I MUST NOW set down a brief vignette, which I have tried to refashion from the outpouring of Sophie’s memories as she talked to me that summer weekend. I suspect that the indulgent reader will not be able to perceive immediately how this little recollecton adumbrates Auschwitz but—as will be seen—it does, and of all of Sophie’s attempts to gain a hold on the confusion of her past, it remains, as a sketch, a fragment, among the most odd and unsettling.
The place is Cracow again. The time: early June in the year 1937. The characters are Sophie and her father and a personage new to this narrative: Dr. Walter Dürrfeld of Leuna, near Leipzig, a director of IG Farbenindustrie, that Interessengemeinschaft, or conglomerate—inconceivably huge even for its day—whose prestige and size are alone enough to set Professor Biegański’s mind abubble with giddy euphoria. Not to mention Dr. Dürrfeld himself, who because of the Professor’s academic specialty—the international legal aspects of industrial patents—is well known to him by reputation as one of the captains of German industry. It would demean the Professor needlessly, would place too much emphasis on the sycophancy he had occasionally displayed in the face of manifestations of German might and potency, to portray him as buffoonishly servile in Dürrfeld’s presence; he possesses, after all, his own illustrious repute as a scholar and an expert in his field. He is also a man of considerable social facility. Nonetheless, Sophie can tell that he is flattered beyond measure to be near the flesh of this titan, and his eagerness to please falls a hair short of the outright embarrassing. There is no professional connection to this meeting; the encounter is purely social, recreative. Dürrfeld with his wife is making a vacation trip through Eastern Europe, and a mutual acquaintance in Düsseldorf—a patent authority, like the Professor—has arranged the get-together through the mail and by a flurry of last-minute telegrams. Because of Dürrfeld’s pressing schedule the little occasion must not take much time, cannot even include a meal together: a brief sightseeing fling at the university with its resplendent Collegium Maius; then Wawel Castle, the tapestries, a pause for a cup of tea, perhaps a tiny side trip elsewhere, but that is all. An afternoon’s pleasant companionship, then off on the wagons-lits to Wroclaw. The Professor plainly pines for more contact. Four hours will have to do.
Frau Dürrfeld is indisposed—a touch of der Durchfall has confined her to their room at the Hotel Francuski. As the trio sits sipping midafternoon tea after their descent from the Wawel parapets, the Professor apologizes with perhaps a touch too much acerbity on the poorness of Cracow water, intones with perhaps a shade too much feeling his regret at having had only the most fleeting glimpse of the charming Frau Dürrfeld before she hastened upstairs to her chambers. Dürrfeld nods pleasantly, Sophie squirms. She knows that the Professor will later require her to help re-create their conversation for his diary. She also knows that she has been dragooned into this outing for two purposes of display—because she is a knockout, as they say in the American movies that year, but also because by her presence, poise and language she can demonstrate to this distinguished guest, this dynamic helmsman of commerce, how fidelity to the principles of German culture and German breeding is capable of producing (and in such a quaint Slavic outback) the bewitching replica of a fräulein of whom not even the most committed racial purist in the Reich could disapprove. At least she looks the part. Sophie continues to squirm, praying that the conversation—once it becomes serious, if it does—will skirt Nazi politics; she is just beginning to be sickened by the extreme turn taken in the evolution of the Professor’s racial views, and she cannot bear listening to or being forced to echo, out of duty, those dangerous imbecilities.
But she need not worry. It is culture and business—not politics—which are on the Professor’s mind as he tactfully leads the conversation. Dürrfeld listens, wearing a thin smile. Polite, attentive, he is a sparely fleshed and handsome man in his mid-forties, with pink healthy skin and (she is struck by this detail) incredibly clean fingernails. They seem almost lacquered, painted on, the terminal edges crescent moons of ivory. His grooming is immaculate and his suit of tailored charcoal flannel, obviously English, makes her father’s broad bright pin-stripe look hopelessly dowdy and old-fashioned. His cigarettes, she notices, are also British—Craven A’s. As he listens to the Professor his eyes have a pleasant, amused, quizzical look. She feels attracted to him, vaguely—no, quite strongly. She finds herself blushing, knows that her cheeks are flushed. Her father is casting gemlike slivers of history around the table now, emphasizing the effect of German-speaking culture and tradition on the city of Cracow and indeed upon all of southern Poland. What a long-lasting and indelible tradition this has been! Of course, and it goes without saying (although the Professor is saying it), Cracow not so long ago was for three-quarters of a century under beneficent Austrian rule—natürlich, this Dr. Dürrfeld knew; but did he also know that the city was almost unique in Eastern Europe in possessing its own constitution, called even now “the Magdeburg rights” and based upon medieval laws formulated in the city of Magdeburg? Was it any wonder, then, that the community was richly steeped in German lore and law, in the very spirit of Germany, so that even now there was among Cracovian citizens the perpetual impulse to nurture a passionate devotion for the language which, as Von Hofmannsthal said (or was it Gerhart Hauptmann?), is the most gloriously expressive since the ancient Greek? Suddenly Sophie realizes that he has focused his attention on her. Even his daughter here, he continues, little Zosia, whose education had perhaps not been of the broadest, speaks with such fluency that she not only has perfect mastery of Hochsprache, the standard German of the schools, but of the colloquial Umgangssprache, and furthermore, can duplicate for the Doctor’s enjoyment almost any accent which lies in between.
There follows a distressing (to Sophie) several minutes in which, egged on pointedly by her father, she must utter a random phrase in various local German accents. It is a trick of mimicry which she picked up easily as a child and which the Professor has relished exploiting ever since. It is one of the misdemeanors he commits upon her from time to time. Sophie, who is shy enough anyway, detests being forced to perform for Dürrfeld, but, smiling a twisted embarrassed smile, complies, speaking at her father’s command in Swabian, then in the indolent cadences of Bavaria, now in the tones of a native of Dresden, of Frankfurt, quickly followed by the Low German sound of a Saxon from Hannover and at last—aware that the desperation shows in her own eyes—blurting out an imitation of some quaint denizen of the Schwarzwald. “Entzuckend!” she hears Dürrfeld’s voice, along with a delighted laugh. “Charming! Just charming!” And she can tell that Dürrfeld, fetched by the little act but at the same time sensing her discomfort, has brought her demonstration adroitly to an end. Is Dürrfeld offended by her father? She doesn’t know. She hopes so. Papa, Papa. Du bist ein... Oh merde...
Sophie is barely able to conquer her boredom but manages to remain attentive. The Professor has now turned subtly (without appearing to be inquisitive) to the subject second most dear to his heart—industry and commerce, especially German industry and commerce, and the power excitingly attending those activities, now so energetically on the upswing. It is easy to gain Dürrfeld’s confidence; the Professor’s knowledge of the architecture of world trade is comprehensive, encyclopedic. He knows when to open up a subject, when to shy away from it, when to be direct, when to be discreet. He does not once mention the Führer. Accepting with perhaps a little too much gratitude the fine hand-rolled Cuban cigar offered him by Dürrfeld, he expresses his profuse admiration for a recent German achievement. He has only recently read about it in the Zurich financial newspaper to which he subscribes. It is the sale to the United States of large quantities of syntheic rubber newly perfected by IG Farbenindustrie. What a glorious coup for the Reich! exclaims the Professor—at which point Sophie notices that Dürrfeld, who appears to be a man not easily flattered, nonetheless smiles in a responsive way and begins to speak with some animation. He seems pleased with the Professor’s technical grasp of the subject, to which now he himself warms, leaning forward and for the first time employing his beautifully manicured hands to make one point, then another and another. Sophie loses track of much of the arcane detail, meanwhile regarding Dürrfeld once more from a point of view that is singularly female: he is attractive, she thinks, then in a dampness of mild shame banishes the thought. (Married, the mother of two little children; how could she!)
