The Edit Page 18
This is the light by which I read your argument of order versus chaos. And I find it spurious. To begin with, your Nazi search for order unleashed the most chaotic period in world history. By attempting to suppress, on a megascale, all those nasty complications of appetite and emotion, you fueled a perversion of them on a scale never before known to the world. By suppressing love, you unleashed hate; by boxing up passion, you fed sadism; by bottling up emotion, you flooded the world in necrophilic urges. So much for your new order; so much for your thousand-year Reich. It was the culminating point of male ascendancy, of the male urge for order and control, and it all but destroyed the world. In a history that views the man-woman struggle as paramount, this was the turning point. From Plato—who was writing at a time recently converted from the supremacy of women—to the Third Reich. Those centuries delineate the time of male dominance. The pendulum has now begun its return swing; those days of male order at all costs are on the wane. That is probably the only good to come out of the Nazi period. It took the male argument to its logical and absurd extreme and showed us all just how empty it really is.
The good life is not one that protects itself from tuche, but rather embraces it. The good life is one of constant change; it cannot be static, for that is not life or living. The good life is not one that views appetites and feelings as chaotic and therefore undesirable forces. The good life is a mixture of rational self-sufficiency and passion, of ethics tempered with emotion. It is not a life represented by the logical either/or symbol, but by the Boolean symbol of overlapping circles. Inclusion rather than exclusion.
“A most intriguing hypothesis, Miss O’Brien.”
“I don’t hypothesize.”
“A guru, then?”
“It’s quite clear to me.”
“You write forcefully. Most convincingly.”
“That’s because I believe in what I write. As I said before, I have stories that need to be written, not merely the need to write stories.”
“That is what you think I am doing with my little narrative.”
“You say that, I don’t.”
“But … ?”
“Well, you have become less convincing lately. Have you thought about my request for an outing? I’m going fucking stir-crazy here.”
“How do you mean, unconvincing?”
“Jesus! I wish I’d never started this editor shtick with you. Unconvincing, like bullshit. Like words put down on paper to fill space, not to fill minds and hearts. Like cacophony.”
“But where? At what point? I thought you liked it.”
“The early parts, yes. Frau Wotruba. There were scenes there that made me believe. That made me see and know you. Even some of the early Staffel stuff. Cow. But now you recite cities where you lived, but not really what you did there. I mean, are you a bad fucker or not? Eichmann came clean finally. Even before the Mossad caught up with him in Argentina. Remember the Life articles? The interview for posterity? It was all there. He convicted himself long before his trial in Jerusalem. But he had the guts at least to own up to what he had done. No repentance, mind you, or recanting. If anything, he was pissed he hadn’t been able to finish his job. To deport every Jew in Europe to Auschwitz. But you, you promise confession and all we get is that hackneyed old line of ‘alles von oben,’ ‘doing my duty,’ ‘true to the Clan.’ But what about you? And if you were so enamored of the Nazi cause, why not tell us about your wondrous career? Enough of insipid Uschi and of your mother with her cakes playing surrogate wife. What about your job? What about the days in the Palais Rothschild in Vienna?”
“I wrote that. I even told of my hard decision vis-à-vis Frau Wotruba.”
“That. That’s not telling anything. That’s wrapping up loose ends in the narrative. Like Chekhov: a gun introduced in the first act needs to go off by act five. So you took care of Frau Wotruba. But it’s all offstage. Don’t you see? We don’t feel it because you don’t. It’s just words.”
“I was Eichmann’s man in Vienna. It’s all in the memoirs. It was I who was responsible for Jewish resettlement in the early forties.”
“Wait. Let’s talk English if we’re going to talk English. ‘Resettlement.’ That means moving, settling down somewhere else. Creating a new life.”
“That’s what it was called.”
“I don’t care fuck all what it was called. That was all part of the Nazi big lie. Playing with language. The language rules, Sprachregeln, where nothing meant what it traditionally meant. ‘Resettlement,’ ‘Jew-free zone,’ ‘special treatment.’ All the euphemisms that meant killing, murder, homicide on a grand scale.”
“You seem to know much about the period, Miss O’Brien. Are you a student of it?”
“—”
“You display more than an editorial interest, it would appear. I do not recall mentioning Sprachregeln in my manuscript.”
“I am a student of life, Herr ____.”
“Yes. Quite. So you advise me to reveal all. Confess my deeds most thoroughly. Name names.”
“Or not at all. You’re the one who wants to write this. Either do it honestly or forget it.”
