TOTENBÜCH

A. Parra (y Figueredo)

The evidence from camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthansen, Ravensbrüch, Sachsenhausen, Treblinka, and Wolsek somehow never ceases to amaze. Libraries of documentation: diaries, photographs, suicide epistology, journals, confessions, depositions, tapes, movies! The imagination falters. But for Oberweiler—nothing. Not a scrap of paper, a shred of film, not a word.

Rudulf von Pfister was in command, though the true genius of the place was not this SS colonel. Elsbeth Zimmermann had come up through the Bund Deutscher Mädel and (a rare honor) had been selected for elite training in the Ordensburgen. So whatever her relationship to von Pfister or her role at Oberweiler, she came well trained and dedicated. And while so much of the bestiality was sexually oriented, Elsbeth's ingenuity had no equal in any of the camps.

"But get on with it."

"Ah! A surge of salacious juices?"

Perhaps you weren't ready for such a story. Like so many amateurs. So wrapped in LITERATURE you miss all around you the stuff it's made of. You conned yourself into believing your mind was recording for the future, in UP-case, for posterity demands the grand style for its memory of reality. So you soaked up the raw materials well enough, the details of the illusion you fabricated.

"The illusion you wanted to fabricate."

Illusions can be controlled, reality not. Yet the front-page came out accurate enough: you spelled all the names right, you got all the facts straight. Lisa Steinberg . . .prominent winter visitor . . .the old Curry house of wrecking fortunes from the Reef . . .charter member of the Old Island Restoration Foundation. But anyone can have money. Who was she? Where did she come from? Why all the rumors of what went on behind the walls of that landmark house? Then Perucho . . .painter of seascapes which in no way compare to the power of his photographs . . .age 48 . . .the—what? The relationship was uncertain, beyond confirmation, though not important enough to risk editorial cuts that might distort the rest. And what photographs! that collection uncovered after the fact. Not at all like the ones he put on exhibit. Was he merely a fancier? a collector? Moreover you discovered in that writing something of how mystery enhances the piece. Or was it mere rationalization that some things are best left unsaid? After all, why not let the reader's imagination work for you?

"How innocent!"

"Like Jarcha?"

The day he sailed between Havana's Malecón and the Morro, bound for Barcelona and the university, how innocent was Jarcha. Those adventures must be slighted here, though, including lessons learned in the International Brigade. So much seemed to happen to him by accident, though, so much. Suffice it to say Jarcha Avicebron was the victim of two mistakes, one of which was Jewish ancestry predating the Inquisition.

Having escaped Spain under the most impossible conditions left him exuberant, however, and he took such Prussian recalcitrance to be a misunderstanding. Manana y manana! But to travel the road to a Vernichtungslager with the eye of a tourist—nothing could be more innocent. Along the way he caught glimpses of the Saale and pleasant meadows. The shade of oak trees tempted him and his mouth watered at the juice-plump blackberries on wayside bushes. Remember, Jarcha? And the linden trees, from the barracks at night remember their fragrance?

"But all that is so ordinary."

Yes, ordinary. All enacted before. On purple pages of juvenalia, in sleazy rooms of cheap hotels, in throbbing chambers of the heart. And Elsbeth, what did she feel?

"What goes on monotonously day after day and by its repetition gains the name of reality?"

The TP would be stripped and shackled by chains from the rafters. In the beginning Elsbeth would personally handle these interrogations. But time sapped any newly aroused interest, regardless of progressively more exotic perversions, until ennui relegated her to the voyeur's sidelines. Jarcha arrived during the period of her experiments with volunteer "administrators," an innovation whose success amazed even von Pfister. Since these sessions were mere introductions to Oberweiler, the TP usually survived. Rare was the time that things went so far as the night a raven-haired gypsy girl so aroused her "administrator" that he cannibalized her, biting away first her nipples and then, on all fours, her clitoris.