Now, while plainly exercising control over himself, Dürrfeld is seized by some churning interior anger; the knuckles of one hand grow white as he clenches his fist, the area around his mouth also becomes blanched, tense. With barely stoppered rage he is speaking of imperialism, of die Englander and die Hollander, of the conspiracy on the part of two rich powers to so rig and control prices in natural rubber as to drive all others out of the market. And they accuse IG Farben of monopolistic practices! What else could we do? he says in a caustic, cutting voice which surprises Sophie, so at variance does it seem with his previous milky equanimity. No wonder that the world is amazed at our coup! With the British and the Dutch sole owners of Malaya and the East Indies, criminally fixing astronomical rates on the world market, what else could Germany do but employ its technological ingenuity to create a synthetic substitute that would not only be economical, durable, resilient, but—“Oil-resistant!” There! The Professor has taken the words right out of Dürrfeld’s mouth. Oil-resistant! He has mastered his homework, the shrewd Professor, in whose memory has lodged the salient fact that it is the oil-resistance of the new synthetic product which is so revolutionary and which is the key to its value and attractiveness. Another touch of flattery that almost works: Dürrfeld smiles pleasantly at the Professor’s expertise. But as often happens, her father does not know when to stop. Preening slightly dandruffed pin-striped shoulders, he begins to show off, murmuring chemical terms like “nitrile,” “Buna-N,” “polymerization of hydrocarbons.” His German is mellifluous—but now Dürrfeld, sidetracked from his righteous rage at the British and the Dutch, subsides into his previous detached self, gazing at the turgid Professor beneath arched eyebrows, looking remotely irritated and bored.
Yet oddly enough, the Professor at his best can be a charmer. Sometimes he is able to redeem himself. And so on the ride to the great salt mine of Wieliczka south of the city, the three of them sitting abreast in the rear seat of the hotel limousine, an ancient but pampered Daimler smelling of wood polish, his well-practiced disquisition on the Polish salt industry and its millennial history is captivating, bright, anything but tedious. He is exercising that talent which has made him an alluring lecturer and a public speaker of vibrant flair. No longer is he so pompous and self-conscious. The name of the king who was the founder of the Wieliczka mine, Boleslaw the Bashful, provides a moment of amusement; one or two low-keyed jokes, nicely timed, again put Dürrfeld at his ease. As he sinks back Sophie feels her liking for Dürrfeld increase; how little like a powerful German industrialist he seems, she thinks. She gives him a sidelong glance, and is affected by the lack of any arrogance in him, touched bv something obscurely warm, vulnerable—is it only a kind of loneliness? The countryside is green with spreading, trembling foliage, lush fields ablaze with wildflowers—the Polish spring in its voluptuous prime. Dürrfeld remarks on the scene with genuine delight. Sophie senses the pressure of his arm against her own, and realizes that her bare skin there is chill with goose flesh. She tries—without success on the cramped seat—to draw away. She shivers slightly, then relaxes.
Dürrfeld has unbent so naturally that he even feels constrained to utter a vague apology; he should not allow the British and the Dutch to agitate him so, he says to the Professor in a mild voice, forgive the outburst, but surely their monopolistic practices and manipulations of the supply of a natural product like rubber, which all the world should receive equitably, was an abomination. Surely a native of Poland, which like Germany has no rich overseas possessions, could appreciate this. Surely it is not militarism or blind desire for conquest (which have been libelously imputed to certain nations—Germany, yes, damnit, Germany) that makes some ghastly war probable, but this greed. What must a nation like Germany do when—deprived of the colonies which might have served as its own Straits Settlements, divested of the equivalent of its own Sumatra, its own Borneo—it faces a hostile world rimmed about at the edge by international pirates and profiteers? The legacy of Versailles! Yes, what! It must go creatively wild. It must manufacture its own substance—everything!—out of chaos and by its own genius, and then stand with its back against the wall, confronting a host of enemies. The little speech ends. The Professor beams and actually applauds with his hands.
Dürrfeld falls silent then. Despite his passion he is very calm. He has spoken not angrily or with alarm but with gentle, easy, brief eloquence, and Sophie finds herself affected by the words and the utter conviction they convey. She is a naif in politics and world affairs, but she has the wit to know it. She cannot tell if she is stirred more by Dürrfeld’s ideas or by his physical presence—perhaps it is a mingling of both—but she feels an honest, heartfelt reasonableness in what he has said, and certainly he does not in the least resemble the paradigmatic Nazi who has been the object of so much savage lampooning rage at the hands of the tiny liberal and radical elements around the university. Maybe he is not a Nazi, she thinks optimistically—but then, surely a man so highly placed must be a member of the Party. Yes? No? Well, no matter. Two things she now knows well: she is beset by a pleasant, wayward, tickling eroticism, and the eroticism itself fills her with the same sweetly queasy sense of danger she once felt in Vienna years ago as a child at the very peak of the terrifying Prater Ferris wheel—danger both delicious and nearly unendurable. (Yet even as the emotion sweeps over her she cannot help but writhe in the memory of the cataclysmic domestic happening which she knows gives her the liberty, the warrant to possess such electrifying desire: the silhouette of her husband, in his robe, standing in the doorway of their dark bedroom only a month before. And Kazik’s words, as excruciatingly hurtful as the sudden slice across her face of a kitchen knife: You must get this under your thick skull, which may be thicker even than your father says it is. If I am no longer able to function with you, it is, you understand, due to no lack of virility but because almost everything about you, especially your body, leaves me totally without sensation... I cannot stand even the smell of your bed.)
Moments later, outside the entrance to the mine, where the two of them are gazing down across a sun-flooded field swaying and rippling with green barley, Dürrfeld asks her about herself. She replies that she is—well, a housewife, a faculty wife, but she is studying the piano, she hopes to be able to continue in Vienna in a year or two. (They are alone for a moment, standing close to each other. Never has Sophie wished so keenly to be alone with a man. What has permitted this moment is a small crisis—a sign announcing no visitors, the mine closed for repairs, the Professor storming off with a cascade of apologies pouring from his lips, telling them to wait, declaring that his personal acquaintanceship with the superintendent will resolve this impasse.) He says she looks so youthful. A girl! He says that it is hard to believe that she has two children. She replies that she was married very young. He says that he has two children, too. “I am a family man.” The remark seems roguish, ambiguous. For the first time their eyes encounter each other’s, his gaze mingles with hers; it is unabashedly admiring, that look, and she turns away feeling a spasm of adulterous guilt. She moves a few paces off from him, shielding her eyes, wondering aloud where Papa is. She hears the tremor in her throat, another voice deep within her tells her that tomorrow she must go to early Mass. Over her shoulder his voice now asks her if she has ever been to Germany. She replies that yes, one summer years ago she stayed in Berlin. Her father’s vacation. She was just a child.
She says that she would love to go to Germany again, to see Bach’s grave in Leipzig—and she halts, embarrassed, wondering why on earth she has said this, although indeed to place flowers on Bach’s grave has long been a secret wish. Yet in his gentle laugh there is understanding. Leipzig, my home! He says why of course we could do that if you came. We could go to all the great musical shrines. She gasps inwardly—the “we,” the “if you came.” Is she to construe this is an invitation? Delicate, even devious—but an invitation? She feels the pulse twitch at her brow and flees the subject, or warily moves away. We have much good music in Cracow, she says, Poland is filled with wonderful music. Yes, he says, but not like Germany. If she were to come, he would take her to Bayreuth—does she like Wagner?—or to the great Bach festivals, or to hear Lotte Lehmann, Kleiber, Gieseking, Furtwängler, Backhaus, Fischer, Kempff... His voice seems to be an amorous melodic murmur, cajoling, politely but outrageously flirtatious, irresistible and (to her utter distress now) wickedly exciting. If she loves Bach, then she must love Telemann. We shall toast his memory in Hamburg! And Beethoven’s in Bonn! Just at this moment a splashing of feet through gravel announces the return of the Professor. He babbles delightedly, saying “Open Sesame.” Sophie can almost hear the sound her heart makes as it deflates, sickly pounding. My father, she thinks, is everything that music cannot be...
