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.
There are many things that it is like, this storytelling business. One of them (so she says in one of the paragraphs she has not crossed out yet) is a bottle with a genie in it. When the storyteller opens the bottle, the genie is released into the world, and it costs all hell to get him back in again. Her position, her revised position, her position in the twilight of life: better, on the whole, that the genie stay in the bottle.
The wisdom of the similitude, the wisdom of centuries (that is why she prefers to think in similitudes rather than reason things out), is that it is silent on the life the genie leads shut up in the bottle. It merely says that the world would be better off if the genie remained imprisoned.
A genie or a devil. While she has less and less idea what it could mean to believe in God, about the devil she has no doubt. The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light. The devil entered the docker that night on Spencer Street, the devil entered Hitler's hangman. And through the docker, all that time ago, the devil entered her: she can feel him crouched inside, folded up like a bird, waiting his chance to fly. Through Hitler's hangman a devil entered Paul West, and in his book West in turn has given that devil his freedom, turned him loose upon the world. She felt the brush of his leathery wing, as sure as soap, when she read those dark pages.
She is quite aware how old-fashioned it sounds. West will have defenders by the thousand.
What can she say in reply? That it would have been better if our hero had stayed at home, or at least had kept his exploits to himself? In times when artists clutch to themselves what few tatters of dignity they have left, what gratitude will that kind of answer bring her among fellow writers?
