Comments on Yann Martel's "Beatrice and Virgil"

© Silke Hesse 2013

Comments on Yann Martel’s  Beatrice and Virgil. Text Publishing: Melbourne, Australia. 2010.

 Silke Hesse

When I returned from travels last September, this book, Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel, awaited me as a birthday present. My nephew had written a dedication on the front page:  “I hope you enjoy this very curious book.”

After reading Martel’s novel I wondered: Is this really a book to enjoy? But yes, we enjoy things that have been done well and books that provoke thought. “Curious” is, of course, a description few readers would quibble with here.

I decided to go back to Martel’s book at a later date. It demanded concentrated thought and there were other things to be done first.

Three days ago I saw Ang Lee’s newly released film Life of Pi with an elderly friend with whom I go out regularly. The film is based on Yann Martel’s earlier novel by that name. My friend had not read it and I only partially. But I was able say that I had read his more recent novel Beatrice and Virgil. And what is that about, she wanted to know. Also about animals, I said; about a taxidermist. But ultimately it is about the Holocaust, I added, aware of how incoherent such a description must sound. I immediately felt guilty for having withheld this reading experience from her, for she was Jewish. In 1938 she had been a gifted young woman who was able to escape Berlin at the last moment with the help of a generous stranger. And she had since made a considerable name for herself in her adopted country; the landscape of our city has been changed by her many memorable sculptures.

What is Beatrice and Virgil about? It would perhaps be more accurate to say that its topic is not “The Holocaust” but “Writing about the Holocaust”. At the beginning of the “novel” the author-protagonist Henry, whose name strikes us almost as a pseudonym for the first person, has just completed what he would like to see published as a “flip-book” on the Holocaust. After five years of research he has produced both an essay and a novel and he would like to have them bound back to back.  But at an infuriatingly polite meeting with his publisher, editors, a book-seller and a historian, where his position at the table in the expensive restaurant makes it impossible for him to escape, his book is rejected. Why? Ostensibly because a flip-book has no back cover. There is no place for a bar-code if there are two front covers and you can’t sell books without bar-codes. Henry suggests the spine but is told that is too narrow. And in what section of the shop would the book be placed? In both, he answers. But then booksellers would have to supervise that the right cover was always in front; much too much trouble. We’re just trying to help you, Henry is told. What is the book about? the historian “with a friendly face and a soothing voice” asks, wanting a  one line answer that the author of this complex book cannot give. As he sees it, it is literature’s role to “give full answers to short questions” (15). But he tries anyway:

My book is about representations of the Holocaust. The event is gone; we are left with stories about it. My book is about a new choice of stories. With a historical event we not only have to bear witness, that is, tell what happened and address the needs of ghosts. We also have to interpret and conclude, so that the needs of people today, the children of ghosts, can be addressed. In addition to the knowledge of history, we need the understanding of art. Stories identify, unify, give meaning to. Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense. (15)

The historian, however, simply repeats his question. While Martel is here obviously satirizing the prescriptions of the modern publishing trade, what is more to the point is society’s fear of any new or unorthodox approach to the fraught and well settled topic of the Holocaust. Also, as the writer Henry knows, he is not Jewish himself. So what business has he meddling in these matters.

Martel’s essay

Though Beatrice and Virgil is no flip-book, the author-protagonist has obviously retrieved parts of Henry’s essay and smuggled them into his novel. In it he asks: Who is entitled to write about the Holocaust and how?

Let me first gather my thoughts: The victims, would be the resounding answer of most people; in our day people have ownership of topics relating to their suffering. The party of the perpetrators, in the widest possible definition, is condemned to silence, unless it be to express submission, guilt and remorse. And society in general? Don’t they need to understand what went wrong in order to prevent any repetition of the like? The Holocaust, we are told is unique; comparison with other genocidal events is misleading, potentially ameliorating, and ultimately just another ploy to interfere with the facts and encourage Holocaust denial. The one impurity these Holocaust guardians have forgotten to outlaw in their censorship restrictions is the reading and viewing public’s appetite for sensation and obscenity under the guise of moral outrage. It is an almost sexual appetite akin to that which drives torturers and it is well catered to particularly by films.