And that (as it evolved in her recollection) is nearly all. The prodigious subterranean castle of salt which she has visited often and which may or may not be, as the Professor claims, one of Europe’s seven man-made wonders, is less an anticlimax in itself than a spectacle which simply fails to register on her awareness, so agitated has she been made by this indefinable whatever-it-is—this infatuation—which has struck her with the random heat of a lightning bolt, making her weak and a little ill. She dares not let her eyes meet Dürrfeld’s again, although once more she glances at his hands: why do they fascinate her so? And now as they descend in the elevator and then embark on a stroll through this glittering white kingdom of vaulted caverns and labyrinthine passageways and soaring transepts—an upended anti-cathedral, buried memorial to ages of human toil, plunging giddily toward the underworld—Sophie blots out both Dürrfeld’s presence and her father’s perambulating lecture, which anyway she has heard a dozen times before. She wonders despondently how she can truly be the victim of an emotion at once so silly and so devastating. She will just have to put this man firmly out of her mind. Yes, put him out of her mind... Allez!
And this she did. She recounted later how she so firmly obliterated Dürrfeld from her thoughts that after he and his wife left Cracow—only an hour or so following their visit to the Wieliczka mine—he never troubled her memory again, did not dwell on the farthest margin of her consciousness even as a romantic figment. Perhaps this was the result of some unconscious force of will, perhaps it was only because of the futility she felt at entertaining the hope of seeing him again. Like a rock falling into one of those bottomless Wieliczka grottoes, he plummeted from her remembrance—another innocuous flirtation consigned to the dusty unopened scrapbook. Yet six years later she did see him again, when the creature of Dürrfeld’s passion and desire—synthetic rubber—and its place in the matrix of history had caused this corporate prince to become master of Farben’s huge industrial complex known as IG-Auschwitz. When they met each other there at the camp the encounter was even briefer and less personal than their meeting in Cracow. Yet from the separate encounters, Sophie carried away two significantly linked and powerful impressions. And they were these: During that spring afternoon’s jaunt in the company of one of Poland’s most influential anti-Semites, her admirer Walter Dürrfeld, like his host, uttered not a word about Jews. Six years later almost all that she heard from Dürrfeld’s lips concerned Jews and their consignment to oblivion.
During that long weekend in Flatbush, Sophie did not speak to me about Eva except to tell me in a few words what I have already set down: that the child was killed at Birkenau on the day of their arrival. “Eva was taken away,” she said, “and I never saw her again.” She offered no embroidery on this and I plainly could not and did not press the point; it was—in a word—terrible, and this information, which she imparted to me in such a listless, offhand way, left me beyond speech. I still marvel at Sophie’s composure. She returned quickly to speak of Jan, who had survived the selection and who, she learned through the grapevine after a number of days, had been thrown into that desperate enclave known as the Children’s Camp. I could only surmise from what she said about her first six months at Auschwitz that the shock and grief caused by Eva’s death created a bereavement which might have destroyed her, too, had it not been for Jan and his survival; the very fact that the little boy still lived, even though beyond her reach, and that she might somehow eventually get to see him was enough to sustain her through the initial phases of the nightmare. Almost every thought she had concerned the child, and the few grains of information she collected about him from time to time—that he was healthy enough, that he still lived—brought her the kind of mild, numb solace which enabled her to get through the infernal existence she woke to every morning.
But Sophie, as I pointed out before and as she elaborated to Höss on that strange day of their aborted intimacy, was one of the chosen elite and therefore had been “lucky” by comparison with most of the others newly arrived at the camp. She had first been assigned to a barracks, where in the ordinary course of events she would doubtless have endured that precisely calculated, abbreviated death-in-life which was the lot of nearly all her fellow sufferers. (It was at this point that Sophie told me about the welcoming statement of SS Hauptsturmführer Fritzch, and it might be well to repeat what they both said, verbatim. “I remember his exact words. He said, ‘You have come to a concentration camp, not to a sanatorium, and there is only one way out—up the chimney.’ He said, ‘Anyone who don’t like this can try hanging himself on the wires. If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.’ Then he said, ‘Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.’ ” Sophie had been aware of her death sentence within twenty-four hours of her arrival, it only took Fritzch to validate the fact in SS language.) But as she later explained to Höss in an episode I have earlier narrated, an odd cluster of little events—the attack on her in the barracks by a lesbian, a fight, intercession by a friendly block leader—had led her to a translator-stenographer’s job and lodging in another barracks, where she was sheltered for the time being from the camp’s mortal attrition. And of course at the end of six months another stroke of good fortune brought her the protective comforts and advantages of Haus Höss itself. Yet first came a critical meeting. It was only a few days before she was to take up residence under the Commandant’s roof that Wanda—who had been immured in one of the unspeakable kennels at Birkenau this entire time and whom Sophie had not seen since that April day of their arrival—made her way to Sophie’s side and through a tumultuous outpouring filled her with hope about Jan and the possibility of his salvation, but also terrified her with demands upon her courage which she felt certain she could not meet.
“You will have to be working for us every moment you’re in that insect’s nest,” Wanda had whispered to her in a corner of the barracks. “You can’t imagine what kind of an opportunity this is. It’s what the underground has been waiting for, praying for, to have somebody like you in a situation like this! You’ll have to use your eyes and ears every minute. Listen, darling, it’s so important for you to get word out about what’s going on. Shifts of personnel, changes of policy, transfers of the top SS pigs—anything is priceless information. It’s the lifeblood of the camp. War news! Anything to counter their filthy propaganda. Don’t you see, our morale is the only thing we have left in this hellhole. A radio, for instance—that would be priceless! Your chances of getting one would be practically nil, but if you could smuggle out a radio just so we could listen to London, it would be nearly the same as saving thousands and thousands of lives.”
Wanda was sick. The dreadful bruise inflicted on her face in Warsaw had never really gone away. Conditions in the women’s compound at Birkenau were hideous and a chronic bronchial ailment to which she had always been prone had flared up, bringing to her cheeks a hectic and alarming flush so bright that it almost matched her brick-red hair, or the grotesque frizzles that were left of it. With mingled horror, grief and guilt Sophie had a swift intuition that the present moment would be the last time she would ever lay eyes on this brave, resolute, luminous flame of a girl. “I can only stay a few more minutes,” Wanda said. She suddenly switched from Polish to a rapid, breezy colloquial German, murmuring to Sophie that the nasty-faced assistant block leader lingering nearby, a Warsaw whore, looked like a stool pigeon and a traitorous rat, which she was. Quickly then she outlined to Sophie her scheme about Lebensborn, trying to make her see that the plan—however quixotic it might appear—was perhaps the only way of assuring Jan’s deliverance from the camp.
It would require a lot of conniving, she said, would require a lot of things which she knew Sophie would instinctively shrink from. She paused, coughed in painful racking spasms, then resumed. “I knew I had to see you when I heard about you through the grapevine. We hear everything. I’ve so wanted to see you anyway all these months, but this new job of yours made it absolutely necessary. I’ve risked everything to get here to see you—if I’m caught I’m done for! But nothing risked, nothing gained in this snakepit. Yes, I’ll tell you again and believe me: Jan is well, he’s as well as can be expected. Yes, not once—three times I saw him through the fence. I won’t fool you, he’s skinny, skinny as I am. It’s lousy in the Children’s Camp—everything’s lousy at Birkenau—but I’ll tell you another thing. They’re not starving the children as badly as some of the rest. Why, I don’t know, it can’t be their conscience. Once I managed to take him some apples. He’s doing well. He can make it. Go ahead and cry, darling, I know it’s awful but you mustn’t give up hope. And you’ve got to try to get him out of here before winter comes. Now, this Lebensborn idea may sound bizarre but the thing really exists—we saw it happening in Warsaw, remember the Rydzón child?—and I’m telling you that you simply must make a stab at using it to get Jan shipped out of here. All right, I know there’s a good chance that he might get lost if he’s sent to Germany, but at least he’ll be alive and well, don’t you see? There’s a good chance that you’ll be able to keep track of him, this war can’t last forever.
