Sophie's Choice - William Styron [170]
Then, her curiosity satisfied, she turned away and opened the door to the salon through which she had to pass to reach the upper stairway. From the Stromberg Carlson phonograph a contralto voice enveloped the room in a lover’s hectic grievance, while Wilhelmine, the housekeeper, stood listening to it, audibly humming as she pawed through a stack of silken female underwear. She was alone. The room was flooded with sunlight.
Wilhelmine (Sophie noticed, trying to hurry through) was wearing one of her mistress’s hand-me-down robes, pink slippers with huge pink pompons, and her henna-dyed hair was in curlers. The face seemed aflame with rouge. The humming was extravagantly off-key. She turned as Sophie edged past, fixing her with a look that seemed not at all unpleasant, which was a difficult trick, since the face itself was the most unpleasant she had ever beheld. (Intrusive as it may appear now, and possibly lacking in graphic persuasion, I cannot resist repeating Sophie’s Manichean reflection of that summer and let it go at that: “If you ever write about this, Stingo, just say that this Wilhelmine was the only beautiful woman I ever saw—no, she was not beautiful really, but good-looking with these hard good looks that some streetwalkers have—the only good-looking woman that the evil inside her had caused this absolute ugliness. I can’t describe her any more than that. It was some kind of total ugliness. I look at her and the blood turn to ice inside me.”) “Guten Morgen,” Sophie whispered, pressing on. But Wilhelmine suddenly arrested her with a sharp “Wait!” German is a loud language anyway, the voice was like a shout.
Sophie turned to confront the housekeeper; oddly, although they had often seen each other, it was the first time they had ever spoken. Despite her unthreatening countenance now, the woman inspired apprehension; Sophie felt the pulse racing in both wrists, her mouth dried up instantly. “Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen,” mourned the querulous, lachrymal voice, the scratches on the shellac amplified, echoing from wall to wall. A sparkling galaxy of dust motes swam through the slanting early light, shimmering up and down across the lofty room crowded with its armoires and desks, its gilt sofas and cabinets and chairs. It’s not even a museum, thought Sophie, it’s a monstrous warehouse. Suddenly Sophie realized that the salon reeked heavily of disinfectant, like her own smock. The housekeeper was weirdly abrupt. “I want to give you something,” she cooed, smiling, fingering the stack of underwear. The filmy mound of silken underpants, looking freshly cleaned, rested on the surface of a marble-top commode inlaid with colored wood and ornamented in strips and scrolls of bronze; a huge and hulking thing, it would have grossly obtruded at Versailles, where in fact it may have been stolen from. “Bronek brought them last night straight from the cleaning unit,” she continued in her strident singsong. “Frau Höss likes to give a lot of them to the prisoners. I know you’re not issued underwear, and Lotte’s been complaining that those uniforms scratch so around the bottom.” Sophie let out her breath. With no chagrin, no shock, not even with revelation, the thought flew through her mind like a sparrow: They’re all from dead Jews. “They’re very, very clean. Some of these are made of marvelous sheer silk, I’ve seen nothing like them since the war began. What size do you wear? I’ll bet you don’t even know.” The eyes flashed indecently.
It had all happened too fast, this sudden gratuitous charity, for Sophie to make immediate sense of it, but soon she had an inkling and she was truly alarmed—alarmed as much by the way Wilhelmine had all but pounced upon her (for now she realized this is what she had done), lurking like a tarantula while she waited for her to emerge from the cellar, as by the precipitate offering of the rather ridiculous largess itself. “Doesn’t that fabric chafe around your bottom?” she heard Wilhelmine ask her now, mezza voce and with a slight quaver that made everything