These are Henry’s thoughts on the topic:

Henry had noticed over years of reading books and watching movies how little actual fiction there was about the Holocaust. The take on the event was nearly always historical, factual, documentary, anecdotal, testimonial, literal. [...] Whereas war – to take another cataclysmic human event – was constantly being turned into something else. War was forever being trivialized, that is made less than it truly is. Modern wars have killed tens of millions of people and devastated entire countries, yet representations that convey the real nature of war have to jostle to be seen, heard and read amidst the war thrillers, the war comedies, the war romances, the war science fictions, the war propaganda. Yet who thinks of “trivialization” and “war” in the same breath? Has any veterans’ group ever made the complaint? No, because that’s just how we talk about war, in many ways and for many purposes. With these diverse representations, we come to understand what war means to us.

No such poetic license was taken with – or given to – the Holocaust, that terrifying event was overwhelmingly represented by a single school: historical realism. [...] Other events in history including horrifying ones, had been treated by artists, and for the greater good. To take just three well-known instances of artful witness: Orwell with Animal Farm, Camus with The Plague, Picasso with Guernica. In each case the artist had taken a vast, sprawling tragedy, had found its heart, and had represented it in a nonliteral and compact way. The unwieldy encumbrance of history was reduced and packed into a suitcase. (9-11)

These, then, are presumably the standards by which Martel would like his book to be judged.

After a brief fit of fury played out in a London park, Henry resigns himself to forgetting about his book. Since the earnings from his previous one provide a comfortable income, he and his wife decide on a change of scenery (a big city: Berlin, Paris or New York, we are told. The famous author is not specific; he obviously wants some privacy). There Henry occupies himself with new hobbies: he takes up the clarinet again and tries to improve his playing, he joins a theatre group, and he works in a fair trade shop with restaurant that sells chocolate products. The couple also acquire a black cat and a dog from an animal pound and they grow very fond of their pets. Henry’s wife, Sarah, becomes pregnant. By devious routes and via publishers and agents, letters from fans of his earlier book, obviously Life of Pi, still reach him and he regularly answers them with appropriate courtesy. Life is pleasant, sociable and moderately interesting.

The other Henry

Then one day Henry receives a package from a fan who lives not far away in the same city. It contains the photocopy of a story by Flaubert, plus a short and puzzling scene from a play in which the characters are animals, and a request for help; the photocopy has highlighted passages. The writer (we later find out that he took up taxidermy in 1945 at the age of sixteen and is now 81) has his workshop in a dark old building, No.1933 in the street (Martel’s book must be fiction). In it he has, over the years, accumulated hundreds of stuffed or mounted animals of every kind. He himself is not a hunter or a scientific collector; he is simply a preserver of the images of animals other people or circumstances have killed. Many are rare specimens, some now extinct. Henry the taxidermist, surprisingly his name is also Henry, is deeply disturbed by the appalling slaughter animals have suffered at the hands of humans; the animal population of the planet has been reduced to a third of the numbers existing only half a century earlier. With two of his mounted animals, a howler monkey and a donkey, the taxidermist has a special relationship. The play, on which he has been working ever since the end of the war, is about them. He is stuck on this play and wants help from Henry the successful author.

Christian Europe    

The passages Henry has highlighted in Flaubert’s story, it is Saint Julian the Hospitator, concern the indiscriminate and pointless slaughter of hundreds of animals. Apart from being an impassioned hunter, Julian the saint was, it turns out, also a great warrior who apparently virtuously killed great numbers of men in the wars he conducted for various kings and rulers. Eventually, after another hunting rampage, an angry stag places a curse on him and this curse ultimately leads to a crime. Julian’s crime, according to the legend, is the accidental killing of his parents whom his wife had invited to rest in her bed; he had mistaken them for his wife and a lover, which would have entitled him to kill them. It is to make good patricide and matricide that he must do penance; he eventually achieves salvation by compassionately sleeping with a leper. Flaubert’s is a barbaric story that seems to be anchored in a morality totally at odds with ours; and yet it is the legend of a Christian saint.

