Amadeus’s worst qualities, how he and the passion he arouses in me bring out my worst qualities, for all of that—I do want to try. I rejoice in him endlessly, when we’re together the smell of him drives me crazy with pure love, just like in the very beginning. I’ve always known that Amadeus will bring me pain—and maybe it’s for later years to examine why even the pain attracts me. And yet, I don’t think it’s to be condemned, my love for him, because in the end, I have won. My life is not so much a happy one as one that gets zapped full of bliss over and over. Amadeus is the zapper, whether I like it or not. I’ve gotten more from him than he has from me, although I would give him everything I have.
EIGHT • Don Quixote of the SS
The days since the city’s transformation—they passed Margaret by. And although when she emerged from Number 88 the city was still burlesque and untamed, Margaret was jaded now. She was not surprised that the city appeared fleshy, and she walked past it all, half blind. Let the city’s bosoms spill out over the top of its dress—what did she care!
But while the sight did not disturb, the sounds still sometimes exhausted. When she heard the doors and windows drawing in breath all at once, making a reverse hissing sound up and down the avenues, she braced herself. The groaning and symphonic sighs sure to follow, as thunder follows lightning, rattled her still. The city meant it vindictively, she thought, knew she was its wind instrument with a reed calibrated just to its melodizing breath.
It had a message, too.
Something would breathe at her, whisper in her ear: Magda was not the only one, it would say at first, more on the quiet side. But then louder, with a slight sneer: And what about the stupid ones?
For reasons Margaret could not quite understand, her mind would run with this instantly. When she heard the question she would begin to ask herself again and again: but what about the stupid ones?
And inexplicably, the question would expand in her mind in the following manner: should stupid people, she would ask herself, be called innocent? And then she always thought of Hitler’s consort, Eva Braun, as exhibit A. It was Eva Braun and her almost successful suicide attempts at the altar of her desperation for Hitler that suggested themselves to Margaret as the purest idiocy. And then the little matter of her mania, her crazy love.
Was Eva Braun, Hitler’s mincing little girlfriend, innocent or guilty?
The stupid could not be called incontrovertibly guilty, so Margaret’s ratiocinations went. In the case of Eva Braun and Hitler’s other concubines, their womanliness held them aloof from activity, like the fatness of larvae. Eva Braun’s three suicide attempts during the years of her affair with Hitler might even be interpreted as resistance, albeit of an exclusively self-referential kind. By no means, however, could these plump larvae be called innocent either. Their coarse minds were complicit by default in any crime offered to them. Margaret had a picture in her head of Eva Braun with her broad, girlish face and swelling hips, her chamois underwear, driving her Volkwagen Beetle, that chubby little car.
The question of how to judge Eva Braun seemed terribly important.
More than once, Margaret read over the few surviving diary entries of Hitler’s mistress.
March 11, 1935
There’s just one thing I wish for: I would like to be seriously ill and to know nothing about him for at least eight days. Why doesn’t anything happen, why do I have to go through all this? If only I had never set eyes on him! I’m in despair. I’m going to go out and buy sleeping powder again and go into a half-trance state, and then I won’t think about it so much.
Why doesn’t that devil come and get me? It must be much nicer at his place than it is here.
I waited for three hours in front of the Carlton and had to watch him as he bought flowers for Ondra and invited her to dinner. (That was just my wild imagination. March 16.)
He needs me only for certain purposes, it’s not possible otherwise. When he says I’m dear to him, it only means: at that particular instant. Just like his promises, which he never keeps. Why does he torment me like this, instead of ending it at once?
February 18, 1935
Yesterday he showed up altogether unexpectedly, and