Elizabeth Costello полностью

When she arrived at her hotel there had been an envelope waiting for her: a letter of welcome from the organizers, a conference programme, maps. Now, sitting on a bench on the Prinsengracht in the tentative warmth of the northern sun, she glances over the programme. She is scheduled to speak the next morning, the first day of the conference. She flips to the notes at the end of the programme.'Elizabeth Costello, noted Australian novelist and essayist, author of The House on Eccles Street and many other books.' Not the way she would have billed herself, but they did not ask her. Frozen in the past, as usual; frozen in the achievements of her youth.

Her eye drifts down the list. Most of her fellow conferees she has not heard of. Then her eye is caught by the last name on the list, and her heart misses a beat. 'Paul West, novelist and critic.' Paul West: the stranger on the state of whose soul she spends so many pages. Can anyone, she asks in her lecture, wander as deep as Paul West does into the Nazi forest of horrors and emerge unscathed? Have we considered that the explorer enticed into that forest may come out not better and stronger for the experience but worse? How can she give the talk, how can she ask such a question, with Paul West himself sitting in the audience? It will seem like an attack, a presumptuous, unprovoked, and above all personal attack on a fellow writer. Who will believe the truth: that she has never had any dealings with Paul West, has never met him, has read only this one book of his? What is to be done?

Of the twenty pages of her text, fully half are devoted to the von Stauffenberg book. With luck the book will not have been translated into Dutch; with extreme luck no one else in the audience will have read it. She could cut out West's name, refer to him only as 'the author of a book on the Nazi period'. She could even make the book itself hypothetical: a hypothetical novel about the Nazis, the writing of which would have scarred the soul of its hypothetical author. Then no one will know, except of course West himself, if he is present, if he bothers to come to the talk by the lady from Australia.

It is four in the afternoon. Usually, on long flights, she sleeps only fitfully. But on this flight she experimented with a new pill, and it seems to have worked. She feels well, ready to plunge into work. There is time enough to rewrite the talk, removing Paul West and his novel into the deep background, leaving only the thesis visible, the thesis that writing itself, as a form of moral adven-turousness, has the potential to be dangerous. But what kind of talk would that be – a thesis with no examples?

Is there someone she can put in the place of Paul West – Céline for instance? One of Celine's novels, its name evades her, flirts with sadism, fascism, anti-Semitism. Years since she read it. Can she lay her hands on a copy, preferably not in Dutch, and write Céline into the talk?

But Paul West is not Céline, is nothing like him. Flirting with sadism is exactly what West does not do; furthermore, his book barely mentions the Jews. The horrors he unveils are sui generis. That must have been his wager with himself: to take as his subject a handful of bumbling German career officers unfitted by the very code of their upbringing to plotting and carrying out an assassination, to tell the story of their ineptitude and its consequences from beginning to end, and to leave one feeling, to one's surprise, authentic pity, authentic terror.

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?