This is not the only work of literature mentioned or alluded to in Martel’s book. The donkey and the howler monkey of the taxidermist’s play have been given the names Beatrice and Virgil, an obvious allusion to Dante’s classical masterpiece The Divine Comedy. Virgil, erroneously classified as a prophet of Christianity by medieval theologians due to their misunderstanding of a passage in the Aeneid, guides the poet through the horrific tortures of hell. These have been divinely inflicted on human souls, many of whose so-called sins amounted to little more than a position on the wrong side of Papal politics. Some of the sinners, like the Emperor Frederick II who is today usually seen as an early enlightened humanist, are assessed quite differently now. From our modern point of view, much of the righteous brutality of hell is inflicted on people who are simply living their lives their way.

Another text mentioned by Martel is Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. Here the narrator is mistakenly turned into an ass because he has been given the wrong ointment. But as soon as he has taken on an animal form, he is overworked and brutally beaten by every human being who takes charge of him. Even he himself doesn’t seem particularly surprised or indignant about this. One might ask: what is this European culture of ours which we proudly proclaim to be Christian really about?

Animals and humans

The Apuleius story also draws our attention to the similarity between humans and animals: how easily a man can become little better than an animal. In the taxidermist’s play, the donkey and the howler monkey talk like humans: kind, gentle and intelligent humans, and are then tortured and murdered by human brutes. When Erasmus, Henry’s much loved dog, contracts rabies later in the story, he becomes a wild animal, a killer like the hyena or the dangerous Bengal tiger in Life of Pi. He fatally injures his companion the cat and has to be put down. When Sarah has her baby the animal in her takes over:

Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, she was reduced to a mucky animal who, after many pants, whimpers and screams, excreted from her body a pound of flesh, as the expression goes, that was red, wrinkled and slimy. The event couldn’t have been more animal-like if the two of them had been in a muddy pen grunting. The thing produced, weakly gesticulating, looked half-simian, half-alien. Yet the call to Henry’s humanity couldn’t have been louder or more radical. (168)

Where does one draw the line between humans and animals, between the pet and the wild creature, between the injured animal and the injured human. This is about Mendelsssohn the cat:

           

When she crawled out, her nose was dripping blood and her back was covered in it, the skin torn and the fur matted, and she didn’t seem able to stand on her back legs. (159)

When Henry is later stabbed by the taxidermist, we have the following description:

           

Henry careened into the tigers and fell over. The pain ripping through his midriff was so intense and uncontrollable that he didn’t so much get back on his feet piecemeal as jerk himself up in one motion, as if he were a marionette pulled up by his strings. (192)

Henry is stabbed at the moment when, for all his research and his previous insights, he cannot see that the taxidermist’s devotion to the memory of  slaughtered animals, and more importantly, his deeply empathetic humanizing of donkey and monkey as victims of torture and human brutality, more precisely as victims of the Holocaust, is not necessarily duplicitous nor an insult to the human victims. It represents for him 65 years of trying to understand and atone, and could be seen as an attempt to change himself and make good his own juvenile crimes. That the taxidermist has actually achieved this in some measure is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that Henry the author will never cease to yearn for Beatrice and Virgil, the taxidermist’s creations. They become more important to him than his dead pets, whose death he has simply accepted.

The taxidermist is not only “a stinking old Nazi collaborator, now casting himself as the great defender of the innocent” though of course he is that too. But how dare Henry the author ascribe the taxidermist’s obsession with Flaubert’s story as due only to the fact that it “offers redemption without remorse” (189) when the other has spent a lifetime trying to come to terms with his crimes.  The taxidermist ultimately perishes in his own holocaust when he sets alight his workshop; he has passed the sentence on himself that Henry’s judgment pronounced by implication: an eye for an eye. If forgiveness is not possible, then this is the only conceivable outcome. Henry the author, in turn, who thought he knew all about the Holocaust, has discovered firsthand what it is to suffer violence.

