Sophie's Choice - William Styron [262]
“Tell me,” Sophie said in a gentle solicitous voice, aimlessly exploiting the lull, “tell me, what’s that design sewn onto your robe? It’s so attractive.”
“It’s the insignia of my swimming championship. I was the champion in my class. The beginners. I was only eight. I wish we had swimming competition here, but we don’t. It’s the war. I have had to swim in the Sola, which I don’t like. The river’s filled with muck. I was a very fast swimmer in the beginners’ competition.”
“Where was that, Emmi?”
“At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.”
Into her dresser drawer she pounced and filled the crook of one arm with a huge album that spilled out photographs and clippings. She lugged it to Sophie’s side, pausing only to switch on the radio. Cracklings and peeps disturbed the air. She made an adjustment and the static vanished, replaced by a far faint chorus of horns and trumpets, exultant, victorious, Handelian: a shiver flowed down Sophie’s backbone like a benediction of ice. “Das bin ich,” the girl began to say over and over again, pointing to herself in endlessly repeated postures of bathing costume encasing juvenile adipose flesh, mushroom-pale. Had the sun never shone in Dachau? Sophie wondered in somnolent sickish despair. “Das bin ich... und das bin ich,” Emmi continued in her childish drone, stabbing at the photographs with her button thumb, the rapt “me me me” uttered again and again in a half-whisper like an incantation. “I also began to learn diving,” she said. “Look here, this is me.”
Sophie ceased looking at the pictures—all became a blur—and her eyes sought instead the window flung open against the October sky where the evening star hung, astonishingly, as bright as a blob of crystal. An agitation in the air, a sudden thickening of the light around the planet, heralded the onset of smoke, borne earthward by the circulation of cool night wind. For the first time since the morning Sophie smelled, ineluctable as a smotherer’s hand, the odor of burning human beings. Birkenau was consuming the last of the voyagers from Greece. Trumpets! The brazen triumphant hymnody poured out of the ether, hosannas, bleats of rams, angelic annunciations—making Sophie think of all the unborn mornings of her life. She began to weep and said, half aloud, “At least tomorrow I will see Jan. At least that.”
“Why are you crying?” Emmi demanded.
“I don’t know,” Sophie replied. And then she was about to say this: “Because I have a little boy in Camp D. And because your father, tomorrow, is going to let me see him. He is almost your age.” But instead she was brought up short by an abrupt voice on the radio, interrupting the choir of brass: “Ici Londres!” She listened to the voice, remote, spoken as if through tinfoil but for the moment clear, a transmission meant for the French but vaulting the Carpathians to make itself heard here on the twilit rim of this anus mundi. She blessed the unknown announcer as she would a cherished sweetheart, smitten with wonder at the tumbling rush of words: “L’ltalie a déclaré qu’un état de guerre existe contre l’Allemagne...” Though exactly how, or why, Sophie could not fathom, her instinct combined with a certain subtle jubilation in the voice from London (which, gazing straight at Emmi now, she knew the child could not understand) told her that this news spelled for the Reich real and lasting woe. It mattered not that Italy itself lay wasted. It was as if she had heard tidings of the Nazis’ sure, eventual ruin. And as she