The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  Today was only the eleventh. And then Margaret thought of something else. There was no holiday to speak of. She ripped the note off the door. And now that she considered, what sort of practice could the old woman possibly have, blind as she was?

  SIX • Magda’s Face

  The next day it rained. Margaret did not set foot outside. Several times, however, she went to her window and looked down the Grunewaldstrasse, and each time there were the buildings, softly puckered, pink and tan and breathing under the raindrops. She threw open the window as the sun went down; she looked for the cool shadow. The chill, wet, autumn air blew into the apartment. Winter was coming. Some of the younger buildings had become pinker with edges chapped; older buildings—that was the majority—looked red in harsher tones, as if they were bursting into flame. The vague, soft scent of flesh, stronger than the smell of coal dust, had already become easily recognizable.

  Yesterday was repeating in a flashing loop in her mind. It was drawing her into a repetitive circle. Instead of swaddling her memory in sleep and slipping it away as was her custom, Margaret was sifting through the day before with both hands.

  The hawk-woman with the ax. Margaret knew very well who the woman was. It was Magda Goebbels. Magda Goebbels—Joseph’s wife.

  That evening, she began to read a biography of Magda Goebbels. She had read this particular biography once before, but she was reading it now with new eyes.

  And it was that evening as well that she had the first of what she would later call an episode.

  It began about thirty pages into the book. She had a sensation as if a bright light had been switched on, or as though she were drunk on red wine and a searchlight were coming in through the window. And whereas she usually read with systematic attention, tonight her interest was untamed and frantic, full of desire, like the need to scratch an itch that has already been scratched to blood. She was making some unsteady attempts at note-taking as she read, but again and again she stood up from her chair, went out of the room, brought herself back, and just as soon was ready to run out of the room again. There came a horrible pleasure, a pleasure that was laced with a kind of shame—her heart was overflowing. Even her handwriting changed: it was crabbed, controlled only by its extreme miniaturization and intense pressure of the pen. She came to a description of Magda Goebbels’s corpse when the Russians found it after her suicide, and the thing struck her so—she felt the need to copy the entire passage into her notebook. Each time she tried, however, the gremlin of her gaze went wild: she mangled sentences, unable to concentrate for the time it took to move her eyes from book to notebook. But still she would not, indeed could not, leave off and let well enough alone, and so five times—each time more desperately than the time before—she began to copy the following.

  Berlin, May 3, 1945

  On May 2, 1945, in the center of Berlin, on the premises of the bunker of the German Reich Chancellery, several meters from the entry door to said bunker, Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko and the Majors Bystrov and Chasin (in the presence of Berlin residents—the German Lange, Wilhelm, cook of the Reich Chancellery, and Schneider, Karl, garage superintendent of the Reich Chancellery) at 17:00 hours found the charred bodies of a man and woman; the body of the man was of short stature, the foot of the right leg was in a half-twisted position (club-foot) in a charred metal prosthesis; on it lay the remains of a burnt party uniform of the NSDAP and a singed party badge; near the burnt body of the woman was discovered a singed golden cigarette etui, on the body a golden party badge of the NSDAP and a singed golden broach. Near the heads of the two bodies lay two Walther pistols Nr. 1 (damaged by fire).

  On the third of May 1945 Platoon Leader of the Russian Defense Department SMERSH of the 207th Protection Division, Lieutenant Colonel Iljin, found in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in a separate room on several beds the corpses of children (five girls and a boy) from the ages of three to fourteen. They were dressed in light nightgowns and showed signs of poisoning.

  As she finished the copying, Margaret grabbed her head in her hand.

  Achtung! (Margaret wrote to herself in the notebook.)

  Regarding the children:

  Their ages, at the time of their deaths, were between four and twelve, not three and fourteen as the Soviets say here.

  They were taken by SMERSH to the prison of Plötzensee, where the bodies were viewed by more Germans, for the sake of identification. And by more Russians, for the sake of the press, and the lurid sight of the enemy’s surrender of even its children.