Once you’ve been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal. The city was ruined for Henry. Sarah, Theo and he would leave it soon. Only where would they settle now?  (193)    

At this point, before we leave the topic of animals and humans, I would like to say something that even Martel was afraid to more than allude to. It is that the system the Nazis eventually set up in their death camps finds an eerie parallel in the efficient and relatively “humane” systems civilized nations use in their slaughterhouses. I wonder whether animal activists have ever considered the slogan: “Men who have learned to do this to animals may one day do it to humans.” Meat-eaters would of course protest.   

Adolescent boys

The taxidermist was sixteen when he committed his atrocities. Adolescent boys are seething with hormones. They compete with their peers for notoriety. They will take up any challenge thrown out to them. They feel anxious and vulnerable but are determined to look tough. They have strong drives and little understanding. They reel under the impact of alcohol. They are always the first to be targeted by recruiters, ideologists and propagandists and they are easy prey. At that age the nice young brother of a friend of my children joined other youths to break into the house of an elderly lady and gang rape her. He could never explain why he did it. This New Year’s Eve at a beach resort just a few kilometers from where we were holidaying a 22-year-old landscape gardener named David Cassai was punched by one of a group of younger men and killed instantly. The killer expressed satisfaction. Later he was bailed because he could not cope with the terror of prison. When my daughter told me about the incident she first expressed relief that her own children had decided not to go there that night but her next thought was for the parents of the killer. Mothers and fathers know the nightmare of trying to control the behavior of adolescents. Our legal system does not allow a sixteen-year-old to be tried in an adult court or confined in an adult prison. Should age, or better youth, be a mitigating circumstance when we judge Nazi crimes? .     

The play

The taxidermist’s play is a strange and at first sight incoherent sequence of disparate scenes. This impression is not helped by the fact that he reads them out randomly and will never let the other Henry look at the manuscript by himself. He is obviously anxious about keeping control of the text. He has approached the famous author of a book about animals primarily for help with the descriptive sections because he needs someone with a greater command of words and more experience with live creatures. As a taxidermist, he is not used to being involved with these; he doesn’t like going to the zoo and he shows no interest in Henry’s dog. It is obvious that the taxidermist’s animal characters are just stand-ins for humans.

He himself is a man of few words; his laconic lines, though meaningful when he explains them, are often extremely hard for a reader to decipher. There are also disorientating switches between the naturalistic and the symbolic. He does not have a natural talent or aptitude for writing but he obviously does have something to say on this topic Henry had been involved with for years and Henry is fascinated. But he eventually catches himself asking the very question he himself was asked at the publisher’s lunch: “What is your play about?” The cryptic answer the taxidermist ultimately gives is: “My story has no story. It rests on the fact of murder.” 

Late in Martel’s novel we discover that the taxidermist is a perpetrator, which means he belongs to the category of people who are generally considered to have no right to be heard in the context of the Holocaust. We know this because in the final scenes of the play three human characters play a role; a boy, who is the ringleader and his two friends. This boy seems to be primarily responsible for forcing two young women to drown their babies and then themselves in a village pond; it also seems to be he who tortures the donkey and who eventually bashes Virgil and Beatrice to death. This is no light load of guilt. The taxidermist has been working on his play since he was sixteen, that is since the end of the war. In its final scenes the play is clearly a veiled confession.

