Now, while plainly exercising control over himself, Dürrfeld is seized by some churning interior anger; the knuckles of one hand grow white as he clenches his fist, the area around his mouth also becomes blanched, tense. With barely stoppered rage he is speaking of imperialism, of die Englander and die Hollander, of the conspiracy on the part of two rich powers to so rig and control prices in natural rubber as to drive all others out of the market. And they accuse IG Farben of monopolistic practices! What else could we do? he says in a caustic, cutting voice which surprises Sophie, so at variance does it seem with his previous milky equanimity. No wonder that the world is amazed at our coup! With the British and the Dutch sole owners of Malaya and the East Indies, criminally fixing astronomical rates on the world market, what else could Germany do but employ its technological ingenuity to create a synthetic substitute that would not only be economical, durable, resilient, but—“Oil-resistant!” There! The Professor has taken the words right out of Dürrfeld’s mouth. Oil-resistant! He has mastered his homework, the shrewd Professor, in whose memory has lodged the salient fact that it is the oil-resistance of the new synthetic product which is so revolutionary and which is the key to its value and attractiveness. Another touch of flattery that almost works: Dürrfeld smiles pleasantly at the Professor’s expertise. But as often happens, her father does not know when to stop. Preening slightly dandruffed pin-striped shoulders, he begins to show off, murmuring chemical terms like “nitrile,” “Buna-N,” “polymerization of hydrocarbons.” His German is mellifluous—but now Dürrfeld, sidetracked from his righteous rage at the British and the Dutch, subsides into his previous detached self, gazing at the turgid Professor beneath arched eyebrows, looking remotely irritated and bored.
Yet oddly enough, the Professor at his best can be a charmer. Sometimes he is able to redeem himself. And so on the ride to the great salt mine of Wieliczka south of the city, the three of them sitting abreast in the rear seat of the hotel limousine, an ancient but pampered Daimler smelling of wood polish, his well-practiced disquisition on the Polish salt industry and its millennial history is captivating, bright, anything but tedious. He is exercising that talent which has made him an alluring lecturer and a public speaker of vibrant flair. No longer is he so pompous and self-conscious. The name of the king who was the founder of the Wieliczka mine, Boleslaw the Bashful, provides a moment of amusement; one or two low-keyed jokes, nicely timed, again put Dürrfeld at his ease. As he sinks back Sophie feels her liking for Dürrfeld increase; how little like a powerful German industrialist he seems, she thinks. She gives him a sidelong glance, and is affected by the lack of any arrogance in him, touched bv something obscurely warm, vulnerable—is it only a kind of loneliness? The countryside is green with spreading, trembling foliage, lush fields ablaze with wildflowers—the Polish spring in its voluptuous prime. Dürrfeld remarks on the scene with genuine delight. Sophie senses the pressure of his arm against her own, and realizes that her bare skin there is chill with goose flesh. She tries—without success on the cramped seat—to draw away. She shivers slightly, then relaxes.
Dürrfeld has unbent so naturally that he even feels constrained to utter a vague apology; he should not allow the British and the Dutch to agitate him so, he says to the Professor in a mild voice, forgive the outburst, but surely their monopolistic practices and manipulations of the supply of a natural product like rubber, which all the world should receive equitably, was an abomination. Surely a native of Poland, which like Germany has no rich overseas possessions, could appreciate this. Surely it is not militarism or blind desire for conquest (which have been libelously imputed to certain nations—Germany, yes, damnit, Germany) that makes some ghastly war probable, but this greed. What must a nation like Germany do when—deprived of the colonies which might have served as its own Straits Settlements, divested of the equivalent of its own Sumatra, its own Borneo—it faces a hostile world rimmed about at the edge by international pirates and profiteers? The legacy of Versailles! Yes, what! It must go creatively wild. It must manufacture its own substance—everything!—out of chaos and by its own genius, and then stand with its back against the wall, confronting a host of enemies. The little speech ends. The Professor beams and actually applauds with his hands.
