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?
Go back to the experience. The flap of Satan's leathery wing: what was it that convinced her she felt it? And how much longer can she occupy one of the two cubicles in this cramped little women's room before some well-intentioned person decides she has had a collapse and calls in the janitor to break the lock?
The twentieth century of Our Lord, Satan's century, is over and done with. Satan's century and her own too. If she happens to have crept over the finish line into the new age, she is certainly not at home in it. In these unfamiliar times Satan is still feeling his way, trying out new contrivances, making new accommodations. He pitches his tent in odd places – for example in Paul West, a good man, for all she knows, or as good as a man can be who is also a novelist, that is to say, perhaps not good at all, but tending nevertheless to the good, in some ultimate sense, otherwise why write? Takes up residence in women too. Like the liver fluke, like the pinworm: one can live and die ignorant that one has been host to generations of them. In whose liver, in whose gut was Satan, that fateful day last year when again, indubitably, she felt his presence: in West's or in her own?
Old men, brothers, hanging dead with their trousers around their ankles, executed. In Rome it would have been different. In Rome they made a spectacle of executions: hauled their victims through howling mobs to the place of skulls and impaled them or flayed them or coated them with pitch and set them on fire. The Nazis, by comparison, mean, cheap, machine-gunning people in a field, gassing them in a bunker, strangling them in a cellar. So what was too much about death at the hands of the Nazis that was not too much in Rome, when all the striving of Rome was to wring from death as much cruelty, as much pain as possible? Is it just the grubbiness of that cellar in Berlin, a grubbiness that is too much like the real thing, the modern thing, for her to bear?
It is like a wall that she comes up against time and again. She did not want to read but she read; a violence was done to her but she conspired in the violation. He made me do it, she says, yet she makes others do it.
She should never have come. Conferences are for exchanging thoughts, at least that is the idea behind conferences. You cannot exchange thoughts when you do not know what you think.
There is a scratching at the door, a child's voice. 'Mammie, er zit een vrouw erin, ik kan haar schoenen zien!"
Hurriedly she flushes the bowl, unlocks the door, emerges.'Sorry,' she says, evading the eyes of mother and daughter.
What was the child saying? Why is she taking so long? If she spoke the language she could enlighten the child. Because the older you get the longer it takes. Because sometimes you need to be alone. Because there are things we do not do in public, not any more.
Her brothers: did they let them use the toilet one last time, or was shitting themselves part of the punishment? That, at least, Paul West drew a veil over, for which small mercy, thanks.
No one to wash them, afterwards. Women's work since time immemorial. No womanly presence in the cellar business. Admission reserved; men only. But perhaps when it was all over, when dawn's rosy fingers touched the eastern skies, the women arrived, indefatigable German cleaning women out of Brecht, and set to work cleaning up the mess, washing the walls, scrubbing the floor, making everything spick and span, so that you would never guess, by the time they had done, what games the boys had got up to during the night. Would never guess until Mr West came along and threw it all open again.
It is eleven o'clock. The next session, the next lecture, must already be in progress. She has a choice. Either she can go to the hotel and hide in her room and go on with her grieving; or she can tiptoe into the auditorium, take a seat in the back row, and do the second thing they brought her to Amsterdam for: hear what other folk have to say about the problem of evil.
There ought to be a third alternative, some way of rounding off the morning and giving it shape and meaning: some confrontation leading to some final word. There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the corridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty.