The Edit

by J Sydney Jones

  I am afflicted with the I-should-have-said syndrome. Of course, like most men of action, I am utterly helpless in a dialectic. Silence is my best course in a battle of verbal pyrotechnics. But her words stung; I wish I could have parried a thrust or two with my own truths, such as:

  “If I am indeed a necrophile, then what attracts you to me? Why thrust yourself into my life, wanting to make me the protagonist of your book, as you insist?”

  Or:

  “Journalists are the ultimate necrophiles, the only winners in any war. The collectors of woeful tales, the capturers of souls on photosensitive paper. Who but a journalist could stand by as children are shot, calmly recording the event for their voyeuristic audiences?”

  Or:

  “My stone Madonna is far warmer than you.”

  I must guard against using the Irish’s phrase for my Kreuzberg Venus. Journalists are most adept at labeling things. What seems a harmless description becomes, at one remove, ironic and sinister. I know what she was implying by her “stone Madonna” business. She sees me as the sort of man who does not want to participate in the to-and-fro of emotional life, who is more comfortable by far with the symbols and trappings of love than with the muck of it, the sometimes unwilling flesh of it. The mess and chaos of human love and loving. It is the typical female argument of man’s inability to engage on the fullest, deepest emotional level. And it is pure garbage. It is not that man cannot participate thusly, only that most choose not to. Most men prefer a more elevated union.

  Yes, there are many things I could have told Miss O’Brien, but she was in no condition to listen. Histrionics cannot be met with reasoned argument. She does not even understand the importance of the Venus for me. She would make me a mere lepidopterist, a collector of objects and people. But Miss O’Brien was possessed by her hormones at the time—there was no possibility of rational discussion. Perhaps after a day or two of injections, she will recover her senses.

  My Venus sits in front of me at this very moment: I have taken it down from the mantel for a closer inspection. It is heavy, incredibly so for sandstone. I acquired this lovely artifact from a spa near Melk in Austria, Bad Kreuzberg. Quite by accident, one of the prisoners in the satellite camp at Melk uncovered her while breaking ground for new camp buildings. As ranking officer of the detail, I fell into possession of this prehistoric “lady.” Of course, this jumps ahead of my biographical narrative; I shall deal with those years in the camps in their proper place. This simply to explain the long possession of my Kreuzberg Venus. But Miss O’Brien is wrong about her, about my Kreuzberg Venus, on two counts; she says, and I quote: “You want to encase me here like some fertility symbol, some fucking stone Madonna that you can pick out of your collection when the spirit moves you.”

  Well, she is patently wrong. I do not wish to make Miss O’Brien into an object in my collection, nor is the Kreuzberg Venus a fertility symbol, despite what all the so-called anthropologists say!

  As an icon of fertility, I cannot imagine one less inspirational of devotion, not to mention ardor. But I realize that perhaps you, gentle reader, have no idea of what I am speaking of. I refer to the squat, bulbous stone objects that doubtless you have seen, perhaps without quite realizing what they are. Ancient stone carvings—some twenty-five thousand years old, in fact. And the feminist anthro-­apologists have made much of the fact of these first “ladies” of history. Their provenance is quite widespread over Europe and represents one of man’s first three-dimensional plastic creations. And they are immensely, nay, hideously fat. Our intellectuals tell us that they are representatives of Mother Earth, of fertility. Granted, fashions change over the millennia, in body types no less than in clothes. Perhaps in that dark time of perpetual winter when the “Venuses” were created, fat truly was beautiful. But these Venuses are not simply fat—they are quite frankly past their prime. Gravity, as Miss O’Brien joked, has played its cruel joke upon their flesh. No man in his right mind would worship at such a female altar. These statues are, indeed, the best birth control method of all time. Earth Mother they may be, but the mother of one’s forebears, rather than one’s own children. Venus is perhaps as large a misnomer as is the Irish’s “stone Madonna.”

  In truth, these figures are the Crone—a foreshadowing of where we are all headed. A foretaste of eternity.

  My Kreuzberg Venus is to me as the skull was to St. Jerome. Life in the shadows of the gallows concentrates one wonderfully on living, as it must have our Stone Age friends, as well. Such is the symbolic program of the Kreuzberg Venus: a memento mori rather than memento fertilis.

  Writing out of pain; it is what God intended for us.

  It is the spring of 1939, a magical time for me. Never shall there be another match for that spring. This was eleven years after the incident with Frau Wotruba. The next crystalline moment—or in this case, interval—that I pick out of the storehouse of my memories. It was a threefold time of magic for me.

  I had just finished my studies and my law exam scores were posted in the university foyer for all to see. The elation of finding the “2” next to my name! I stood by the corkboard where it was posted for a full two hours that afternoon, watching the other students come, their faces white, puckered—as nervous as mine had been when first coming to check on the exam results. Some of these faces brightened as they saw the results. These had passed the first hurdle in life and would be going on out into the great world, as I myself was. Others went even whiter in the face upon seeing their grades. For these, it would be a failure from which they would never recover.