But what are the other scenes about? There is one in which Virgil describes a pear to the starving Beatrice; this fruit becomes an object of rare magical beauty. The need for food is here sublimated till hunger is replaced by a poet’s love of every detail of the world. There is a scene in a cafe where Virgil hears the official announcement that his class of people have been declared non-persons; the taxidermist has designed the propagandist posters defaming Virgil. There is a scene on the road where the animals marvel at the beauty of the landscape; suddenly a blue and grey striped shadow which they have never seen before is projected over everything; it is the shadow of striped concentration camp garb. The name of the play picks up this theme; it is “A 20^th-Century Shirt”. There are scenes where Virgil and Beatrice are anxiously looking for each other; they culminate in tender reunions. There is a scene where the friends wonder whether “empty good cheer” is better than no good cheer. On one occasion Virgil whispers jokes concerning their plight in Beatrice’s ear, a dangerously rebellious act. The two talk about religion and decide that the most they can manage is to be believers on three days of the week, hesitating on the fourth before disbelief sets in on the remaining three days; the only problem is that neither is sure which day of the week it currently is. There is a scene where Virgil dances with the red cloth of suffering. There are scenes where the two animals try to find a name for what is happening to them; they settle on “the horrors”. They work on devising a wider language that includes gesture and symbol through which “the horrors” can be remembered and even memorialized by posterity and they work on assembling a survival kit for themselves, a list which they call the sewing kit (the knowing kit) which will make it possible to speak and live truthfully both in the world of “the horrors” and in a future post-horrors world. The taxidermist explains that his play is constructed around this list.

All in all, this play is evidence of a perpetrator immersing himself in the lives and predicaments of his victims with extraordinary empathy and tenderness. His taxidermy is, in turn, an ongoing protest against our culture’s callous disregard for lives arbitrarily classified as inferior, whether they be Jews or animals. He has devoted 65 lonely years of his life to these projects, preserved the memory of rare and extinct animals, and created characters which Henry the author will never be able to forget.

And yet when Henry realized he was facing a perpetrator, he rejected the play, threw it back at the author who wanted to give it to him, mentally accusing him of “wanting redemption without remorse”. (189) Henry was of course in good company; his wife Sarah had seen the taxidermist as a creep, and both the grocer and the waiter at the cafe considered him strange and dangerous. Their healthy instincts had told them all three to have nothing to do with this man. Perhaps some of the neighbors knew of the taxidermist’s past doings for which there had been no public trial and legally determined punishment. The taxidermist is a little like the priest in Nathanael Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter whose public reputation remains intact at the cost of his private agony. Both these men had not wanted “redemption without remorse” though perhaps redemption without public shame and retribution.

But citizens are responsible to their society. They expect each other to be upfront about their identity; they want to know who the neighbors they live and work beside are. Henry’s new friends had, to his surprise, also become suspicious when they discovered that he was actually a famous author who wrote under a pseudonym. One of them had asked, half in jest: “So what else are you hiding?”

Quite apart from that, ordinary nice people tend to react with horror to strange, haunted and driven people like the taxidermist. He was, as it turns out, a dangerous madman who later turned round and stabbed his visitor and then condemned himself to a holocaust of his own. But the horror we have of a madman is different from the horror evoked by an unrepentant murderer. And a madman can have the makings of a true poet.

           

Henry regretted not having saved Beatrice and Virgil. He missed them with an ache that made itself felt even years later. [...] All that remained now was their story, that incomplete story of waiting and fearing and hoping and talking. A love story, Henry concluded. Told by a madman whose mind he had never understood, but a love story nevertheless. Henry wished he had taken the taxidermist’s play. That was another regret, that he had been so blinded by anger. But some stories are fated to be lost, at least in part. [...] After the stabbing, Henry went about remembering and writing down exactly what had happened to him. [...] The essential part of the story, the taxidermist’s play, was the most difficult to recreate. The sun of faith came before the generous wind, but which came first, the black cat or the three whispered jokes? The most elusive fragments on the sewing list were those the taxidermist had never discussed, such as the song, the food dish, the shirts with an arm missing, the porcelain shoes, the float in a parade. But bit by bit, painstakingly, Henry managed to reconstruct parts of the play. (194-5)

