down the mountainside. She had made no advance, no inroads at all. She was finished. Sobbing uncontrollably, she stood there with the sticky tears leaking through her fingers, sensing the approach of doom. She gazed into the darkness of her wet cupped hands and heard the strident Tyrolean minnesingers from the salon far below, a cackling barnyard of voices propelled upward on a choir of thumping tubas, trombones, harmonicas in soggy syncopation.

  Und der Adam hat Liebe erfunden,

  Und der Noah den Wein, ja!

  Almost never shut, the attic door was closed then upon a squeak of hinges, slowly, gradually, as if by some reluctant force. She knew it could only have been Höss who closed the door and she was conscious of the sound of his boots as he returned toward her, then his fingers grasping her shoulder firmly even before she allowed herself to draw her hands away from her eyes and to look up. She forced herself to stop crying. The clamor beyond the intervening door was muffled.

  Und der David hat Zither erschall...

  “You’ve been flirting shamelessly with me,” she heard him say in an unsteady voice. She opened her eyes. His own eyes were distraught and the way in which they goggled about—seemingly out of control, at least for that brief moment—filled her with terror, especially since they gave her the impression somehow that he was about to raise his fist and strike her. But then with a great visceral heave he seemed to regain possession of himself, his gaze became normal or nearly so, and when next he spoke, his words were uttered with their ordinary soldierly steadiness. Even so, the manner of his breathing—rapid but deep—and a certain tremor about the lips betrayed to Sophie his inner distress, which still, with more terror, she could not help but identify as an extension of his rage at her. Rage at her for what in particular she could not fathom: for her foolish pamphlet, for being a flirt, for praising Streicher, for being born a dirty Pole, perhaps all of these. Then suddenly, to her astonishment, she realized that although his distress clearly partook of some vague and inchoate rage, it was not rage at her at all but at someone or something else. His clutch on her shoulder was hurting her. He made a nervous choking sound.

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

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

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