Badings is at her elbow. 'Very interesting, Mrs Costello,' he murmurs, doing his hostly duty. She shakes him off, she has no wish to be soothed. Head down, meeting no one's eye, she pushes her way to the ladies' room and shuts herself in a cubicle.
The banality of evil. Is that the reason why there is no longer any smell or aura? Have the grand Lucifers of Dante and Milton been retired for good, their place taken by a pack of dusty little demons that perch on one's shoulder like parrots, giving off no fiery glow but on the contrary sucking light into themselves? Or has everything she has said, all her finger-pointing and accusing, been not only wrong-headed but mad, completely mad? What is the business of the novelist, after all, what has been her own lifetime business, but to bring inert matter to life; and what has Paul West done, as the man with the beard pointed out, but bring to life, bring back to life, the history of what happened in that cellar in Berlin? What has she conveyed to Amsterdam to display to these puzzled strangers but an obsession, an obsession that is hers alone and that she clearly does not understand?
Obscene. Go back to the talismanic word, hold fast to it. Hold fast to the word, then reach for the experience behind it: that has always been her rule for when she feels herself slipping into abstraction. What was her experience? What was it that happened as she sat reading the accursed book on the lawn that Saturday morning? What was it that upset her so much that a year later she is still grubbing after its roots? Can she find her way back?
She knew, before she began the book, the story of the July plotters, knew that within days of their attempt on Hitler's life they were tracked down, most of them, and tried and executed. She even knew, in a general way, that they were put to death with the malicious cruelty in which Hitler and his cronies specialized. So nothing in the book had come as a real surprise.
She goes back to the hangman, whatever his name was. In his gibes at the men about to die at his hands there was a wanton, an obscene energy that exceeded his commission. Where did that energy come from? To herself she has called it satanic, but perhaps she should let go of that word now. For the energy came, in a certain sense, from West himself. It was West who invented the gibes (English gibes, not German), put them in the hangman's mouth. Fitting speech to character: what is satanic about that? She does it herself all the time.
Go back. Go back to Melbourne, to that Saturday morning when she felt, she could have sworn, the brush of Satan's hot, leathery wing. Was she deluded? I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had gone on reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on: what kind of excuse is that?
Paul West was only doing his writerly duty. In the person of his hangman he was opening her eyes to human depravity in another of its manifold forms. In the persons of the hangman's victims he was reminding her of what poor, forked, quivering creatures we all are. What is wrong with that?
What had she said? I do not want to read this. But what right had she to refuse? What right had she not to know what, in all too clear a sense, she already knew? What was it in her that wanted to resist, to refuse the cup? And why did she nonetheless drink – drink so fully that a year later she is still railing against the man who put it to her lips?
If there were a mirror on the back of this door instead of just a hook, if she were to take off her clothes and kneel before it, she, with her sagging breasts and knobbly hips, would look much like the women in those intimate, over-intimate photographs from the European war, those glimpses into hell, who knelt naked at the lip of the trench into which they would, in the next minute, the next second, tumble, dead or dying with a bullet to the brain, except that those women were in most cases not as old as she, merely haggard from malnutrition and fright. She has a feeling for those dead sisters, and for the men too who died at the hands of the butchermen, men old and ugly enough to be her brothers. She does not like to see her sisters and brothers humiliated, in ways it is so easy to humiliate the old, by making them strip, for example, taking away their dentures, making fun of their private parts. If her brothers, that day in Berlin, are going to be hanged, if they are going to jerk at the end of a rope, their faces going red, their tongues and eyeballs protruding, she does not want to see. A sister's modesty. Let me turn my eyes away.
Let me not look. That was the plea she breathed to Paul West (except that she did not know Paul West then, he was just a name on the cover of a book). Do not make me go through with it! But Paul West did not relent. He made her read, excited her to read. For that she will not easily forgive him. For that she has pursued him across the seas all the way to Holland.
Is that the truth? Will that do as an explanation?
Yet she does the same kind of thing, or used to. Until she thought better of it, she had no qualms about rubbing people's faces in, for instance, what went on in abattoirs. If Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, casting the shadow of his wings over the beasts who, their nostrils already filled with the smell of death, are prodded down the ramp towards the man with the gun and the knife, a man as merciless and as banal (though she has begun to feel that that word too should be retired, it has had its day) as Hitler's own man (who learned his trade, after all, on cattle) – if Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, where is he? She, no less than Paul West, knew how to play with words until she got them right, the words that would send an electric shock down the spine of the reader. Butcherfolk in our own way.
So what has happened to her now? Now, all of a sudden, she has grown prim. Now she no longer likes to see herself in the mirror, since it puts her in mind of death. Ugly things she prefers wrapped up and stored away in a drawer. An old woman turning back the clock, back to the Irish-Catholic Melbourne of her childhood. Is that all it amounts to?
Go back to the experience. The flap of Satan's leathery wing: what was it that convinced her she felt it? And how much longer can she occupy one of the two cubicles in this cramped little women's room before some well-intentioned person decides she has had a collapse and calls in the janitor to break the lock?
The twentieth century of Our Lord, Satan's century, is over and done with. Satan's century and her own too. If she happens to have crept over the finish line into the new age, she is certainly not at home in it. In these unfamiliar times Satan is still feeling his way, trying out new contrivances, making new accommodations. He pitches his tent in odd places – for example in Paul West, a good man, for all she knows, or as good as a man can be who is also a novelist, that is to say, perhaps not good at all, but tending nevertheless to the good, in some ultimate sense, otherwise why write? Takes up residence in women too. Like the liver fluke, like the pinworm: one can live and die ignorant that one has been host to generations of them. In whose liver, in whose gut was Satan, that fateful day last year when again, indubitably, she felt his presence: in West's or in her own?
Old men, brothers, hanging dead with their trousers around their ankles, executed. In Rome it would have been different. In Rome they made a spectacle of executions: hauled their victims through howling mobs to the place of skulls and impaled them or flayed them or coated them with pitch and set them on fire. The Nazis, by comparison, mean, cheap, machine-gunning people in a field, gassing them in a bunker, strangling them in a cellar. So what was too much about death at the hands of the Nazis that was not too much in Rome, when all the striving of Rome was to wring from death as much cruelty, as much pain as possible? Is it just the grubbiness of that cellar in Berlin, a grubbiness that is too much like the real thing, the modern thing, for her to bear?
It is like a wall that she comes up against time and again. She did not want to read but she read; a violence was done to her but she conspired in the violation. He made me do it, she says, yet she makes others do it.
She should never have come. Conferences are for exchanging thoughts, at least that is the idea behind conferences. You cannot exchange thoughts when you do not know what you think.
There is a scratching at the door, a child's voice. 'Mammie, er zit een vrouw erin, ik kan haar schoenen zien!"
Hurriedly she flushes the bowl, unlocks the door, emerges.'Sorry,' she says, evading the eyes of mother and daughter.
What was the child saying? Why is she taking so long? If she spoke the language she could enlighten the child. Because the older you get the longer it takes. Because sometimes you need to be alone. Because there are things we do not do in public, not any more.
Her brothers: did they let them use the toilet one last time, or was shitting themselves part of the punishment? That, at least, Paul West drew a veil over, for which small mercy, thanks.