Dürrfeld falls silent then. Despite his passion he is very calm. He has spoken not angrily or with alarm but with gentle, easy, brief eloquence, and Sophie finds herself affected by the words and the utter conviction they convey. She is a naif in politics and world affairs, but she has the wit to know it. She cannot tell if she is stirred more by Dürrfeld’s ideas or by his physical presence—perhaps it is a mingling of both—but she feels an honest, heartfelt reasonableness in what he has said, and certainly he does not in the least resemble the paradigmatic Nazi who has been the object of so much savage lampooning rage at the hands of the tiny liberal and radical elements around the university. Maybe he is not a Nazi, she thinks optimistically—but then, surely a man so highly placed must be a member of the Party. Yes? No? Well, no matter. Two things she now knows well: she is beset by a pleasant, wayward, tickling eroticism, and the eroticism itself fills her with the same sweetly queasy sense of danger she once felt in Vienna years ago as a child at the very peak of the terrifying Prater Ferris wheel—danger both delicious and nearly unendurable. (Yet even as the emotion sweeps over her she cannot help but writhe in the memory of the cataclysmic domestic happening which she knows gives her the liberty, the warrant to possess such electrifying desire: the silhouette of her husband, in his robe, standing in the doorway of their dark bedroom only a month before. And Kazik’s words, as excruciatingly hurtful as the sudden slice across her face of a kitchen knife: You must get this under your thick skull, which may be thicker even than your father says it is. If I am no longer able to function with you, it is, you understand, due to no lack of virility but because almost everything about you, especially your body, leaves me totally without sensation... I cannot stand even the smell of your bed.)
Moments later, outside the entrance to the mine, where the two of them are gazing down across a sun-flooded field swaying and rippling with green barley, Dürrfeld asks her about herself. She replies that she is—well, a housewife, a faculty wife, but she is studying the piano, she hopes to be able to continue in Vienna in a year or two. (They are alone for a moment, standing close to each other. Never has Sophie wished so keenly to be alone with a man. What has permitted this moment is a small crisis—a sign announcing no visitors, the mine closed for repairs, the Professor storming off with a cascade of apologies pouring from his lips, telling them to wait, declaring that his personal acquaintanceship with the superintendent will resolve this impasse.) He says she looks so youthful. A girl! He says that it is hard to believe that she has two children. She replies that she was married very young. He says that he has two children, too. “I am a family man.” The remark seems roguish, ambiguous. For the first time their eyes encounter each other’s, his gaze mingles with hers; it is unabashedly admiring, that look, and she turns away feeling a spasm of adulterous guilt. She moves a few paces off from him, shielding her eyes, wondering aloud where Papa is. She hears the tremor in her throat, another voice deep within her tells her that tomorrow she must go to early Mass. Over her shoulder his voice now asks her if she has ever been to Germany. She replies that yes, one summer years ago she stayed in Berlin. Her father’s vacation. She was just a child.
She says that she would love to go to Germany again, to see Bach’s grave in Leipzig—and she halts, embarrassed, wondering why on earth she has said this, although indeed to place flowers on Bach’s grave has long been a secret wish. Yet in his gentle laugh there is understanding. Leipzig, my home! He says why of course we could do that if you came. We could go to all the great musical shrines. She gasps inwardly—the “we,” the “if you came.” Is she to construe this is an invitation? Delicate, even devious—but an invitation? She feels the pulse twitch at her brow and flees the subject, or warily moves away. We have much go
od music in Cracow, she says, Poland is filled with wonderful music. Yes, he says, but not like Germany. If she were to come, he would take her to Bayreuth—does she like Wagner?—or to the great Bach festivals, or to hear Lotte Lehmann, Kleiber, Gieseking, Furtwängler, Backhaus, Fischer, Kempff... His voice seems to be an amorous melodic murmur, cajoling, politely but outrageously flirtatious, irresistible and (to her utter distress now) wickedly exciting. If she loves Bach, then she must love Telemann. We shall toast his memory in Hamburg! And Beethoven’s in Bonn! Just at this moment a splashing of feet through gravel announces the return of the Professor. He babbles delightedly, saying “Open Sesame.” Sophie can almost hear the sound her heart makes as it deflates, sickly pounding. My father, she thinks, is everything that music cannot be...
