Wartime lies - Louis Begley [81]
LB: Perhaps I should go back to your question about the grandmother and Bern. At the top of the very next page Maciek relates how Tania responded to the grandmother: “Tania looked very tired and very calm. After a while, she turned to my grandmother and said, You don’t know yet what is shameless, you don’t know yet what we will do, just wait, you will see before you die.” Of course, Tania is right, because worse is yet to come, including—although she cannot possibly foresee it specifically—her liaison with the good German, Reinhard. However understandable and justifiable, that is the ultimate disgrace, and a reader who follows carefully Maciek’s report of Tania’s and his own existence in Lwów will see how that aspect of her condition is present in her mind. This leads me to think that you are right in your assessment: To love Reinhard—possibly she really thinks she does—makes her case less sordid, even if it doesn’t exculpate her. I believe also that she is likely to think that telling the little boy that she loves Reinhard will make it easier for him to accept the searing fact of their ménage.
I agree that something similar is at work when it comes to Maciek’s catechism class and taking Communion. According to Maciek’s rules of decency, what he is doing is despicable. He will do it nevertheless, because he has no choice, but he will perform the defiling act as cleanly and respectfully as possible. An absurd notion? Perhaps. But I think that is the psychological truth.
JM: And that subtle psychological truth is, I gather, what you want the reader to understand, whether the reader excuses it or not. Earlier in this conversation, you called Dante a “connoisseur of evil.” Perhaps only a connoisseur of evil would see Tania’s interaction with the begging Jew, Hertz, as bringing her to a point “so degraded, that she had no trust left and no pity.” A coarser mind might think that sleeping with a German soldier had degraded her worse. But this is not how she sees the matter, and the aftermath of her encounter with Hertz is evidently one of those moments in the writing of this book that were so intense for you in the writing that you had to, as you say, “pause for breath” in the interlude. Would you care to comment?
LB: Yes. Once again, I must go back to the grandmother, and her outburst about the shamelessness of Bern’s talk. As I have said, I think she has in mind the shattering of solidarity among Jews.
In the passage you have now referred to, Tania’s sees further and more deeply. I believe that she takes her fear and distrust of Hertz to be signs of the shattering of all human solidarity, a vaster, and, for me, an unbearable vision.
JM: “I was chained to the habit of lying, and I no longer believed that weakness or foolishness or mistakes could be forgiven by Tania or me”. This seems to be a moment of bleak truth for Maciek corresponding to the one mentioned just above for Tania. The reader is prepared to forgive the two of them almost anything and wants to believe that their integrity will emerge unscathed from their ordeal. They themselves seem not to share this belief. They do not see moral integrity and psychological deformity as mutually exclusive. Innocent though they are, their experience has left them in some sense morally damaged. It must be both emotionally and conceptually difficult to speak of this damage and yet pointless to speak of the experience at all without speaking of this aspect of it. Does this explain why “Our man avoids Holocaust books and dinner conversation about Poland in the Second World War”?
LB: I do not think that the man with “sad eyes” would agree that he has—except for his skin being “intact and virgin of tattoo”—escaped unscathed, and I doubt that he thinks that Tania has had that good fortune. On the contrary, “he believes that he has