  I wondered if these failures saw the “2” next to my name and wished they were me. More than wondered—I rather hoped they did. I had long enough wanted to be one of them: a middle-class university student from a good home. Instead, I was the son of a tobacconist from the Wieden district, for by now, my father had been six years dead, victim of angina brought on, Mother always swore, by the quantities of wine that he somehow managed to consume. Mother had taken Father’s life insurance and gambled, investing in a tobacco shop that ultimately supported us quite well. Yet still, the Viennese are very like the British about this point: Money made in trade is not really quite as clean as that from land, the professions, or even from inheritance. Inheritance: Now that is the great launderer of money!

  It was that spring also when I fell in love with and became engaged to a woman for whom I was prepared to work and sacrifice that we might start a life together. Ursula was her name: I knew her by the sobriquet of Uschi. Uschi von Danzel.

  The von Danzels, despite their “von,” had their status (rather more status than money) from the professions. They were a long line of doctors; ear, nose, and throat was their specialty. Uschi’s uncle had, in fact, performed a biopsy on Freud’s mouth cancer, a matter of little more than jesting account at the time, but one that takes on increasing importance for me as the years pass. How often the fate of that one Jew touched the borders of my life!

  A ranking family, then. One that it would be a great advancement for me to join.

  Imagine my surprise when, on the night we announced our engagement, Uschi finally introduced me to her family, and the men were all ranking Schutzstaffel members. By mentioning this, I do not abdicate responsibility for joining the Staffel. Admittedly, having future in-laws in positions of power made my entrance into the Black Corps much easier than it would have been had I submitted my name independently. With someone to vouch for my character and my potential (for it was all I had to trade on in those early days before actively beginning my profession), I was ensured a ranking position after officer cadet school.

  But going to the von Danzels’ that evening in the spring of 1939, I had not the slightest idea of what awaited me. Uschi had been cautious about introducing me to her family, fearful of their disapprobation. With the successful completion of my law degree, however, I was somebody substantial enough to bring home to dinner without Mummy a
nd Daddy throwing a fit. I should have taken warning from this but was much too naive about the ways of women and the world to take note at the time. I had met one of Uschi’s brothers before. We had gotten on all right, as those sharing a conspiracy may do. For that was what Uschi’s relationship with me had been at that time: a conspiracy. There had been the usual bantering jokes that men make with each other in vain attempts at creating intimacy. Vain because man is always and forever in competition with other men. He had not worn his black uniform at that meeting: I only knew he was a pharmacy student in his last year and that he hoped to open a chemists shop in the fashionable Josefstadt, for which opportunity he would need no little amount of money. I assumed that, for the von Danzels, this was no problem.

  Uschi’s father had more or less honorary rank in the Staffel. The brother, Joachim, the budding pharmacist, had gone through the elaborate yearlong training process. Once he passed the crucial racial vetting, he had been accepted into the Clan on November 9, 1938, the date honoring the famous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich fifteen years before. On January 30, another holy day for the party—the date when the Nazis came to power in 1933—Joachim had been accepted as a cadet and was given a provisional pass into the Staffel. Finally, on April 20, Hitler’s birthday, he had sworn his oath of allegiance, unto death, to Hitler. At that point, he received his permanent Staffel pass and the collar patches—one oak leaf, in his case. He was now awaiting active service in the coming October, and from that time, he would be permitted to wear the silver dagger that so complemented the blackness of the uniform.

  How I longed to wear such a smart uniform! How I longed, after that night with the von Danzels, and spurred by Uschi, to join such an elite club as the Clan!

  This was of course no will-o’-the-wisp decision on my part. By the spring of 1939, for quite some time, I had seen the advantages that admission into the Staffel could provide. All the best people were members; the connections one would accumulate with such membership were an absolute requirement for a beginning lawyer such as myself. I do not shrink from absolute honesty: I was a callow, self-centered youth. When I went with Joachim several days later to register with the local Staffel offices on Jasomirgottstrasse, it was with the most material intentions in mind. I joined the Clan more out of a need for what it could do for me than vice versa. Though this self-serving motivation changed radically and abruptly once I put the black uniform on, I must still confess to less than noble intentions at the outset of my career in the Staffel.

  But this joining of the Staffel, for whatever naive reasons at the time, completed the triumvirate of exquisite and life-determining decisions I made in that, my twenty-third year.

  “Get out of here!”

  “You have to eat.”

  “—”

  “You’ll feel better if you do. Really. Trust me.”

  “That’s a fucking laugh.”

  “—”

  “You really don’t understand a thing, do you? All right, I’ll spell it out for you. Why the hell should I trust you? Why should anyone? You’re fucking crazy. You’ve kidnapped me. Threatened me with death. Drugged me. Stuffed me into this paradise of kitsch. Now you want me to trust you. Fine. Fucking fine. Say I’m free to go, then I’ll trust you.”

  “I know what is best for you, Miss O’Brien. In these matters, believe me, I am an expert.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you had enough experience in the camps.”

  “If you do not eat, you will sicken and die. At this point, I am not prepared to allow such an eventuality.”

  “A fucking humanitarian.”

  “If you do not eat, I shall have to give you further injections and feed you intravenously. It is your choice.”

  “That’s better. You look as though you slept well last night. And your appetite is picking up. Didn’t I tell you so, Miss O’Brien?”

