“Your bed’s nicer than mine.”
“You must be getting better.”
“How long has it been?”
“Only a few days. You’ve been very ill.”
“That’s good to hear. I’d hate to feel like this if I were healthy. Have you been having your way with me?”
“Miss O’Brien!”
“Only kidding. It feels like I’ve been sodomized by the entire Albanian army, though. Don’t you think I’m a bit old for diapers?”
“—”
“Thanks. That’s what I should say. It’s just that I’m a little embarrassed.”
“Don’t be. There is no such thing as propriety where illness is concerned.”
“No, I didn’t mean about the fever and the diapers. I meant about saying thanks to my captor. That’s what embarrasses me. Why did you do it? If you’d let me die, your problems would be over.”
“I thought of that. I guess I’ve gotten used to having you around. You needed help. There wasn’t much choice.”
“Do me a favor?”
“Certainly.”
“Get me a pen. I’ll write that postcard to my agent now.”
It is true, I should have let nature take its course. Miss O’Brien asked the correct question: Why didn’t I? I still have no answer to it. I have gotten used to having her around; that is a fact. But one becomes accustomed to all sorts of things, both good and bad. Propinquity—forced or otherwise—brings about feelings too often confused with liking or even love. Yet man is a creature of habit. Thus anything threatening to disrupt habit is fought against, even that which threatens a bad habit. Realizing this does not mean that I am not controlled by the principle. Though I do not rule out the possibility of a true attachment, I do leaven it with the pragmatism of propinquity. To this must be added another possibility: During the days of nursing her, I rarely associated the being and personality of Miss O’Brien to this sick person. There was no way I could turn a blind eye toward her. She was sick unto death. It was impossible not to do all I could to help her. That is the paradox: She is my enemy, yet I must save her life!
There is a resonance here between my treatment of Miss O’Brien and that of the inmates of Mauthausen, the concentration camp where I served during the war. There at Mauthausen, in the winter of 1944, I decided to let nature take its course, as opposed to my intervention in the case of the Irish. Diphtheria struck the camp, a particularly virulent strain as it turned out, and by the time it had run its course, it had killed some forty-five hundred inmates. There was little enough one could have done under the best circumstances. What little medicine available was reserved for frontline soldiers and camp guards. Yet, in the end, it was my name on the order deciding not to aid the prisoners whatsoever. Even had there been adequate supplies, I would have acted the same. For in this case, it was right and proper to let nature proceed in its ineluctable cleansing process. In this, I was merely acting in good faith with party doctrine. The parallel with Miss O’Brien is this: In the case of the Mauthausen inmates—Jews, Gypsies, social undesirables, and hardened criminals—the patient was Europe and the disease was the inmates themselves. I acted as automatically to save civilization as I did to save the Irish. About this I am unrepentant, nor should it be otherwise, despite the in absentia judgment handed down against me at Nuremberg.
Things have begun to return to normal around here. Miss O’Brien regains energy every day. Yesterday, she elected to move back to her own quarters. I helped her down the stairs, but otherwise she is becoming quite steady on her feet once again. It was quite touching to see her face as she returned to the familiar surroundings of her room. We have, suffice to say, come a distance since the time, nearly two months ago, when I first introduced her to her new home. I do believe it would be safe now to return the paintings to her walls.
She walked about the room, touching her things. At her work desk, she simply stood and felt the wood of the tabletop with her palm. She said not a word, but I knew what she was thinking: that she might never have survived to come back to this room, that what she had seen as her jail before now had the comforting and sheltering effect of home. One becomes used to so much in this world. I, for my part, am very happy I helped her through her illness. It took that to establish trust between us. If that was the price to be paid, I do not find it too high.
Today as I write, Miss O’Brien is once again in her compound. The sun at this time of year does not reach the back area but for a few hours at midday. The jungle growth blocks its light as the sun approaches its southern winter course. Winter. A laughable concept here, though after so many decades I do not know why it should matter anymore. How bizarre to think I have spent the greater part of my life here on this coast, backed up against the jungle. I, who love snow and the festivities of winter more than any man I have ever known. The ironies that life dishes up!
