The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  Miss Braun’s submission to fate, her longing, and the dependency of her desire! It was monstrous.

  And then, by chance, a new person appeared. A man in a polyester golf coat it was; he walked into Margaret’s life, and it was the reality, rather than the unreality, that threw down the gauntlet this time. Berlin had yet another trick up its sleeve.

  It began when Margaret was giving a tour of general sites to a group of middle-aged Irish and Australians. The group was standing at Hitler’s bunker, when a heckler accosted them.

  Margaret had positioned the tourists on the parking lot that covers the eastern edge of the Führer’s final cubbyhole, at the end of the flat expanse opening onto the Wilhelmstrasse, beyond the shuddering apartment buildings. She faced them, and in the distance, behind the backs of the tourists, she caught a glimpse of a gangly, bobbing figure coming through the arcade.

  On most tours, even through her trance, Margaret maintained a monitor of all people nearby not part of the tour. Passersby might always cause her trouble. Precisely because her trances were so precious, she knew how to deflect, without even stopping to think, all of the following: Italians and Americans who joined the tour surreptitiously without paying, Germans who didn’t appreciate foreign interest in the Third Reich, drunken Brits visiting Berlin on stag weekends, beggar women who weaved in and out of the group asking for money and unsettling the tourists, jeering teenagers of every nationality, and the mentally disturbed. She protected her tourists like a lioness.

  And on this day, the man in the distance wasn’t moving with intention, but was rather making circles, coming slowly closer to the group, and this set Margaret’s alarm bells ringing. Finally the man was mingling with her customers, and sure enough, he began to crow at them.

  He prattled. He spoke German to an Australian, one of Margaret’s customers, a man who had walked off on his own to take a few snapshots, and the other tourists saw what was happening. They gave Margaret questioning glances. Margaret stopped the tour. She fixed the man with a glare, as public humiliation of the intruder was always the first step.

  The heckler was an octogenarian. He was thick-shouldered, horse-faced, and comically tall. He wore a polyester leisure suit of the East German kind. Because he was behaving impolitely, when Margaret spoke, she too was coarse. She said, “Was wollen Sie mit uns? Dies hier ist eine Privattour—die Leute können auch nicht mal Deutsch.”

  “Ich war dabei,” he crowed, with saucy pride.

  “Ach so?” said Margaret, with disbelief.

  The man’s elderly voice sounded cottony, as if the tip of his tongue were wrapped in duct tape, and his timbre warbled like a pubescent teenage boy’s.

  “Ja, ich gehörte dazu, damals.”

  “Wozu?”

  “Na, zu den Hitlerleuten in dem Bunker.”

  Margaret did not want to be drawn in, but she did notice that a quick shot of adrenaline flushed her veins. She thanked him with a caustic twinge, told him that these people didn’t understand him and he’d better save his stories for more sympathetic ears, but inside, she was excited. She turned back to her charges and said, by way of explanation for the interruption, “This man here says he was in the bunker with Hitler.” The faces turned back to the man. He was not insensible to her ironic stance, and cried out again, “Sie glauben’s mir nicht! Aber ich bin der Prell! Ich war dabei! Das können Sie nachgucken.”

  “Ich bin es mir sicher,” Margaret said with conciliatory warmth.

  “Ja, ja! Glauben Sie es nicht? Dabei war ich aber.”

  Ignoring him, Margaret turned toward the group. “Perhaps we should be moving on now?” and they returned her raised eyebrows and set off to the south.

  Behind her, the old man was still crowing, this time at a group of children wearing in-line skates: “He! Kinder! Erkennt ihr mich? Ich bin der Prell! Ich war dabei!”

  So his name was Prell. She would look it up. Maybe he was crazy, but maybe he was not. The people on the tour tumbled after her, everyone eager to discuss.

  When she got home she took out her books on the topic of Hitler’s last days, and it was not long before she found that there had indeed been a Prell, a certain Arthur Prell, who worked as bodyguard and radio operator in the bunker. She looked for a picture on the Internet and saw a photograph of this Arthur Prell, taken in 1942. He was very different but also very much the same: the long, horse-like face, the exceptionally broad shoulders. Her fingers shook with excitement. She swallowed. Having stumbled upon something entirely real was as good as a draught of air. She breathed deeply, and for a few moments, she felt herself a soldier called to a just war.

  NINE • The Whale Ducks

  A bird of prey traces a certain kind of line in the sky because it need not flap its wings, and every time Margaret glanced out the window, so this line came into her peripheral vision.

  On Saturday afternoon, Margaret opened one of the windows and put her head out. She looked up into the sky. It was a blue sky, shocked out of all clouds, making the slow sound of an airplane. After a squinting perusal, she concluded there were no birds; her peripheral vision must have been mistaken. She drew back and began to pull the window closed. One final glance at the shuddering flesh of the buildings, however, an almost admiring glance at their vivacity, and she saw something move on the balcony of the building catty-corner.

  Something flashed in her eyes. She squinted, and saw: the grey-feathered, hunchbacked woman in black gabardine, standing at attention. Not only that: the hawk-woman held a pair of binoculars, and her long eyes were trained on Margaret’s windows. Her perch was one of those ornamental balconies from the 1890s, the kind that are convex from the house, so the woman, with her hair molded in its immaculate water waves and the lenses of her voyeur’s binoculars glinting in the light, caught the full gift of the sun, and the reflection from her telescope eyes blinked into Margaret’s apartment like Morse code signals.

