February 6, 1935

 

I think this must be the right day to begin this extra-special diary. I've now reached the happy age of 23. No, happy is not really the word. Right now I'm far from happy.

The truth is that I had pretty big ideas about the significance of this day: If I owned a dog I would not feel so lonely, but I suppose that is asking too much.

Frau Schaub came as an ambassador, bringing flowers and telegrams. The result is that my office looks like a florist's and smells like a funeral chapel.

I suppose I'm ungrateful, but I did want to be given a dachshund. And I don't have one. Perhaps I'll get one next year, or much later, when it'll be more appropriate for a budding old maid.

What's important is not to give up hope. I should have learned to be patient by now.

Today I bought two lottery tickets, because I had a feeling that it would be now or never - they were both duds. So I am not going to be rich after all. And there's nothing I can do about it.

Today I was going to Zugspitze with Herta, Gretl, Ilse, and Mutti, and I would have had a wonderful time, for it's always best when other people are enjoying themselves, too. But nothing came of it. This evening I'm going to have dinner with Herta. What else can you do, when you are a little single woman of 23? So I shall end my birthday "with gluttony and drunkenness." I think this is what he would want me to do.

The Cat

 

It’s harder to post letters than I thought. I’ve had to do it before, of course. I was programmed to take dictation, spell-check, grammar-check. I’m a secretary model. But writing to you is different. I want to tell you everything, but I don’t know how to do it.

I told you about the party, but now I realize that I didn’t even say why. You know that I work for Marta, but I didn’t say how long I’ve been doing that, or who I am really.

I’ve had a friend before. Not a person, not like you. There was a little cat who lived with me. It wasn’t with Marta, it was before. I’ve had a lot of masters and mistresses. Some of them were kind to me and some were cruel. I don’t really want to write about all that.

I don’t need to sleep, but I have to have a place to restart and absorb new data. One hour a night is a minimum, but every few weeks I need to do a total shutdown and reboot (and once a year I have to be examined by a representative. That’s happened to me a number of times now).

Marta gave me a cupboard for my own when I first came to her. She told me to clear out all the files and boxes, and told me that I could store my clothes and anything else I wanted to keep in there. There’s a hook for me to hang myself on when I do my restarts, and shelves and hangers for the coats and dresses. There’s even a bulb and a light-switch, but I don’t need light.

Before I met Marta, before she bought my contract, I used to live in a block of flats. I was the concierge for a four-floor building. Most of the people living there were young couples, and they couldn’t afford a fulltime servant. So all the people living on that staircase got together and each bought one seventh of my time. I had to spend three hours a day in every flat, and I would spend the night each day of the week with a different master or mistress.

There was a garden out the back where I used to hang washing.

And one day, while I was down there, I met the cat.

He was a little white cat, quite dirty, and he had a limp. I think he must have been quite young. I didn’t speak to him, but I knew that he was there. I could see his big eyes staring out at me from a mass of briars.

Later that day, when I came down to take in the washing, he was still there. This time he crept out and looked at me again. I didn’t move, but he ran back as if I had.

He was afraid of me, I thought. But then I realized he was hungry! None of the couples living on my staircase had children, but I’d seen some playing in the park across the way, and their nurses were always giving them food and drink, ice-cream and sweets.

I don’t really need to eat, though I do have to inject myself with supplements every day or two, so it took me some time to think of what I could give the cat. Finally I managed to steal some table-scraps, and I also took some milk. Babies like milk. I know that – basic training.

The little cat seemed quite pleased with what I had brought him. He ate it all up and lapped up the milk form the concrete path, and then he started to growl and rub against me as if he wanted more.

I had no more to give, but every day I would come down with some bits of food and a saucer of milk, and he would come out and eat it all up and rub against me. I worked out after a while that the growling meant he was full.

But then he wanted to come inside with me.

I told him he couldn’t come in. That the people would see him and they’d punish me and probably him as well, but he was only a little cat and he didn’t understand. He’d play around the door when I tried to shut it, and it was very hard to shut it again and leave him outside.

I told you I had to stay in a different flat every night. Mostly I stood in the corner when my work was done. I’d give myself my shots and then turn off.

Some of the men would do things to me. Some of the women, too. But most of them were couples, and the men slept in the same beds as their wives.