As it happened, Jarcha drew a stout Jewess whose husband had been beaten headless with rifle butts that morning for trying to wrest their screaming children from guards come to take one to the brothel, the younger sickly boy to the "Baths." The fury this woman spent on Jarcha's naked body was fantastic. The air whistling with flails, Elsbeth got up from her desk, her interest stirred for the first time since the night of the gypsy. Here was a Test Person who writhed, apparently, in pleasure. Her heart quickened to the spasmodic jerks of his body. No longer did she understand, she merely obeyed this urgency in her chest. In a sense she had no awareness of ordering the others from the room. Of undressing. Of hearing the moans of some deep voice coursing Jarcha's flesh. Of none of this had Elsbeth any knowledge. In a sense. Nor the flourishes at the end. So you became lovers, you and Elsbeth. But let's not forget the social graces.

"It's not my fault you know."

"I know—it's this heat. For crissake don't start on that. The tropics are supposed to be hot."

"You don't love me anymore, that's what. Anyway, we're not in the tropics, not technically. That is it, isn't it? You don't love me anymore."

"You've gotten as shrill as one of these green parrots. Get me a light, will you, love?"

"One thing, Americans know how to make cigarettes. Sometimes I feel the cigarettes make it all worthwhile."

"Ay! tú—it burns. You did it, I know, you did it on purpose. Even at cocktails you enjoy making me suffer."

"It's true. Nothing's like it used to be."

"You are shrill. Strange I've not seen that until now."

"All I know, all the fun has gone out of life. Nothing happens anymore."

"All things end, love. Then they are forgotten. Who knows that better than you?"

Much else you knew for fact never did appear in the KEY WEST CITIZEN. Of course, with people like Lisa and Perucho there always are fantastic tales on the tip of every tongue. Apocrypha which awed even intelligent men like Scott Fitzgerald into supposing that a difference exists among people. Even the fact that, after having spent only the winter months during previous years, in that one year they established residence at the outset of summer, that was enough to incite new curiosity about them. But it was short-lived. There was more interest in what would happen to Eichmann, who had been spirited from Buenos Aires.

So in the end what did you understand? What did you plumb of the scene enacted in this air-conditioned room upstairs in a wealthy house? Is it to your credit after all that so much blood did not dismay you? Neither the mutilations. No rationalization of—

"It's my job."

—rests easy with that spectacle of flesh you cannot imagine the mind so tormented as to consummate it. Did you not learn anything about the human heart? And the mind? How boundless the imagination to conceive the drama performed in this room reeking of passion and blood. How naive to think this a sex crime! How inane to dismiss it all as psychopathic! To generalize (however secretly) about moral decadence. You did not even know what to make of the "confession." All this hell behind papered walls because the victim had become a wretched bore. Understatement belonged to high comedy. Ah! You had begun to rewrite, with that you began, recreating the actors, redirecting their movements, their dialogue, building a new set entire. In so doing did you discover nothing important about the laws of reality and the nature of illusions?

"In the dark of the night who can hold his hand to the light without seeing blood?"

"All endings are the same, yes—invective, guilt, accusation."

These many years later you are uncertain about what to expect. But to find nothing—? It is perhaps the wrong place, you misunderstood the directions in Weissenfels. Yet you remember the oak woods, the pleasant meadows, and unmistakable is the June fragrance of lindens. No, this is the place. Here stood Oberweiler—one, an illusion. Pick one of the berries there. And feel! the sun bursting in your mouth, the succulence spreading on your tongue. When last you passed this way how you yearned to press those berries between tongue and palate. Remember how in your thirst you closed your eyes to imagine the tart juice filling your mouth? On that visit to Oberweiler, though, you weren't allowed to pick blackberries. Remember? And in this moment of perception do you know which blackberry tasted better? Those your imagination picked along the thirsty road here, or these you savor in the fields from which the reality of Oberweiler has been effaced?

"Come!" you cry. "Get down to the meat."

Ah! Petulance does not become you, though I understand your impatience. How many have been conditioned by our detumescent fiction?

"I've done my part."

Yes, everything but use your imagination. Still you want your titillation.

"But I don't know—"

Whether you want to go that far? You're no different than anyone else, and the heart has no limit. What you really want is to be relieved of responsibility, that's all.

"Have no qualms, love, that's only your humanity you feel. Nobody ever dies of that."

You want your juices to dry up in its heat, your skin to pop with blisters, you want me to draw taut your spinal cord with expectancy's arrow aimed at your heart.

"Well, can I help it if—It's not my fault you know."

Coercion is rationalized so that responsibility may be disclaimed.

"It burns! Ay, tú, it burns."

