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Sophie's Choice - William Styron [255]

By Root 23131 0
’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.

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