“A most severe ethical system. But what of your honored tuche, of the happenstance of life? The soft corners of it, the rounded edges, the fuzzy areas of morality. Your Boolean symbol rather than either/or?”
“—”
“In truth, Miss O’Brien, I believe the two of us are closer in spirit than you would ever like to admit. I believe we are both uncompromising, true to our ideals. Unshakable. If we are at the opposite ends of your energy color spectrum, still our lights shine brightly enough.”
“The outing. Have you thought of it?”
“I have, Miss O’Brien. And I shall let you know.”
“And the other?”
“Yes. Quite so. I nearly forgot. Here you are.”
“—”
“What is it you find so amusing, Miss O’Brien?”
“I’m just trying to imagine your explanation for these at the local drugstore.”
“Actually, I had a supply of them sent from the capital. More anonymous that way.”
“How many months’ worth, Herr ____?”
PART IV
“They are such fine tens you have, my friend, that I shall build on them. And three aces, four jacks. I fear I am out.”
“—”
“Your mind is not on the game, my friend. Have the tentacles of love ensnared you? Have you finally succumbed to female charms? That is what they are saying in the village. No one sees you about anymore. Your boat has not even yet been soundly moored for winter. People wonder if you have died or are simply too weak from nightly calisthenics to get out of the house. Don José at Café Candide even speaks of a wedding, of how he shall be the logical one to cater it. Octopus, bream, all manner of shellfish, and the most lively of Bolivian white wines.”
“Don José is a fool. And I wonder at your sagacity, Cordoba, in repeating such inanities.”
“Another hand?”
“I think not. As you observe, my mind is not on the cards tonight.”
“My friend, I worry about you. It is this woman, is it not? She has some hold, some power over you. You do not look well. You are too much shut in of late. Altogether you have taken too much upon yourself with this woman.”
“Out with it, Cordoba. Have your friends been whispering in your ear again?”
“On the contrary. Your last postcard seems to have done the trick. The Mexican police will now have the missing person’s report on her—last reported location, Mexico City. That is all as you planned. My friends can live with that. They are still miffed at you for taking individual action, but no longer clamor for your hide.”
“That’s reassuring to hear. Then what is it? Why the sudden concern?”
“I hate to lose a good gin partner, is all.”
“What a bastard you are.”
“Men are bastards. All of us, even the legitimate ones.”
“And supposing I am truly in love with the woman. Which I am not. But just let us suppose. You, I imagine, would do everything possible to scotch the affair, just so as not to lose a partner at cards?”
“Put like that it does sound petty. Yet there are few enough halfway cultured people in this godforsaken place. Few enough with whom one can exchange a friendly word, let alone share a fine dinner. Such things are worth fighting for, yes. And look at you, my friend. You are a shambles. You have not shaved in days; there are bags under your eyes large enough that my father could have packed his diplomatic wardrobe in them. You are as gray as the herring gull and as tired looking as an old sea turtle. If this is the result of love, give me celibacy any day.”
“—”
“A word of advice, my friend. In seriousness now. Get rid of this woman. She will kill you in the end. I do not know what power she has over you, but whatever it is, you must destroy it before it destroys you.”
“Nonsense, Cordoba. She’s proven quite helpful editing my memoirs.”
“You haven’t let her read them, have you?”
“She wouldn’t sign the postcard unless …”
“Yes?”
“She said she wanted to know me. To see if she could trust me. Believe in me as a man.”
“I see.”
“Now don’t go getting Jesuitical on me. What the hell is it you see?”
“I see that you two are locked in mortal combat. You know that you can never let her free now. Before—reading just the first pages of your memoirs—perhaps. Perhaps that was only an accident. As I say, journalists are naturally snoopy. But now that she has pried into your total life, has begun to edit for you … well, now you can never be sure.”
“Damn your eyes! Be sure of what?”
“Sure that she is not playing the double game. That she did not come down here expressly to worm her way into your life to win conclusive proof for her Israeli masters.”
“Be serious, Cordoba. Who would take such a chance? How could she know that I would not kill her out of hand?”
“Yet still, now you can never be sure, my friend. Can you? Tell me, does she, at times, speak quite knowingly of the Reich? Does she, in heated moments of conversation, know a trifle too much for a layman?”
