ever going to be faced with anything quite that appalling, certainly not that dramatic. It's a very moving episode, and I remember myself when I first encountered that particular passage in some excerpts from a book about Anne Frank in Life magazine years ago, I remember being very moved by it. It obviously stuck in my mind so that when I was writing this story I went back and tracked that passage down and quoted it in my own story.

It's been a long time since I've written or read the story, but I think that obviously its major theme is a tormented set of questions about what love is between human beings, what it can be, what sorts of strains it can take and really how the great holocaust experience reflects upon our own cliches about love. I think Charles in the story asks a number of questions about what happens to what we call human love, romantic love, love between men and women or parents and children, when love appears to conflict with individual survival. . . .

Q: Can you tell us what Sara was thinking, why she didn't want to go into the camp?

A: Anybody got any ideas? I don't want to be coy about this, but I'm not sure that I have the complete answer to that. You might read the other stories in this series called "A Fool's Education"; the title is purposely ambiguous: does it mean you take a fool and educate him into something else, or does it mean you educate somebody to be a fool?—which obviously a great deal of education is dedicated towards doing. I myself would vote for the fact that Charles gets a lot of the foolishness educated out of him, not by academic institutions but by his own experience. My guess is that, if you've read what comes before about Tamplin and Sara and then read this, you're faced with several things, one of which is that Sara realizes that Charles is setting this up as some kind of elaborate emotional test, that they really are going to do this pretty awful thing. At the time they go into Dachau—does the story give the date? I said I was there in '56. I think they're there in '55 or '57, a year before or a year after I was there for some reason. At that particular time it was only twelve years after the liberation of the camp, twelve years after the whole world found out really what was going on there. I myself was twelve years old at the time the camp was liberated, so I have vivid memories of suddenly seeing in Life magazine or in the newsreels the piles of corpses being pushed together by bulldozers. That was really the absolute first time that any civilians in the western world knew that the concentration camps existed, or at least existed as dead ends for that many Jews and gypsies or other "impure" elements.

I should have brought along my little leaflet that I found in a Holiday Inn day before yesterday. There was an American Nazi group spending the night in the local Holiday Inn in their Nazi uniforms with their swastikas on; and they left little leaflets around the tables, about racial purity and the necessity of exterminating the Jews from around the world, and so on. It's hardly an idea that ended in 1945, as you probably know. This was a group of people in Idaho; I'm happy to say they weren't from Arkansas, but they might get some sympathy in certain parts of Arkansas, as they might get some sympathy anywhere in America for that matter.

Anyway, Charles and Sara were there at a time when the camp was still a kind of physically raw place. The story talks about the fact that literally nothing had been done to prettify it or make it into a kind of national park. Have any of you been to Dachau? A number of American tourists who go to Germany now—especially to Munich, which is only a few miles from Dachau—take a little side trip over there. I myself haven't been since 1956 and don't want to go, but I gather from what students of mine have told me and from photographs I've seen that it has indeed been decorated quite a lot. All sorts of museums have been built, and statues have been put up, flowers have been planted. That's only natural; but at the time I was there it looked essentially the way it looked on the day of liberation, except the bodies were all gone. So you just saw this absolutely stark—and as I say in the story—this surprisingly small thing. You always think that if you hear of some great event, you're going to go there, and the place is going to be physically as grand and frightening as the whole thing has become in your imagination. In 1956 Dachau looked like a little Arkansas brick factory. You couldn't imagine that millions of people had passed through.

So I think Charles in his own rather dramatic, poetic way, has built this thing up in his mind as some sort of symbolic testing of their own love. Sara knows him well enough to resent that, to resent that romanticism in him; and really when the crunch comes, when they get there to the parking lot, she's just independent enough to resist it. It's not some elaborate plan that she's made to stage a refusal at that point; it's just a spontaneous choice. Charles reads it quite correctly. He reads it as some sort of symbolic rejection of their whole relationship, and it does become a sort of watershed that is the end of their relationship. They go on—though actually there is one story that comes after this in the series, called "Happiness of Others"—they go on to England and part there but have essentially parted for good at Dachau, which is what the story says; it invites Sara back, it begs her back, but there's no indication that she's coming. . . .

Q: What is the scene in which Charles and Sara discuss the "old chalk fingerprint" in the sky ("the great spiral galaxy in Andromeda") supposed to suggest about them—that they (and all of us) are a part of nature?