Christmas approaches. I do not know if the Irish is such a one as to celebrate the season. I shall have to inquire. As a sign of her trust, she has let me take one of her short stories that she has worked on while here. She sits now in the midday sun reading my memoirs, while I sit up here, having looked at her story.
What she has created here is really quite remarkable. I am a bit at sea as to know how to interpret the work, however. The title itself is quite something: “I Have to Tell You What I Know Before I Know What I Have to Tell You.” I am not sure I understand this at all; I must confer with Miss O’Brien about it. This is the story, if you could call it that, of a sort of gigolo, a young man who has great success with the ladies. He falls in love with an older woman. This woman is, at one point, described as “someone whom the feminist battle had killed, but who advanced to fight the proper dentry.”
Now I ask you. What in the world does this mean? What is dentry? I assume I am in the precincts of some new and weird modern fiction techniques. All right. I persevere. Little really happens in the story itself. It is told in conversation, somewhat like the transcripts of my tapes. Asterisks litter the text, however, and correspond to footnotes—this is the only way I can describe them. These are at times completely unintelligible mixes of abbreviated words; sometimes little cartoons in boxes at the foot of the page that in a way seem to throw light on the woman’s character, or the man’s, but do not seem really to have anything to do with advancing the story.
And the story is simply this: Here is one woman (hardly worth the fight, I should think) who will not allow the man easy access to her body. She forces him to admit first that he wants her, that he needs her.
“Though she was dead from the sexual battle herself, she knew how it should be waged.”
Admittedly, there is a power to Miss O’Brien’s rather understated, spare prose. It is almost lyrical without attempting to be so. The footnote to this particular aperçu is a picture instructing us, I assume, on how to win love: three monkeys of the “hear-see-speak no evil” sort with the caption “Fight, love, and live” beneath them. Another cartoon, its meaning totally lost on me, shows a bus with a smirk on its front radiator like a face, and a destination board on top with Dentry on it. This fixation with dentistry or oral hygiene (or is it some form of the Greek for tree?) is evident throughout the story. And when the young man is trying to woo the older lady—he has by now rented a room in her house—he is shown to be frying cold clotted rice in too much oil in a white porcelain dish over a low flame. This being the first literal concrete detail in the story, it must obviously have meaning, but I’m damned if I can figure it out. Sounds like some silly dream she had one night and transcribed it word for word. An eerie quality to it.
The lady now listens to the young man’s subtle wooing without responding.
“Until now I have made no advances,” he continues into her silence.
She is stubborn. She will not let him use that speech as meaning everything. She wants him to spell it out, if only for himself.
&n
bsp; In the end, after playing by her rules and admitting his love for her, he is unable to perform.
“A very interesting story.”
“You didn’t like it.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I don’t expect you to like it. Most wouldn’t.”
“I thought the footnotes clever.”
“They weren’t meant to be clever. They were meant to hurt, to sear into your guts. Clever is for novelists.”
“—”
“—”
“I thought you drew him quite well. The poor chap’s utter confusion at the antics of the older woman.”
“Oh, Christ! Look, do you take everything in the world at its surface value?”
“Yes, I do, Miss O’Brien. I am not a miner. I leave grubbing around the pits to the colliers. When I read a story, a book, an essay, I like to know what it is the writer has to say. If he or she has a clear conception, then they make it apparent to their readers. If not, then they should remain silent until they have sorted things out for themselves.”
“‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.’ That sort of thing?”
“You surprise me continually, Miss O’Brien. But yes, precisely. One should learn to hold one’s tongue about that which cannot be expressed in words, rather than fussing and fretting about it all over volumes of works.”
“Like you and your memoirs?”
“I don’t follow. Those are different altogether. A very realistic laying down of the facts. … Why do you shake your head?”
“I don’t know how to get through to you.”
