Sophie's Choice - William Styron [257]
“Listen! It all depends on what kind of relationship you strike up with Höss. So much depends on that, Zosia darling, not only what happens to Jan and yourself but to all of us. You’ve got to use that man, work on him—you’re going to be living under the same roof. Use him! For once you’ve got to forget that priggish Christer’s morality of yours and use your sex for all it’s worth. Pardon me, Zosia, but give him a good fucking and he’ll be eating out of your hand. Listen, underground intelligence knows all about that man, just as we’ve learned about Lebensborn. Höss is just another susceptible bureaucrat with a blocked-up itch for a female body. Use it! And use him! It won’t be any skin off his nose to take one Polish kid and have him committed to that program—after all, it’ll be another bonus for the Reich. And sleeping with Höss won’t be collaboration, it’ll be espionage—a fifth column! So you’ve got to work this ape over to every possible limit. For God’s sake, Zosia, this is your chance! What you do in that house can mean everything for the rest of us, for every Pole and Jew and misbegotten bundle of misery in this camp—everything. I beg of you—don’t let us down!”
Time was running out. Wanda had to go. Before she went, she left Sophie with a few last instructive words. There was the matter of Bronek, for instance. At the Commandant’s house she would encounter a handyman named Bronek. He would be a crucial link between the mansion and the camp underground. Ostensibly a stooge for the SS, he was not quite the bootlicker and Höss’s lackey that a necessity for accommodation would make him appear. Höss trusted him, he was the Commandant’s pet Polack; but within this simple being, superficially servile and obliging, there beat the heart of a patriot who had shown that he could be counted upon for certain missions, provided they were not too mentally taxing or complex. The truth was, he was harebrained but clever—made into such a reliable turnip by the medical experiments which had addled his thought processes. He could initiate nothing on his own but was a willing instrument. Poland forever! In fact, said Wanda, Sophie would soon discover that Bronek was so secure in his role as the submissive, harmless drudge that from Höss’s viewpoint he could only be beyond suspicion—and therein lay both the beauty and the crucial nature of his function as an underground operative and go-between. Trust Bronek, Wanda said, and use him if she could. Now Wanda had to go, and after a long and tearful embrace she was gone—leaving Sophie weak and hopeless, with a sense of inadequacy...
Thus Sophie came to spend her ten days under the Commandant’s roof—a period culminating in that hectic, anxiety-drenched day which she remembered in such detail and which I have already described: a day when her feckless and flat-footed attempt at seducing Höss yielded not the possibility of freedom for Jan but only the bitterly wounding yet sweetly desirable promise of seeing her child in the flesh. (And this might be too brief to bear.) A day on which she had miserably failed, through a combination of panic and forgetfulness, to broach the idea of Lebensborn to the Commandant, thereby losing the richest chance she had of offering him the legitimate means to oversee Jan’s removal from the camp. (Unless, she thought, as she descended toward the cellar that evening, unless she collected her wits and was able to outline to him her plan the next morning, when Höss had promised to bring the little boy to his office for the reunion.) It was