Sophie's Choice

by William Styron

  She was at the doorway of a chapel which itself was situated on a dune overlooking the sea. She could not see him but she felt the presence of the man somewhere. It was a sunny, simple chapel with plain wooden pews on either side of a single aisle; over the altar hung a cross of unpainted pine, almost primitive in its stripped, unadorned angularity, and somehow loomingly central to Sophie’s apprehension of the place, into which she now wandered, feverish with lust. She heard herself giggle. Why? Why should she giggle when the little chapel was suddenly suffused by the grief of a single contralto voice and the strains of that tragic cantata Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde? She stood before the altar, unclothed now; the music, pouring forth softly from some source both distant and near, enveloped her body like a benison. She giggled again. The man from the beach reappeared. He was naked, but again she could not name him. He was no longer smiling; a murderous scowl clouded his face and the threat embedded in his countenance excited her, inflaming her lust. He told her sternly to look down. His penis was thick and erect. He commanded her to get down on her knees and suck him. She did so in a frenzy of craving, pulling back the foreskin to expose a spade-shaped glans of a deep blue-black hue and so huge that she knew that she could not surround it with her lips. Yet she was able to do this, with a choking sensation that wilted her with pleasure, while at the same time the Bach chimes, freighted with the noise of death and time, shivered down her spine. Schlage dock, gewünschte Stunde! He pushed her away from his belly, told her to turn around, commanded her to kneel at the altar beneath the skeletal cruciform emblem of God’s suffering, glowing like naked bone. She turned at his order, knelt on hands and knees, heard a clattering of hoofs on the floor, smelled smoke, cried out with delight as the hairy belly and groin swarmed around her naked buttocks in a tight cloaklike embrace, the rampaging cylinder deep within her cunt, thrusting from behind again and again...

  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 to put in a telephone call to Herr Dürrfeld at the Buna factory without realizing (except in her subconscious) that the recipient of the call was her romantic fixation of long ago? Certainly a dozen times. Höss had been on the phone to someone named Dürrfeld day in and day out. Moreover, the same name had figured prominently on some of those papers and memoranda of Höss’s she had glanced at from time to time. Thus in the end, upon analysis of these keys, it was not at all difficult to explain Walter Dürrfeld’s role as protagonist in Sophie’s terrifying yet exquisite Liebestraum. Nor was it really difficult, either, to see why her dream lover became so easily metamorphosed into the devil.

  That morning the voice she heard from the anteroom outside Höss’s office in the attic was identical to that of the man in the dream. She had not entered the office immediately, as she had each morning for the past ten days, although she burned to rush through the door and smother her child in her arms. Höss’s adjutant, perhaps aware of her new status, had brusquely ordered her to stand outside and wait. She then felt sudden, unspeakable doubt. Could it really be that since Höss had promised to let her see Jan, the little boy was inside the office, listening to the strange loud colloquy between Höss and the person with the voice of the man in her dream? She stirred nervously under Scheffler’s gaze, aware from his icy manner of her loss of privilege; she was only a common prisoner again, among the lowliest of the low. She sensed his hostility, it was like a graven sneer. She fixed her eyes on the framed photograph of Goebbels adorning the wall and as she did so an odd picture leaped to mind: that of Jan standing between Höss and the other man, the child peering upward first at the Commandant and then at the stranger with the voice that was so perplexingly familiar. Suddenly, like a chord drawn forth from the bass pipes of an organ, she heard words from the past: We could go to all the great musical shrines. She gasped, sensed the adjutant’s startled response to the choked noise she made. As if she had been struck a blow in the face, she rocked backward with a recognition of the voice, whispered to herself the name of its owner—and for the swiftest instant this October day and that afternoon years ago in Cracow melted together almost indistinguishably.

