Sophie's Choice - William Styron [175]
Sophie kept her eyes shut as the flow of his weird Nazi grammar, with its outlandishly overheated images and clumps of succulent Teutonic wordbloat, moved its way up through the tributaries of her mind, nearly drowning her reason. Then suddenly the mist from his sweaty torso reeked in her nostrils like rancid meat and she heard herself give a gasp at the very instant that he yanked her body up against his own. She had a sense of elbows, knees and a scratchy cheese-grater of stubble. As insistent in his ardor as his housekeeper, he was incomparably more awkward and his arms around her seemed multitudinous, like those of a huge mechanical fly. She held her breath while his hands at her back tried out some sort of massage. And his heart—his rampaging galloping heart! Never had she conceived that a single heart was capable of the riotous romantic thumping which moved against her like a drumbeat through the Commandant’s damp shirt. Trembling like a very sick man, he essayed nothing so bold as a kiss, although she was certain she sensed some protuberance—his tongue or nose—mooning restlessly around her bekerchiefed ear. Then an abrupt knock at the door caused him to break apart from her swiftly and he uttered a soft, miserable “Scheiss!”
It was his adjutant Scheffler again. Begging the Commandant’s pardon, Scheffler said, standing in the doorway, but Frau Höss—now on the landing below—had come upstairs with a question for the Commandant. She was going to the movies at the garrison recreation center and she wanted to know if she might take Iphigenie with her. Iphigenie, the older daughter, was recovering from a week-long case of die Grippe and Madame wished to find out whether, in the Commandant’s judgment, the girl was well enough to accompany her to the matinee. Or should she consult Dr. Schmidt? Höss snarled something in return which Sophie could not hear. But it was during this brief exchange that she had a desperate flash of intuition, sensing that the interruption with its jejune domestic flavor could only blot out forever the magic moment into which the Commandant, like some soul-eaten Tristan, had had the infirmity to allow himself to be lured. And when he turned again to face her she knew immediately that her presentiment was an accurate one, and that her cause was in its deepest peril yet.
“When he come back toward me,” Sophie said, “his face was even more twisted up and tormented than before. Again I have this strange feeling that he was going to hit me. But he didn’t. Instead, he come very close to me and said, ‘I long to have intercourse with you’—he used the word Verkehr, which have in German the same stupid formal sound as ‘intercourse’; he said, ‘Having intercourse with you would allow me to lose myself, I might find forgetfulness.’ But then suddenly his face changed. It was as if Frau Höss had changed everything around in a moment. His face became very calm and sort of impersonal, you know, and he said, ‘But I cannot and I will not, it is too much of a risk. It would be doomed to disaster.’ He turned away from me then, turned his back to me and walked to the window. I heard him say, ‘Also, pregnancy here would be out of the question.’ Stingo, I thought I might faint. I felt very weak from all my emotion and this tension; also, I guess, from hunger, from not eating anything since those figs I had vomited up that morning, and only the little piece of chocolate he had given me. He turned around again and spoke to me. He said,