J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

'I am not, I believe,' she says slowly, the words coming out one by one, like stones, 'a weak vessel. Nor, would I guess, is Mr West. The experience that writing offers, or reading – they are the same thing, for my purposes, here, today -' (but are they the same thing, really? – she is losing her track, what is her track?) 'real writing, real reading, is not a relative one, relative to the writer and the writer's capacities, relative to the reader' (she has not slept in God knows how long, what passed for sleep on the plane was not sleep). 'Mr West, when he wrote those chapters, came in touch with something absolute. Absolute evil. His blessing and his curse, I would say. Through reading him that touch of evil was passed on to me. Like a shock. Like electricity.' She glances at Badings, standing in the wings. Help me, her glance says. Put an end to this. 'It is not something that can be demonstrated,' she says, returning a last time to her questioner. 'It is something that can only be experienced. However, I am recommending to you that you do not try it out. You will not learn from such an experience. It will not be good for you. That is what I wanted to say today. Thank you.'

As the audience rises and disperses (time for a cup of coffee, enough of this strange woman from Australia of all places, what do they know about evil there?), she tries to keep an eye on Paul West in the back row. If there is any truth in what she has said (but she is full of doubt, and desperate too), if the electricity of evil did indeed leap from Hitler to Hitler's butcherman and thence to Paul West, surely he will give off some sign. But there is no sign she can detect, not at this distance, just a short man in black on his way to the coffee machine.

Badings is at her elbow. 'Very interesting, Mrs Costello,' he murmurs, doing his hostly duty. She shakes him off, she has no wish to be soothed. Head down, meeting no one's eye, she pushes her way to the ladies' room and shuts herself in a cubicle.

The banality of evil. Is that the reason why there is no longer any smell or aura? Have the grand Lucifers of Dante and Milton been retired for good, their place taken by a pack of dusty little demons that perch on one's shoulder like parrots, giving off no fiery glow but on the contrary sucking light into themselves? Or has everything she has said, all her finger-pointing and accusing, been not only wrong-headed but mad, completely mad? What is the business of the novelist, after all, what has been her own lifetime business, but to bring inert matter to life; and what has Paul West done, as the man with the beard pointed out, but bring to life, bring back to life, the history of what happened in that cellar in Berlin? What has she conveyed to Amsterdam to display to these puzzled strangers but an obsession, an obsession that is hers alone and that she clearly does not understand?

Obscene. Go back to the talismanic word, hold fast to it. Hold fast to the word, then reach for the experience behind it: that has always been her rule for when she feels herself slipping into abstraction. What was her experience? What was it that happened as she sat reading the accursed book on the lawn that Saturday morning? What was it that upset her so much that a year later she is still grubbing after its roots? Can she find her way back?

She knew, before she began the book, the story of the July plotters, knew that within days of their attempt on Hitler's life they were tracked down, most of them, and tried and executed. She even knew, in a general way, that they were put to death with the malicious cruelty in which Hitler and his cronies specialized. So nothing in the book had come as a real surprise.

She goes back to the hangman, whatever his name was. In his gibes at the men about to die at his hands there was a wanton, an obscene energy that exceeded his commission. Where did that energy come from? To herself she has called it satanic, but perhaps she should let go of that word now. For the energy came, in a certain sense, from West himself. It was West who invented the gibes (English gibes, not German), put them in the hangman's mouth. Fitting speech to character: what is satanic about that? She does it herself all the time.

Go back. Go back to Melbourne, to that Saturday morning when she felt, she could have sworn, the brush of Satan's hot, leathery wing. Was she deluded? I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had gone on reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on: what kind of excuse is that?

Paul West was only doing his writerly duty. In the person of his hangman he was opening her eyes to human depravity in another of its manifold forms. In the persons of the hangman's victims he was reminding her of what poor, forked, quivering creatures we all are. What is wrong with that?

What had she said? I do not want to read this. But what right had she to refuse? What right had she not to know what, in all too clear a sense, she already knew? What was it in her that wanted to resist, to refuse the cup? And why did she nonetheless drink – drink so fully that a year later she is still railing against the man who put it to her lips?

If there were a mirror on the back of this door instead of just a hook, if she were to take off her clothes and kneel before it, she, with her sagging breasts and knobbly hips, would look much like the women in those intimate, over-intimate photographs from the European war, those glimpses into hell, who knelt naked at the lip of the trench into which they would, in the next minute, the next second, tumble, dead or dying with a bullet to the brain, except that those women were in most cases not as old as she, merely haggard from malnutrition and fright. She has a feeling for those dead sisters, and for the men too who died at the hands of the butchermen, men old and ugly enough to be her brothers. She does not like to see her sisters and brothers humiliated, in ways it is so easy to humiliate the old, by making them strip, for example, taking away their dentures, making fun of their private parts. If her brothers, that day in Berlin, are going to be hanged, if they are going to jerk at the end of a rope, their faces going red, their tongues and eyeballs protruding, she does not want to see. A sister's modesty. Let me turn my eyes away.

Let me not look. That was the plea she breathed to Paul West (except that she did not know Paul West then, he was just a name on the cover of a book). Do not make me go through with it! But Paul West did not relent. He made her read, excited her to read. For that she will not easily forgive him. For that she has pursued him across the seas all the way to Holland.

Is that the truth? Will that do as an explanation?

Yet she does the same kind of thing, or used to. Until she thought better of it, she had no qualms about rubbing people's faces in, for instance, what went on in abattoirs. If Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, casting the shadow of his wings over the beasts who, their nostrils already filled with the smell of death, are prodded down the ramp towards the man with the gun and the knife, a man as merciless and as banal (though she has begun to feel that that word too should be retired, it has had its day) as Hitler's own man (who learned his trade, after all, on cattle) – if Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, where is he? She, no less than Paul West, knew how to play with words until she got them right, the words that would send an electric shock down the spine of the reader. Butcherfolk in our own way.

So what has happened to her now? Now, all of a sudden, she has grown prim. Now she no longer likes to see herself in the mirror, since it puts her in mind of death. Ugly things she prefers wrapped up and stored away in a drawer. An old woman turning back the clock, back to the Irish-Catholic Melbourne of her childhood. Is that all it amounts to?