“Listen! It all depends on what kind of relationship you strike up with Höss. So much depends on that, Zosia darling, not only what happens to Jan and yourself but to all of us. You’ve got to use that man, work on him—you’re going to be living under the same roof. Use him! For once you’ve got to forget that priggish Christer’s morality of yours and use your sex for all it’s worth. Pardon me, Zosia, but give him a good fucking and he’ll be eating out of your hand. Listen, underground intelligence knows all about that man, just as we’ve learned about Lebensborn. Höss is just another susceptible bureaucrat with a blocked-up itch for a female body. Use it! And use him! It won’t be any skin off his nose to take one Polish kid and have him committed to that program—after all, it’ll be another bonus for the Reich. And sleeping with Höss won’t be collaboration, it’ll be espionage—a fifth column! So you’ve got to work this ape over to every possible limit. For God’s sake, Zosia, this is your chance! What you do in that house can mean everything for the rest of us, for every Pole and Jew and misbegotten bundle of misery in this camp—everything. I beg of you—don’t let us down!”
Time was running out. Wanda had to go. Before she went, she left Sophie with a few last instructive words. There was the matter of Bronek, for instance. At the Commandant’s house she would encounter a handyman named Bronek. He would be a crucial link between the mansion and the camp underground. Ostensibly a stooge for the SS, he was not quite the bootlicker and Höss’s lackey that a necessity for accommodation would make him appear. Höss trusted him, he was the Commandant’s pet Polack; but within this simple being, superficially servile and obliging, there beat the heart of a patriot who had shown that he could be counted upon for certain missions, provided they were not too mentally taxing or complex. The truth was, he was harebrained but clever—made into such a reliable turnip by the medical experiments which had addled his thought processes. He could initiate nothing on his own but was a willing instrument. Poland forever! In fact, said Wanda, Sophie would soon discover that Bronek was so secure in his role as the submissive, harmless drudge that from Höss’s viewpoint he could only be beyond suspicion—and therein lay both the beauty and the crucial nature of his function as an underground operative and go-between. Trust Bronek, Wanda said, and use him if she could. Now Wanda had to go, and after a long and tearful embrace she was gone—leaving Sophie weak and hopeless, with a sense of inadequacy...
Thus Sophie came to spend her ten days under the Commandant’s roof—a period culminating in that hectic, anxiety-drenched day which she remembered in such detail and which I have already described: a day when her feckless and flat-footed attempt at seducing Höss yielded not the possibility of freedom for Jan but only the bitterly wounding yet sweetly desirable promise of seeing her child in the flesh. (And this might be too brief to bear.) A day on which she had miserably failed, through a combination of panic and forgetfulness, to broach the idea of Lebensborn to the Commandant, thereby losing the richest chance she had of offering him the legitimate means to oversee Jan’s removal from the camp. (Unless, she thought, as she descended toward the cellar that evening, unless she collected her wits and was able to outline to him her plan the next morning, when Höss had promised to bring the little boy to his office for the reunion.) It was also the day on which to her other frights and miseries had been added the almost intolerable burden of a challenge and a responsibility. And four years later, in a bar in Brooklyn, she spoke of the desperate shame that still engulfed her at the memory of how such a challenge and a responsibility had frightened her and finally defeated her. This was ultimately one of the darkest parts of her confession to me and the focus of what she called, again and again, her “badness.” And I began to see how this “badness” went far beyond what—it seemed to me—was misplaced guilt over her clumsy effort to seduce Höss or even her equally clumsy attempt to manipulate him through her father’s pamphlet. I began to see how, among its other attributes, absolute evil paralyzes absolutely. In the end, Sophie recalled with anguish, her failure was reduced to such a cheaply trivial yet overwhelmingly important agglomeration of metal, glass and plastic as the radio that Wanda thought Sophie would never have the incredible chance to steal. And she blew her chance to pieces...
On the floor just underneath the landing which served as the antechamber to Höss’s attic was the small room occupied by Emmi, age eleven, middle member of the Commandant’s five offspring. Sophie had passed the room many times on her way up to and down from the office, and had noted that the door was often left open—not a remarkable fact really, she had reflected, when one realized that petty theft in this despotically well-regulated stronghold was nearly as unthinkable as murder. Sophie had paused for a glimpse more than once and had seen the orderly, dustless child’s bedchamber which would have been unexceptional in Augsburg or Münster: a sturdy single bed with a flowered coverlet, stuffed animals heaped on a chair, some silver trophies, a cuckoo clock, a wall with gingerbread picture frames enclosing photographs (an alpine scene, marching Hitler Youth, a seascape, the child herself in a swimsuit, ponies at play, portraits of the Führer, “Onkel Heini” Himmler, smiling Mummy, smiling Daddy in civvies), a dresser with a cluster of boxes for jewelry and trinkets, and next to these a portable radio. It was the radio that always captured her attention. Only rarely had Sophie seen or heard the radio in operation, no doubt because its charms had been superseded by the huge phonograph downstairs which blared forth night and day.
Once when passing by the room she had noticed the radio on—dreamy, modern ersatz-Strauss waltzes strained through a voice which identified the source as a Wehrmacht station, possibly Vienna, perhaps Prague. The limpid, muted strings were stunningly clear. But the radio itself bewitched her not by its music but by its very being—ravished her by its size, its shape, its adorable shrunken self, its cuteness, its miniatureness, its incredible portability. Never had it occurred to Sophie that technology could achieve such marvelous compactness, but then, she had overlooked what the Third Reich and its newborn science of electronics had been up to all these exploding years. The radio was no bigger than a medium-sized book. The name Siemens was written across a side panel in intaglio script. Deep maroon in color, its plastic front cover sprang up on hinges to form the antenna, standing sentinel over the little tube-and-battery-filled chassis small enough to be balanced easily in the palm of a man’s hand. The radio afflicted Sophie with terror and desire. And at dusk on that October day after her confrontation with Höss, when she descended to her dank quarters in the basement, she caught sight of the radio through the open door and felt her bowels give way with fear at the very idea that at last, with no more hesitations or delays, she must manage somehow to steal it.
She stood in the shadows of the hallway, only a few feet from the bottom of the attic stairs. The radio was playing soft murmurous schmaltz. Above, there was a sound of the booted feet of Höss’s adjutant, thumping about on the landing. Höss himself had left the house on an inspection tour. She stood still for a moment, feeling strengthless, hungry, chill-swept and on the edge of illness or collapse. No day in her life had been longer than this one, wherein all that she had hoped to achieve had come to an ugly, gaping naught. No, not absolutely nothing: Höss’s promise to at least let her see Jan was something salvaged out of the wreckage. But to have mismanaged things so utterly, to have returned virtually to where she had started, faced with the oncoming night of the camp’s perdition—all this was beyond her acceptance or comprehension. She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall in a dizzy siege of nausea, brought on by hunger. That morning on this very spot she had puked up those figs: the mess had long since been scrubbed away by some Polish or SS minion, but in her fancy there lingered a ghostly sour-sweet fragrance, and hunger suddenly clamped down upon her stomach in a spasm of aching colic. Unseeing, she reached up with wandering fingers, suddenly touched fur. It felt like the hairy balls of the devil. She uttered a foreshortened scream, a squeaky gasp, realizing as her eyes popped open that her hand had grazed the chin of an antlered stag, shot in 1938—as Höss had told an SS visitor within her hearing—squarely behind the brain at three hundred meters, “open sight,” on the slopes above the Königssee so deep within the very shadow of Berchtesgaden that the Führer, had he been in residence (and who knows, perhaps he had been!), might have heard the fatal crack!...