How to talk about the Horrors

One of the most thought-provoking sections of the taxidermist’s play is that on language because it implies that language as we know it is no longer functional in light of the Holocaust. For one thing, it has been so widely abused to conceal the truth that it now needs the warning [sic] to alert people that words are being employed erroneously. Beatrice and Virgil envisage “[sic] dramas” in which every word is thus queried. Another possible practice is onelongword “that, by agreement, would be about the Holocaust”. Suggestions are: thepityofitallwhensomuchwaspossible or Virgil’s more cryptic evilivingroomanerroneously compound, thought-provoking concepts that allow of no modification, no watering down. To preserve the memory of the Horrors, Beatrice proposes that “every book, magazine and newspaper, in a spot conspicuous or discreet” contain the word Aukitz, “to indicate that the language within is knowing of the Horrors”. 9147) Aukitz is similar enough to the dreaded word to evoke it and dissimilar enough to bypass the cliché it has become. And, they suggest, that the central block of seats in each theatre auditorium could from now on be called The Horrors, simply to create a convention that will enforce the ongoing usage of that word for generations to come. When they discuss their own talk, the two animals wonder about the merits of silence. But silence always allows other distracting sounds or thoughts to be heard; Beatrice finds that she experiences the alternative silence behind loud noise as “thousands of shadows pressing on me”. So silence will not do. They turn to gestures and devise one in which a depressed Nazi salute is dissolved in an unobvious gesture of condemnation: “The hand was brought in front of the chest, two fingers were pointed down and then the hand dropped” (142) Henry finds it puzzling: “Why two fingers he wondered?” But wondering about things never hurts. Not only language but literary conventions too have become questionable. Henry tries to persuade the taxidermist that the characters in a drama must develop and change but he protests: “If Beatrice and Virgil have to change according to someone else’s standards, they might as well give up and be extinct. [...] It is we who have to change, not they. [...] Beatrice and Virgil are the same before, during and after.” (152) Unfortunately, most of the taxidermist’s suggestions, alluded to on “the list”, are lost because Henry had initially rejected his play.

Games for Gustav

In hospital after his stabbing Henry was handed a blood-stained piece of paper that had been found with his clothes. It contained a further fragment of the play:

Virgil: We did the best we could. We wrote to newspapers. we marched and we protested. We voted. After that why not be cheerful? If we stop being cheerful, we give in to them.

Beatrice: Next to a dead body?

Virgil: Let’s give him a name. We’ll call him Gustav. Yes, next to Gustav, for the sake of Gustav, let’s play games.

Beatrice: Gustav?

Virgil: Yes, games for Gustav. (196)

The taxidermist had earlier asked Henry to help him with the invention of games for Gustav and Henry now compiles a text by that name.

It was too short to be a novel, too disjointed to be a short story, too realistic to be a poem. Whatever it was, it was the first piece of fiction Henry had written in years. (197)

These twelve games, typically dilemmas, affixed to Henry’s/Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil  text, together make up a powerful Holocaust text. Some samples:

Game Number One: Your ten-year-old son is speaking to you./ He says he has found a way of obtaining / some potatoes to feed your starving family./ If he is caught, he will be killed./ Do you let him go?  

           

Game Number Two: You are a barber./ You are working in a room full of people./ You shear them and then they are led away and killed./ You do this all day, every day. A new group is brought in./ You recognize the wife and sister of a good friend./ They recognize you too, with joy in their eyes./ You embrace./ They ask you what is going to happen to them./ What do you tell them?

Game Number Three: You are holding your granddaughter’s hand./ Neither of you is well after the long trip/ with no food or water./ Together, you are taken to the “infirmary” by a soldier./ The place turns out to be a pit where people are/ being “cured with a single pill,” as the soldier puts it,/ that is, with a single shot to the back of the head./ The pit is full of bodies, some of them still moving./ There are six people ahead of you in the line./ Your granddaughter looks up at you/ and asks you a question./ What is that question?

Game Number Nine: Afterwards, when it’s all over, you meet God./ What do you say to God?

What do you say to God?

