Sophie's Choice - William Styron [169]
She had secreted the package of figs in the loose inside hem of her striped smock. At a little before eight o’clock, nearly the time when she had to make her way up the four flights of stairs to the office in the attic, she could resist no longer the urge to eat some of the figs. She stole away to a large cubbyhole underneath the stairs where she would be out of sight of the other prisoners. And there she frantically broke open the cellophane. A film of tears misted her eyes as the tender small globes of fruit (slightly moist and deliciously textured in their chewy sweetness that mingled with archipelagos of minute seeds) slid richly down her throat, one by one; wild with delight, unashamed at her piggishness and the sugary saliva drooling over fingers and chin, she devoured them all. Her eyes were still misted over and she heard herself panting with pleasure. Then after standing there for a moment in the shadows to let the figs settle on her stomach and to compose her expression, she began to ascend slowly to the upper levels of the house. It was a climb of no more than a few minutes’ duration but one which was interrupted by two singularly memorable occurrences that seemed to fit with ghastly appropriateness into the hallucinatory fabric of her mornings, afternoons and nights at Haus Höss...
On separate landings—one on the floor above the basement and the other just below the attic—there were dormer windows that gave off on a western exposure, from which Sophie usually tried to avert her eyes, though not always successfully. This view contained some nondescript subjects—in the foreground a brown grassless drill field, a small wooden barracks, the electrified wires hemming in an incongruous stand of graceful poplars—but it also presented a glimpse of the railroad platform where the selections were made. Invariably, lines of boxcars stood waiting there, dun-colored backdrop to blurred, confounding tableaux of cruelty, mayhem and madness. The platform dwelt in the middle distance, too near to be ignored, too far away to be seen with clarity. It may have been, she later recounted, her own arrival there on that concrete quai and its associations for her, that caused her to shun the scene, to turn her eyes away, to blot out of her sight the fragmentary and flickering apparitions which from this vantage point registered only imperfectly, like the grainy shadow-shapes in an antique silent newsreel: a rifle butt raised skyward, dead bodies being yanked from boxcar doors, a papier-mâché human being bullied to the earth.
Sometimes she sensed that there was no violence at all, and got only a terrible impression of order, throngs of people moving in shambling docile parade out of sight. The platform was too distant for sound; the music of the loony-bin prisoner band which greeted each arriving train, the shouts of the guards, the barking of the dogs—all these were mute, though upon occasion it was impossible not to hear the crack of a pistol shot. Thus the drama seemed to be enacted in a charitable vacuum, from which were excluded the wails of grief, cries of terror and other noises of that infernal initiation. It was for this reason perhaps, Sophie thought as she climbed the steps, that she succumbed from time to time to an occasional irresistible peek—doing so now, seeing only the string of boxcars newly arrived, as yet unloaded. SS guards in swirls of steam surrounded the train. She knew from manifests which had been received by Höss the day before that this was the second of