And that (as it evolved in her recollection) is nearly all. The prodigious subterranean castle of salt which she has visited often and which may or may not be, as the Professor claims, one of Europe’s seven man-made wonders, is less an anticlimax in itself than a spectacle which simply fails to register on her awareness, so agitated has she been made by this indefinable whatever-it-is—this infatuation—which has struck her with the random heat of a lightning bolt, making her weak and a little ill. She dares not let her eyes meet Dürrfeld’s again, although once more she glances at his hands: why do they fascinate her so? And now as they descend in the elevator and then embark on a stroll through this glittering white kingdom of vaulted caverns and labyrinthine passageways and soaring transepts—an upended anti-cathedral, buried memorial to ages of human toil, plunging giddily toward the underworld—Sophie blots out both Dürrfeld’s presence and her father’s perambulating lecture, which anyway she has heard a dozen times before. She wonders despondently how she can truly be the victim of an emotion at once so silly and so devastating. She will just have to put this man firmly out of her mind. Yes, put him out of her mind... Allez!
And this she did. She recounted later how she so firmly obliterated Dürrfeld from her thoughts that after he and his wife left Cracow—only an hour or so following their visit to the Wieliczka mine—he never troubled her memory again, did not dwell on the farthest margin of her consciousness even as a romantic figment. Perhaps this was the result of some unconscious force of will, perhaps it was only because of the futility she felt at entertaining the hope of seeing him again. Like a rock falling into one of those bottomless Wieliczka grottoes, he plummeted from her remembrance—another innocuous flirtation consigned to the dusty unopened scrapbook. Yet six years later she did see him again, when the creature of Dürrfeld’s passion and desire—synthetic rubber—and its place in the matrix of history had caused this corporate prince to become master of Farben’s huge industrial complex known as IG-Auschwitz. When they met each other there at the camp the encounter was even briefer and less personal than their meeting in Cracow. Yet from the separate encounters, Sophie carried away two significantly linked and powerful impressions. And they were these: During that spring afternoon’s jaunt in the company of one of Poland’s most influential anti-Semites, her admirer Walter Dürrfeld, like his host, uttered not a word about Jews. Six years later almost all that she heard from Dürrfeld’s lips concerned Jews and their consignment to oblivion.
During that long weekend in Flatbush, Sophie did not speak to me about Eva except to tell me in a few words what I have already set down: that the child was killed at Birkenau on the day of their arrival. “Eva was taken away,” she said, “and I never saw her again.” She offered no embroidery on this and I plainly could not and did not press the point; it was—in a word—terrible, and this information, which she imparted to me in such a listless, offhand way, left me beyond speech. I still marvel at Sophie’s composure. She returned quickly to speak of Jan, who had survived the selection and who, she learned through the grapevine after a number of days, had been thrown into that desperate enclave known as the Children’s Camp. I could only surmise from what she said about her first six months at Auschwitz that the shock and grief caused by Eva’s death created a bereavement which might have destroyed her, too, had it not been for Jan and his survival; the very fact that the little boy still lived, even though beyond her reach, and that she might somehow eventually get to see him was enough to sustain her through the initial phases of the nightmare. Almost every thought she had concerned the child, and the few grains of information she collected about him from time to time—that he was healthy enough, that he still lived—brought her the kind of mild, numb solace which enabled her to get through the infernal existence she woke to every morning.
