Sophie's Choice - William Styron [184]
It was his adjutant Scheffler again. Begging the Commandant’s pardon, Scheffler said, standing in the doorway, but Frau Höss—now on the landing below—had come upstairs with a question for the Commandant. She was going to the movies at the garrison recreation center and she wanted to know if she might take Iphigenie with her. Iphigenie, the older daughter, was recovering from a week-long case of die Grippe and Madame wished to find out whether, in the Commandant’s judgment, the girl was well enough to accompany her to the matinee. Or should she consult Dr. Schmidt? Höss snarled something in return which Sophie could not hear. But it was during this brief exchange that she had a desperate flash of intuition, sensing that the interruption with its jejune domestic flavor could only blot out forever the magic moment into which the Commandant, like some soul-eaten Tristan, had had the infirmity to allow himself to be lured. And when he turned again to face her she knew immediately that her presentiment was an accurate one, and that her cause was in its deepest peril yet.
“When he come back toward me,” Sophie said, “his face was even more twisted up and tormented than before. Again I have this strange feeling that he was going to hit me. But he didn’t. Instead, he come very close to me and said, ‘I long to have intercourse with you’—he used the word Verkehr, which have in German the same stupid formal sound as ‘intercourse’; he said, ‘Having intercourse with you would allow me to lose myself, I might find forgetfulness.’ But then suddenly his face changed. It was as if Frau Höss had changed everything around in a moment. His face became very calm and sort of impersonal, you know, and he said, ‘But I cannot and I will not, it is too much of a risk. It would be doomed to disaster.’ He turned away from me then, turned his back to me and walked to the window. I heard him say, ‘Also, pregnancy here would be out of the question.’ Stingo, I thought I might faint. I felt very weak from all my emotion and this tension; also, I guess, from hunger, from not eating anything since those figs I had vomited up that morning, and only the little piece of chocolate he had given me. He turned around again and spoke to me. He said, ‘If I were not leaving here, I would take the risk. Whatever your background is, I feel that in a spiritual way we could meet on common ground. I would risk a great deal to have relations with you.’ I thought he was going to touch or grab me again, but he didn’t. ‘But they have got rid of me,’ he said, ‘and I must go. And so you must go too. I am sending you back to Block Two where you came from. You will go tomorrow.’ Then he turned away again.
“I was terrified,” Sophie went on. “You see, I had tried to get close to him and I had failed, and now he was sending me away and all my hopes were destroyed. I tried to speak to him, but all I could feel was this choking in my throat and the words wouldn’t come. It was like he was going to cast me back into darkness and there was nothing I could do—nothing at all. I kept looking at him and I was trying to speak. That beautiful Arabian horse was still in the field down below and Höss was leaning against the window, gazing down at it. The smoke from Birkenau had lifted up. I heard him whisper something about his transfer to Berlin again. He spoke very bitterly. I remember he used words like ‘failure’ and ‘ingratitude,’ and once he said very clearly, ‘I know how well I have performed my duty.’ He didn’t say anything for a long while then, only kept looking at that horse, and finally I heard him say this, I am almost sure they were his exact words, ‘To escape the body of a man yet still dwell in Nature. To be that horse, to live within that beast. That would be freedom.’ ” She paused for an instant. “I have always remembered those