Sophie's Choice - William Styron [140]
She finished the letter without a mistake, appending an exclamation point to the salute to the Führer with such vigorous precision that it brought forth from the machine a faintly echoing tintinnabulation. Höss looked up from his manual, gestured for the letter and for a fountain pen, which she swiftly handed him. Sophie stood waiting while Höss scribbled an intimate postscript on a slip which she had paper-clipped to the bottom of the original, he muttering aloud in cadence to his written words, as was his habit, “Dear old Heini: Personal regrets at not being able to meet you tomorrow at Posen, where this letter is being routed air courier. Good luck with your speech to the SS ‘Old Boys.’ Rudi.” He gave the letter back to her, saying, “This must go out soon, but do the letter to the priest first.”
She returned to the table, straining with the effort as she lowered the leaden German contraption to the floor, replacing it with the Polish model. Manufactured in Czechoslovakia, it was much less heavy than the German typewriter, and of a more recent vintage; it was also speedier and considerably kinder to her fingers. She began to type, translating as she went from the shorthand message Höss had dictated to her the previous afternoon. It concerned a minor but vexing problem, one having to do with community relations. It also had weird echoes of Les Misérables, which she recalled... oh, so well. Höss had received a letter from a priest in a nearby village—nearby, but beyond the perimeter of the surrounding area, which had been cleared of Polish inhabitants. The priest’s complaint was that a small group of drunken camp guards (exact number unknown) had entered the church at night and made off with a pair of priceless silver candlesticks from the altar—irreplaceable objects, really, hand-wrought works of art dating to the seventeenth century. Sophie had translated the letter aloud to Höss from the priest’s crucified, splintered Polish. She had sensed the audaciousness, even the brazenness of the letter as she read it; one or the other, or perhaps simple stupidity, had to impel such a communication from an insignificant parish priest to the Commandant of Auschwitz. Yet there was a certain guile; the tone was obsequious to the point of servility (“intrude upon the honored Commandant’s valuable time”) when it was not delicate to a fault (“and we can understand how the excessive use of alcohol might provoke such an escapade, which was no doubt harmlessly conceived”), but the plain fact was that the poor priest had written in a controlled frenzy of unhappiness, as if he and his flock had been divested of their most revered possession, which they no doubt had been. In reading out loud, Sophie had emphasized the obsequious tone, which somehow underscored the priest’s manic desperation, and when she had finished she heard Höss give a groan of discomfort.
“Candlesticks!” he said. “Why must I have problems about candlesticks?”
She looked up to see the wisp of a self-mocking smile on his lips, and she realized—for the first time after these many hours in his mechanically impersonal presence, when any inquiry he might have made of her had strictly to do with stenography and translation—that his mildly facetious, rhetorical question was addressed at least partially to her. She had been so taken off balance that her pencil flew out of her hand. She felt her mouth drop open but she said nothing, and could muster no ability to return his smile.
“The church,” he said to her, “we must try to be polite to the local church—even in a country village. It is good policy.”
Silently she bent down and retrieved her pencil from the floor.