A: That and the opposite of that, which is the standard thing you say upon looking up at the stars—"Gee, what am I so upset about my own little problems for, when the whole thing is this big and this grand and this mysterious and this inscrutable? Why am I so depressed about, you know, what Bobby Jo said to me today in the cafeteria?" That, added to the fact that we are all to some extent literally the same thing as the galaxy in Andromeda; we're made out of the same hydrogen and oxygen and carbon atoms; and, I think, any kind of satisfactory human relationship probably needs to have some sort of, not necessarily conscious, awareness of those facts. Yet, in the end, Charles appears to go beyond all that rationalization and all that intellectualization and just say, "Sara, come back." What the hell, what's the point of depriving ourselves of the consolation that personal commitment and personal loyalty can bring, the sort of consolation that presumably the de Wieks got out of being who they were to one another.

And there's nothing at all implicitly or explicitly anti-Semitic in saying that one of the amazing things about the holocaust is how easy it was for Hitler to bring it off. Certainly the Western European powers and the United States made it a lot easier, for various complicated political reasons that you may or may not know anything about (very fascinating and horrible reasons). But the Jews of central and eastern and western Europe also made it much easier for Hitler to bring it off by their own refusal to believe that Hitler really meant what he said, that he was really going to do this, and by their refusal to get out. If these guys at the Holiday Inn suddenly became a political majority, would those of us who were running contrary to their program, would we pack up our toothbrushes and our favorite two pieces of clothing and leave the United States and emigrate to Canada or Mexico? It's unthinkable that somebody's going to pull a truck up to your house and haul you away and convert you to ashes just because you're a Jehovah's Witness or a homosexual or a Jew or a black or a gypsy, or whatever the particular program happens to condemn as being racially impure. That's what was happening.

Q: Would you explain about Sara's writing on the mirror?

A: That's something that happened to me. I once was with a friend at a bar, and the friend was telling me about the serious problem he was having. The problem didn't involve me; it was a problem with another relationship in his life. He got up and went to the men's room and came back; and half an hour later I got up and went to the men's room, and I saw in his handwriting (he had very distinctive, unmistakable handwriting)—I saw that written on the bathroom wall, and I couldn't resist putting it in the story. So I don't quite know what it's doing there except obviously Sara is at a very serious emotional crisis in her own life. She's deciding whether or not to give up on this relationship that has been the center of her young adult life to this point; and at this particular time in America, the '50s, it was much more fashionable for people that age, in their early '20s, to go steady and get engaged and have .. . I mean the fashion's beginning to come back but certainly through the '60s and '70s relationships of that sort weren't nearly as common as they are now—these very intense engagement experiences when people were in great detail planning the next sixty years together in their neat little house and their little children and their little car and little jobs and what not. So she's making a very crucial decision that she thinks is of the greatest importance to her future life, and she just phrases that prayer. I don't really mean to imply that she has some sort of mystical experience in the ladies' room. She's just feeling very intense, and she's probably had a little wine, and she just writes it. Do women's bathrooms have a lot of graffiti in them?

Q: Could you comment further on Sara and her relationship with Charles?

A: If you'd read the other stories about them, you'd see that the relationship has altered. She's begun to feel pretty rejected. She's tried to catch up with what seems to be his rejection of her. . . . I think she would have been much more willing to try to hold on for the whole trip than he.

If you really want to read a full expansion on a relationship of this sort, you might look at my novel published a few years ago called The Source of Light. It really is very much about a young man and a young woman a lot like Charles and Sara. They have different names, but I really think in many ways "Waiting at Dachau" is a kind of sketch for the later novel, The Source of Light. It's set in virtually the same time period, and is about very intense, thoughtful young people.

Q: Why do Charles and Sara travel to Dachau in the first place?