There was one flat, though – the top flat, the biggest of the seven (all the other floors had two flats each; only the top floor was lived in by one person). He was away a lot, and he had so much space that he’d set aside a whole room for me to use!

It was wet and cold in the garden, and the little cat shivered and sneezed so much that I began to think I might be able to hide him in that room.

It was stupid. I know that now. But the first time I carried him in there and put him down in the corner and he butted me with his little head, and I knew that I could keep him there with me all night, I felt as if I’d never be sad again.

I told him lots of things. Things I’d done, places I’d been, dreams I had, and he never answered me – just looked up with his big eyes and rubbed against me. I’d never had a friend, or even known that I could have one, but it made me feel happy.

*

One day when I went up to the room to feed him he was gone. I looked everywhere for him but couldn’t find him. Then, when I was looking through the rubbish bins (he used to sniff around them sometimes, looking for food to eat) I found him wrapped up in a black plastic bag.

His pretty white fur was all muddy and stiff and I could see that someone had broken his neck. He had a snarly look on his face as if he’d been very frightened, and that made me feel frightened, too. I was afraid that they’d ask me about him and that they’d find out he was my friend.

No-one ever asked, though, and a bit after that, when my contract was up for renewal, Marta outbid the flats. I didn’t know, then, but she was a friend of the man in the top flat, the man I hardly ever saw. He’d told her about me and that was why she brought me.

“No friends, or pets – or cats,” she said to me when I first moved here. That gave me a strange feeling. Did they know about it all along? About the cat? The man in the top flat, the couples in the other rooms? Did they talk about me and my little friend the cat? Was it too much for them that I should have a friend?

He didn’t do any harm. He never scratched anything except the old blanket I found for him, and he hardly made any noise. I kept him clean and tidied up after him. I wanted to ask Marta about it but I knew she wouldn’t tell me.

I wanted to help the cat, feed him, give him a home. Instead I killed him.

I don’t want to do that again.

That’s why I chose you.

your sister, Eva

Posted by Eva Android at 9:01 am

February 11, 1935

 

He came to see me, but no sign of of a dog - or anything else, for that matter. He didn't even ask me what I wanted for my birthday. So I bought some jewellery for myself. A necklace, earrings, and a matching ring, all for 50 marks. Very pretty, and I hope he likes them. If he doesn't, then he should choose something for me himself.

Strange Meeting

 

It was a Friday evening, I think. It must have been, in fact, because that was the night I always went out, after a long week slogging away, plugged into the library stacks. I was a poverty-stricken student in those days (I was about to say a poor student, but I was never that – never a poor student. No, I was always the one at the front of the auditorium, jostling to ask the right questions).

There was a long route and there was a short route from my bedsit to the nearest pub, the place where I usually met my friends to plan the course of the night – whether on to the narco dens, the virtual reality palaces, or just getting shitfaced in some anonymous bar. The last was my secret preference, but I didn’t want the rest of them to see just how dependent I'd become on these regular debauches. For the most part they were rich kids slumming – waiting for some distant parental unit to take them safely back under tow.

She was waiting for me at the corner of the alley. Not for me, precisely, of course – for anyone who might come by. I could see at once the kind of girl she was. Big eyes, an emaciated body, ragged clothes – part of the fallout of the narcolepsy laws.

“Please,” she said. “Please.” Holding out her hand.

Normally I would have hurried on by. That was one of the unfortunate side-effects of taking the short way. One had to pass by the dark chasms of the forgotten city – the one gradually expanding and proliferating in the shade of all that was bright and glossy and endlessly renewed above.

This time, however, I stopped. I don’t know why. I’ve interrogated my motives a thousand times, and I still can’t come up with a clear answer. She was attractive, yes -- in a kind of fey, artless way – but that wouldn’t normally have been enough for me. I was very keen on intellectual stimulation and the true companionship of minds in those days, sombre little prig that I was, and wouldn’t have given the time of day to any mere party girl who tried to distract me from what I fondly imagined to be the dark intricacies of my midnight studies.

Not that any of them did.

“What’s in it for me?” I asked, roughly enough, imagining that would be enough to bring the conversation to an end.

“I … don’t know,” she replied. “What would you like?”