“Be direct. Tell the thing simply and openly. All this symbolism, Miss O’Brien. The metaphor. The private language. I simply do not understand.”
“But don’t you see? That’s the point! You aren’t supposed to understand everything. Not up here, anyway. It works down here. Not with reason, but with your guts. That’s the idea. It makes you wonder rather than feel self-satisfied at understanding.”
“But what, pray tell, is wrong with understanding? What is wrong with plain talking?”
“How can I tell you what you have to know before I know what I have to tell you?”
It is 1941. I am stationed in Vienna, quite an advancement. I am now a Schutzstaffel obersturmführer, and via my job in Section IVA, 4b, I commingle my destiny with a man history knows only too well: Adolf Eichmann. I am his assistant, as it were, at the Central Bureau for Jewish Resettlement; our offices are found in a suite of rooms in an old Rothschild palace on Prinz-Eugen Strasse. Initially, we get along fine, Eichmann and I. We are both Austrians; we understand the courtesies. Besides, by this time, Eichmann is seldom in Vienna. Much of the time, his duties are taking him to distant parts of the far-flung Reich.
My work, organizing the transport of Viennese Jewry, is all-encompassing. I take great satisfaction in solving problems of logistics and transport that others say are insoluble. Indeed, my colleagues take to calling me the Problem Man. I solve, rather than make, problems.
By now, I have learned the subtle art of simulated subservience. I have made it my trademark to know how to work my way through the state bureaucracy. My legal training helps here: I understand the hypocrisy of written laws, of constitutions, and how to get around these impediments.
In ways, it seems strange to be back in Vienna. After only two years in Germany, I am already feeling the German impatience with Austrian Schlamperei—a legacy of our quasi Mediterranean Catholic heritage. The city resists organization, punctuality, order—all the virtues of the Reich. To find it so is a bit of a shock to me, having always seen Vienna as the most cosmopolitan of cities. Perhaps it still is—but after Berlin, Vienna pales in my eyes. It is, if this can be the case, much too feminine of a city for my liking. I appreciate the masculine charms of Berlin more: the Brandenburg Gate, the magnificent broad Kurfürstendamm, or Unter den Linden stretching from the Tiergarten to the Royal Palace. True, Vienna has her Ringstrasse, but even this is described by cognoscenti as a necklace around the Inner City, a most feminine adornment. And the rabbit warren of old streets in the First District unsettles me now, where once, as a child, I had found them rather romantic. I look at things from a tactician’s point of view; I would just as soon Haussmannize Vienna as look it. Baroque lanes no longer fill me with a deep sense of rootedness in history. I care not that Mozart once trod these very cobbles, that Beethoven and Brahms lived in this house or that. Such considerations no longer pertain in the modern world. The free flow of traffic, of goods, materiel, and people is the goal of the modern world. That is how I saw it then, and largely how I see it still. Things that impede free flow are obstructions to be dismantled, destroyed, blown up—be they buildings, narrow lanes, or other people. Life is a magnificent procession: There is no room in it for backward looking, retrograde thinking, or for sentimentality. And Vienna is the capital of sentiment. The City of Dreams, it is called. The Phaeacian paradise with a chicken in the pot every Sunday, where the wine flows freely and the women are all insouciantly sweet. How laughable, how frivolous this reputation seems in 1941 when faced with the monumental tasks of war. I suppose I write so strongly about the procession of life, the meaning of life lying in the free flow of traffic, because those were my concerns during those years.
Sixteen-hour days are nothing for me, nor are six days a week to boot. I am at the center of the chaos that is Vienna. Presented with a tangled ball of string the size of Manhattan, I have the task to unravel it. That is what the work feels like; and when one loop of string is pulled free, it only tightens and knots another. Sisyphus, then, and the stuffed bureaucrats of the Municipality are my carrion birds, forever pecking at my innards.
Forgive the melodrama, but that is sincerely the way I felt in that period of service in Vienna. The wonder is that we were able to round up the several hundred thousand Jews residing in Vienna, that I was able to secure transport for their shipment and resettlement in the east.
