Sophie's Choice - William Styron [166]
She had been a little girl climbing, a dozen years before, in the Dolomites with her cousin Krystyna; chattering in French, they had been searching for edelweiss. Dark and misty peaks soared up around them. Baffling, like all dreams, touched with shadowy peril, the vision had also been almost unbearably sweet. Above them the milky-white flower had beckoned from the rocks and Krystyna, preceding her up a dizzying path, had called back, “Zosia, I’ll bring it down!” Then Krystyna seemed to slip and, in a shower of pebbles, to be on the edge of falling: the dream became murky with terror. Sophie prayed for Krystyna as she would for herself: Angel of God, guardian angel, stay by her side... She uttered the prayer over and over again. Angel, don’t let her fall! Suddenly the dream was flooded with alpine sunlight and Sophie looked up. Serene and triumphant, framed in a golden aureole of light, the child smiled down at Sophie, securely perched on a mossy promontory, clutching the sprig of edelweiss. “Zosia, je l’ai trouvé!” Krystyna cried. And in the dream her feeling of averted evil, of safety, of answered prayer and jubilant resurrection was so piercingly hurtful that when she came awake, hearing Lotte’s noise, her eyes stung with salty tears. Then her eyelids had closed again and her head had fallen back in a futile attempt to recapture her phantasmal joy when she felt Bronek roughly shaking her shoulder.
“I’ve got good grub for you ladies this morning,” Bronek said. Cued to the Germanic punctiliousness of the manse, he had arrived exactly on schedule. In a battered copper pan he carried the food, almost invariably leftovers from the Höss dinner table of the night before. It was always cold, this morning provender (as if to feed pets, the female cook left it in the pan each night by the kitchen door, from whence Bronek fetched it at daybreak), and usually consisted of a greasy potpourri of bones with bits of meat and gristle attached, crusts of bread (on propitious days smeared with a little margarine), vegetable remnants and sometimes a half-eaten apple or pear. By comparison with the food fed to the prisoners in the camp at large, this was a sumptuous meal; indeed, it was a banquet in terms of mere quantity, and since this breakfast was occasionally augmented, inexplicably, by such tidbits as canned sardines or a hunk of Polish sausage, it simply was assumed that the Commandant had seen to it that his household staff would not starve. Furthermore, although Sophie had to share her pan with Lotte, and the two Jewish sisters ate in the same way, face to face as over a kennel pail, they were each supplied with an aluminum spoon—an almost unheard-of daintiness for inmates anywhere else behind the wires.
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