Sophie's Choice - William Styron [159]
Sophie heard Lotte wake with a groan, muttering disconnected syllabics, perhaps some matutinal invocation to Jehovah, in a sepulchral Rhenish accent. Bronek, thrusting the pan down between them, said, “Look there—what’s left of a pig’s shank, with meat on it still. Plenty of bread. Also some fine bits of cabbage. I knew you girls would get fed good the minute I heard yesterday that Schmauser was coming to dinner.” The handyman, pale and bald in the silvery filtering light, all angular limbs and joints like a mantis, switched from Polish to his crippled clownish German—this for Lotte’s benefit as he goosed her with his elbow. “Aufwecken, Lotte!” he whispered hoarsely. “Aufwecken, mein schöne Blume, mein kleine Engel!” Were Sophie ever disposed to laughter, this running by-play between Bronek and the elephantine governess, who plainly enjoyed his attentions, would have come as close as anything to providing her with comic relief.
“Come awake, my little Bible-worm,” Bronek persisted, and at this moment Lotte roused herself and sat up. Bleared with sleep, her slab of a face looked monstrous yet ethereally placid and benign, like one of those Easter Island effigies. Then without a moment’s hesitation she began to slurp up the food.
Sophie held back for a moment. She knew that Lotte, a godly soul, would take only her share, and so luxuriated in the space of time before she would eat her own portion. She salivated with pleasure at the sight of the slimy mess in the pan and blessed the name Schmauser. He was an SS Obergruppenführer, the equivalent of a lieutenant general and Höss’s superior from Wroclaw; his visit had been bruited about the house for days. And thus Bronek’s theory had proved to be accurate: get a real bigwig in the house, he had kept saying, and Höss will lay on such a fine feed that there will be enough left over so even the cockroaches will get sick.
“What’s it like out, Bronek?” said Lotte between mouthfuls of food. Like Sophie, she knew that he had a farmer’s nose for weather.
“Cool. Wind from the west. Sunny now and then. But lots of low clouds. They keep the air down. The air stinks now but it might get better. A lot of Jews going up the chimney. My darling Sophie, please eat.” He spoke the last in Polish, grinning, revealing pink gums in which the stubs of three or four teeth protruded like raw white slivers.
Bronek’s career at Auschwitz coincided with the history of the camp itself. By happenstance, he was one of its early novitiates, and had begun working in Haus Höss shortly after his incarceration. He was an ex-farmer from the vicinity of Miastko, in the far north. Most of his teeth had fallen out as a result of his involvement in a vitamin-deficiency experiment; like a rat or guinea pig, he had been systematically deprived of ascorbic acid and other essentials until the expected ruination in his mouth: it may have also made him a little daft. Whatever, he had been struck by the preternatural luck that came down on certain prisoners for no good reason at all, like a lightning bolt. Ordinarily, he would have been put away after such a trial, a useless husk sped into the night by a quick injection in the heart. But he possessed a farmer’s resilience and a really extraordinary vigor. Save for his destroyed teeth, he displayed almost none of the symptoms of scurvy—lassitude, weakness, weight loss, and so on—which were predicted under the circumstances. He remained as hardy as a billygoat, which brought him under the bemused scrutiny of the SS doctors and, in a roundabout way, to the attention of Höss. Asked to take a look at this phenomenon, Höss did so, and in their fleeting encounter something about Bronek—perhaps only the language he spoke, the droll garbled German of an uneducated Pole from Pomerania—caught the Commandant’s fancy. He moved Bronek into the protection of his house, where he had worked ever since, enjoying certain small privileges, leeway to wander through the premises picking up gossip, and that general exemption from constant surveillance that is granted a pet or favorite