Now the protuberant glass eyeballs of the deer, artfully detailed even to its minute bloodshot flecks, gave back twin images of herself; frail, wasted, her face bisected by cadaverous planes, she gazed deeply at her duplicate self, contemplating how, in her exhaustion and in the tension and indecision of the moment, she could possibly hold on to her sanity. During the days Sophie had plodded up and down the stairs past Emmi’s room she had pondered her strategy with increasing dread and anxiety. She was hagridden by the need not to betray Wanda’s trust, but—oh God, the difficulties! The key factor lay in one word: suspicion. The disappearance of such a scarce and valued instrument as a radio would be a matter of appalling gravity, inviting the possibility of reprisal, punishment, torture, even random killing. The prisoners in the house would automatically fall under suspicion; they would be the first to be searched, interrogated, beaten. Even the fat Jewish dressmakers! But there was a saving element upon which Sophie realized she had to depend—this was the fact of the members of the SS themselves. If a few prisoners like Sophie alone had access to the upper regions of the house, any such contrived theft would be completely out of the question. It would be suicide. But SS members by the dozens beat a path up to Höss’s office door day after day—messengers, bearers of orders and memorandums and manifests and transfers, all sorts of enlisted Sturmanns and Rottenführers and Unterscharführers on various missions from every corner of the camp. They, too, would have laid covetous eyes on Emmi’s little radio; there were a few at least who were not beyond larceny and they, too, would scarcely be immune to suspicion. Indeed, because far more SS troops than prisoners had cause to frequent Höss’s roost under the eaves, it seemed logical to Sophie to assume that trusted inmates like herself might escape the burden of the most immediate suspicion—allowing an even better opportunity to get rid of the goods.
It became, then, a question of precision, as she had whispered to Bronek the day before: secreting the radio beneath her smock, she would hurry downstairs and pass it along to him in the darkness of the cellar. Bronek in turn would hustle the little set quickly to his contact on the other side of the mansion gate. Meanwhile there would be an outcry. The cellar would be ransacked. Joining in the search, Bronek would limp about with gobbets of advice, exhibiting the collaborator’s odious zeal. The fury and commotion would yield nothing. The frightened prisoners would gradually relax. Somewhere in the garrison a pimply-faced Unterscharführer, frozen with terror, would hear himself accused of this reckless felony. A minor triumph in itself for the underground. And here in the depths of the camp, huddled dangerously in the dark around the precious little box, men and women would listen to the far faint sound of a Chopin polonaise, and to voices of exhortation and good tidings and support, and would feel the closest thing to a restoration of life.
She knew she had to move swiftly now and take it, or be forever damned. And so she moved, heart rampaging, not shedding her fear—it clung to her like an evil companion—and sidled her way into the room. She had to walk only a few paces, but even as she did so, swaying, she sensed something wrong, sensed a ghastly error in tactics and timing: the moment she placed her hand on the cool plastic surface of the radio she had a premonition of disaster which filled the space of the room like a soundless scream. And she recalled later more than once how at that exact instant of contact with that longed-for little object, knowing her mistake (why was it instantly jumbled with a game of croquet?), she heard her father’s voice in some remote summer garden of her mind, almost exultant in its contempt: You do everything wrong. But she had the merest instant to reflect on this before hearing the other voice behind her, so unsurprising in its inevitability that even the cool, didactic, Germanic sense of Ordnung in the words themselves were no surprise: “Your business may take you up and down the hallway but you have no business in this room.” Sophie whirled about then and beheld Emmi.
The girl was standing at the closet door. Sophie had never seen her so close at hand. She was clad in pale blue rayon panties; her precocious eleven-year-old breasts bulged in a bra of the same washed-out shade. Her face was very white and astonishingly round, like an underdone biscuit, crowned by a fringe of frizzy yellow hair; her features were both handsome and degenerate; trapped within that spherical frame the puffed prettiness of nose, mouth and eyes appeared to be painted on—at first, Sophie thought, on a doll, then as if on a balloon. On second thought she looked less depraved than... preinnocent? Unborn? Speechless, Sophie gazed at her, thinking: Papa was right about my wrongdoing, I mess up everything; here all I had to do was to investigate things first. She stammered, then found speech. “I’m sorry, gnädiges Fraulein, I was only—” But Emmi interrupted. “Don’t try to explain. You came in here to steal that radio. I saw you. I saw you almost pick it up.” Emmi’s face wore, or perhaps was incapable of, very little expression. With an aplomb that belied the fact of her near-nudity she slowly reached into her closet and drew on a robe of white terry cloth. Then she turned and said with bland matter-of-factness, “I’m going to report you to my father. He will have you punished.”
“I was only going to look at it!” Sophie improvised. “I swear it! I’ve passed by here so many times. I’ve never seen a radio so... so small. So... so cunning! I couldn’t believe it really worked. I just wanted to see—”
“You’re a liar,” said Emmi, “you were going to steal it. I could tell by the look on your face. You had an expression as if you were going to steal it, not just pick it up and look at it.”
“You must believe me,” Sophie said, aware of the sob in the back of her throat, and feeling a hopeless infirm lassitude, legs heavy and cold. “I wouldn’t want to take your...” But she halted, struck by the idea that it didn’t matter. Now that she had so preposterously bungled the job, nothing seemed to matter. It only mattered, still, that on the next day she would see her little boy, and how could Emmi interfere with that?
“You would want to take it,” the girl persisted, “it cost seventy Deutschmarks. You could listen to music on it, down in the cellar. You’re a dirty Polack and Polacks are thieves. My mother says that Polacks are worse thieves than Gypsies and dirtier too.” The nose puckered in the circular face. “You smell!”
Sophie sensed darkness surging at the back of her eyes. She heard herself groan. Because of incalculable stress or hunger or grief or terror, or God knew what, her period had been delayed for at least a week (this had happened to her in the camp twice before), but now at her loins the wet warm downward-pulling sensation came in a rush; she felt the huge abnormal flood and at the same time was aware in her eyes of the spreading, irrepressible darkness. Emmi’s face, a lunar blur, became caught up in this web of darkness, and Sophie found herself falling, falling... Lulled as if amid sluggish waves of time she drowsed in a blessed stupor, awoke listlessly to the sound of a distant gathering ululation that blossomed in her ears, grew louder, becoming a savage roar. For the barest instant she dreamed that the roar was the roar of a polar bear and that she was floating on an iceberg, swept by frigid winds. Her nostrils burned.
“Wake up,” said Emmi. The face, white as wax, hovered so close that she felt the child’s breath on her cheek. Sophie then knew that she was lying flat and supine on the floor while the girl crouched next to her, flourishing a phial of ammonia beneath her nose. The casement window had been flung open, letting the frosty wind fill the room. The shriek in her ears had been the camp whistle; she heard its distant voice now, decrescendo. At eye-level, next to Emmi’s bare knee, was a small plastic medical kit embellished with a green cross. “You fainted,” she said. “Don’t move. Keep your head horizontal for a minute so it will get the flow of blood. Sniff deeply. That cold air will help revive you. Meanwhile, remain still.” Recollection came sweeping back, and as it did Sophie had the feeling that she was the performer in a play from which the central act was missing: wasn’t it only a minute or so ago (it could not have been much longer) that the child had been raging at her like an urchin storm trooper, and could this really be the same creature who was now attending to her with what might pass for humane efficiency, if hardly angelic compassion? Had her collapse brought out in this frightening Mädel with her face like that of a swollen fetus the stifled impulses of a nurse? The question was answered just then, when Sophie groaned and stirred. “You must keep still!” Emmi commanded her. “I have a certificate in first aid—junior grade, first class. Do as I say, do you understand?”