  Regarding the photographs:

  Margaret held the pictures up to the light and considered whether or not she could sketch what she saw on the page, but she felt nauseous.

  Instead, she wrote,

  The children look fresh in death. They can be seen in the photographs—mortuary pictures from Plötzensee—still in the clean, white cotton nightgowns they wore to bed, blond hair still in braids, color in their cheeks, the apotheosis of everything the National Socialists meant by the word Heimat. Their heads are turned toward the camera, each in turn, held erect by a young Russian coroner in a butcher’s apron, round tortoiseshell glasses, and long, black rubber gloves.

  A few moments later, Margaret was still on red alert. She recalled that once, she had read a letter Magda Goebbels wrote with her own hand. It was reproduced in its entirety in a book that she knew was very likely still somewhere in the flat. It quickly became shining and irresistible. She went to the shelf and began to page through several books. She couldn’t remember exactly where she had read it, that was the trouble. She went into the hall and knocked over two piles of books and rummaged.

  The passage was nowhere to be found.

  Back at the desk, she grabbed her forehead in her hand again. Her mind pulsed. All at once, like a word on the tip of the tongue bubbling up after sleep, she knew after all which book it was. She plunged her hand to the shelf and withdrew a dust-covered book: The Death of Adolf Hitler. She paged through it, and there indeed was the facsimile.

  She could feel hives blooming on her neck. She was so excited—it was as if someone else’s body were moving under her head. Her heart beat, and it was hardly her own heart.

  My beloved son! Now we have been here in the Führerbunker for six days—Papa, your six little siblings, and I—in order to give our National Socialist lives the only possible honorable finish. Whether you will receive this letter I don’t know … You must know that against his wishes I have stayed by Papa’s side, that even last Sunday the Führer wanted to help me to get out of here. You know your mother—we have the same blood, for me there was no question of it. Our heavenly idea is going to pieces—and with it everything beautiful, awe-inspiring, noble, and good that I have known in my life. The world that will come after the Führer and National Socialism is no longer worth living in, and therefore I have brought the children here with me. They are too good for the life that will come after us, and the merciful Lord will understand me when I give them salvation myself. You will live on, and I have one request of you: Don’t forget that you’re a German, never do anything that is against your honor, and take care that through your life our death was not in vain.

  The children are wonderful. Without any assistance they help each other in these more than primitive conditions. Whether they sleep on the floor, whether or not they can wash, whether they have something to eat or not, never a word of complaint or tears. The bombardments shake the bunker. The older ones protect the younger ones, and their presence here is already a blessing in that every now and then they manage to bring a smile to the Führer.

  Be true! True to yourself, true to humanity, and true to your country. In each and every regard! … Be proud of us and try to hold us in proud and joyous memory. Everyone has to die sometime, and isn’t it more beautiful, honorable, and brave to die young than to live a long life under shameful conditions? The letter must go out—Hanna Reitsch is taking it with her. She’s flying out again! I embrace you in closest, warmest, m
otherly love! My beloved son, live for Germany!

  Yours, Mother

  By the time Margaret finished, her hands were shaking and her eyes were wet; she thought they were bleeding, but it was only a few tears. Magda’s strange idea gripped her—this choosing of death over shame.

  Margaret made herself ready and went to bed. For a long time she lay still under the covers. It was raining out and there came a tapping. The panes shook.

  Margaret could not sleep. She began to read a second time, now with heavier eyes. She read about Magda Goebbels’s high marks in Gymnasium; about the details of her relationship with the Zionist Arlosoroff; about Magda’s own efforts on behalf of the Zionist movement as a young woman. Regarding the Soviet inquest, she learned that Magda killed her children with the help of a doctor, that none of the children had struggled, except the oldest girl, who, according to the coroner’s report, had bruises on her body and so apparently had been held down. No one was sure exactly what the poison was, as the Russian coroner had not been able to ascertain, but it left the tips of the children’s fingers yellow. When Margaret read this, she was very quiet inside, her thoughts slowing and then stopping altogether, her head pulsing.

