Sophie's Choice - William Styron [156]
And although he could not have realized it as he scuttled about during those days of early fall, the clock was ticking remorselessly away toward his end. Under the indifferent eye of the Nazi Moloch he was another doomed cipher. So on the wet gray morning in November when Sophie, kneeling alone in St. Mary’s church, had that premonition she earlier described and leaped up and rushed back to the university—there to discover the glorious medieval courtyard cordoned off by German troops who held one hundred and eighty faculty members captive beneath their rifles and machine guns—the Professor and Kazik were among the unlucky ones shivering in the cold, hands clawing at the heavens. But she never laid eyes on them again. In the later, emended (and, I am convinced, truthful) version of her story she told me she felt no real bereavement over the seizure of her father and husband—she was by this time too alienated from both of them for it to affect her deeply—but she was forced to feel on another level shock that hammered at her bones, glacial fear and a devastating sense of loss. Her entire sense of self—of her identity—was unfastened. For if the Germans could commit this obscene assault on score upon score of defenseless and unsuspecting teachers, it was the forerunner of God only knew what horrors awaiting Poland in the coming years. And it was for that reason alone if for nothing else that she hurled herself sobbing into her mother’s arms. Her mother was genuinely shattered. A sweet, unthinking, submissive woman, she had retained a faithful love for her husband to the very end; through the dumbshow of the sorrow Sophie simulated for her benefit she could not help but grieve for her mother’s grief.
As for the Professor—sucked like a mere larva into the burial mound of KL Sachsenhausen, dismal clone of the insensate leviathan of human affliction spawned years before at KL Dachau—his efforts to extricate himself were in vain. And it becomes all the more ironic since it is plain that the Germans had unwittingly imprisoned and doomed a man whom later they might have considered a major prophet—the eccentric Slavic philosopher whose vision of the “final solution” antedated that of Eichmann and his confederates (even perhaps of Adolf Hitler, the dreamer and conceiver of it all), and who had the message tangibly in his possession. “Ich habe meine Flugschrift,” he wrote piteously to Sophie’s mother in a smuggled note, the only communication they ever received, “I have my pamphlet. Ich verstehe nicht, warum... I cannot understand why I am unable to get through to the authorities here and make them see...”
The hold of mortal flesh, and of mortal love, is bewilderingly strong, never so fierce as when love is lodged in childhood memory: strolling along beside her, running his fingers through the tangles of her yellow hair, he had once taken her for a ride in a pony cart amid the summery morning fragrance and birdsong of the gardens below Wawel Castle. Sophie remembered this and could not smother a moment of scalding anguish when the news of his death came and she saw him falling, falling—protesting to the last that they had the wrong man—in a fusillade of hot bullets against a wall in Sachsenhausen.
Chapter Ten
DEEP IN THE GROUND and surrounded by thick stone walls, the basement of Höss’s house where Sophie slept was one of the very few places in the camp into which there never penetrated the smell of burning human flesh. This was one of the reasons that she sought its shelter as often as she could, despite the fact that the part of the basement reserved for her straw pallet was damp and ill-lit and stank of rot and mold. Somewhere behind the walls there was an incessant trickle of water in the pipes from the drains and toilets upstairs, and occasionally she was disturbed at night by the furry, shadowy visit of a rat. But all in all this dim purgatory was a far better place to be than any of the barracks—even the one where for the previous six months she had lived with several dozen other relatively privileged female prisoners who worked in the camp offices. Although spared in those confines most of the brutality and destitution which was the lot of the common inmate throughout the rest of the camp, there had been constant noise and no privacy, and she had suffered most from an almost continual lack of sleep. In addition, she had never been able to keep herself clean. Here, however, she shared her quarters with only a handful of prisoners. And of the several seraphic luxuries afforded by the basement, one was its proximity to a laundry room. Sophie made grateful use of these facilities; indeed, she would have been required to use them, since the mistress of the mansion, Hedwig H