“Rudi, it’s true that you are answerable to authority,” Walter Dürrfeld was saying, “and how I respect your problem! But I’m answerable too, and so there seems to be no way to resolve this issue. You have upper echelons watching you; ultimately I have stockholders. I am answerable to a corporate authority which is now simply insisting on one thing: that I be supplied with more Jews in order to maintain a predetermined rate of production. Not only at Buna but at my mines. We must have that coal! So far so good, we have not yet substantially fallen behind. But all the formulations, the statistical predictions which I have available are... are ominous, to say the least. I must have more Jews!”
Höss’s voice at first seemed muffled, but then the reply was clear: “I cannot force the Reichsführer to make up his mind about this. You know that. I can only ask for a certain guidance, also suggest things. But he seems—for whatever good reason—to be unable to come to a decision about these Jews.”
“And your personal feeling is, of course...”
“My personal feeling is that only really strong and healthy Jews should be selected for employment in a place like Buna and in the Farben mines. The sick ones simply become an expensive drain on medical facilities. But my personal feeling counts for nothing here. We must wait for a decision.”
“Can’t you worry Himmler into a decision?” There was an edge of querulousness in Dürrfeld’s voice. “As a friend of yours he might...” A pause.
“I tell you I can only make suggestions,” Höss replied. “And I think you know what my suggestions have been. I understand your point of view, Walter, and I certainly don’t take offense that you don’t see eye to eye with me. You want bodies at all cost. Even an aged person with advanced consumption is capable of a certain number of thermal units of energy—”
“Precisely!” Dürrfeld broke in. “And this is all I’m asking at first. A trial period of, let us say, no more than six weeks, to see what utilization might be made of those Jews who are presently being submitted to...” He seemed to falter.
“Special Action,” Höss said. “But here is the very crux of the matter, don’t you see? The Reichsführer is pressed on one side by Eichmann and by Pohl and Maurer on the other. It is a matter of security versus labor. For security reasons Eichmann wishes to see every Jew undergo Special Action, no matter what the age or the physical condition of the individual Jew. He would not save a Jewish wrestler in perfect physical condition, if there were such a thing. Plainly, the Birkenau installations were promulgated to advance that policy. But see for yourself what’s happened! The Reichsführer had to modify his original order regarding Special Action for all Jews—this obviously at the behest of Pohl and Maurer—to satisfy the need for labor, not only at your Buna plant but at the mines and all the armament plants supplied by this command. The result is a split—completely down the middle. A split—You know... what is the word that I mean? That strange word, that psychological expression meaning—”
“Die Schizophrenie.”
“Yes, that’s the word,” Höss replied. “That mind doctor in Vienna, his name escapes—”
“Sigmund Freud.”
There was a space of silence. During this small hiatus Sophie, almost breathless, continued to focus upon the image of Jan, his mouth slightly parted beneath snub nose and blue eyes as his gaze shifted from the Commandant (pacing the office, as was so often his restless habit) to the possessor of this disembodied baritone voice—no longer the diabolical marauder of her dream, but simply the remembered stranger who had enchanted her with promises of trips of Leipzig, Hamburg, Bayreuth, Bonn. You’re so youthful! that same voice had murmured. A girl! And this: I am a family man. She was so intent upon laying her eyes on Jan, so smothered with anticipation over their reunion (she recalled later her difficulty in breathing), that her curiosity over what Walter Dürrfeld might look like now registered in her mind fleetingly, then faded into indifference. However, something in that voice—something hurried, peremptory—told her that she would be seeing him almost instantly, and the last words he spoke to the Commandant—every nuance of tone and meaning—were implanted in her memory with archival finality, as if within the grooves of a phonograph record which can never be erased.
