Sophie's Choice - William Styron [172]
It was not until Sophie was on the stairs to the attic, moments later, that the reaction smote her, and she felt her legs go elastic and weak and she was forced to sit down. The mere fact of the assault was not what left her unstrung—it was nothing new, she had been nearly raped by a woman guard months before, shortly after her arrival—nor was it Wilhelmine’s response in her mad scramble for safety after Höss had gone upstairs (“You must not tell the Commandant,” she had said with a snarl, then repeated the same words as if imploring Sophie in abject fear, before scuttling out of the room. “He would kill us both!”). For a moment Sophie felt this compromising situation had in an obscure way given her an advantage over the housekeeper. Unless—unless (and the second thought caught her up short and made her sit tremblingly on the stairs) this convicted forger, who wielded so much power in the house, should seize upon that moment of thwarted venery as a way to get back at Sophie, work out her frustration by turning love into vengeance, run to the Commandant with some tale of wrongdoing (specifically, that it was the other prisoner who had initiated the seduction), and in this way shatter to bits the framework of Sophie’s all-too-unsubstantial future. She knew, in the light of Höss’s detestation of homosexuality, what would happen to her if such a scandal were fabricated, and suddenly felt—as had all her fellow trusty prisoners smothering in their fear-drenched limbo—the phantom needle squirting death into the center of her heart.
Squatting on the stairs, she bent forward and thrust her head into her hands. The confusion of thoughts roiling about in her mind caused her an anxiety she felt she could hardly bear. Was she better off now, after the episode with Wilhelmine, or was she in greater peril? She didn’t know. The clarion camp whistle—reedy, harmonic, more or less in B minor and reminding her always of some partly recaptured, sorrow-sick, blowzy chord from Tannhäuser—shattered the morning, signaling eight o’clock. She had never been late before to the attic but now she was going to be, and the thought of her tardiness and of the waiting Höss—who measured his days in milliseconds—filled her with terror. She rose to her feet and continued the climb upward, feeling feverish and unstrung. Too many things crushing down upon her all at once. Too many thoughts to sort out, too many swift shocks and apprehensions. If she didn’t take hold of herself, make every effort to keep her composure, she knew she might simply collapse today like a puppet that has performed its jerky dance on strings, then, abandoned by its master, falls into a lifeless heap. A small nagging soreness across her pubic bone reminded her of the housekeeper’s rummaging head.
Winded by the climb, she reached the landing on the floor beneath the Commandant’s attic, where a partly opened window gave out once more upon the westward view with its barren drill field sloping toward the melancholy stand of poplars, beyond which stood the countless boxcars in drab file, smeared with the dust of Serbia and the Hungarian plains. Since her encounter with Wilhelmine the boxcar doors had been thrown open by the guards, and now hundreds more of the condemned voyagers from Greece milled about on the platform. Despite her haste, Sophie was compelled to halt and watch for an instant, drawn by morbidity and dread in equal measure. The poplar trees and the horde of SS guards obscured most of the scene. She could not clearly see the faces of the Greek Jews. Nor could she tell what they wore: mostly she