There was an indescribable delicacy in the way she spoke, as if she were some angel fallen into the midst of this desolation. There were sections of the city (still are, I suppose) where the very foundation stones had given away, opening up huge caverns and pools with waterfalls, framed by impenetrable fences of iron. She’d come creeping up from one of them, I supposed. How could she seem so clean, so unsullied by her bestial surroundings?

I suppose the worst romantics are those who pride themselves on their unrelenting realism.

“Who are you? What’s your name?”

“Celeste,” she said, letting her skinny hand drop to her side. I could see the emaciation of her body through a rip in the side of her dress – pitiful half-starved ribs protruding through the ivory skin.

“Well, Celeste, I’m going out on the piss tonight. D’you understand that? I’m going to spend all night getting roaring, fall-down drunk, and then I’m going to stagger home, possibly in this direction, possibly in another …” I’d already had a bit to drink before leaving home, which no doubt accounts for my elevated mood. I suppose I already felt something for her – a bemused half-contempt, mixed with a tiny tincture of pity and even (I suppose) some lust spawned by the sight of her skinny, half-starved body.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir. I’m not 'sir' to the likes of you, even if you are a little whore or a beggar … and you’re both, aren’t you, Celeste?”

“Y—yes”

She seemed honestly to find it more difficult to leave off the “sir” than to admit to her status in her eyes. Humble she always was, my little Celeste.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

It might even have been true. God knows she didn’t look a day over fourteen, with her little screwed up face and those huge, childlike eyes, eyes like the saucers of a tea-set, but with depths of blue within them: eyes captured in a perpetual flash of surprise.

“D’you want to wait for me, Celeste? Wait for me right here?”

“If you like.”

I could see that she’d be off in a second if I didn’t increase the offer.

“There’s a bed for the night in it for you, little girl. There’s some late supper and possibly some breakfast tomorrow. I might even give you some money, though God knows I’ve little enough of that for myself.”

Silence. I could see her thinking it over, sizing me up. A little angel she might be, but to live this long she must have learnt at least some survival traits. Whether or not she waited was nothing to me, of course. I’d only suggested it to get out of making any immediate decision about her. Why had I stopped to talk to her in the first place? And yet those few instants when her eyes were playing over me were some of the most intensely felt of my life – it was as if I were before the Judgement Seat, with some incomprehensible deity scanning my very soul. Looking in and finding me wanting, I cannot but conclude.

“All right, I’ll wait,” she said, and it was as if she were conferring a favour on me by choosing to stay. How had she turned the tables like that? I’d still like to know that, I’d like to know that about you, about all of you ...

Anyway, the rest is quickly enough told. I met my friends, as I said before, and we agreed to hole up for the night in some gin palace. I was morose and touchy the whole evening through, though – little disposed to talk, as the one thing most on my mind was the thing I was most determined not to share with them – so they finally concerted among themselves to go off to the virtual palace, leaving me soaking grimly at the bar.

I was hardly in the best of humours when I got back to my section of town, then. It was a difficult climb around the rocks and thickets of rusty steel – old monorails and mars-rockets, scavenged for scrap by the underdwellers – and it shocked me further to find her still there.

I’d been wondering all night if she’d wait for me, hoping against hope that she would, but trying to deny to myself the whole time that that was what I was hoping for.

Accordingly I tried to make as light of it as possible when I saw her leaning against a broken railing – her eyes half-closed with sleepiness.

“Come then if you’re coming,” I barked at her, and hurried off as fast as I could stagger-shuffle (I’d had a bad fall earlier in the evening, which had left an oozing cut on my leg, and of course the huge amount of alcohol I’d drunk had left me only barely perambulatory).

She fell in behind me. And that, Eva, is how I met my future wife.

The Contract

 

Dearest E,

The strangest thing has happened. You remember that party, the fight, the man who got hurt? Marta says he’s asked to buy out my contract. It’s not even up for renewal, so it’s necessary for him to get her consent to sell.

She told me about it in the kitchen while she was ordering her meals for the day. I always make her the same breakfast: café-au-lait and a croissant, but she likes a varied menu for lunch and dinner.

“Would you like to go, Eva?”

“No, Marta.”

“They’re offering me quite a lot of money, you know. I don’t really understand it. Is there something you haven’t told me? Did something happen that night that I don’t know about?”

“No, Marta. I told you everything next morning. I held his hand, that’s all.”