There was a trace of laughter in the voice. He uttered a word heretofore unspoken. “You and I know that, either way, they will be dead. All right, let’s leave it there for the moment. The Jews are giving us all schizophrenia, especially me. But when it comes to a failure of production, do you think I can plead sickness—I mean schizophrenia—to my board of directors? Really!” Höss said something in an offhand, obscure voice, and Dürrfeld replied pleasantly that he hoped they would confer again tomorrow. Seconds later, when he brushed past her in the little anteroom, Dürrfeld clearly did not recognize Sophie—this pallid Polish woman in her stained prisoner’s smock—but as he inadvertently touched her he did say “Bitte!” with instinctive politeness and in the same polished gentleman’s tones she recalled from Cracow. However, he looked a caricature of the romantic figure gone to seed. He had grown swollen around the face and porkishly rotund in the midriff, and she noticed that those perfect fingers which, describing their gentle arabesques, had so mysteriously aroused her six years before seemed like rubbery little wurstlike stubs as he adjusted upon his head the gray Homburg that Scheffler obsequiously handed him.
“Then, what finally happened to Jan?” I asked Sophie. Once again I felt I had to know. Of all the many things she had told me, the unresolved question of Jan’s fate was the one which nagged at me the most. (I think I must have absorbed, then pushed to the back of my mind, her odd, offhand mention of Eva’s death.) I began also to see that she shied away from this part of her story with the greatest persistence, seeming to circle about it hesitantly, as if it were a matter too painful to touch upon. I was a little ashamed of my impatience and was certainly loath to intrude upon this obviously cobweb-fragile region of her memory, but in some intuitive way I also knew she was on the verge of giving up this secret, and so I pressed her to go on in as delicate a voice as I could manage. It was late on Sunday night—many hours after our near-disastrous bathing episode—and we were sitting at the bar of the Maple Court. Since the hour was close to midnight and since it was the tag end of an exhaustingly humid Sabbath, the two of us were nearly alone in the cavernous place. Sophie was sober; both of us had stuck to 7-Up. During this long session she had talked almost ceaselessly, but now she paused to look at her watch and to mention that it might be time to go back to the Pink Palace and call it a night. “I’ve got to move my things out to my new place, Stingo,” she said. “I’ve got to do that tomorrow morning, and then I’ve got to go back to Dr. Blackstock. Mon Dieu, I keep forgetting that I’m a working girl.” She looked drawn and tired, now musing down upon the scintillant little treasure which was the wristwatch Nathan had given her. It was a gold Omega with tiny diamonds at the four quarter points of the dial. I hesitated to consider what it might have cost. As if reading my thoughts, Sophie said, “I really shouldn’t keep these expensive things that Nathan gave me.” A new sorrow had entered her voice, of a different, perhaps more urgent tone than the one which had infused her reminiscences of the camp. “I guess I should give them away or something, since I’ll never see him again.”
“Why shouldn’t you keep them?” I said. “He gave them to you, for heaven’s sake. Keep them!”
“It would make me think of him all the time,” she replied wearily. “I still love him.”
“Then sell them,” I said, a little irritably, “he deserves it. Take them to a pawnshop.”
“Don’t say that, Stingo,” she said without resentment. Then she added, “Someday you will know what it is to be in love.” A sullen Slavic pronouncement, infinitely boring.
We were both silent for a while, and I pondered the profound failure of sensibility embedded in this last statement, which—aside from its boringness—expressed such oblivious unconcern for the lovelorn fool to whom it was addressed.
In silence I cursed her with all the force of my preposterous love. Suddenly I felt the presence of the real world again, I was no longer in Poland but in Brooklyn. And even aside from my heartache over Sophie, I stirred inside with a fretful, unhappy malaise. Self-lacerating worries began to dog me. I had been so caught up in Sophie’s story that I had utterly lost sight of the unshakable fact that I was nearly destitute as a result of yesterday’s robbery. This, combined with the knowledge of Sophie’s imminent departure from the Pink Palace—and my consequent solitude there, floundering pennilessly around Flatbush with the fragments of an uncompleted novel—gave me a real wrench of despair. I dreaded the loneliness I faced without Sophie and Nathan; it was far worse than my lack of money.