  “—”

  “Well, I dare say you’ll want to talk sometime. It gets frightfully lonely …”

  “Yes, mein Herr?”

  “That. On the wall. You did that?”

  “A bit of artwork only. Since you took away the paintings …”

  “That smell. It’s … You couldn’t have. The lowest of animals wouldn’t.”

  “Don’t be squeamish, mein Herr. I’m sure you saw worse in the camps.”

  “I’m bored. I need writing materials. Even in your friends’ jails, they supply that.”

  “My friends?”

  “You know. Argentina. Chile. Nice places like that.”

  “—”

  “Well? Come on. What harm can it do? And it may placate me. You never know. Keep me from further ventures into the visual arts. In fact, I’ll make a deal. I’m changing mediums. No more excreta artworks if I can have paper and pencil. Okay?”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “It really was disgusting of you, Miss O’Brien. I would never have believed a woman such as you capable of that.”

  “Even Pope’s Celia shits.”

  “—”

  “All right. Sorry. Just get me the paper and pencil. Please.”

  “Very well.”

  “Still writing? Were you at it all night, then?”

  “I slept some. Don’t know when or how long. I’ve gone day-for-night down here. No clocks, no daylight. Nothing to tell me if I should be tired or not.”

  “You know, I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “How long have I been down here?”

  “Not long. A couple of weeks.”

  “What’s it like outside?”

  “Fall storms. It’s been frightfully wet, actually. Good weather for staying indoors.”

  “I guess I should be grateful to you. For keeping me dry.”

  “Do I detect irony, Miss O’Brien? That’s a sure sign you’re coming around. I would like to think so.”

  The rains have somewhat abated. I have, after transcribing these last dialogues, been thinking about Miss O’Brien’s living arrangements. She has not directly complained, but I do see how disorienting it must be living without the benchmarks of sunrise and sunset to standardize one’s days. Admittedly, this was not part of my intent in housing her in the basement. Security was foremost in that regard. A soundproof space removed from any possible prying eyes. That was my one intent. I know that sense deprivation is a standard drill with political prisoners, yet that is only an unintended side effect to my primary concerns for safety. I should somehow correct this situation. Miss O’Brien is showing, finally, less tendency to hysteria. Though I know I have written such before only to be subsequently fooled. But now, after nearly a month here (you see, I lied to her—though for her own good so as not to unduly depress her—about the length of time she has been here), she truly seems to have settled into her new life. No more of those terrible incidents with the feces on the wall. No more tantrums. No more attempted attacks with the food tray as I enter. Hardly even a sulk since I supplied her with writing materials. But I know the human body needs fresh air and daylight; we can not long survive without these. Exist perhaps, but not truly live. Following this line of thinking, I have given consideration to converting the dog run at the back of the house. Crudely built, but securely caged, it is part of the residue of my early years here when I felt it important to keep watch dogs. Schäferhund primarily, which the English so strangely call German shepherds. They were, ironically, good shepherds for this benighted German. But when they died, I found the loss so excruciatingly painful that it became, in the long run, better to remain alone than to know one would outlive another canine companion.

  At any rate, after examination, I have found the dog run is still in good order. Some little repair work is needed here and there, but otherwise it will provide an excellent exercise yard for Miss O’Brien. Large enough to work up a good stiff pace back and forth. It is also built right up to the door in
back. Thus, it would be a simple matter to escort her from her lodgings to the outdoor enclosure. Whether or not we can begin with outdoor exercises will depend on her behavior the next few days. After all, I can hardly be expected to countenance a woman’s hysterics out of doors. Removed as I am here, there is always the possibility that someone might be passing by or approaching the house. I must ensure that Miss O’Brien will preserve decorum while outside. Ironically, I must trust her before she trusts me.

  Cordoba came last night for our regular card game. I must confess that the day had slipped my mind, so busy had I been preparing Miss O’Brien’s compound. And he came on foot. He laments that his Ford is well and truly dead this time. He has reached the end of his tether over that car; he has had enough of the constant repairs it requires to stay on the road. He spoke glowingly of my battered old Land Rover, as if he were a suitor talking to the father of the beloved. I hope he has no designs on that machine, for I should hate to disappoint him and thereby lose a fine card partner.

  But his arrival by foot and my forgetting what was formerly a most important date on my calendar combined to give me quite a startle. I was still below working on the dog run when I heard his voice. It seems he’d been pounding on the front door for some time before deciding to investigate further. He did not explain himself, but I assume he meant he was afraid that the old German gaffer might finally have checked out, and he might have to force entrance into the house to discover my bloated and stinking corpse. Thus, he had let himself in.

  There he stood on the little escarpment over the dog run (one can only get to the back by going through the house; there is no walkway around the steep ravine in back). I was dressed rough in khakis and high boots, warily clearing the encroaching foliage from the compound. Miss O’Brien, if true to her fellow countrymen, would have had little experience with reptiles. I wished to give the little creatures no cover in which to hide. Cordoba smiled that he had caught me off guard. It was the first time in the long period of our friendship that he had done so. But he did not question what I was doing. He is much too subtle for that.