Sophie's Choice - William Styron [150]
Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes,
und seiner Hände Werk
zeigt an das Firmament!
The Elysian chorus, thrusting itself up through the muttering chatter of Höss and his aide below, stabbed her with such astonished exaltation that she rose spontaneously from her seat at the typewriter, as if in homage, faintly trembling. What on earth had happened? What fool or freak had put that record on the machine? Or might it have been only Hedwig Höss herself, gone suddenly mad? Sophie didn’t know, but it didn’t matter (it later occurred to her that it must have been the Hösses’ second daughter, Emmi, a blond eleven-year-old with a sullen freckled perfectly circular face, in idle postprandial boredom fiddling with tunes both novel and outlandish); it didn’t matter. The ecstatic hosanna moved across her skin like divine hands, touching her with ecstatic ice; chill after chill coursed through her flesh; for long seconds the fog and night of her existence, through which she had stumbled like a sleepwalker, evaporated as if melted by the burning sun. She stepped to the window. In the angled windowpane she saw the reflection of her pale face beneath the checkered scarf, below this the blue and white stripes of her coarse prisoner’s smock; blinking, weeping, gazing straight through her own diaphanous image, she glimpsed the magical white horse again, grazing now, the meadow, the sheep beyond, and further still, as if at the very edge of the world, the rim of the drab gray autumnal woods, transmuted by the music’s incandescence into a towering frieze of withering but majestic foliage, implausibly beautiful, aglow with some immanent grace. “Our Father... ” she began in German. Half drowned, borne utterly away by the anthem, she closed her eyes while the archangelic trio chanted its mysterious praise to the whirling earth:
Dem kommenden Tage sagt es der Tag.
Die Nacht, die verschwand
der folgenden Nacht...
“It stopped then, the music,” Sophie said to me. “No, not just then but right afterwards. It stopped in the middle of that last passage—do you know it maybe?—that in English have, I think, the words that go ‘In all the lands resounds the Word—’ It just stopped suddenly, this music, and I felt a complete emptiness. I never finished the paternoster, the prayer I begun. I don’t know any more, I think maybe it was that moment that I begun to lose my faith. But I don’t know any more, about when God leave me. Or I left Him. Anyway, I felt this emptiness. It was like finding something precious in a dream where it is all so real—something or someone, I mean, unbelievably precious—only to wake up and realize the precious person is gone. Forever! I have done that so many times in my life, waking up with that loss! And when this music stopped, it was like that, and suddenly I knew—I had this premonition—that I would never hear such music again. The door was still open and I could hear Höss and Scheffler talking downstairs. And then far down below Emmi—I’m sure it must have been Emmi—put guess what on the phonograph. ‘The Beer Barrel Polka.’ I felt such rage then. That fat little bitch with this face like a white moon, made of oleo-mar-ga-rine. I could have killed her. She was playing ‘The Beer Barrel Polka,’ loud; they must have been able to hear it in the garden, in the barracks, in the town. In Warsaw. The singing was in English, that stupid piece.
“But I knew I had to control myself, forget about music, think of other things. Also, you see, I knew that I must use every bit of intelligence that I had, every bit of wit, I think you would say, in order to get what I wanted out of Höss. I knew he hated Poles, but that was no matter. I have made this—comment dit-on, fêlure... crack!—crack in the mask already and now I must move further on because time was of l’essence. Bronek, that was this handyman, had whispered to us women in the cellar that he heard this rumor that Höss was going soon to be transferred to Berlin. I must move quickly if I was to—yes, I will say it, seduce Höss, even