I continued to writhe inwardly, gazing at Sophie’s pensive and downcast face. She had assumed that reflective pose I had become so accustomed to, hands cupped lightly over her eyes in an attitude that contained an inexpressible combination of emotions (What would she be thinking about now? I wondered): perplexity, amazement, recollected terror, recaptured grief, rage, hatred, loss, love, resignation—all these dwelt there for an instant in a dark tangle even as I watched. Then they went away. As they did I realized that she as well as I knew that the dangling threads of the chronicle she had told me, and which had obviously neared its conclusion, still remained to be tied. I also realized that the momentum which had been building up in her memory all evening had not really diminished, and that despite her weariness she was under a compulsion to scrape out the rest of her appalling and inconceivable past to its bottommost dregs.
Even so, a curious evasiveness seemed to prevent her from closing in directly on the matter of what happened to her little boy, and when I persisted once more—saying “And Jan?”—she let herself fall into a moment’s reverie. “I’m so ashamed about what I done, Stingo—when I swam out into the ocean. Making you risk yourself like that—that was so bad of me, so bad. You must forgive me. But I will be truthful with you when I say that there have been many times since those days in the war when I have thought to kill myself. It seems to come and go in this rhythm. In Sweden right after the war was over and I was in this center for displaced persons I tried to kill myself there. And like in that dream I told you about, the chapel—I had this obsession with le blasphème. Outside the center there was a little church, I do not believe it was Catholic, I think it must have been Lutheran, but it don’t matter—I had this idea that if I killed myself in this church, it would be the greatest sacrilege I could ever commit, le plus grand blasphème, because you see, Stingo, I didn’t care no more; after Auschwitz, I didn’t believe in God or if He existed. I would say to myself: He has turned His back on me. And if He has turned His back on me, then I hate Him so that to show and prove my hatred I would commit the greatest sacrilege I could think of. Which is, I would commit my suicide in His church, on sacred ground. I was feeling so bad, I was so weak and sick still, but after a while I got some of my strength back and one night I decide to do this thing.
“So I come out of the gate of the center with a piece of very sharp glass I found in the hospital where I was kept. It was easy enough to do. The church was quite near. There weren’t any guards or anything at this place and I arrived at the church in the late evening. There was some light in the church and I sat in the back row for a long time, alone with my piece of glass. It was summertime. In Sweden there is always light in the summer night, cool and pale. This place was in the countryside and I could hear the frogs outside and smell the fir and the pines. It was a lovely smell, it remind me of the Dolomites when I was a child. For a while I imagined having this conversation with God. One of the things I imagined that He said was ‘Why are you going to kill yourself, Sophie, here in My holy place?’ And I remember saying out loud, ‘If You don’t know in all Your wisdom, God, then I can’t tell You.’ Then He said, ‘So it’s your secret.’ And I answered, ‘Yes, it’s my secret from You. My last and only secret.’ So then I started to cut my wrist. And do you know something, Stingo? I did cut my wrist a little and it hurt and bled some, but then I stopped. And do you know what make me stop? I’ll swear to you, it was one thing. One thing! It was not the hurt or the fear. I had no fear. It was Rudolf Höss. It was thinking of Höss very suddenly and knowing he was alive in Poland or Germany. I saw his face in front of me just as the piece of glass cut my wrist. And I stopped cutting and—I know it sounds like folie, Stingo—well, I have this understanding which comes in a flash that I cannot die as long as Rudolf Höss is alive. It would be his final triumph.”