Sophie lay still. She wore no underwear and she wondered how extensively she had stained herself. The back of her smock felt soaked. Surprised at her own delicacy, under the circumstances, she also wondered if she had not at the same time soiled Emmi’s spotless floor. Something in the child’s manner enlarged her sense of helplessness, the feeling of being simultaneously ministered to and victimized. Sophie began to realize that Emmi had her father’s voice, utterly gelid and remote. And in her officious busy bossiness, so lacking in any quality of the tender as she prattled away (now she was smartly smacking Sophie’s cheeks, saying that the first-aid manual stated that smart smacks might help in reviving a victim of die Synkope, as she persisted, with medical precision, in calling a fainting spell), she seemed an Obersturmbannführer in microdimension, the SS spirit and essence—its true hypostasis—embedded in her very genes.
But at last the barrage of slaps on Sophie’s cheeks created, apparently, a satisfactory rosiness, and the child ordered her patient to sit erect and lean against the bed. This Sophie did, slowly, suddenly grateful that she had fainted at the moment and in the way she had. For as she gazed toward the ceiling now through pupils gradually shrinking back to their normal focus, she was aware that Emmi had stood up and was regarding her with an expression resembling benignness, or at least a certain tolerant curiosity, as if there had been expelled from her mind her fury at Sophie for being both a Polack and a thief; the nursing seizure appeared to have been cathartic, allowing her enough in the way of an exercise of authority to satisfy the most frustrated SS dwarfling, after which she now assumed once again the plump round outlines of a little girl. “I will say one thing,” Emmi murmured, “you’re very pretty. Wilhelmine said you must be Swedish.”
“Tell me,” Sophie said in a gentle solicitous voice, aimlessly exploiting the lull, “tell me, what’s that design sewn onto your robe? It’s so attractive.”
“It’s the insignia of my swimming championship. I was the champion in my class. The beginners. I was only eight. I wish we had swimming competition here, but we don’t. It’s the war. I have had to swim in the Sola, which I don’t like. The river’s filled with muck. I was a very fast swimmer in the beginners’ competition.”
“Where was that, Emmi?”
“At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.”
Into her dresser drawer she pounced and filled the crook of one arm with a huge album that spilled out photographs and clippings. She lugged it to Sophie’s side, pausing only to switch on the radio. Cracklings and peeps disturbed the air. She made an adjustment and the static vanished, replaced by a far faint chorus of horns and trumpets, exultant, victorious, Handelian: a shiver flowed down Sophie’s backbone like a benediction of ice. “Das bin ich,” the girl began to say over and over again, pointing to herself in endlessly repeated postures of bathing costume encasing juvenile adipose flesh, mushroom-pale. Had the sun never shone in Dachau? Sophie wondered in somnolent sickish despair. “Das bin ich... und das bin ich,” Emmi continued in her childish drone, stabbing at the photographs with her button thumb, the rapt “me me me” uttered again and again in a half-whisper like an incantation. “I also began to learn diving,” she said. “Look here, this is me.”
Sophie ceased looking at the pictures—all became a blur—and her eyes sought instead the window flung open against the October sky where the evening star hung, astonishingly, as bright as a blob of crystal. An agitation in the air, a sudden thickening of the light around the planet, heralded the onset of smoke, borne earthward by the circulation of cool night wind. For the first time since the morning Sophie smelled, ineluctable as a smotherer’s hand, the odor of burning human beings. Birkenau was consuming the last of the voyagers from Greece. Trumpets! The brazen triumphant hymnody poured out of the ether, hosannas, bleats of rams, angelic annunciations—making Sophie think of all the unborn mornings of her life. She began to weep and said, half aloud, “At least tomorrow I will see Jan. At least that.”
“Why are you crying?” Emmi demanded.
“I don’t know,” Sophie replied. And then she was about to say this: “Because I have a little boy in Camp D. And because your father, tomorrow, is going to let me see him. He is almost your age.” But instead she was brought up short by an abrupt voice on the radio, interrupting the choir of brass: “Ici Londres!” She listened to the voice, remote, spoken as if through tinfoil but for the moment clear, a transmission meant for the French but vaulting the Carpathians to make itself heard here on the twilit rim of this anus mundi. She blessed the unknown announcer as she would a cherished sweetheart, smitten with wonder at the tumbling rush of words: “L’ltalie a déclaré qu’un état de guerre existe contre l’Allemagne...” Though exactly how, or why, Sophie could not fathom, her instinct combined with a certain subtle jubilation in the voice from London (which, gazing straight at Emmi now, she knew the child could not understand) told her that this news spelled for the Reich real and lasting woe. It mattered not that Italy itself lay wasted. It was as if she had heard tidings of the Nazis’ sure, eventual ruin. And as she strained to hear the voice, fading out now into a fogbank of static, she continued to weep, aware that she wept for Jan, yes, but also for other things, mainly herself: for her failure to steal the radio and her certain knowledge that she could never retrieve the courage to try to steal it again. That preservative and maternal passion of hers which in Warsaw, only months before, Wanda had deemed so selfish, so indecent, was something that, brought to its cruelest trial, Sophie could not overcome—and she wept now, helplessly, in the shame of her dereliction. She placed quivering fingers in front of her eyes. “I’m crying because I’m so hungry,” she said to Emmi in a murmur, and this was at least in part the truth. She thought she might faint again.
The stench became more powerful. A dim fire-glow was reflected from the night’s horizon. Emmi went to the window to close out either the cold or the pestilential air, or both. Following her with her eyes, Sophie caught sight of a sampler on the wall (the embroidery as florid as the German words), framed in shellacked and curlicued pine.
Just as the Heavenly Father saved people
from sin and from Hell,
Hitler saves the German Volk
from destruction.
The window slammed shut. “That stink is of Jews burning,” Emmi said, turning back to her. “But I guess you know that. It’s forbidden to ever speak of it in this house, but you—you’re just a prisoner. The Jews are the chief enemy of our people. My sister Iphigenie and I have a jingle we made up about the Yids. It begins ‘Der Itzig—’ ”
Sophie stifled a cry and blinded her sight with her hands. “Emmi, Emmi... ” she whispered. In her blindness she was overtaken, again, with the mad vision of the child as a fetus, yet fully grown, gigantic, a leviathan brainless and serene, silently stroking its way through the black, incomprehensible waters of Dachau and Auschwitz.
“Emmi, Emmi!” she managed to say. “Why is the name of the Heavenly Father in this room?”
It was, she said a long time after, one of the last religious thoughts she ever had.
After that night—her final night as a prisoner-resident in the Commandant’s house—Sophie spent nearly fifteen more months at Auschwitz. As I have said before, because of her silence this long period of her incarceration remained (and still remains) largely a blank to me. But there are one or two things I can say for a certainty. When she left Haus Höss she was lucky enough to regain her status as a translator and typist in the general stenographic pool, and so remained among the small group of the relatively privileged; thus, while her life was wretched and her privations were often severe, she was for a long time spared the slow and inevitable sentence of death which was the lot of the multitude of prisoners. It was only during the last five months of her imprisonment, when the Russian forces approached from the east and the camp underwent a gradual dissolution, that Sophie endured the worst of her physical sufferings. It was then that she was transferred to the women’s camp at Birkenau and it was there that she experienced the starvation and diseases that brought her very close to death.
During those long months she was almost completely untroubled or untouched by sexual desire. Illness and debilitation would account for this state, of course—especially during the unspeakable months at Birkenau—but she was certain it was also psychological: the pervasive smell and presence of death caused any generative urge to seem literally obscene, a travesty, and thus—as in the depths of illness—to remain at so low an ebb as to be virtually snuffed out. At least that was Sophie’s personal reaction, and she told me that she had sometimes wondered whether it might not have been this total absence of amorous feeling which threw into even sharper focus the dream she had that last night while sleeping in the basement of the Commandant’s house. Or perhaps, she thought, it was the dream that helped dampen all further desire. Like most people, Sophie rarely remembered dreams for long in vivid or significant detail, but this dream was so violently, unequivocally and pleasurably erotic, so blasphemous and frightening, and so altogether memorable, that much later she was able to believe (with a touch of facetiousness which only the passage of time could permit) that it might have scared her away from thoughts of sex all by itself, quite aside from bad health and mortal despair...
