Sophie's Choice - William Styron [260]
She knew she had to move swiftly now and take it, or be forever damned. And so she moved, heart rampaging, not shedding her fear—it clung to her like an evil companion—and sidled her way into the room. She had to walk only a few paces, but even as she did so, swaying, she sensed something wrong, sensed a ghastly error in tactics and timing: the moment she placed her hand on the cool plastic surface of the radio she had a premonition of disaster which filled the space of the room like a soundless scream. And she recalled later more than once how at that exact instant of contact with that longed-for little object, knowing her mistake (why was it instantly jumbled with a game of croquet?), she heard her father’s voice in some remote summer garden of her mind, almost exultant in its contempt: You do everything wrong. But she had the merest instant to reflect on this before hearing the other voice behind her, so unsurprising in its inevitability that even the cool, didactic, Germanic sense of Ordnung in the words themselves were no surprise: “Your business may take you up and down the hallway but you have no business in this room.” Sophie whirled about then and beheld Emmi.
The girl was standing at the closet door. Sophie had never seen her so close at hand. She was clad in pale blue rayon panties; her precocious eleven-year-old breasts bulged in a bra of the same washed-out shade. Her face was very white and astonishingly round, like an underdone biscuit, crowned by a fringe of frizzy yellow hair; her features were both handsome and degenerate; trapped within that spherical frame the puffed prettiness of nose, mouth and eyes appeared to be painted on—at first, Sophie thought, on a doll, then as if on a balloon. On second thought she looked less depraved than... preinnocent? Unborn? Speechless, Sophie gazed at her, thinking: Papa was right about my wrongdoing, I mess up everything; here all I had to do was to investigate things first. She stammered, then found speech. “I’m sorry, gnädiges Fraulein, I was only—” But Emmi interrupted. “Don’t try to explain. You came in here to steal that radio. I saw you. I saw you almost pick it up.” Emmi’s face wore, or perhaps was incapable of, very little expression. With an aplomb that belied the fact of her near-nudity she slowly reached into her closet and drew on a robe of white terry cloth. Then she turned and said with bland matter-of-factness, “I’m going to report you to my father. He will have you punished.”
“I was only going to look at it!” Sophie improvised. “I swear it! I’ve passed by here so many times. I’ve never seen a radio so... so small. So... so cunning! I couldn’t believe it really worked. I just wanted to see—”
“You’re a liar,” said Emmi, “you were going to steal it. I could tell by the look on your face. You had an expression as if you were going to steal it, not just pick it up and look at it.”
“You must believe me,” Sophie said, aware of the sob in the back of her throat, and feeling a hopeless infirm lassitude, legs heavy and cold. “I wouldn’t want to take your...” But she halted, struck by the idea that it didn’t matter. Now that she had so preposterously bungled the job, nothing seemed to matter. It only mattered, still, that on the next day she would see her little boy, and how could Emmi interfere with that?
“You would want to take it,” the girl persisted, “it cost seventy Deutschmarks. You could listen to music on it, down in the cellar. You’re a dirty Polack and Polacks are thieves. My mother says that Polacks are worse thieves than Gypsies and dirtier too.” The nose puckered