  It was almost morning. Margaret got out of bed. She had a thick twist of energy in her chest.

  She took a gesso board out of the closet. She flipped through the biography of Magda, to its glossy centerfold pictures. She propped the book up on the desk. Over the gesso board, her hands moved. She was surprised at herself, and frightened. Her fingers were of steel, and she applied so much pressure to the stick of charcoal that twice she broke it. Finally she drew with only a nub. She watched as Magda Goebbels’s face bloomed in black lines. Magda Goebbels’s face rose up, in the form of a glamour shot taken in Magda’s youth. It was a young face, from the time before she had given birth to any of her six children with Goebbels.

  The image of the face held Margaret and mesmerized her. It had traces of all the later forms of ugliness that came to dominate—the low, heavy brow bone; the snideness of the lines between the wing of the nose and outer corner of the lip; the thin mouth; the priggish tilt of the forehead. And yet—and here is where Margaret dragged her charcoal back and forth, craving the curve: something, something in the young face was still bleeding, still searching for metaphysics, and Margaret carefully traced every softness and hardness. She felt her disgust stretching, becoming a concentration that was almost tenderness.

  Later she took out oils. She brought in color. One corner of the face became so vivid, it seemed ready to move. Margaret, possessed by some devil, produced a large, cold face, with silver-blond, salon-waved hair—a face glaring out at her with civilized eyes and callousness. Margaret brought in the squeezed-out bits of light and dark, setting the woman’s hair to gleaming, the shadows of her nostrils to deepening. And finally, Magda Goebbels stared out at Margaret Taub, pert and quizzical.

  As dawn broke, Margaret was in bed. The last thing she remembered before falling asleep was that she could feel the heat of a bird at the window, the slash of its wings against the glass—although it may have been nothing more than the rain grown violent.

  SEVEN • Privacy and Devotion

  The Grunewaldstrasse was an old West Berliner street, too far behind the front lines to have been rocked by the fall of the Wall or any other terror of the metropolis, so the street did not want for eyes, the kind of eyes that grow like lichen if a street knows no heavy winds.

  Even an abbreviated inventory must include the eyes of the old lady from Armenia with bottle-black hair, who leaned permanently from the window of a half-height flat that was squeezed under the airy belétage at Number 89. She folded her arms across the cobwebbed ledge and watched, especially at night. Although it was not unheard of that a pedestrian’s eyes wandered up and met the old lady’s by accident, something about the way her eyelids squared with her brow seemed to suggest a lack of involvement: “have no fear” they seemed to say—“we will not tell a soul if we see you hot-wire a 1986 Mercedes.” Meanwhile, across the street, two glossy dogs were on standby behind the door at the Internet café. They had eyes as blue as forget-me-nots, with the same yellow center, and roused themselves for the man in a neon orange traffic cop’s uniform, who passed several times each day, bicycling up and down the Grunewaldstrasse without once touching the handlebars, yelling his head off. Everyone called him Loud Guy, or sometimes only The Loud One.

  So if Erich, the Hausmeister at Number 88, where Margaret Taub lived, was watching everyone and everything, who could blame him? He told himself it was a defensive stance—he lived in a neighborhood of ghouls.

  Erich was the hero of his own story. In the courtyard of Margaret’s building he lived, in a little ivy-covered house. He was unusually fleshless, his skull easily visible through the skin of his face, and already the night when Margaret returned from the Grunewald Forest, he had seen her while she was heaving clumps of clothing into the trash. And he had observed her long before that as well.

  Erich was old. He seemed stern but in fact he was kindly; he was blindingly efficient, and he was knowledgeable about all matters literal and very few matters figurative. He was one of those men who think simply but are politically resolute, much like the plain-spoken Georg Elser, the carpenter who built cabinets and clocks, kept his own counsel, and in 1938 almost managed to assassinate Hitler singlehandedly.

