Sophie's Choice - William Styron [168]
“Save them for later,” he said, giving another package to Lotte, “don’t eat them all at once. Eat this shit from up above first. It’s swill, but it’s the best swill you’ll have for a long time. Fit for the pigs I used to raise in Pomorze.”
Bronek was a non-stop talker. Sophie listened to the stream of chitchat while she greedily gnawed at the chill and stringy stump of pork. It was scorched, cartilaginous and vile. But her taste buds responded, as if slaked with ambrosia, to the small bursting pods and pockets of fat which her body clamored for. She could have gorged herself on any grease. Fancifully, her mind’s eye re-created the feast at which Bronek last night had scurried about as busboy: the lordly suckling pig, the dumplings, the steaming potatoes, cabbage with chestnuts, the jams and jellies and gravies, a rich custard for dessert, all sluiced down the SS gullets with the help of portly bottles of Bull’s Blood wine from Hungary, and served (when a dignitary as lofty as an Obergruppenführer was present) upon a superb Czarist silver service shipped back from some museum ransacked on the eastern front. Apropos of which, Sophie realized, Bronek was now speaking in the tones of one proud to be privy to portentous tidings. “They keep trying to look happy,” he said, “and for a while they seem to be. But then they get on the war, and it’s all misery. Like last night Schmauser said the Russians were getting ready to recapture Kiev. Lots of other bad news from the Russian front. Then it’s rotten news in Italy too, so said Schmauser. The British and the Americans are moving up there, everyone dying like lice.” Bronek rose from his crouch, moving with his other pan toward the two sisters. “But the real big news, ladies, is something you may not hardly believe, but it’s the truth—Rudi is leaving! Rudi is being transferred back to Berlin!”
In mid-swallow, gulping down the gristly meat, Sophie nearly choked on these words. Leaving? Höss leaving the camp! It couldn’t be true! She rose to a sitting position and clutched at Bronek’s sleeve. “Are you sure?” she demanded. “Bronek, are you sure of that?”
“All I’m telling you is what I heard Schmauser say to Rudi after the other officers had left. Said he’d done a fine job but that he was needed at Berlin Central Office. So he could get himself ready for immediate transfer.”
“What do you mean—immediate?” she persisted. “Today, next month, what?”
“I don’t know,” Bronek replied, “he just plainly meant soon.” His voice became tinged with foreboding. “Me, I’m not happy about it, I’ll tell you.” He paused somberly. “I mean, who knows who’ll take his place? Some sadist maybe, you know. Some gorilla! Then maybe Bronek too... ?” He rolled his eyes and drew his forefinger across his throat. “He could have had me put away, he could have given me a little gas, like the Jews—they were doing that then, you know—but he brought me here and treated me like a human being. Don’t think I won’t be sorry to see Rudi go.”
But Sophie, preoccupied, paid no more attention to Bronek. She was panicked by this news of Höss’s departure. It made her realize that she must act with urgency and dispatch if she was to persuade him to take notice of her and thus try to accomplish through him what she had set out to do. For the following hour or so, toiling alongside Lotte over the Höss household laundry (the prisoners in the house were spared the lethally grueling and interminable roll calls of the rest of the camp; luckily, Sophie was compelled only to wash the vast heaps of soiled clothing from upstairs