‘Come on, why’d you stop it?’
Ariane with flushed cheeks rolled out of my bed. ‘Because I’m just not feeling it right now.’
I was going to have to break up with Ariane.
For the last few months, she’d been trying too hard to get in my head. She’d even started doing research for me, trying to work her academic magic. I was almost ready to break up with Ariane.
‘Germany is now open to excavation of its past,’ Ariane told me, reading some website on her phone about an exhibit in Berlin on the brothels in concentration camps.
‘So even if he was fantasizing,’ Ariane continued, ‘your guy was actually there!’
I hated how she called Ka-Tzetnik ‘my guy.’
‘There were brothels in ten concentration camps,’ Ariane read. ‘Between three hundred and four hundred Jewish prisoners were forced to become sex workers. Okay, listen, it says here that a visit to a brothel, known as a “special barrack,” was part of a system of incentives intended to boost the productivity of concentration-camp slave labourers.’
Ariane seemed so proud of herself. It was like she thought she’d found me the magic ticket, the ticket to our future togetherness, to everything.
‘Do those Germ-boys admit that those places were basically pussy for the Judenrat?’
Ariane looked up at me, extremely disturbed.
‘I mean, the complicit Jews. The rich Jews. The ones who tried to save their own skin.’
‘Uh, babe, I get that you’re not addressing the exploitation of women in your thesis,’ Ariane said. ‘Like, I totally understand that you’re not looking at rape as a war crime, okay? But my point still stands that your guy Ka-Tzetnik was working from reality – I mean, real brothels, right? Not made-up brothels. That’s all that I was trying to say.’
It bothered me that Ariane could find rape culture in everything. She was right, I was not dealing with rape as a war crime, but I wasn’t trying to say that it didn’t happen either.
‘Ka-Tzetnik wrote pulp, but he was not a rape apologist,’ I said.
‘Yes, I understand that,’ said Ariane.
‘No,
you don’t.’
‘Yes, I do. And I think whatever you do is going to be brilliant.’
‘Stop lying. You do not.’
‘Babe, what’s wrong with you? I told you to apply to uc Berkeley and the European Grad School. They get your work.’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it even though Ariane looked hurt.
‘Come on, Ariane. You know that Berkeley is not going to take me – one hundred and fucking ten percent. And European Grad School lets in any fool with cash.’
‘Why are you being so aggressive?’
‘Let’s just stop talking.’
‘No. Why?’
‘I don’t want to talk about this anymore.’
‘Why? I’m not saying anything wrong! I’m trying to support you. All I do, babe, is try to support you.’
I told Ariane that I didn’t need support. I needed money. I needed to be published, to be taken seriously.
‘But that’s what I’m saying, babe. Come on, you will be!’