—————
Fully alone.
I who have no name and no body—I have slipped out from under him and am now scattered above like flakes of ash-blonde human hair. No longer can I bear with the ruined god, betrayed and beaten by his own magic. Calling on powers best left unsummoned, he took human beings apart—and then he put them back together again. For a while it worked (there was redemption); and while it worked he and I were one, on the banks of the Vistula. He put us back together. But of course you shouldn’t be doing any of this kind of thing with human beings. . . . The party is over. He lies there in the peeling pyramid of the attic bedroom, on his cot shaped like a gutter. A damp pink pillow is twisted in his fists. I’ll always be here. But he’s on his own.
7
She loves me, she loves me not
The world has stopped making sense
again, and Odilo forgets everything
again (which is probably just as
well), and the war is over now (and it
seems pretty clear to me that we lost
it), and life goes on for a little while.
Odilo is innocent. His dreams are innocent, purged of menace and sickness. Oh, sure, he quivers on slippery poles as tall as the moon is high, and lopes nude down tunnels while alarm clocks sound, etc.—but there are no worrying resonances. And, as against that, his sleep savors many vulgar triumphs with treasure chests and locks of hair and sleeping beauties. And toilet bowls. The tutelary spirit of these dreams is no longer the man in the white coat and the black boots: it is a woman, a woman the size and shape of a galleon’s sail, who can forgive him everything. My hunch is that this woman is his mother, and I’m anxious to know when she’s going to show up. Odilo is innocent. Odilo is, it turns out, innocent, emotional, popular, and stupid.
Also potent. He has no power whatever, of course, and does his stuff in the Reserve Medical Corps with impeccable ovinity. But he’s potent. Ask little Herta, who will defeat-edly attest to it. She can barely walk. National Socialism is nothing more than applied biology. Odilo is a doctor: a biological soldier. So this two-year orgy we’re having must form part of his personal campaign. He’s on active service; he smells powder; he’s going over the top for the baby. Yes, they still want one, even though Eva was such a disappointment. When Odilo has Herta on the bed, splayed and buckled, with her ankles on either side of the headboard, it’s as if he’s trying to kill something rather than create it. But we all know by now that violence creates, here on earth. Never before have we been so potent, not even in New York when we were combing nurses out of our hair. Herta sometimes looks as though she could do with the odd impotent interlude. But there aren’t any. What made the difference, I wonder? After Schloss Hartheim, which seemed to go on forever, the three of us moved out of her parents’ house and came down here to Munich and its Alpine air Away from
Herta’s childhood room, away from the angels on the walls that used to watch over her. Here, in our apartment, we have a skeleton watching over us, made of white wood, and anatomical drawings loud with ginger meat.
The German girl is a natural girl. She comes just as she is. With no makeup and hairy legs. This is okay by Odilo. In fact he forbids the use of cosmetics, even soap; and as for her hair and down, her crackling armpits, her upper locks and lower wreath—Herta, I suspect, could be woollier than any yak and still keep Odilo happy. He calls her his Schimpanse: his chimpanzee. I have to say that I’m mad about her too. Herta’s body gossips with youth. Her ears are like cookies, her teeth are like candy. Her flesh is as taut as the flesh of an olive. At first she wasn’t so keen, always complaining of tiredness or soreness or emotional unease; but these days, as Odilo says again and again to all his friends (and the compliment, I think, is pitched decorously high), she bangs like a shithouse door in a gale. Herta is so small that it seems natural to be quite strict with her. She is eighteen. And getting smaller all the time. One mustn’t give in to pessimism, and it’s pointless to look too far ahead, but in a couple of years she won’t even be legal.