Sophie's Choice - William Styron [265]
The dream still hung in her mind hours later when Bronek awakened her, bearing his pail of slops. “I waited for you last night but you didn’t come,” he said. “I waited as long as I could but it got too late. My man at the gate had to leave. What happened to the radio?” He spoke in low tones. The others were still asleep.
That dream! She could not dislodge it from her mind after these many hours. Groggily, she shook her head. Bronek repeated the question.
“Help me, Bronek,” she said listlessly, gazing up at the little man.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen someone... awful.” Even as she spoke, she knew she was making no sense. “I mean, Christ, I’m so hungry.”
“Eat this, then,” said Bronek. “It’s what’s left over from their rabbit stew. Lots of meat in it.”
The mess was slippery, greasy and cold but she slurped it up ravenously, watching the rise and fall of Lotte’s breast as she slept on the pallet nearby. Between gulps she informed the handyman that she was leaving. “God, I’ve been so hungry since yesterday,” she murmured. “Bronek, thank you.”
“I waited,” he said. “What happened?”
“The little girl’s door was locked,” she lied. “I tried to get in but the door was locked.”
“And today you’re going back to the barracks. Sophie, I’m going to miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too, Bronek.”
“Maybe you could still get the radio. That is, if you go up to the attic again. I can still pass it on this afternoon, get it through the gate.”
Why didn’t the imbecile shut up? She was finished with that radio—finished! She might easily have escaped suspicion before, but certainly not now. Surely if the radio were to disappear today, that terrible child would blab all about last night’s visit. Anything further having to do with the radio was out of the question, especially on a day like this with its electric certainty of Jan’s appearance—this reunion which she had looked forward to with a suspenseful greed beyond imagining. And so she repeated her lie. “We’ll have to forget that radio, Bronek. There’s no way to get at it. The little monster always keeps her door locked.”
“All right, Sophie,” said Bronek, “but if something happens... if you can get it, just give it to me quickly. Here in the cellar.” He made an empty chuckle. “Rudi would never suspect me. He thinks he’s got me in his pocket. He thinks I’m mentally deficient.” And in the morning shadows, from an orifice filled with cracked teeth, he shed upon Sophie a luminous, enigmatic smile.
Sophie had a confused and unformed belief in precognition, even of clairvoyance (on several occasions she had sensed or predicted coming events), although she did not connect it with the supernatural. I admit that she inclined toward this explanation until I argued her out of it. Some inner logic persuaded us both that such moments of supreme intuition followed from perfectly natural “keys”—circumstances which had been buried in memory or had lain dormant in the subconscious. Her dream, for example. Anything but a metaphysical explanation seemed utterly impossible for the fact that the love partner in her dream should have been a man whom she finally recognized as Walter Dürrfeld and that she should have dreamed of him only the night before setting eyes on him for the first time in six years. It was quite beyond the bounds of plausibility that that suave and seductive visitor who had so captivated her in Cracow should appear in the flesh only hours after such a dream (duplicating the very face and voice of the dream figure)—when she had not thought of the man or even heard his name spoken in all that time.
But had she not? Later, as she sorted out her recollections, she understood that she had heard the name spoken, and more than once. How often had she heard Rudolf Höss order his aide Scheffler