There was a long pause, then: “I never saw my little boy again. You see, on that morning Jan was not in Höss’s office when I went in. He was not there. I was so certain that he was there that I thought he might be hiding under the desk—you know, for fun. I looked around but there was no Jan. I thought it must be some joke, I knew he had to be there. I called out for him. Höss had closed the door and was standing there, watching me. I asked him where was my little boy. He said, ‘Last night after you were gone I realized that I couldn’t bring your child here. I apologize for an unfortunate decision. To bring him here would be dangerous—it would compromise my position.’ I couldn’t believe this, couldn’t believe he was saying this, I really couldn’t believe it. Then all of a sudden I did believe it, I believed it completely. And then I went crazy. I went insane. Insane!
“I don’t remember anything I done—everything was black for a time—except I must have done two things. I attacked him, I attacked him with my hands. I know this because after the blackness went away and I was sitting in a chair where he had pushed me I looked up and I saw the place on his cheek where I had scraped him with my fingernails. He was wiping a little blood away from the place with his handkerchief. He was looking down at me, but there was no anger in his eyes, he seemed very calm. The other thing I remember is this echo in my ears, the sound of my own voice when I screamed at him just a minute before. ‘Gas me, then!’ I remember shouting at him. ‘Gas me like you gassed my little girl!’ I shouted at him over and over. ‘Gas me, then, you... ’ Et cetera. And I must have screamed a lot of dirty names in German because I remember them like an echo in my ear. But now I just put my head in my hands and wept. I didn’t hear him say anything and then finally I felt his hand on my shoulder. I heard his voice. ‘I repeat, I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I should not have made that decision. I will try to make it up to you somehow, in some other way. What is there that I can do?’ Stingo, it was so strange, hearing this man talk like this—asking me such a question in such a voice, apologetic, you know, asking me what he might do.
“And then, of course, I thought about Lebensborn, and what Wanda had said I must try to do—the thing I should have mentioned to Höss the day before but was somehow unable to. And so I made myself calm and stopped crying and finally I looked up at him and said, ‘You can do this for me.’ I used the word ‘Lebensborn’ and I knew right away from the look in his eyes that he had a knowledge of what I was speaking about. I said something like this, I said, ‘You could have my child moved away from the Children’s Camp and into the program of Lebensborn which the SS has and which you know about. You could have him sent to the Reich, where he would become a good German. Already he is blond and looks German and speaks perfect German like I do. There are not many Polish children like that. Don’t you see how my little boy Jan would be excellent for Lebensborn?’ For a long time I remember Höss didn’t say anything, just stood there lightly touching the place on his cheek where I had cut him. Then he said something like this: ‘I think that what you say might be a possible solution. I will look into the matter.’ But that was not enough for me. I knew I was groping for straws, desperate, he could have simply shut me up right there—but I had to say it, had to say, ‘No, you’ve got to give me a more definite answer than that, I cannot bear it living with any more uncertainty.’ After a moment he said, ‘All right, I will see that he is removed from the camp.’ But even this was not good enough for me. I said, ‘How w
ill I know? How will I know for certain that he has been taken away from here? Also, you must promise me this,’ I went on, ‘you must promise to let me know where he has been taken in Germany so that someday when the war is over I will be able to see him again.’
“This last thing, Stingo, I could hardly believe I was saying, making these demands on such a man. But in truth, you see, I was relying on his feeling for me, depending on that emotion he had shown for me the day before, you know, when he had embraced me, when he had said, ‘Do you think I am some kind of monster?’ I was depending on some small remaining piece of humanity in him to help me. So after I said this he kept quiet again for a time and then he answered me by saying, ‘All right, I promise. I promise that the child will be removed from the camp and you will hear of his whereabouts from time to time.’ Then I said—I knew I was maybe risking his anger, but I couldn’t help it, ‘How can I be sure of this? My little girl is already dead, and without Jan I will have nothing. You said to me yesterday that you would let me see Jan today, but you didn’t. You went back on your word.’ This must have—well, hit him in some way, because he said then, ‘You can be sure. You will have a message from me from time to time. You have my assurance and word as a German officer, my word of honor.’ ”
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 214