Though still, Elsbeth sweats. Outside snow falls. The only sound is the crackling of the fire. At the other end of the room where shadows move along the wall, Jarcha paces and turns. They honor the invisible bars keeping them apart, for they have learned that in due time their cages open. Some nights one cage, but not the other. Other nights nothing happens, each remains caged. Only once have they found themselves with no bars to constrain their freedom.

Elsbeth starts slapping the dagger blade against her naked thigh. Jarcha stops to consider her actions. The flames make his eyes shine. Elsbeth steps from behind her desk, then takes another step. Her cage has opened. Her nipples sting. Jarcha's nostrils flare. Warm odors of flesh have stirred from folds of shadow. Elsbeth has squatted at the fireplace. She plays at cutting the flames with the dagger.

"Today the orders came. By spring Oberweiler will have ceased to exist."

"What will you do then to—"

"The orders are precise. Nothing and no one remains."

"And you?"

"No doubt some higher-up has his orders. But—that seems the way of the world. All things come to an end."

"The way of the world is to deceive. Its illusions make us believe we guide our own destinies. That is the great trick. To make us believe that when in fact there's always something higher manipulating the strings."

Elsbeth turns her face from the fire. "The one thing that has come to bore me most, you are given to platitudes."

"There lies the comic element. Each puppet-master concentrates so intently on manipulating his dolls that he never realizes the strings making him function."

Elsbeth stands. Jarcha comes toward her, then stops. They seem bewildered, momentarily, and nervous. Then they sense that his cage has opened.

"You can't let it end like this."

"It always does, tú, it always does."

There he lies, ensconced in death's far country. He has the bad habit of the condemned: conceiving himself in plurality. Such is the stuff of loneliness and dull conversation.

"Well, now our moment of truth comes, eh?"

A bit of pedantry you picked up in Spain that means nothing.

"But we do know what arbitrary means, eh, we know that much. Remember Lisa? Perucho? For no better reason than she was a bore, remember how—"

You phony intellectual. You speak as if your hands are clean. What of Jarcha Avicebron?

"So! Again it comes to this, arguing guilt? Always the same. Always you. It's always you who must bear the guilt, tú, the other."

Dentro el cielo y la tierra no hay nada oculto, as Jarcha would say.

But, the future must yet occur.

Afterword

The original conception was to construct a fiction which synthesizes in the reader not vicarious but real experience. For example, a story about characters who set out on some kind of adventure only to get lost, but written so that the reader himself becomes lost in the story.

In "Totenbüch" the characters and story serve as pawns in the happening between writer and reader. Ostensibly "Totenbüch" is about some characters discovering what it feels like to be powerless before forces that determine what will happen to them at a given time and place. Okay. The reader can get that in any number of fictions. I wanted him to feel the frustration first-hand, to feel screwed, exploited, manipulated, and to feel helpless to do anything about it, just as powerless, say, as a prisoner.

"Totenbüch" is anti-pornography. My objection to pornography is that it seldom leaves anything to the imagination, so is dull to most people past their virginity. Pornography works best for innocents. To me serious, speculative fiction goes the other way, bringing to light the vision of evil. So in "Totenbüch" I promise the reader some pornographic specificity, tease him along with the promise of some sado-masochism. What he is supposed to get in the end is—nothing. Nothing except the real experience of frustration and maybe some insight into his own impulses.

One thing I wanted to suggest in "Totenbüch" was that the impulse that generates atrocities and Nazism and perversion and concentration camps continues, like a virus, cropping up in different places, different times, and is not restricted to a few psychos. For this reason I shifted places and times (Germany/America) and changed names, if not characters—Jarcha/Elsbeth and Lisa/Perucho. But this is an area that left me dissatisfied: I wanted ambiguity (leaving open the possibility that Elsbeth and Jarcha escaped to South America, like Eichmann) but don't feel it came off.

So. If I'm wrong in interpreting the reactions to the story, then it would be pointless to add anything, for that means the idea behind the story is wrong, it just doesn't work.

On the other hand, if I am getting a true reading to your reaction (that is, you as reader experienced a sense of frustration in being promised a satisfaction that is withheld), this would suggest the concept operates, and nothing more is needed.

One of the drawbacks of speculative fiction, no doubt, is the greater risk of falling flat on your ass.