“Well, he must admire something about you. Maybe you were the last thing he saw. He’s blind, you know.”

“Blind.”

“Yes. Don’t be dense. You know what blindness is. The glass damaged his optic nerve. I don’t know how. Usually they can fit people with artificial eyes these days, but in his case the whole business was destroyed, apparently – no chance of growing it back.”

“Do you want me to go, Marta?”

“Of course not, sweetie, but … well, it is a lot of money, and that would pay for quite a few things around here. And it’s not as if I really need you a lot of the time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You could look a bit more enthusiastic! He’s quite a famous man, you know – writer, critic and all that. And he’s blind! He won’t be able to see what you’re up to. You can laze around, read books, do whatever you like most of the time, I should think … You know I’ve never been able to tolerate that, your slackness. I know that you do what I tell you to do, but it’s as if you never want to do any of it. It’s as if you don’t care about me at all, sweetie – about what would please me.”

“You want me to go.”

“Well, quite frankly, yes. I feel I’ve treated you very well here – far better than at the last place, skivvy for all those flats. But I don’t think I’ve really got value for money. Now, Charles …”

Charles was the name of the clan who helped with the lights the night of the book party. She’d mentioned him a few times before. With the amount she was being offered for my contract, she’d be able to buy him and install him instead of me.

I understood then that I would be going to work for the blind man.

I hope that he’s kind to me.

Marta has been kind, very kind. She’s letting me keep the clothes I’m wearing. The others she says she’ll sell (“No use to me, darling: clan cast-offs”).

Last time I was stripped and wrapped in plastic before they packed me up. This time I’ll still have my clothes on when I get to the other end.

I’m happy about that. I know he won’t see me. He’s blind, after all! But last time they told me to switch myself off and I saw the big box and the wrappings, I thought of the little cat, the black plastic bag.

It’s different, of course. That was death. This is just a pause before reboot. I kept on seeing his little face in my head even so.

*

They’re coming for me tomorrow morning, early.

I hope that you’re well and that everything is good with you. I may not be able to write to you ever again, but please don’t forget me. I’ll be thinking of you. You’re all I have now.

your loving sister, Eva

Posted by Eva Android at 3:38 pm

February 15, 1935

 

It sounds as if the idea of going to Berlin is actually going to come off. However, I won't believe it until I am really in the Reich's Chancellery. Let's hope everything turns out for the best.

It's a pity Herta can't come with me instead of Charly. With Herta I could be sure of a few happy days. I imagine there'll be a good deal of bickering, and I don't believe he's likely to show Charly his nicer side.

I refuse to get excited about it, but if everything goes all just right, it'll be wonderful. I really really hope that all goes well.

First Night

 

What were my feelings that first evening? Cruel, I suppose. First of all I wanted to see if she actually would wait for me. Rather relishing the idea of her standing there in the cold, hesitating to solicit others on the half-chance that I might come back again and that my intentions might be … what? Hardly honourable. Profitable enough to her to make it worth her while to stay.

Dinner, I guess, was at the forefront of her mind – the fact that she waited a sign of the difficulty she was finding even in getting enough to eat ...

Did I want sex from her? Not especially, I don’t think. She was so scrawny and thin that it was hard to anticipate any pleasure from it, but again – I don’t deny it – the fact (I was sure) that she was fearing and anticipating it gave me a little flush of satisfaction.

The pleasure I anticipated was in treating her well enough to keep my conscience smug and beaming, whilst secretly enjoying her fear of the moment when I would force her to strip and prostrate herself for me.

But it didn’t go like that. It didn’t work out like that at all. In retrospect, I suppose my mistake was in thinking that I could control the situation in any way: control myself, for one thing; but most of all, control her, preprogram the actions of another human being: a good human being – kind and gentle and full of sympathy for others – almost an empathic genius, I’d say now.

I didn’t even look round until I reached the sealed hatch of my coffin apartment.

“You’ll have to climb in first,” I said. "The mechanism is keyed to my wristchip, and it won’t stay open after I’ve gone through."

She nodded, wary now, scenting a trap.

I opened the hatch and in she crawled.

You know what men are. You above all people -- maybe that’s not something I can call you, really – not a person, but not a thing exactly, either – you of all creatures can understand what men are. I checked her out as she crawled under my nose – checked to see if she was wearing underwear, eyeing up her thin legs and her little bony behind.