Uschi, I regret to say, was very little help in these labors. In point of fact, she even questioned the advisability of our racial policy. She liked putting on aristocratic airs: Her family’s von was granted at the time of Kaiser Franz, when one of the Danzel men became a minor court physician because of his impressive work with phlebitis, a disease from which one of the royal charges was suffering at the time. Of course, a physician could not be at court without the vestiges of belonging to the aristocracy. The rest of Uschi’s family were quite humorous about their titled status, very droll, but Uschi latched on tighter and tighter to this von as the years of our empty marriage increased. She turned into something of a snob, in point of fact, and thought it her duty to protect those less fortunate than she. This noblesse oblige attitude of hers extended even unto the Jews and would be expressed at the most inconvenient of times, as would her opinion of Hitler himself, whom she described as a tapezierer and anstreicher, a mere paper-hanger and house painter, because of the rumors of his down-and-out days as a youth in Vienna. In general, this was the feeling of the entire von Danzel family. Though two of them had accepted the colors of the Staffel, they tolerated Hitler as some kind of comic hero who would fade away after the Nazis finally came onto the world stage; after the New Order had been firmly established.
Such a conversation was broached only once in my presence. I quickly put an end to it by a rather pointed comment; namely, that all we men in the room had pledged our very lives to this man they were ridiculing. Whereupon a long silence was punctuated by Frau von Danzel accidentally knocking her Lobmeyr crystal wineglass against her Augarten porcelain plate as she lifted the former. As for Uschi, I simply disallowed her to speak on the subject in my hearing.
So there was little support for my work at my villa, the big empty house on the Hohe Warte. It was Uschi who went for ostentation this time, who had to have the representative villa in the posh northern suburbs. It was a strange
reversal for us: In Berlin I had been the one to play the role of newly arrived, swanking it with the Wannsee villa and the accounts at all the finest shops on Unter den Linden and Kurfürstendamm, all grossly above our means. Uschi had been the condemning one then, scornful of my typical middle-class delight in wealth. I embarrassed her, I do believe. One accustomed to living with fine things finds the delight in them by others to be slightly bad form. Lord knows why it is that, to truly exhibit class, one exhibits nothing, or if anything, just a disdain for it and its accoutrements. It is a policy of understatement that we inherit from the British, world advisers on all things to do with snobbery. The very suburbs we lived in, so proudly adorned with the finest villas and mansions in the world, we referred to in English as the “Cottage” district, as if to describe a twenty-room edifice on two acres of grounds as anything more than a humble cottage were in the worst of bad taste, just as with the lawyer Haberloch and his “simple” pied-à-terre.
And, of course, during my sojourn in Berlin, I had not a clue about such artifice and was thus forever inviting colleagues to my Wannsee villa. Uschi would blanch at the mere use of the word. I would handle the Sèvres vases in the entry hall and tell visitors how much they had cost. This was enough to make Uschi want to cry. Perhaps I knew better, yet I loved the feel of those pieces and the knowledge that my talents and hard work had won them for us.
But now, in Vienna, all this had changed. I was immersed in my organizational work; I cared little where I lay my head down at night or what I ate, let alone what I ate off of. But Uschi, back in her hometown, wanted to put on the dog. Hence the “cottage” in Hohe Warte; hence the Hoffmann furnishings, the tapestries on the wall by Kolo Moser and his wife. Uschi’s penchant for Jugendstil was a trifle unsettling to me. The Wiener Werkstätte had, I must admit, turned out some lovely designs. But have you really ever attempted sitting in one of Hoffmann’s chairs? Impossible! One even risked the damning epithet of “decadent” having so much of that fin-de-siècle production around. There was something not quite right about furnishing a house so in 1941. The proper furnishing for a villa such as ours should have been Empire, or at the very least Biedermeier: something solid and eternal in oak. But Uschi cared not about such things; it was Jugendstil she loved, and thus, the entire house, even down to her bathroom and bedroom, were done in that style.
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