  Erich was an Autonomer, an old one—he had been part of the ’68 generation before there was a ’68 generation to be a part of, one of those West Berliner anti-warriors who use the informal du to one and all, even to plumbers and bank tellers, and the plumbers and bank tellers almost fall to the floor with a heart attack at the audacity if they are new to the quarter and he hasn’t broken them in yet, although around here, almost everyone was broken in long ago.

  Now it happens that Erich’s story must be told as well, for through no fault of his own (almost no fault of his own, that is), he was destined to betray Margaret Taub.

  The very same morning the city turned to flesh, Erich was wearing his black leather pants and matching vest, busying himself eagerly, delivering mail from the co-op management to the tenants. This was a practice he had thought up himself, officially so that the management could save the cost of postage, but he was also (although he would deny it if accused) using the opportunity to peek at the contents of each letter box—no real reason and it was certainly not mean-spirited, but he was interested. To see who had letters from the tax office, who had letters from collection agencies, and by Jove, if he saw a letter from abroad, perhaps from a lover! These were his great pleasures. Erich, who as a young man had been an anarchist, was, in his old age, something he would never have expected. His anarchism had taken a turn for the officious, his native kindness had twisted into rodent-like curiosity.

  After the letters, he would check the trash. Here too, he had been active: Erich had introduced a new system of trash sorting which would save the building co-op forty euros each month. It meant the recycling was far stricter than in other living communities. A relatively low rate of compliance concerned him. Certain tenants insisted on throwing trash into improper receptacles, and thus he found himself required to sort through the trash thoroughly every week, reorganizing, rescuing treasures here and there. Today he pulled various letters and even a couple of books out of the slimy heat of the decomposing biodegradables, also a glass jar full of pickles! The letters, at least—he could easily see the names of the addressees. He would have a look at them, and then take the matter up with those individuals later.

  He heard the main door to the apartment house open. Sunlight broke through from the carriage entryway. He poked forth his head. Ah, it was the American. He rustled through the trash again, watching her out of the corner of his eye.

  The foreign girl was a difficult case. She always seemed to be sunken, her eyelids heavy. Erich had theories on this. In the past he had played with the idea that she slept fifteen hours a night. He knew when she came i
n (as he knew when everyone came in) and he knew when she went out (he could see these things from his garden house in the courtyard), and he also had a good view of when her lights were on and when they were off. Unless she was reading with a flashlight, there was no way around it: the girl slept extremely long hours. This was one of the benedictions of the winter for Erich, when the sun in Berlin rises so late and sets so early—he had an unusually profound insight into the sleeping habits of the building’s tenants.

  Still, he considered the possibility that the American, this Margaret, had found some way to fool him. It seemed like her, somehow. Maybe she was awake in some invisible corner of the flat. He had had certain outrageous experiences with her in the past that would support this. On one occasion when her lights were on, Erich went and rang her bell in order to discuss with her the new basement allotments, and she did not come to the door. Even after repeated ringing of the bell. He went back downstairs and looked up at her windows again and saw the lights were certainly on and a shadow was moving behind the curtains. He went up and rang the bell more forcefully. Still, she did not come to the door. He watched from his house in the courtyard as her bathroom window went from open to shut, and he fumed. Erich would not have minded helping the girl, back at the beginning. She was not unsympathetic. But she had been so morose toward the community for several years now, he had lost his goodwill.

  After the incident with the door, Erich even considered not saying Guten Tag to her. If he wanted, he could certainly pull this off. When angered with another fellow who lived in the building, he had done exactly this—for twenty-five years. Even after repeated pleas from third parties to relent. But Erich believed in an apology. When, after twenty-six years and three months, the man did apologize, Erich had been more than willing to drink a beer with him. But he did like to hear that someone was sorry. It was worth the wait.