She didn’t try to conceal them at all, coyly gather her rags around her. How could she, really? She crawled in as if it hadn’t occurred to her to do otherwise, as if a simple action could be performed simply in this world we’ve made for ourselves.

“Food’s in the cupboard,” I grunted, falling forwards on the mattress, as the hatch swung shut behind me.

I’d intended something more ceremonious, no doubt – some showing off of the glories of my boxed-in manor – but I was far too drunk. Let her deal with the intricacies of the situation, I thought. I’m a kind man, I thought, I won’t make her fuck me before I sleep.

I woke up, once, to see a tiny light off in the corner. I could hear a scrunching sound coming from there, as if a little mouse were gnawing at some crumbs. To be honest, I doubt if there’d been much more in the house for her to scavenge.

There was a bucket by the mattress, and I was naked. She must have undressed and washed me (so far as she could), and – from the reek of it – cleaned up some vomit, too.

Then she’d left me to it. My head was whirling still, in that way that tells you that you’ll regret the waking up tomorrow morning. That whatever has gone down will soon be coming up again, and that any attempts not to mix your drinks and to balance them with copious draughts of water have been in vain. The throbbing head you’ll soon be feeling is already shaping up for you, but hasn’t hit you yet.

And when I woke next morning she was gone.

It was late, it must have been almost midday. My head (as I’d predicted) was throbbing like an open wound, and my whole body felt convulsed with illness and nausea. "Never again," I resolved -- as if I didn't say the same thing every week, relapsing again as the days unfolded their manifold boredoms and indignities – "Never again am I going to put myself through this. It isn’t worth it!"

And yet – this time, though I was drenched in sweat, sweat that had soaked right through the mattress – I wasn’t festooned in puke. My clothes weren’t swaddled around me like ineffectual towels. I was (comparatively) clean and fresh. There was a glass of water by my elbow which I proceeded to knock over before I could sip on it – but still … This was undoubtedly an improvement.

“Fuck! The girl!”

I remembered her then. Made a brief sweep with my eyes to see what she had taken. Fair rent for a night spent nursing the dead-drunk, one might have thought. Even I scarcely grudged her some kind of toll. The only question was what? The printed books?

No, they all looked undisturbed in their little fileboxes.

The clothes were worth practically nothing, but at least they lacked very obvious rips and holes. I thought at first she’d contented herself with them, till I discovered they’d been put away – folded - in the chest-of-drawers.

That folding was almost too much. Had I really entertained an angel unawares? An angel who’d taken the time to sweep and tidy, an angel who didn’t want payment? Of any kind? Or was it my soul she’d stolen?

There was nothing else to steal! That was the point. To be sure, she’d eaten some of my food, but there was so pitifully little that the wonder was she could have taken any of it – there was still some left for me: enough and more than enough for all the breakfast I’d be eating, at any rate.

I began to feel more curious about her. Perhaps I should have brought her back here at once last night, I thought. Before the long hours of drinking had turned me speechless and retching. Who was she? Where did she live? Would I ever see her again?

Her actions had succeeded in arousing my curiosity (I won’t say my compassion, as I’m not sure I possess such a thing – certainly didn’t then, at any rate). I felt a strange desire to see her again: a strong desire.

Not that I was going to search. Oh no, bad enough that I’d started taking an interest in another human being – especially a beggar girl whom my friends would laugh at and whom everyone would assume I’d taken home for sex. Any attempts to look for her, ask after her, would be fatal – alerting her and everyone else to my deviancy.

I would have to search by affecting not to search. Wander as if at random through such streets as she might frequent – speak to her (if I deigned to speak at all) in as offhand a manner as I could manage.

And yet I did strongly desire to see her. That was the fact of the matter. And who in the whole wide world would have cared if I’d gone after her to my heart’s content? The burning searchlight of my egotism persuaded me that my doings were at least worthy of gossip (possibly they were), but how I could have managed to conclude that I must avoid all occasions for malicious inference is beyond me.

I’ve ended up a worse pariah than if I’d set out from the first to make myself a moral leper: an outcast shunned by everyone – everyone human that is – that knows him.

Posted by Eva Android at 8:46 am