After leaving Emmi’s room she had made her way downstairs and then fallen into a heap on her pallet. She had sunk into almost instantaneous sleep, with only a moment’s anticipation of the coming day when she would finally see her son. And she was soon walking alone along a beach—a beach, in the manner of dreams, both familiar and strange. It was a sandy shore of the Baltic Sea, and something told her that it was the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. To the right of her was the shallow wind-swept Kiel Bay, dotted with sailing craft; on her left as she strolled north toward the distant coastal barrens of Denmark were sand dunes, and behind these a forest of pinetrees and evergreen shimmered in the noonday sun. Although she was clothed she sensed a nakedness, as if she were enveloped in a fabric of seductive transparency. She felt unashamedly provocative, conscious of her backside swaying amid the folds of her transparent skirt, attracting the eyes of the bathers umbrella-shrouded along the beach. Immediately the bathers were left behind. A path through the marsh grass made a junction with the beach; she continued past this place, aware now that a man was following her, and that his eyes were fastened on her hips and the extravagant swaying motion she felt compelled to make. The man came abreast of her, looked at her, and she returned his gaze. She could not possibly recognize the face, which was middle-aged, jovial, fair, very German, attractive—no, it was more than attractive, it made her melt with desire. But the man himself! Who was he? She struggled for an instant’s recognition (the voice, so familiar, purred “Guten Tag”) and in a flash she thought him to be a famous singer, a Heldentenor from the Berlin Opera. He smiled at her with clean white teeth, stroked her on the buttocks, uttered a few words that were at once barely comprehensible and flagrantly lewd, then disappeared. She smelled the warm sea breeze.
She was at the doorway of a chapel which itself was situated on a dune overlooking the sea. She could not see him but she felt the presence of the man somewhere. It was a sunny, simple chapel with plain wooden pews on either side of a single aisle; over the altar hung a cross of unpainted pine, almost primitive in its stripped, unadorned angularity, and somehow loomingly central to Sophie’s apprehension of the place, into which she now wandered, feverish with lust. She heard herself giggle. Why? Why should she giggle when the little chapel was suddenly suffused by the grief of a single contralto voice and the strains of that tragic cantata Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde? She stood before the altar, unclothed now; the music, pouring forth softly from some source both distant and near, enveloped her body like a benison. She giggled again. The man from the beach reappeared. He was naked, but again she could not name him. He was no longer smiling; a murderous scowl clouded his face and the threat embedded in his countenance excited her, inflaming her lust. He told her sternly to look down. His penis was thick and erect. He commanded her to get down on her knees and suck him. She did so in a frenzy of craving, pulling back the foreskin to expose a spade-shaped glans of a deep blue-black hue and so huge that she knew that she could not surround it with her lips. Yet she was able to do this, with a choking sensation that wilted her with pleasure, while at the same time the Bach chimes, freighted with the noise of death and time, shivered down her spine. Schlage dock, gewünschte Stunde! He pushed her away from his belly, told her to turn around, commanded her to kneel at the altar beneath the skeletal cruciform emblem of God’s suffering, glowing like naked bone. She turned at his order, knelt on hands and knees, heard a clattering of hoofs on the floor, smelled smoke, cried out with delight as the hairy belly and groin swarmed around her naked buttocks in a tight cloaklike embrace, the rampaging cylinder deep within her cunt, thrusting from behind again and again...
The dream still hung in her mind hours later when Bronek awakened her, bearing his pail of slops. “I waited for you last night but you didn’t come,” he said. “I waited as long as I could but it got too late. My man at the gate had to leave. What happened to the radio?” He spoke in low tones. The others were still asleep.
That dream! She could not dislodge it from her mind after these many hours. Groggily, she shook her head. Bronek repeated the question.
“Help me, Bronek,” she said listlessly, gazing up at the little man.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen someone... awful.” Even as she spoke, she knew she was making no sense. “I mean, Christ, I’m so hungry.”
“Eat this, then,” said Bronek. “It’s what’s left over from their rabbit stew. Lots of meat in it.”
The mess was slippery, greasy and cold but she slurped it up ravenously, watching the rise and fall of Lotte’s breast as she slept on the pallet nearby. Between gulps she informed the handyman that she was leaving. “God, I’ve been so hungry since yesterday,” she murmured. “Bronek, thank you.”
“I waited,” he said. “What happened?”
“The little girl’s door was locked,” she lied. “I tried to get in but the door was locked.”
“And today you’re going back to the barracks. Sophie, I’m going to miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too, Bronek.”
“Maybe you could still get the radio. That is, if you go up to the attic again. I can still pass it on this afternoon, get it through the gate.”
Why didn’t the imbecile shut up? She was finished with that radio—finished! She might easily have escaped suspicion before, but certainly not now. Surely if the radio were to disappear today, that terrible child would blab all about last night’s visit. Anything further having to do with the radio was out of the question, especially on a day like this with its electric certainty of Jan’s appearance—this reunion which she had looked forward to with a suspenseful greed beyond imagining. And so she repeated her lie. “We’ll have to forget that radio, Bronek. There’s no way to get at it. The little monster always keeps her door locked.”
“All right, Sophie,” said Bronek, “but if something happens... if you can get it, just give it to me quickly. Here in the cellar.” He made an empty chuckle. “Rudi would never suspect me. He thinks he’s got me in his pocket. He thinks I’m mentally deficient.” And in the morning shadows, from an orifice filled with cracked teeth, he shed upon Sophie a luminous, enigmatic smile.
Sophie had a confused and unformed belief in precognition, even of clairvoyance (on several occasions she had sensed or predicted coming events), although she did not connect it with the supernatural. I admit that she inclined toward this explanation until I argued her out of it. Some inner logic persuaded us both that such moments of supreme intuition followed from perfectly natural “keys”—circumstances which had been buried in memory or had lain dormant in the subconscious. Her dream, for example. Anything but a metaphysical explanation seemed utterly impossible for the fact that the love partner in her dream should have been a man whom she finally recognized as Walter Dürrfeld and that she should have dreamed of him only the night before setting eyes on him for the first time in six years. It was quite beyond the bounds of plausibility that that suave and seductive visitor who had so captivated her in Cracow should appear in the flesh only hours after such a dream (duplicating the very face and voice of the dream figure)—when she had not thought of the man or even heard his name spoken in all that time.
But had she not? Later, as she sorted out her recollections, she understood that she had heard the name spoken, and more than once. How often had she heard Rudolf Höss order his aide Scheffler to put in a telephone call to Herr Dürrfeld at the Buna factory without realizing (except in her subconscious) that the recipient of the call was her romantic fixation of long ago? Certainly a dozen times. Höss had been on the phone to someone named Dürrfeld day in and day out. Moreover, the same name had figured prominently on some of those papers and memoranda of Höss’s she had glanced at from time to time. Thus in the end, upon analysis of these keys, it was not at all difficult to explain Walter Dürrfeld’s role as protagonist in Sophie’s terrifying yet exquisite Liebestraum. Nor was it really difficult, either, to see why her dream lover became so easily metamorphosed into the devil.