“—”
“I see by your eyes that I have struck oil. Perhaps such well-informed arguments did not strike you as being out of character at first. After all, you have spent your life with such facts. The Reich was a reality for you. But for this woman … She was born after the war. She has no direct personal experience of it. Remember that, my friend. All information she has of the war will have come from her own study of it. She had to make the conscious decision to learn about it. The inevitable question then is: Why? And once you ask why, then the worm of doubt has entered your mind. You see, you can never set her free now. You two are handcuffed together for eternity. Unless …”
At the behest of Miss O’Brien, some leaves from my Staffel scrapbook (translated of course):
SCHUTZSTAFFFEL PERSONALITY EVALUATION
Religion: Has none
Race: Nordic
Personality: Self-assured
Appearance Out of Uniform: Unfailingly correct
General Character Analysis: Objective, sociable, clever, ambitious
It is the “clever” that rankles. Surely this was Eichmann’s adjective, pejorative in the extreme in the original German, meant to rein one in, to put a curse on one so that no other Staffel department would have me. Eichmann above all hated losing his trusted subordinates. As Miss O’Brien says, if it works, do not fix it. That was Eichmann’s lifelong motto.
Training: Expert in legal disentanglements; quite knowledgeable on the Jewish question
Special Characteristics: Knows his way through the state bureaucracies, whom to contact and whom to avoid
Sports Activities: Received the Special Decoration of the SD
I passed a physical exam, that is all. I had no desire to do well in competitive games, though Uschi urged fencing on me.
General Note: A good organization man and faithful follower
Another Eichmann description, surely. This meant to put the kiss of death on my promotion past major of the Schutzstaffel.
SCHUTZSTAFFEL PROGRESS AND PROMOTION REPORT
SS No. 323498 6.2.39
Party No. 2038692
Station
Rank
Performance of Duties
Bernau Academy
Kadet SS Schütze
3.9.39
Willing, cooperative, somewhat reserved. Took part in Special Action Himmler, for which he was awarded Cross of Merit, 2nd Class.
Berlin RSHA
1939–1940
SS-Rottenführer
1.10.39
SS-Scharführer
2.6.40
SS-Oberscharführer
9.9.40
SS-Untersturmfuührer
1.1.41
As member of SD, performed diligently and loyally all duties assigned in accordance with RSHA requirements, assistant on Foreign Desk, Amt IV, Foreign Intelligence. Work on Foreign Desk is exemplary. Fine organizational/clerical talent. Also acute facility for resolution of delicate legalistic problems.
Vienna
1941-42
SS-Obersturmführer
20.5.41
Assigned to Department IVA, 4b, Jewish Affairs. Quick grasp of problems at hand. Ready hand at untangling antiquated Austrian legalities. Diligent worker. Loyal party man. Question arises over unstable domestic situation.
Mauthausen KZ
1942
SS-Hauptsturmführer
13.12.42
SS-Sturmbannführer
1.10.43
Administrative Officer of major Austrian Konzentrationslager at Mauthausen. Unfailingly diligent and uncompromising in fulfillment of duties to Reich and humanity. Iron Cross awarded 8.9.44 for outstanding and unfailing troth, loyalty, and exactitude.
CEDULA DE IDENTIDAD
No. 212430
_____________
Firma del interesado
Certifico que don ________________ que dice de estado ____________ que lee y escribe si y cuya fotografia, impresion digito-pulgar derecha y firma figuran al dorso, es naciado el 23 de Mayo de 1916 en el puebla de _________ Provincia de __________ Nacion Alemania que tiene I m_____etms, de estatura, el cutis de color blanco, Cabello rubio. Barba afeit. Nariz dorso recto.
Base bajada. Boca medi. Orejas meds. Mat. ___________ Distrito __________ Div. ____________ Observaciones ______________
Abril 3 de 1947
The above was my identity card issued when first I came to this godforsaken strip along the sea. But why grouse? The country has been good enough to me. You, gentle reader, will surely forgive me if I have left many blanks. I am still somewhat schizoid on the point of my exact physical whereabouts. I assume I shall sort this out sooner or later. Perhaps on the second draft.
“Chickens are laying again.”
“I’m not really hungry. When can I get out of here? No kidding, it’s driving me batty being closed in like this. I’m not used to it.”
“Eat. Don’t start all that again. You don’t want to get ill.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to have to coax you to eat.”
/> “You mean force-feed me.”
“I mean coax. If I had meant the other, I would have said it. Stop putting words in my mouth. Or on my papers for that matter.”
“I’m not so sure, Herr ____. I mean, I’m not sure you ever say what you mean. Too many years of dissimulation. It becomes a habit.”
“Eat. I’m still considering your suggestion. An outing might be nice for both of us. But do eat, Miss O’Brien.”
“Okay. I’m cooperating, see? Knocking off the top of this five-minute egg. You do them perfectly, you know.”
“Years of training.”