Sophie's Choice - William Styron [250]
Chapter Thirteen
I MUST NOW set down a brief vignette, which I have tried to refashion from the outpouring of Sophie’s memories as she talked to me that summer weekend. I suspect that the indulgent reader will not be able to perceive immediately how this little recollecton adumbrates Auschwitz but—as will be seen—it does, and of all of Sophie’s attempts to gain a hold on the confusion of her past, it remains, as a sketch, a fragment, among the most odd and unsettling.
The place is Cracow again. The time: early June in the year 1937. The characters are Sophie and her father and a personage new to this narrative: Dr. Walter Dürrfeld of Leuna, near Leipzig, a director of IG Farbenindustrie, that Interessengemeinschaft, or conglomerate—inconceivably huge even for its day—whose prestige and size are alone enough to set Professor Biegański’s mind abubble with giddy euphoria. Not to mention Dr. Dürrfeld himself, who because of the Professor’s academic specialty—the international legal aspects of industrial patents—is well known to him by reputation as one of the captains of German industry. It would demean the Professor needlessly, would place too much emphasis on the sycophancy he had occasionally displayed in the face of manifestations of German might and potency, to portray him as buffoonishly servile in Dürrfeld’s presence; he possesses, after all, his own illustrious repute as a scholar and an expert in his field. He is also a man of considerable social facility. Nonetheless, Sophie can tell that he is flattered beyond measure to be near the flesh of this titan, and his eagerness to please falls a hair short of the outright embarrassing. There is no professional connection to this meeting; the encounter is purely social, recreative. Dürrfeld with his wife is making a vacation trip through Eastern Europe, and a mutual acquaintance in Düsseldorf—a patent authority, like the Professor—has arranged the get-together through the mail and by a flurry of last-minute telegrams. Because of Dürrfeld’s pressing schedule the little occasion must not take much time, cannot even include a meal together: a brief sightseeing fling at the university with its resplendent Collegium Maius; then Wawel Castle, the tapestries, a pause for a cup of tea, perhaps a tiny side trip elsewhere, but that is all. An afternoon’s pleasant companionship, then off on the wagons-lits to Wroclaw. The Professor plainly pines for more contact. Four hours will have to do.
Frau Dürrfeld is indisposed—a touch of der Durchfall has confined her to their room at the Hotel Francuski. As the trio sits sipping midafternoon tea after their descent from the Wawel parapets, the Professor apologizes with perhaps a touch too much acerbity on the poorness of Cracow water, intones with perhaps a shade too much feeling his regret at having had only the most fleeting glimpse of the charming Frau Dürrfeld before she hastened upstairs to her chambers. Dürrfeld nods pleasantly, Sophie squirms. She knows that the Professor will later require her to help re-create their conversation for his diary. She also knows that she has been dragooned into this outing for two purposes of display—because she is a knockout, as they say in the American movies that year, but also because by her presence, poise and language she can demonstrate to this distinguished guest, this dynamic helmsman of commerce, how fidelity to the principles of German culture and German breeding is capable of producing (and in such a quaint Slavic outback) the bewitching replica of a fräulein of whom not even the most committed racial purist in the Reich could disapprove. At least she looks the part. Sophie continues to squirm, praying that the conversation—once it becomes