Sophie's Choice - William Styron [183]
“A number of years ago when I would go from my farm up to Lübeck—I was quite young at the time—I saw a silent film version of Faust in which the woman who played Gretchen was unbelievably beautiful and made a deep impression on me. So fair, such a perfect fair face and lovely figure—I thought about her for days, weeks afterwards. She visited me in my dreams, obsessing me. Her name was Margarete Something, this actress, her last name escapes me now. I always thought of her simply as Margarete. Her voice too: I could only believe that if I could hear her speak, there would be such a purity in her German. Very much like yours. I saw the film a dozen times. I learned later that she died very young—of tuberculosis, I believe—and it saddened me terribly. Time passed and eventually I forgot about her—or at least she no longer obsessed me. I could never completely forget her.” Höss paused and squeezed her shoulder once more, hard, hurting her, and she thought with shock: Strange, with that pain he is really trying to express some tenderness... The yodelers below had fallen silent. Involuntarily she closed her eyes tightly, trying not to flinch from the pain and aware now—in the dark hollow of her consciousness—of the camp’s symphonic death sounds: of metal clangor, of the boxcars’ remote colliding booms and the faint keening of a locomotive whistle, mournful and shrill.
“I am very much conscious that in many ways I am not like most men of my calling—of men brought up in a military environment. I was never one of the fellows. I have always been aloof. Solitary. I never consorted with prostitutes. I went to a brothel only once in my life, when I was very young, in Constantinople. It was an experience that left me disgusted; I am made sick by the lewdness of whores. There is something about the pure and radiant beauty of a certain kind of woman—fair of skin and of hair, although if truly Aryan she can of course also be somewhat darker—that inspires me to idolize that beauty, to idolize it almost to the point of worship. That actress Margarete was one of these—then also a woman I knew in Munich for some years, a splendid person with whom I had a passionate relationship and a child out of wedlock. Basically I believe in monogamy. I’ve been unfaithful to my wife on very few occasions. But this woman, she... she was the most glorious example of this beauty—exquisite of feature and of pure Nordic blood. My attraction to her was of an intensity beyond anything so crude as mere sex, and its so-called pleasures. It had to do with a grander scheme of procreation. It was an exalted thing to deposit my seed within such a beautiful vessel. You inspire in me much the same desire.”
Sophie kept her eyes shut as the flow of his weird Nazi grammar, with its outlandishly overheated images and clumps of succulent Teutonic wordbloat, moved its way up through the tributaries of her mind, nearly drowning her reason. Then suddenly the mist from his sweaty torso reeked in her nostrils like rancid meat and she heard herself give a gasp at the very instant that he yanked her body up against his own. She had a sense of elbows, knees and a scratchy cheese-grater of stubble. As insistent in his ardor as his housekeeper, he was incomparably more awkward and his arms around her seemed multitudinous, like those of a huge mechanical fly. She held her breath while his hands at her back tried out some sort of massage. And his heart—his rampaging galloping heart! Never had she conceived that a single heart was capable of the riotous romantic thumping which moved against her like a drumbeat through the Commandant’s damp shirt. Trembling like a very sick man, he essayed nothing so bold