But Sophie, as I pointed out before and as she elaborated to Höss on that strange day of their aborted intimacy, was one of the chosen elite and therefore had been “lucky” by comparison with most of the others newly arrived at the camp. She had first been assigned to a barracks, where in the ordinary course of events she would doubtless have endured that precisely calculated, abbreviated death-in-life which was the lot of nearly all her fellow sufferers. (It was at this point that Sophie told me about the welcoming statement of SS Hauptsturmführer Fritzch, and it might be well to repeat what they both said, verbatim. “I remember his exact words. He said, ‘You have come to a concentration camp, not to a sanatorium, and there is only one way out—up the chimney.’ He said, ‘Anyone who don’t like this can try hanging himself on the wires. If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.’ Then he said, ‘Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.’ ” Sophie had been aware of her death sentence within twenty-four hours of her arrival, it only took Fritzch to validate the fact in SS language.) But as she later explained to Höss in an episode I have earlier narrated, an odd cluster of little events—the attack on her in the barracks by a lesbian, a fight, intercession by a friendly block leader—had led her to a translator-stenographer’s job and lodging in another barracks, where she was sheltered for the time being from the camp’s mortal attrition. And of course at the end of six months another stroke of good fortune brought her the protective comforts and advantages of Haus Höss itself. Yet first came a critical meeting. It was only a few days before she was to take up residence under the Commandant’s roof that Wanda—who had been immured in one of the unspeakable kennels at Birkenau this entire time and whom Sophie had not seen since that April day of their arrival—made her way to Sophie’s side and through a tumultuous outpouring filled her with hope about Jan and the possibility of his salvation, but also terrified her with demands upon her courage which she felt certain she could not meet.
“You will have to be working for us every moment you’re in that insect’s nest,” Wanda had whispered to her in a corner of the barracks. “You can’t imagine what kind of an opportunity this is. It’s what the underground has been waiting for, praying for, to have somebody like you in a situation like this! You’ll have to use your eyes and ears every minute. Listen, darling, it’s so important for you to get word out about what’s going on. Shifts of personnel, changes of policy, transfers of the top SS pigs—anything is priceless information. It’s the lifeblood of the camp. War news! Anything to counter their filthy propaganda. Don’t you see, our morale is the only thing we have left in this hellhole. A radio, for instance—that would be priceless! Your chances of getting one would be practically nil, but if you could smuggle out a radio just so we could listen to London, it would be nearly the same as saving thousands and thousands of lives.”
Wanda was sick. The dreadful bruise inflicted on her face in Warsaw had never really gone away. Conditions in the women’s compound at Birkenau were hideous and a chronic bronchial ailment to which she had always been prone had flared up, bringing to her cheeks a hectic and alarming flush so bright that it almost matched her brick-red hair, or the grotesque frizzles that were left of it. With mingled horror, grief and guilt Sophie had a swift intuition that the present moment would be the last time she would ever lay eyes on this brave, resolute, luminous flame of a girl. “I can
only stay a few more minutes,” Wanda said. She suddenly switched from Polish to a rapid, breezy colloquial German, murmuring to Sophie that the nasty-faced assistant block leader lingering nearby, a Warsaw whore, looked like a stool pigeon and a traitorous rat, which she was. Quickly then she outlined to Sophie her scheme about Lebensborn, trying to make her see that the plan—however quixotic it might appear—was perhaps the only way of assuring Jan’s deliverance from the camp.
It would require a lot of conniving, she said, would require a lot of things which she knew Sophie would instinctively shrink from. She paused, coughed in painful racking spasms, then resumed. “I knew I had to see you when I heard about you through the grapevine. We hear everything. I’ve so wanted to see you anyway all these months, but this new job of yours made it absolutely necessary. I’ve risked everything to get here to see you—if I’m caught I’m done for! But nothing risked, nothing gained in this snakepit. Yes, I’ll tell you again and believe me: Jan is well, he’s as well as can be expected. Yes, not once—three times I saw him through the fence. I won’t fool you, he’s skinny, skinny as I am. It’s lousy in the Children’s Camp—everything’s lousy at Birkenau—but I’ll tell you another thing. They’re not starving the children as badly as some of the rest. Why, I don’t know, it can’t be their conscience. Once I managed to take him some apples. He’s doing well. He can make it. Go ahead and cry, darling, I know it’s awful but you mustn’t give up hope. And you’ve got to try to get him out of here before winter comes. Now, this Lebensborn idea may sound bizarre but the thing really exists—we saw it happening in Warsaw, remember the Rydzón child?—and I’m telling you that you simply must make a stab at using it to get Jan shipped out of here. All right, I know there’s a good chance that he might get lost if he’s sent to Germany, but at least he’ll be alive and well, don’t you see? There’s a good chance that you’ll be able to keep track of him, this war can’t last forever.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 211