What you say to God will depend on your God, what He expects of you and what you expect of Him, whether he is a God who rewards and punishes in an otherworldly heaven and hell or simply the creator of a complex machine that has now been handed over to humans to control. But beliefs are by no means irrelevant in extreme situations. While early Christians might have leapt at the opportunity to be martyrs, while those who believe in an afterlife may die confidently, while those who feel God is testing them will pick up the challenge as best they can, while the humanist will endeavor never to betray his humanity, while an orthodox Jew might submit to God’s recurring but cleansing fury with His chosen people, an atheist may feel entitled to employ any means, however dubious, to save his own life because this is his highest good. And if we believe, as so many do today, that God is a synonym for good and that it is His duty to provide each of us with what we consider good for ourselves, something He never seems to get right, then we will probably discard this useless God. Who are we to judge behavior driven by beliefs?

More Games for Gustav

I have only ever known one man by the name of Gustav and even he preferred his nickname Lutz. I am going to tell this story as I remember it. Gustav Lahusen was the Lutheran pastor in Sydney in the years just prior to World War II; he christened me. In 1938 he and his wife Maria decided to return to Germany with their three little children; it was the duty of decent Germans, they believed, still more of German Christians, to fight Hitler on their home ground. Gustav had joined the  Bekennende Kirche and he now used his pulpit to preach against the Nazi scourge. He was immediately arrested and sent to a concentration camp. Maria with her three little children, the middle one exactly my age, found herself a secretarial job in the office of the mayor of Bad Kreuznach by the Rhine. One day a Jewish friend knocked at her door in a panic of terror. Maria must help her to obtain documents that would get her out of Germany. Maria was horrified; her husband was imprisoned and she had three small children. But the woman could not be calmed. Maria ended up going to the office at night to steal the necessary document. She was caught by the mayor. Though mayors were always Party members, he did not betray her and the Jewish woman left with forged papers which allowed her to escape. Now Maria decided to try to bring about her husband’s release. She had heard that a top Nazi functionary could be bribed with a Gabelfrühstück, an expensive breakfast presumably followed by sexual favors. She made an appointment and travelled to Berlin. Eventually her husband was released. He was not deemed worthy of fighting for his country and was instead employed in the censor’s office in Berlin! The Lahusens later lost the little girl my age from rapid encephalitis; after the war they had two more sons. Gustav was now allowed to work as a pastor again. When the children were older, Maria, who had always enjoyed writing, enrolled in a course. For it, she wrote the story of her dilemma with her Jewish friend. She was then commissioned by the church to write a radio play about Oskar Schindler, at the time an unknown story, and it was performed and broadcast. She had now drawn attention to herself and Israel recognized her as one of the righteous. Gustav who was older died. New trials began. Her second youngest son, who was born just after the war, started to commit burglaries. He ended up in prison where he was well liked by all. But he escaped and came to her, asking her to conceal him from the police, something she said she could not do. Maybe she gave him a little money. He was caught. Then it all happened again: burglary, prison, escape, appeal to his mother. When she could no longer cope, she sent him to my mother in Sydney for a year; there he got on well with everyone: a fat boy and a real clown and joker. Eventually he grew up and settled; he was lucky to have a loyal girlfriend. I used to visit Maria whenever I was in Germany. When she died one day she had prepared a farewell note to me which was sent by her daughter without comment. My query was not answered. Over the years I had become something of a rival daughter to Maria, a reminder of young Cornelia who died but perhaps also a child whom she had not betrayed.  

Memorials

What the taxidermist in Martel’s novel tries to create, and maybe does create, is memorials: a memorial to the vast and beautiful but diminishing animal world, a memorial to the humane beings brutally killed in the Holocaust, and perhaps also a site of warning to young men at the mercy of ideologies and hormones.

I have recently visited Holocaust Memorials in several European cities. In Paris the Deportation Memorial was on the Îsle de la Cité. Steep steps led from the world of trees and flowers and Gothic cathedrals and dancing river water into a dungeon: a cold bare yard, a dark narrow tunnel, bars and grilles blocking all escape, a suggestion of torture instruments, and no trace of life. This is no doubt symbolic of the sort of place to which French collaborators sent their Jewish fellow citizens: a place to which no one goes voluntarily. Not surprisingly, though the island was overrun with tourists, there was only one other visitor in the time I was there. Perhaps it is not the bleak sites of torture and death we need to be reminded of - they are not hard to imagine - but the people lost to them.