  “Rudi, it’s true that you are answerable to authority,” Walter Dürrfeld was saying, “and how I respect your problem! But I’m answerable too, and so there seems to be no way to resolve this issue. You have upper echel
ons watching you; ultimately I have stockholders. I am answerable to a corporate authority which is now simply insisting on one thing: that I be supplied with more Jews in order to maintain a predetermined rate of production. Not only at Buna but at my mines. We must have that coal! So far so good, we have not yet substantially fallen behind. But all the formulations, the statistical predictions which I have available are... are ominous, to say the least. I must have more Jews!”

  Höss’s voice at first seemed muffled, but then the reply was clear: “I cannot force the Reichsführer to make up his mind about this. You know that. I can only ask for a certain guidance, also suggest things. But he seems—for whatever good reason—to be unable to come to a decision about these Jews.”

  “And your personal feeling is, of course...”

  “My personal feeling is that only really strong and healthy Jews should be selected for employment in a place like Buna and in the Farben mines. The sick ones simply become an expensive drain on medical facilities. But my personal feeling counts for nothing here. We must wait for a decision.”

  “Can’t you worry Himmler into a decision?” There was an edge of querulousness in Dürrfeld’s voice. “As a friend of yours he might...” A pause.

  “I tell you I can only make suggestions,” Höss replied. “And I think you know what my suggestions have been. I understand your point of view, Walter, and I certainly don’t take offense that you don’t see eye to eye with me. You want bodies at all cost. Even an aged person with advanced consumption is capable of a certain number of thermal units of energy—”

  “Precisely!” Dürrfeld broke in. “And this is all I’m asking at first. A trial period of, let us say, no more than six weeks, to see what utilization might be made of those Jews who are presently being submitted to...” He seemed to falter.

  “Special Action,” Höss said. “But here is the very crux of the matter, don’t you see? The Reichsführer is pressed on one side by Eichmann and by Pohl and Maurer on the other. It is a matter of security versus labor. For security reasons Eichmann wishes to see every Jew undergo Special Action, no matter what the age or the physical condition of the individual Jew. He would not save a Jewish wrestler in perfect physical condition, if there were such a thing. Plainly, the Birkenau installations were promulgated to advance that policy. But see for yourself what’s happened! The Reichsführer had to modify his original order regarding Special Action for all Jews—this obviously at the behest of Pohl and Maurer—to satisfy the need for labor, not only at your Buna plant but at the mines and all the armament plants supplied by this command. The result is a split—completely down the middle. A split—You know... what is the word that I mean? That strange word, that psychological expression meaning—”

  “Die Schizophrenie.”

  “Yes, that’s the word,” Höss replied. “That mind doctor in Vienna, his name escapes—”

  “Sigmund Freud.”

  There was a space of silence. During this small hiatus Sophie, almost breathless, continued to focus upon the image of Jan, his mouth slightly parted beneath snub nose and blue eyes as his gaze shifted from the Commandant (pacing the office, as was so often his restless habit) to the possessor of this disembodied baritone voice—no longer the diabolical marauder of her dream, but simply the remembered stranger who had enchanted her with promises of trips of Leipzig, Hamburg, Bayreuth, Bonn. You’re so youthful! that same voice had murmured. A girl! And this: I am a family man. She was so intent upon laying her eyes on Jan, so smothered with anticipation over their reunion (she recalled later her difficulty in breathing), that her curiosity over what Walter Dürrfeld might look like now registered in her mind fleetingly, then faded into indifference. However, something in that voice—something hurried, peremptory—told her that she would be seeing him almost instantly, and the last words he spoke to the Commandant—every nuance of tone and meaning—were implanted in her memory with archival finality, as if within the grooves of a phonograph record which can never be erased.