A: I don't think they necessarily planned it to produce any great discoveries. Charles is a graduate student in England. Sara has come over there to visit him. They take a trip, just what you do when you're in Europe: you sort of get in a car or bus; you ride around and look at the great scenes. Charles has this rather bizarre idea that they should go and look at this one rather awful scene; most people would not include Dachau on their travel itineraries any more than you would include the State electric chair on your itinerary around Arkansas. Few people would. But Charles did that. As the trip moves along—I don't know whether you've noticed or not, but nothing in the world is harder on a relationship than traveling together; it's the ultimate test of any relationship from friendship to roommates to romance. Sara and Charles experience a lot of that travel abrasion. And then poor old Charles—he's a fool—decides to stage this one big showdown—the showdown at the Dachau corral. Sara realizes that he is trying to stage a showdown, and she just says, "I'm not going to play. This is some kind of elaborate romantic game. The woman is supposed to be the romantic, and you're the man, and you're not supposed to be; but you've gone a little bananas, and I'm not going to play your game." Then she regrets it and realizes that she's rained on his parade, and that's why that very peculiar scene follows when they're in the restaurant and the lion bites her, which again is something I really saw. Could I ever have invented anything like that? I was once in a restaurant on the French Riviera; and some men came in with a lion, exactly as described in the story. "Does anybody want to have their picture taken with a lion?" This one woman, not with our party, said "Sure" and picked it up and held it in her arms; the flashbulb went off, and the lion chomped into her shoulder, and she was absolutely magnificent. The men who owned the lion went absolutely haywire. They were screaming. The woman stood there and kept stroking the lion until he finally turned her loose. She had this row of teeth prints and blood streaming down her arm.

You know, if you're a writer, you go through life like a magnet, or an electrically charged comb: all sorts of little bits of paper or metal filings start clinging to you; and when you come to write something as complicated as this, you suddenly think, "Oh, there's that whole lion business—that was interesting, that was weird. Suppose that happened now in this story."

I like Sara a lot. She's a very strong, admirable character. And obviously so does Charles. She's much stronger and more realistic than he—which is frequently the case in male-female relations. It is our stereotype that men are supposed to be strong, rational people, and women are the weak romantics. But it's almost invariably the other way around, I find. And Charles comes to realize it years later when he writes the story and presumably sends it to her, wherever she is. Maybe I should write a sequel to it. I always wonder what happened, what she does. Does she acquire a condominium in Florida and live happily ever after? Presumably Sara has gone on about her own life in the interval. Charles certainly doesn't tell us at the end of the story where Sara's been. That's one of the unspoken messages that the story contains—that is, again, that Charles is continuing to think of the world entirely as it relates to him and not as it relates to Sara or anybody else. . . .

Q: What was the experience of visiting Dachau like for you?

A: Pretty powerful. It's one of the top five most powerful places I ever visited. One of the strange things, I think, about scenes of great suffering—have any of you ever been to a place where there has been an enormous amount of concentrated suffering over a substantial period of time? There're not a lot of such places in America. God knows there's plenty of suffering; but America tends to be a violent country and, if there's going to be suffering, it tends to happen fast. Somebody gets lynched in an hour, or we mow down X number of Sioux Indians in a five minute encounter. We don't tend to put people in a single place and keep them there. You can say slavery went on for 300 years, but you probably can't quote me one single place where X number of slaves were made to suffer for X number of years.

There's only one place I can think of—it's in the South, Andersonville Prison in Georgia. If you ever go to Americus, Georgia, ride out about ten miles in the country and see the National Cemetery at Andersonville. It was a concentration camp kept by the Confederates. I've forgotten how many people died at Andersonville but far too many, maybe eight or nine thousand prisoners (northern prisoners were kept there). It was not maintained as a conscious extermination place the way the Nazi camps were. It was just largely the result of incredible mistakes. The Confederates got all these people in one place, and the sanitation conditions got so appalling. They were losing the war, and they couldn't feed or take care of these prisoners, so enormous numbers of them died. My point is, if you go to something like Dachau years later or Andersonville or any one of the battlefields of the First World War, almost invariably the scene now has the most incredible peacefulness to it. The birds are singing and the flowers are blooming, and you think: this is unimaginable. What I felt at Dachau is what Charles feels: something's all wrong. He's read about this place as being the scene of all this concentrated suffering, and yet it seems like the world's nicest picnic ground. Andersonville is one of the loveliest places you'd ever want to go to now. Yet all the photographs hanging in the museum at Andersonville show this appalling hogwallow that it was in 1865 when men were dying like flies.

Q: What is the significance of "waiting" in the title?

A: Well, there's got to be some significance if I put it there, but I'm not sure at the moment I can exactly remember. I think what Charles really means is that in a sense what he's saying in the story is "I'm still waiting. I'm still waiting for you to enter this commitment with me." And you see from the end of the story that Charles has changed and matured some, but the old Charles is still very much there. The fact that he calls the story "Waiting at Dachau" means that he still is clinging to this very romantic notion that love is this very titanic commitment—total loyalty, total suffering, total togetherness—whereas Sara has a much brisker, more realistic notion of what they're up to.