In Berlin a vast area of the central city has been flattened, cluttered with forbidding black walls or ruins or gravestones or steles or wailing walls, between which run narrow, rough, dark lanes, a labyrinth of devastation through which one could walk on and on. But looking from a distance over the whole construction, you see the geometrical patterns of our scientific age. One realizes here that the heart of the old city has gone, charred and petrified. Nothing will grow on this site. Underground, in what feels like a grave chamber, visitors can then gather information about the people who were the victims of Germany’s ruthless madness and about the many camps in which they perished.

In Battery Point Lower Manhattan, on the banks of the Hudson, there was a museum of voices. I wound my way up through three storeys, listening to Jewish people speaking of pre-war Eastern European Jewish life, of the horrors of persecution, and eventually there were the  survivors. I spent far longer here than I had intended. It is only when you can envisage fully what people and cultures have been destroyed, how much humanity we have lost, that sadness and love overwhelm you. The taxidermist’s play about Beatrice and Virgil was, I think, of this nature. We need monuments of such a kind.

A Jewish story

Perhaps one reason for the prohibition against non-Jews writing about the Holocaust is that many Jews consider it a puzzlingly horrific part of their unique and ancient historical tradition. The Jewish God is a God who has accompanied his people throughout their history, training them, supporting them or punishing them as the occasion demanded. Prominent in the Jewish memory are periods of enslavement, as in Egypt, captivity, as in Babylon, and occupation and domination as by the Romans. In post-biblical times there was the expulsion from Spain and there have been too many pogroms to count. In the biblical stories God always ultimately rescues His people. In some ways, the Holocaust seems to have an eerie place in this context of persecution and rescue. Can one say that after 2000 years of exile the Nazi persecution has led to the Holy Land being returned to the Jewish nation? But could a caring God have sanctioned the Holocaust and can the tiny, embattled, both politically and morally endangered state of Israel be seen as God’s rescue of the Jewish nation? Is the Diaspora not perhaps a more acceptable and blessed state of being?  What sort of a God is this? What sort of a history is this? While Jewish people debate such questions, sometimes with bitterness verging on despair, it can be seen as quite inappropriate for non-Jews to be noisy with their opinions. (Martel’s book is not noisy with opinions.)

Two Henrys

What should we make of the apparent coincidence that both the narrator and the taxidermist  happen to be called Henry. Of course they are both writers though of differing ability and of a different generation, they have both been working on an unconventional book on the Holocaust which they have researched intensively, and they are both interested in animals though in different ways. There is also a lot that distinguishes them. Perhaps guilt is the crucial concern here. Could one say that one of them, the older one, is guilty while the younger one is innocent? Or are things not as clear-cut? Martel is a philosopher by training and it would probably be right to say that his novels too are exercises in philosophical thinking.

Stories

So what is Yann Martel’s book ultimately about? His intention was to throw new light on the Holocaust through fiction and I believe his novel does help us to ask some new questions and encourage us to come up with new stories.

Human beings live their lives through stories. We need every story we can get, fiction, yes, but also non-fiction and part-fiction, the most common category that lies in between, to achieve the full potential of our humanity. The stories will change as the generations and their needs change. Martel writes, and I shall repeat the quote: “We talk about [topics] in many ways and for many purposes. With these diverse representations, we come to understand what [they] mean to us.” I would conclude that it is always far more damaging to prohibit a story that needs to be told, the taxidermist’s story is an example, than it is to allow a bad story to circulate. Bad stories die their own death. Writers know which stories they have an urge to tell. These are inevitably the ones that need to be told. Censors judge by different standards from authors, usually by moralistic ones. They may think they know what people need but perhaps they do not. Publishers are more often than not in league with censors.