WALTER ABISH
No. Not success. What do you rea ll y reall y want?
Why not success?
You 're terribl y devi ous, di d you know that.
No.
65
If
onl y I knew wha t you rea ll y wanted I would be a bl e
to
trust you,
she said.
7.
You can trust me.
No.
By now I like to think tha t most people in Wurtenburg have put me
out of their minds. My somewha t inept performance in court as
reported widely in all the papers and o n T V and radio has fortuna tely
been superseded by more recent events. An earthquake in Chile, a
famine in Ethiopia, a coup d 'eta t in T anzani a, wides pread use of
torture in La tin America and Greece. Once in a whil e, one of my wife's
former fri ends, a fellow activist, now serving ten to twenty, or was it
fifteen
to
tr.:rty years for a long list of all eged crimes, inel uding: arson ,
assault, kidnapping, armed robbery, and second degree murder, will go
on a hunger strike and receive menti on in the papers. But no one is
really interes ted in my whereabouts. No one could possibl y care wha t I
plan to write next. I expect tha t a number of peopl e famili ar with my
work expect to find in my next book some kind of expl anati on of my
obviously, to them, aberrant behavi or ... an expl ana ti on tha t strikes
me as being totall y redundant. I have been led to believe tha t a grea t
many of my acquaintances were con vinced that I li ed to the Poli ce and
in court in order to extri ca te Paul a and myself fr om the mess we were
in. I didn 't. I merely told the truth
to
save our skin.
It
was n 't necessary
to fabri cate anything. I didn 't have to worry about being caught tellin g
a li e. I didn ' t have
to
worry about contradicting myself. Still , it com es
to the same thing. What I had
to
say enabl ed the Ministry of Justi ce
to
convict eight people who had frequentl y eaten a t my table and, for
reasons I still cannot expl ain, entrusted me with their idi oti c pl ans.
After all , Ulrich von Hargenau, the elder, had died witho ut di vul gin g
to
the
Sicherheitsdienst
the names of his fellow conspira tors. So wh y
shouldn't Ulrich Hargenau , the younger, be expected to do the same.
The police knew that Paul a had been the chief strategist, the planner,
the brain behind so many of the Einzig "wargames," just as she must
have known that I, or rather our hall owed name Hargenau would pull
her out of the mess.
