Sophie's Choice - William Styron [261]
Sophie sensed darkness surging at the back of her eyes. She heard herself groan. Because of incalculable stress or hunger or grief or terror, or God knew what, her period had been delayed for at least a week (this had happened to her in the camp twice before), but now at her loins the wet warm downward-pulling sensation came in a rush; she felt the huge abnormal flood and at the same time was aware in her eyes of the spreading, irrepressible darkness. Emmi’s face, a lunar blur, became caught up in this web of darkness, and Sophie found herself falling, falling... Lulled as if amid sluggish waves of time she drowsed in a blessed stupor, awoke listlessly to the sound of a distant gathering ululation that blossomed in her ears, grew louder, becoming a savage roar. For the barest instant she dreamed that the roar was the roar of a polar bear and that she was floating on an iceberg, swept by frigid winds. Her nostrils burned.
“Wake up,” said Emmi. The face, white as wax, hovered so close that she felt the child’s breath on her cheek. Sophie then knew that she was lying flat and supine on the floor while the girl crouched next to her, flourishing a phial of ammonia beneath her nose. The casement window had been flung open, letting the frosty wind fill the room. The shriek in her ears had been the camp whistle; she heard its distant voice now, decrescendo. At eye-level, next to Emmi’s bare knee, was a small plastic medical kit embellished with a green cross. “You fainted,” she said. “Don’t move. Keep your head horizontal for a minute so it will get the flow of blood. Sniff deeply. That cold air will help revive you. Meanwhile, remain still.” Recollection came sweeping back, and as it did Sophie had the feeling that she was the performer in a play from which the central act was missing: wasn’t it only a minute or so ago (it could not have been much longer) that the child had been raging at her like an urchin storm trooper, and could this really be the same creature who was now attending to her with what might pass for humane efficiency, if hardly angelic compassion? Had her collapse brought out in this frightening Mädel with her face like that of a swollen fetus the stifled impulses of a nurse? The question was answered just then, when Sophie groaned and stirred. “You must keep still!” Emmi commanded her. “I have a certificate in first aid—junior grade, first class. Do as I say, do you understand?”
Sophie lay still. She wore no underwear and she wondered how extensively she had stained herself. The back of her smock felt soaked. Surprised at her own delicacy, under the circumstances, she also wondered if she had not at the same time soiled Emmi’s spotless floor. Something in the child’s manner enlarged her sense of helplessness, the feeling of being simultaneously ministered to and victimized. Sophie began to realize that Emmi had her father’s voice, utterly gelid and remote. And in her officious busy bossiness, so lacking in any quality of the tender as she prattled away (now she was smartly smacking Sophie’s cheeks, saying that the first-aid manual stated that smart smacks might help in reviving a victim of die Synkope, as she persisted, with medical precision, in calling a fainting spell), she seemed an Obersturmbannführer in microdimension, the SS spirit and essence—its true hypostasis—embedded in her very genes.
But at last the barrage of slaps on Sophie’s cheeks created, apparently, a satisfactory rosiness, and the child ordered her patient to sit erect and lean against the bed. This Sophie did, slowly, suddenly grateful that she had fainted at the moment and in the way she had. For as she gazed toward the ceiling now through pupils gradually shrinking back to their normal focus, she was aware that Emmi had stood up and was regarding her with an expression resembling benignness, or at least a certain tolerant curiosity, as if there had been expelled from her mind her fury at Sophie for being both a Polack and a thief; the nursing seizure appeared to have been cathartic, allowing her enough