Sophie's Choice - William Styron [173]
Ôque les îies de la Grèce sont belles!
Ô contempler la mer à l’ombre d’un haut figuier
et écouter tout autour les cris des hirondelles
voltigeant dans l’azur parmi les oliviers!
She thought she had long ago become used to the smell, at least resigned to it. But for the first time that day the sweet, pestilential stench of flesh consumed by fire assailed her nostrils with the ripe bluntness of an abattoir, so violently taking command of her senses that her eyes went out of focus and the throng on the distant platform—seeming for one last moment like some country festival viewed from afar—swam away from her vision. And involuntarily, with creeping horror and disgust, she raised her fingertips to her lips.
...la mer à l’ombre d’un haut figuier...
Thus, simultaneously with her awareness of where Bronek had obtained the fruit, the liquefied figs themselves came flooding up sourly in her throat, pouring out and spattering onto the floor between her feet. With a groan she thrust her head against the wall. She stood heaving and retching for long moments by the window. Then upon limp weak legs she sidled away from the mess she had made and fell to her hands and knees on the tiles, writhing in misery and riven by a feeling of strangeness and loss such as she had never known.
I’ll never forget what she told me about this: she realized that she could not remember her own name. “Oh God, help me!” she called aloud. “I don’t know what I am!” She remained for a while in that crouch, trembling as if in arctic cold.
Insanely, a cuckoo clock from the moon-faced daughter Emmi’s bedroom scant steps away sounded the hour in eight cuckoo cries. They were at least five minutes late, Sophie observed with grave interest, and odd satisfaction. And slowly she rose erect and proceeded to climb the last steps upward, into the lower vestibule where the framed photographs of Goebbels and Himmler were the only adornments on the wall, and upward further to the attic door, ajar, with the brotherhood’s holy motto engraved on the lintel: My Honor Is My Loyalty—beyond which Höss in his eyrie waited beneath the image of his lord and savior, waited in that celibate retreat of a calcimine purity so immaculate that even as Sophie approached, unsteadily, the very walls, it seemed, in the resplendent autumn morning were washed by a blindingly incandescent, almost sacramental light.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Kommandant,” she said.
Later during that day Sophie could not shake from her mind Bronek’s distressing news that Höss was to be transferred back to Berlin. It really meant that she would have to move with haste if she was to accomplish what she had set out to do. And so in the afternoon she resolved to make her advance and prayed silently for the poise—the necessary sang-froid—to carry it off. At one point—waiting for Höss to return to the attic, feeling her emotions subside to something like normal after the tumult provoked in her breast by that brief passage from Haydn’s Creation—she had been encouraged by some interesting new changes in the Commandant. His relaxed manner, for one thing, then his rather awkward but real attempt at conversation, followed by the insinuating touch of his hand on her shoulder (or was she reading too much into this?) when they had both gazed at the Arabian stallion: these seemed to her to signal cracks in that impregnable mask.
Then, too, there was the letter to Himmler he had dictated to her, regarding the condition of the Greek Jews. Never before had she transcribed any correspondence which was not somehow connected with Polish affairs and Polish language—those official letters to Berlin usually being