Sophie's Choice - William Styron [179]
Sophie rose from her chair and drew near him. She sensed another aperture chinking open ever so slightly. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “and forgive me for suggesting this if I am mistaken. But it may be a tribute to you instead. It may be that they fully understand your difficulties, your hardships, and how exhausted you have been made by your work. Forgive me again, but during these few days here in the office I could not help but notice the extraordinary strain you are constantly under, the amazing pressure...” How careful was her obsequious solicitude. She heard her voice trail off but meanwhile kept her eyes fixed on the back of his neck. “It may be that this is really in the nature of a reward for all your... your devotion.”
She fell silent and followed Höss’s gaze to the field below. On the capriciously changing wind the smoke from Birkenau had blown off and away, at least momentarily, and in the clear sunlight the great glorious white stallion romped again around the fenced rim of the paddock, tossing tail and mane in a small windstorm of dust. Even through the window they could hear the thudding collision of his galloping hoofs. From the Commandant’s throat came an aspirated whistle of air; he fumbled at his pocket for another cigarette.
“I wish you were right,” he said, “but I doubt it. If they just understood the magnitude, the complexity! They seem to have no knowledge of the incredible numbers involved in these Special Actions. The endless multitudes! These Jews, they come on and on from all the countries of Europe, countless thousands, millions, like the herring in the spring that swarm into Mecklenburg Bay. I never dreamed the earth contained so many of das Erwählte Volk.”
The Chosen People. His use of the phrase allowed her to press her initiative a little further, enlarging the opening where she was confident now she had secured a fragile but real hold. “Das Erwählte Volk—” her voice was edged with scorn as she echoed the Commandant—“the Chosen People, if you’ll permit me to say so, sir, may only at last be paying the just price for having arrogantly set themselves apart from the rest of the human race—for having posed as the only people worthy of salvation. I honestly do not see how they could expect to escape retribution when they have commited such a blasphemy for so many years in the sight of Christians.” (Suddenly the image of her father loomed, monstrous.) With anxiety she hesitated, then resumed, spinning out another of her lies, impelled forward like a splinter bobbingly afloat upon a rushing stream of fabrication and falsehood. “I am no longer Christian. Like you, sir, I have abandoned that pathetic faith with its pretexts and evasions. Yet it is easy to see why the Jews have inspired such hatred in Christians as well as in people like yourself—Gottgläubiger, as you said to me just this morning—righteous and idealistic people who are only striving for a new order in a new world. Jews have threatened this order, and it is only just now that they finally suffer for it. Good riddance, I say.”
He still remained standing with his back to her when he replied evenly, “You speak with a great deal of feeling in this matter. For a woman, you talk like one