Sophie's Choice - William Styron [171]
“Yes...” said Sophie, fiercely uneasy. “No! I don’t know.”
“Come,” she murmured, beckoning toward an alcove. It was a shadowy space sheltered behind a Pleyel concert grand piano. “Come, let’s try a pair on.” Sophie moved unresistingly forward, and felt the light touch of Wilhelmine’s fingers on the edge of her smock. “I’ve been so interested in you. I’ve heard you speaking to the Commandant. You speak marvelous German, just like a native. The Commandant says you are Polish, but I don’t really believe him, ha! You’re too beautiful to be Polish.” The words, vaguely feverish, spilled over one another as she maneuvered Sophie toward the nook in the wall, ominously filled with darkness. “All the Polish women here are so ordinary and plain, so lumpig, so trashy-looking. But you—you must be Swedish, aren’t you? Of Swedish blood? You look more Swedish than anything, and I hear there are many people of Swedish blood in the north of Poland. Here we are now, where no one can see us and we can try on a pair of these undies. So your nice bottom will stay all white and soft.”
Until this instant, hoping against hope, Sophie had said to herself that the woman’s advances just might be innocuous, but now, so close, the signs of her voracious letch—first her rapid breathing and then the ripe rosiness spreading like a rash over the bestially handsome face, half Valkyrie, half gutter trull—left no doubt about her intentions. They were clumsy bait, those silk panties. And in a spasm of strange mirth it flashed across Sophie’s mind that in this psychotically ordered and scheduled household the wretched woman could only have sex on the fly, so to speak, vertically in an alcove behind a mammoth grand piano during these fleetingly few, precious and unprogrammed minutes after breakfast when the children were just off to the garrison school and before the beginning of daily routine. All other hours of the day, down to the last clock-tick, were accounted for: voilà! for the desperate challenges, beneath a regulated SS roof, of a taste of Sapphic amour. “Schnell, schnell, meine Süsse!” Wilhelmine whispered, more insistently now. “Lift up your skirt a bit, darling... no, higher!”
The ogress lunged forward then and Sophie felt herself engulfed in pink flannel, rouged cheeks, henna hair—a reddish miasma stinking of French perfume. The housekeeper worked with the frenzy of a madwoman. She was busy with her hard sticky lupine tongue for only a second or two around Sophie’s ear, fondled her breasts urgently, manhandled her buttocks, drew back with an expression of lust so intense that it was like some terminal anguish, then set about her serious labors, slumping earthward in genuflection and squeezing Sophie’s hips roundabout with her arms. Nur nicht aus Liebe weinen... “Swedish kittycat... beautiful thing,” she mumbled. “Ah, bitte... higher!” Having made her decision moments before, Sophie was not about to resist or protest—in a kind of headlong autohypnosis she had placed herself beyond revulsion, realizing in any case that she was as helpless as a crippled moth—and let her thighs, submissively, be spread apart as the brutish muzzle and the bullethead of a tongue probed into what, with some dull distant satisfaction, she realized was her obdurate dryness, as parched and without juice as desert sand. She rocked on her heels and raised her arms lazily and resistlessly akimbo, mainly aware now of the woman frantically fingering herself, the flaming becurlered mop of hair bobbing beneath like a huge shredded poppy. Then there was a booming noise from the other end of the huge room, a door was flung open and Höss’s voice called, “Wilhelmine! Where are you? Frau Höss wants you in the bedroom.”
The Commandant, who should have been in his attic office, had become briefly unpinned from his schedule, and the fear which his unexpected presence caused down below was transmitted instantly to Sophie, who thought that