  Quickly, Margaret closed the window and drew the curtains. It was the middle of the day, but she climbed into bed.

  Under the covers, she whispered to herself violently. She muttered, tossing this way and that. She told herself in a grave voice to pull herself together. She told herself in a grave voice that she was sane, but a fool. She told herself to buck up, to strike down her gullibility. She closed her eyes.

  She tried to sleep but then came that old jangling vision she had had once before—of the curving, oval staircase with its red runner. It rose from deep in her skull, bearing its blunt weapon, and pressed against her eyes. She could smell the flaxen runner, taste the chalk of disappointment; she could touch the shadowed walls, flinch at the cold.

  She slept, but when she woke up, she was not refreshed. And her heart beat again, and never had it beat faster. She thought of that feathered woman in gabardine, a feathered woman who she believed was a figment of her imagination and yet who made her stomach dive and flip.

  If she could not return to the doctor right away, she decided, she would have to talk to someone else.

  But Margaret didn’t know anyone. She had managed that—she really had.

  She decided to ride her bicycle over to Akazienstrasse and buy a guidebook to European birds.

  When she got home from the bookstore she parted the curtain a crack to see if the bird was still there. Indeed. Present and alert. When the nasty beast saw the curtain move, it flew right at her window in full bird form and landed on the wide outer sill. It cocked a topaz eye at her, Margaret the helpless zoo animal, the bird gawking.

  Margaret reached for the book. She compared several pictures. The bird had long tail feathers with banded stripes and yellow eyes; this bird must be an enormous version of the Sperber, the sparrow hawk—Accipiter nisus.

  The Sperber, according to the book, was “a bird of prey with long, pointed talons that nourishes itself on smaller birds. These it hunts with lightning-quick loops and dives, knowing how to rip them out of the air in mid-flight with its beak.”

  At this description, a
sharp and bracing sort of panic took hold of the room, and Margaret had to shut her eyes.

  That evening, as she sat over her books, the memory of a friend crossed her mind. Or perhaps he should be called an acquaintance; in any case, she remembered someone. It was a certain Benjamin, a fellow expatriate, a music critic, with whom she had once spent a good deal of time. She had never known him well, but she had liked him; he let her sit in his kitchen for hours with a newspaper while he went about his other business, entertaining women in the living room and making loud international calls to magazine editors. He claimed having a silent and strange woman in the house put everyone on edge, and he was eccentric enough to like the idea of putting his guests on edge. As for Margaret, she was permitted to eat his canned bratwurst and sauerkraut, and so for her part she had never complained.

  It was not until ten in the evening that she finally made up her mind to go to him. It had been years since she last saw him, she did not even have his telephone number any longer. Late at night, too, there was a risk he would not be at home—he had been in the habit, she recalled, of spending every night at some hidden club or other. She would have to take her chances.

  She traveled half an hour on the U2 line, all the way up to Prenzlauer Berg. She went through a concrete courtyard to a rear building where Benjamin’s dark apartment house decayed. All this, she remembered well. She rang the bell, and praise be—her heart skipped a beat with gladness—Benjamin himself came to the door.

  He was a portly man, almost forty. He had the air of a ringmaster or a butcher, his cheeks a deep pink, his muttonchop whiskers thick and black. His eyes were white like hard-boiled eggs, the irises friendly and burlesque. Now he narrowed these eyes at the young woman in his doorway.

  There might have been some question as to whether he recognized her. Before the night in the forest, Margaret knew, her features had been soft, as though one were seeing her through a grease-smeared lens. Now she had become sharp—the bones of her face had floated up to the surface, and her oversized men’s clothing too moved about her in harsh shapes. After a long glance, however, Benjamin’s eyes relaxed, and he opened the door.

  “Margaret Taub,” he said. He was in his pajamas and a tattered smoking jacket, reeking of garlic.

  “Benjamin.”

  “Do you wish to visit me now, Margaret?”

  “Yes, Benjamin.” She tried to take him in her arms, but he stiffened.

  “It’s been a long time, Margaret.” He looked down the stairwell to see if anyone was with her. “After three years, all of a sudden Margaret Taub shows up.”

  Margaret, excited, headed straight for her old spot in the kitchen. Benjamin followed. His eyes widened, the whites waxing larger. “You know what, Margaret? You’re in luck, I was about to eat a can of sauerkraut.”

  “Oh, yes.” Margaret breathed a sigh of happiness, although she was speechless for lack of socialization. She sat down at the table in the kitchen and looked around her.

  Just a moment before, standing in the hallway ringing his bell, she had had no image of his apartment; the door to his flat seemed as if it would open onto nothing at all, as though part of a stage set. But now inside, she discovered she knew the place in every detail, was sure that almost nothing had been moved since she was last here. The same dusty, poolside furniture in orange-and-white plastic was scattered here and there, the same album covers were thumbtacked to the walls featuring lounge lizard girls in blue lipstick; the electric organ; several lamps made out of coconuts; tall piles of CDs and LPs, white-and-green-striped wallpaper falling off the walls for the moisture. Benjamin took an open can of sauerkraut out of the refrigerator and brought it to the table.

  “To be honest, