Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess

off it.’
    â€˜How did you know about rocket fuel?’ asked Roper, wide-eyed. ‘I never mentioned –’
    â€˜Just a guess. Look,’ I said, ‘I think I’d better be going.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Brigitte very promptly, ‘be going.’ I looked at her, wondering whether to be nasty back, but her body got in the way. Perhaps I’d said enough already. Perhaps I’d been discourteous. I still had fragments of Uncle Otto’s ham in my back teeth. Perhaps I was ungrateful. I said to Roper: ‘It’s a messy sort of journey back where I’m going.’
    â€˜I thought you were in Preston.’
    â€˜No, a country house some way outside. A matter of a last bus.’
    â€˜Well,’ he said unhappily, ‘it’s been nice having you. You must come again some time.’ I looked at Brigitte to see if she would corroborate that in smile, nod, word, but she sat stony. So I said: ‘
Danke schön
,
gnädige Frau
.
Ich habe sehr gut gegessen
.’ And then, like a fool, I added: ‘
Alles
,
alles über Deutschland
.’ Her eyes began to fill with angry tears. I got out without waiting to be shown out. Jolting on the bus into town, I kept seeing Brigitte’s great
Urmutter
breasts wagging and jumping inside their white cotton blouse. Roper would undo a button, and then the catechism would start: ‘Whose fault was it all?’ – ‘England’s, England’s’ (most breathily). It would continue, intensifying, to the point where she would lose interest in catechising. I turned myself into Roper. Oh yes, cupping a fine firm huge Teutonic breast I too would breathily revile England, would blame my own mother for the war, would say, preparing for the plunge, that not enough Jews had been plunged into gas-chambers. And afterwards I would take it all back, though not in any chill disgust of
post coitum
: rather I would call her an evil bitch, very hot, and strafe her. And then it would start again.
    That was a significant event in Roper’s life, sir. I mean his going into the death-camp and seeing evil for the first real time – not the pruriently reported evil of the Sunday rags, but stinking palpable evil. For the sake of scientific rationalism he’d jettisoned a whole system of thought capable of explaining it. I mean Catholic Christianity; face to face with an irrational emptiness he’d made himself a sucker (ah, how literally) for the first coherent system of blame that had been presented to him. There’s another letter I haven’t mentioned, a letter in reply to that letter of mine advising him to get stuck into the German women:
    â€˜I’ve tried to do what you said. It’s reminded me in a queer way of the old days of going to confession. Blasphemous, those still in the fold would think. I met this girl in a small beer-place, she waswith a German man. I was a bit drunk and a bit more forward than I’d have normally been. The man sort of slunk off when I came to their table. I think it was her brother. Anyway, I bought her several beers and gave her three packets of Player’s. To cut a long story short, before I properly knew what was happening I found we were lying on the grass in this sort of park place. It was a lovely evening –
Mondschein
, she kept saying. That was right for what they call LOVE. Then, when I saw part of her bared body under the moon, it all came over me – that camp and all that bare wasted flesh there, not at all like hers. I sort of grabbed hold of her in a kind of hate you could call it, and I even screamed at her while I was doing it. But she seemed to like it. “
Wieder wieder wieder
,” she seemed to keep on crying. And then it seemed to me that I’d done wrong to her, raped her even, but, worse than that, I was sort of corrupting her by all this, she took such pleasure in what was meant to be hate but became a great joy I was sharing