J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

But in fact it goes on a little longer, by five or ten minutes, and this is the part she cannot tell Blanche. It goes on long enough for her, the woman, to drop a hand casually on to the bedcover and begin to stroke, ever so gently, the place where the penis, if the penis were alive and awake, ought to be; and then, when there is no response, to put the covers aside and loosen the cord of Mr Phillips's pyjamas, old-man's flannel pyjamas such as she has not seen in years – she would not have guessed one could still find them in shops – and open up the front and plant a kiss on the entirely flaccid little thing, and take it in her mouth and mumble it until it stirs faintly with life. It is the first time she has seen pubic hair that has turned grey. Stupid of her not to have realized that happens. It will happen to her too, in due course. Nor is the smell pleasant either, the smell of an old man's nether parts, cursorily washed.

Less than ideal, she thinks, withdrawing and covering old Mr Phillips up and giving him a smile and patting his hand. The ideal would be to send in a young beauty to do it for him, a fille de joie with the plump new breasts old men dream about. About paying for the visit she would have no qualms. A birthday present, she could call it, if the girl wanted an explanation, if going-away present were too chilling a name. But then, once you are past a certain age everything is less than ideal; Mr Phillips might as well get used to that. Only the gods are for ever young, the inhuman gods. The gods and the Greeks.

As for her, Elizabeth, crouched over the old bag of bones with her breasts dangling, working away on his nearly extinct organ of generation, what name would the Greeks give to such a spectacle? Not eros, certainly – too grotesque for that. Agape? Again, perhaps not. Does that mean the Greeks would have no word for it? Would one have to wait for the Christians to come along with the right word: Caritas?

For that, in the end, is what she is convinced it is. From the swelling of her heart she knows it, from the utter, illimitable difference between what is in her heart and what Nurse Naidoo would see, if by some mischance Nurse Naidoo, using her pass key, were to fling open the door and stride in.

That is not what is uppermost in her mind, however – what Nurse Naidoo would make of it, what the Greeks would make of it, what her mother on the next floor up would make of it. What is uppermost is what she herself will make it of, in the car on the way home, or when she wakes up tomorrow morning, or in a year's time. What can one make of episodes like this, unforeseen, unplanned, out of character? Are they just holes, holes in the heart, into which one steps and falls and then goes on falling?

Blanche, dear Blanche, she thinks, why is there this bar between us? Why can we not speak to each other straight and bare, as people ought who are on the brink of passing? Mother gone; old Mr Phillips burned to a powder and scattered to the winds; of the world we grew up in, just you and I left. Sister of my youth, do not die in a foreign field and leave me without an answer!

She has been invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam, a conference on the age-old problem of evil: why there is evil in the world, what if anything can be done about it.

She can make a shrewd guess why the organizers picked on her: because of a talk she gave last year at a college in the United States, a talk for which she was attacked in the pages of Commentary (belittling the Holocaust, that was the charge) and defended by people whose support for the most part embarrassed her: covert anti-Semites, animal-rights sentimentalists.

She had spoken on that occasion on what she saw and still sees as the enslavement of whole animal populations. A slave: a being whose life and death are in the hands of another. What else are cattle, sheep, poultry? The death camps would not have been dreamed up without the example of the meat-processing plants before them.

That and more she had said: it had seemed to her obvious, barely worth pausing over. But she had gone a step further, a step too far. The massacre of the defenceless is being repeated all around us, day after day, she had said, a slaughter no different in scale or horror or moral import from what we call the holocaust; yet we choose not to see it.

Of equal moral import: that they had baulked at. There had been a protest by students from the Hillel Centre. Appleton College should as an institution distance itself from her utterances, they demanded. In fact, the college should go further and apologize for having offered her a platform.

Back home the newspapers had picked up the story with glee. The Age ran a report under the headline PRIZE-WINNING NOVELIST ACCUSED OF anti-Semitism and reprinted the offending paragraphs from her talk, riddled with faulty punctuation. The phone started to ring at all hours: journalists, for the most part, but strangers too, including a nameless woman who shouted down the line, 'You Fascist bitch!' After that she stopped answering the phone. It was she, all at once, who was on trial.

It was an entanglement she might have foreseen and should have avoided. So what is she doing on the lecture platform again? If she had any sense she would keep out of the limelight. She is old, she feels tired all the time, she has lost what appetite she ever had for disputation, and anyhow what hope is there that the problem of evil, if problem is indeed the right word for evil, big enough to contain it, will be solved by more talk?

But at the time the invitation came she was under the malign spell of a novel she was reading. The novel was about depravity of the worst kind, and it had sucked her into a mood of bottomless dejection. Why are you doing this to me? she wanted to cry out as she read, to God knows whom. The same day there arrived the letter of invitation. Would Elizabeth Costello, the esteemed writer, grace a gathering of theologians and philosophers with her presence, speaking, if she so pleases, under the general rubric 'Silence, Complicity and Guilt'?

The book she was reading that day was by Paul West, an Englishman, but one who seemed to have freed himself of the more petty concerns of the English novel. His book was about Hitler and Hitler's would-be assassins in the Wehrmacht, and all was going well enough until she came to the chapters describing the execution of the plotters. Where could West have got his information? Could there really have been witnesses who went home that night and, before they forgot, before memory, to save itself, went blank, wrote down, in words that must have scorched the page, an account of what they had seen, down to the words the hangman spoke to the souls consigned to his hands, fumbling old men for the most part, stripped of their uniforms, togged out for the final event in prison cast-offs, serge trousers caked with grime, pullovers full of moth-holes, no shoes, no belts, their false teeth and their glasses taken from them, exhausted, shivering, hands in their pockets to hold up their pants, whimpering with fear, swallowing their tears, having to listen to this coarse creature, this butcher with last week's blood caked under his fingernails, taunt them, telling them what would happen when the rope snapped tight, how the shit would run down their spindly old-man's legs, how their limp old-man's penises would quiver one last time? One after the other to the scaffold they went, in a nondescript space that could have been a garage or equally well an abattoir, under carbon-arc lights so that back in his lair in the forest Adolf Hitler, commander-in-chief, would be able to watch on film their sobbings and then their writhings and then their stillness, the slack stillness of dead meat, and be satisfied he had had his revenge.