J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

Once upon a time she would have said, All honour to a writer who undertakes to follow such a story to its darkest recesses. Now she is not sure. That is what seems to have changed in her. In any event, Céline is not like that, Céline will not work.

On the deck of a barge moored across from her two couples are seated at a table, chatting, drinking beer. Cyclists rattle past. An ordinary afternoon on an ordinary day in Holland. Having travelled thousands of miles to bathe in precisely this variety of the ordinary, must she forsake it to sit in a hotel room wrestling with a text for a conference that will be forgotten in a week's time? And to what end? To save embarrassment to a man she has never met? In the greater scheme of things, what does a moment's embarrassment amount to? She does not know how old Paul West is – the jacket of his book does not say, the photo could date from years ago – but she is sure he is not young. Might he and she, in their different ways, not be old enough to be beyond embarrassment?

Back at the hotel there is a message to call Henk Badings, the man from the Free University with whom she has been corresponding. Did she have a good flight, Badings asks? Is she comfortably settled? Would she like to join him and one or two other guests for dinner? Thank you, she replies, but no: she would prefer an early night. A pause, then she asks her question. The novelist Paul West: has he arrived yet in Amsterdam? Yes, comes Badings' reply: not only has Paul West arrived but, she will be glad to hear, is lodged at the same hotel as she.

If anything is needed to spur her, this is it. Unacceptable that Paul West should find himself quartered with a woman who rants against him in public as a dupe of Satan. She must cut him out of the talk or she must withdraw, and that is that.

She stays up all night wrestling with the lecture. First she tries leaving out West's name. A recent novel, she calls the book, coming out of Germany. But of course it does not work. Even if most of her auditors are taken in, West will know she means him.

What if she tries softening her thesis? What if she suggests that, in representing the workings of evil, the writer may unwittingly make evil seem attractive, and thereby do more harm than good? Will that soften the blow? She strikes out the first paragraph on page eight, the first of the bad pages, then the second, then the third, begins to scribble revisions in the margins, then stares in dismay at the mess. Why did she not make a copy before she started?

The young man at the reception desk sits with headphones on, jiggling his shoulders from side to side. When he sees her he springs to attention. 'A photocopier,' she says. 'Is there a photocopier I can use?'

He takes the wad of paper from her, glances at the heading. The hotel caters to many conferences, he must be used to distraught foreigners rewriting their lectures in the middle of the night. The lives of dwarf stars. Crop yields in Bangladesh. The soul and its manifold corruptions. All the same to him.

Copy in hand, she proceeds with the task of watering down her paper, but with more and more doubt in her heart. The writer as dupe of Satan: what nonsense! Ineluctably she is arguing herself into the position of the old-fashioned censor. And what is the point of all this pussyfooting anyway? To forestall a petty scandal? Where does it come from, her reluctance to offend? Soon she is going to be dead. What will it matter then if once upon a time she ruffled the feathers of some stranger in Amsterdam?

When she was nineteen, she remembers, she allowed herself to be picked up on the Spencer Street bridge near the Melbourne waterfront, then a rough area. The man was a docker, in his thirties, good-looking in a crude sort of way, who called himself Tim or Tom. She was an art student and a rebel, in rebellion principally against the matrix that had formed her: respectable, petit bourgeois, Catholic. In her eyes, in those days, only the working class and the values of the working class were authentic.

Tim or Tom took her to a bar and after that to the rooming house where he lived. It was not something she had done before, sleeping with a strange man; at the last minute she could not go through with it. 'I'm sorry' she said. 'I'm really sorry, can we stop.' But Tim or Tom would not listen. When she resisted, he tried to force her. For a long time, in silence, panting, she fought him off, pushing and scratching. To begin with he took it as a game. Then he got tired of that, or his desire tired, turned to something else, and he began to hit her seriously. He lifted her off the bed, punched her breasts, punched her in the belly, hit her a terrible blow with his elbow to her face. When he was bored with hitting her he tore up her clothes and tried to set fire to them in the waste-paper basket. Stark naked, she crept out and hid in the bathroom on the landing. An hour later, when she was sure he was asleep, she crept back and retrieved what was left. Wearing the scorched tatters of her dress and nothing else she waved down a taxi. For a week she stayed first with one friend, then with another, refusing to explain what had happened. Her jaw was broken; it had to be wired up; she lived on milk and orange juice, sucked through a straw.

It was her first brush with evil. She had realized it was nothing less than that, evil, when the man's affront subsided and a steady glee in hurting her took its place. He liked hurting her, she could see it; probably liked it more than he would have liked sex. Though he might not have known it when he picked her up, he had brought her to his room to hurt her rather than make love to her. By fighting him off she had created an opening for the evil in him to emerge, and it emerged in the form of glee, first at her pain ('You like that, do you?' he whispered as he twisted her nipples. 'You like that?'), then in the childish, malicious destruction of her clothes.

Why does her mind go back to this long-past and – really -unimportant episode? The answer: because she has never revealed it to anyone, never made use of it. In none of her stories is there a physical assault by a man on a woman in revenge for being refused. Unless Tim or Tom himself has survived into doddering old age, unless the committee of angelic observers has saved the minutes of the proceedings of that night, what happened in the rooming house belongs to her and her alone. For half a century the memory has rested inside her like an egg, an egg of stone, one that will never crack open, never give birth. She finds it good, it pleases her, this silence of hers, a silence she hopes to preserve to the grave.

Is it some equivalent reticence that she is demanding of West: a story about an assassination plot in which he does not tell what happened to the plotters when they fell into the hands of their enemies? Surely not. So what exactly is it that she wants to say to this assembly of strangers in – she glances at her watch – less than eight hours?

She tries to clear her mind, go back to beginnings. What was it inside her that rose in revolt against West and his book when she first read it? As an initial approximation, that he had brought Hitler and his thugs back to life, given them a new purchase on the world. Very well. But what is wrong with that? West is a novelist, as is she; both of them live by telling or retelling stories; and in their stories, if their stories are any good, characters, even hangmen, take on a life of their own. So how is she any better than West?

The answer, as far as she can see, is that she no longer believes that storytelling is good in itself, whereas for West, or at least for West as he was when he wrote the Stauffenberg book, the question does not seem to arise. If she, as she is nowadays, had to choose between telling a story and doing good, she would rather, she thinks, do good. West, she thinks, would rather tell a story, though perhaps she ought to suspend judgement until she hears it from his own lips.