Sophie's Choice - William Styron [253]
Dürrfeld has unbent so naturally that he even feels constrained to utter a vague apology; he should not allow the British and the Dutch to agitate him so, he says to the Professor in a mild voice, forgive the outburst, but surely their monopolistic practices and manipulations of the supply of a natural product like rubber, which all the world should receive equitably, was an abomination. Surely a native of Poland, which like Germany has no rich overseas possessions, could appreciate this. Surely it is not militarism or blind desire for conquest (which have been libelously imputed to certain nations—Germany, yes, damnit, Germany) that makes some ghastly war probable, but this greed. What must a nation like Germany do when—deprived of the colonies which might have served as its own Straits Settlements, divested of the equivalent of its own Sumatra, its own Borneo—it faces a hostile world rimmed about at the edge by international pirates and profiteers? The legacy of Versailles! Yes, what! It must go creatively wild. It must manufacture its own substance—everything!—out of chaos and by its own genius, and then stand with its back against the wall, confronting a host of enemies. The little speech ends. The Professor beams and actually applauds with his hands.
Dürrfeld falls silent then. Despite his passion he is very calm. He has spoken not angrily or with alarm but with gentle, easy, brief eloquence, and Sophie finds herself affected by the words and the utter conviction they convey. She is a naif in politics and world affairs, but she has the wit to know it. She cannot tell if she is stirred more by Dürrfeld’s ideas or by his physical presence—perhaps it is a mingling of both—but she feels an honest, heartfelt reasonableness in what he has said, and certainly he does not in the least resemble the paradigmatic Nazi who has been the object of so much savage lampooning rage at the hands of the tiny liberal and radical elements around the university. Maybe he is not a Nazi, she thinks optimistically—but then, surely a man so highly placed must be a member of the Party. Yes? No? Well, no matter. Two things she now knows well: she is beset by a pleasant, wayward, tickling eroticism, and the eroticism itself fills her with the same sweetly queasy sense of danger she once felt in Vienna years ago as a child at the very peak of the terrifying Prater Ferris wheel—danger both delicious and nearly unendurable. (Yet even as the emotion sweeps over her she cannot help but writhe in the memory of the cataclysmic domestic happening which she knows gives her the liberty, the warrant to possess such electrifying desire: the silhouette of her husband, in his robe, standing in the doorway of their dark bedroom only a month before. And Kazik’s words, as excruciatingly hurtful as the sudden slice across her face of a kitchen knife: You must get this under your thick skull, which may be thicker even than your father says it is. If I am no longer able to function with you, it is, you understand, due to no lack of virility but because almost everything about you, especially your body, leaves me totally without sensation... I cannot stand even the smell of your bed.)
Moments later, outside the entrance to the mine, where the two of them are gazing down across a sun-flooded field swaying and rippling with green barley, Dürrfeld asks her about herself.