That morning the voice she heard from the anteroom outside Höss’s office in the attic was identical to that of the man in the dream. She had not entered the office immediately, as she had each morning for the past ten days, although she burned to rush through the door and smother her child in her arms. Höss’s adjutant, perhaps aware of her new status, had brusquely ordered her to stand outside and wait. She then felt sudden, unspeakable doubt. Could it really be that since Höss had promised to let her see Jan, the little boy was inside the office, listening to the strange loud colloquy between Höss and the person with the voice of the man in her dream? She stirred nervously under Scheffler’s gaze, aware from his icy manner of her loss of privilege; she was only a common prisoner again, among the lowliest of the low. She sensed his hostility, it was like a graven sneer. She fixed her eyes on the framed photograph of Goebbels adorning the wall and as she did so an odd picture leaped to mind: that of Jan standing between Höss and the other man, the child peering upward first at the Commandant and then at the stranger with the voice that was so perplexingly familiar. Suddenly, like a chord drawn forth from the bass pipes of an organ, she heard words from the past: We could go to all the great musical shrines. She gasped, sensed the adjutant’s startled response to the choked noise she made. As if she had been struck a blow in the face, she rocked backward with a recognition of the voice, whispered to herself the name of its owner—and for the swiftest instant this October day and that afternoon years ago in Cracow melted together almost indistinguishably.
“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 will 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.’ ”
Sophie paused and gazed into the murky evening light of the Maple Court, invaded by a fluttering crowd of vagrant moths, the place deserted now except for ourselves and the bartender, a weary Irishman making a muffled clacking sound at the cash register. Then she said, “But this man did not keep his word, Stingo. And I never saw my little boy any more. Why should I think this SS man might have a thing called honor? Maybe it was because of my father, who was always talking about the German army, and officers and their high sense of honor and principles and such. I don’t know. But Höss did not keep his word, and so I don’t know what happened. Höss left Auschwitz for Berlin soon after this and I went back to the barracks, where I was an ordinary stenographer. I never got any kind of message from Höss, ever. Even when he came back the next year he did not contact me. For a long time I figure, well, Jan has been taken out of the camp and sent to Germany and soon I will get a message saying where he is and how his health is, and so on. But I never heard nothing at all. Then sometime later I got this terrible message on a piece of paper from Wanda, which said this—just this and nothing more: ‘I have seen Jan again. He is doing as well as can be expected.’ Stingo, I almost died at this because, you see, it meant that Jan had not been taken out of the camp, after all—Höss had not arranged for him to be put in Lebensborn.
“Then a few weeks after this I got another message from Wanda at Birkenau, through this prisoner—a French Resistance woman who came to the barracks. The woman said that Wanda had told her to say to me that Jan was gone from the Children’s Camp. And this for a short time filled me with joy until I realized that it really meant nothing—that it might mean only that Jan was dead. Not sent to Lebensborn, but dead of disease or something—or of just the winter, it had become so cold. And there was no way for me to find out what was truly the case about Jan, whether he had died there at Birkenau or was in Germany somewhere.” Sophie paused. “Auschwitz was so vast, so hard to get news of anyone. Anyway, Höss never sent me any message like he said he would. Mon Dieu, it was imbécile for me to think that such a man would have this thing he called meine Ehre. My honor! What a filthy liar! He was nothing but what Nathan calls a crumbum. And I was just a piece of Polish Dreck for him to the end.” After another pause she peered up at me from her cupped hands. “You know, Stingo, I never knew what happened to Jan. It would almost be better that...” And her voice trailed off into silence.
Quietude. Enervation. A sense of the summer’s wind-down, of the bitter bottom of things. I had no voice to answer Sophie after all this; certainly I had nothing to say when her own voice now rose slightly to make a quick blunt statement which, ghastly and heartbreaking as it was to me as a revelation, seemed in light of all the foregoing to be merely another agonizing passage embedded in an aria of unending bereavement. “I thought I might find out something. But soon after I got this last message from Wanda, I learned that she had been caught for her Resistance activity. They took her to this well-known prison block. They tortured her, then they hung her up on a hook and made her slowly strangle to death... Yesterday I called Wanda a kvetch. It’s my last lie to you. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”
Sitting there in the wan light, both Sophie and I had, I think, a feeling that our nerve endings had been pulled out nearly to the snapping point by the slow accumulation of too much that was virtually unbearable. With a feeling of decisive, final negation that was almost like panic within me, I wanted to hear no more about Auschwitz, not another word. Yet a trace of the momentum of which I have spoken was still at work upon Sophie (though I realized that her spirits were bedraggled and frayed) and she kept going long enough to tell me, in one brief insistent burst, of her last leave-taking from the Commandant of Auschwitz.
“He said to me, ‘Go now.’ And I turned and started to go and I said to him, ‘Danke, mein Kommandant, for helping me.’ Then he said—you must believe me, Stingo—he said this. He said, ‘Hear that music? Do you like Franz Lehàr? He is my favorite composer.’ I was so startled by this strange question, I could barely answer. Franz Lehár, I thought, and then I found myself saying, ‘No, not really. Why?’ He looked disappointed for a moment, and then he said again, ‘Go now.’ And so I went. I walked downstairs past Emmi’s room and there was the little radio playing again. This time I could have taken it easily because I looked around very carefully and there was no Emmi anywhere. But as I say, I didn’t have the courage to do what I should have done, with my hope for Jan and everything. And I knew that this time they would suspect me first. So I left the radio there, and was suddenly filled with a terrible hatred for myself. But I left it there and it was still playing. Can you imagine what it was that the radio was playing? Guess what, Stingo.”
There comes a point in a narrative like this one when a certain injection of irony seems inappropriate, perhaps even “counterindicated”—despite the underlying impulse toward it—because of the manner in which irony tends so easily toward leadenness, thus taxing the reader’s patience along with his or her credulity. But since Sophie was my faithful witness, supplying the irony herself as a kind of coda to testimony I had no reason to doubt, I must set her final observation down, adding only the comment that these words of hers were delivered in that wobbly tone of blurred, burned-out, exhausted emotional pandemonium—part hilarity, part profoundest grief—which I had never heard before in Sophie, and only rarely before in anyone, and which plainly signaled the onset of hysteria.
“What was it playing?” I said.
“It was the overture to this operetta of Franz Lehár,” she gasped, “Das Land des Lächelns—The Land of Smiles.”
It was well past midnight when we strolled the short blocks home to the Pink Palace. Sophie was calm now. No one was abroad in the balmy darkness, and along the maple-lined summer streets the houses of the good burghers of Flatbush were lightless and hushed with slumber. Walking next to me, Sophie wound her arm around my waist and her perfume momentarily stung my senses, but I understood the gesture by now to be merely sisterly or friendly, and besides, her long recital had left me far beyond any stirrings of desire. Gloom and despondency hung over me like the August darkness itself and I wondered idly if I would be able to sleep.
Approaching Mrs. Zimmerman’s stronghold, where a night light glowed dimly in the pink hallway, we stumbled slightly on the rough sidewalk and Sophie spoke for the first time since we had left the bar. “Have you got an alarm clock, Stingo? I’ve got to get up so early tomorrow, to move my things into my new place and then get to work on time. Dr. Blackstock has been very patient with me during these past few days, but I really must get back to work. Why don’t you call me during the middle of the week?” I heard her stifle a yawn.
I was about to make a reply about the alarm clock when a shadow, dark gray, detached itself from the blacker shadows surrounding the front porch of the house. My heart made a bad beat and I said, “Oh my God.” It was Nathan. I uttered his name in a whisper just as Sophie recognized him too and gave a soft moan. For an instant I had the, I suppose, reasonable idea that he was going to attack us. But then I heard Nathan call out gently, “Sophie,” and she disengaged her arm from my waist with such haste that my shirttail was pulled out of my trousers’ waistband. I halted and stood quite still as they plunged toward each other through the chiaroscuro of dimly trembling, leafy light, and I heard the sobbing sounds that Sophie made just before they collided and embraced. For long moments they clung together, merged into each other amid the late-summer darkness. Then at last I saw Nathan slowly sink to his knees on the hard pavement, where, surrounding Sophie’s legs with his arms, he remained motionless for what seemed an interminable time, frozen in an attitude of devotion, or fealty, or penance, or supplication—or all of these.