  There was a trace of laughter in the voice. He uttered a word heretofore unspoken. “You and I know that, either way, they will be dead. All right, let’s leave it there for the moment. The Jews are giving us all schizophrenia, especially me. But when it comes to a failure of production, do you think I can plead sickness—I mean schizophrenia—to my board of directors? Really!” Höss said something in an offhand, obscure voice, and Dürrfeld replied pleasantly that he hoped they would confer again tomorrow. Seconds later, when he brushed past her in the little anteroom, Dürrfeld clearly did not recognize Sophie—this pallid Polish woman in her stained prisoner’s smock—but as he inadvertently touched her he did say “Bitte!” with instinctive politeness and in the same polished gentleman’s tones she recalled from Cracow. However, he looked a caricature of the romantic figure gone to seed. He had grown swollen around the face and porkishly rotund in the midriff, and she noticed that those perfect fingers which, describing their gentle arabesques, had so mysteriously aroused her six years before seemed like rubbery little wurstlike stubs as he adjusted upon his head the gray Homburg that Scheffler obsequiously handed him.

  “Then, what finally happened to Jan?” I asked Sophie. Once again I felt I had to know. Of all the many things she had told me, the unresolved question of Jan’s fate was the one which nagged at me the most. (I think I must have absorbed, then pushed to the back of my mind, her odd, offhand mention of Eva’s death.) I began also to see that she shied away from this part of her story with the greatest persistence, seeming to circle about it hesitantly, as if it were a matter too painful to touch upon. I was a little ashamed of my impatience and was certainly loath to intrude upon this obviously cobweb-fragile region of her memory, but in some intuitive way I also knew she was on the verge of giving up this secret, and so I pressed her to go on in as delicate a voice as I could manage. It was late on Sunday night—many hours after our near-disastrous bathing episode—and we were sitting at the bar of the Maple Court. Since the hour was close to midnight and since it was the tag end of an exhaustingly humid Sabbath, the two of us were nearly alone in the cavernous place. Sophie was sober; both of us had stuck to 7-Up. During this long session she had talked almost ceaselessly, but now she paused to look at her watch and to mention that it might be time to go back to the Pink Palace and call it a night. “I’ve got to move my things out to my new place, Stingo,” she said. “I’ve got to do that tomorrow morning, and then I’ve got to go back to Dr. Blackstock. Mon Dieu, I keep forgetting that I’m a working girl.” She looked drawn and tired, now musing down upon the scintillant little treasure which was the wristwatch Nathan had given her. It was a gold Omega with tiny diamonds at the four quarter points of the dial. I hesitated to consider what it might have cost. As if reading my thoughts, Sophie said, “I really shouldn’t keep these expensive things that Nathan gave me.” A new sorrow had entered her voice, of a different, perhaps more urgent tone than the one which had infused her reminiscences of the camp. “I guess I should give them away or something, since I’ll never see him again.”

  “Why shouldn’t you keep them?” I said. “He gave them to you, for heaven’s sake. Keep them!”

  “It would make me think of him all the time,” she replied wearily. “I still love him.”

  “Then sell them,” I said, a little irritably, “he deserves it. Take them to a pawnshop.”

  “Don’t say that, Stingo,” she said without resentment. Then she added, “Someday you will know what it is to be in love.” A sullen Slavic pronouncement, infinitely boring.

  We were both silent for a while, and I pondered the profound failure of sensibility embedded in this last statement, which—aside from its boringness—expressed such oblivious unconcern for the lovelorn fool to whom it was addressed. In silence I cursed her with all the force of my preposterous love. Suddenly I felt the presence of the real world again, I was no longer in Poland but in Brooklyn. And even aside from my heartache over Sophie, I stirred inside with a fretful, un
happy malaise. Self-lacerating worries began to dog me. I had been so caught up in Sophie’s story that I had utterly lost sight of the unshakable fact that I was nearly destitute as a result of yesterday’s robbery. This, combined with the knowledge of Sophie’s imminent departure from the Pink Palace—and my consequent solitude there, floundering pennilessly around Flatbush with the fragments of an uncompleted novel—gave me a real wrench of despair. I dreaded the loneliness I faced without Sophie and Nathan; it was far worse than my lack of money.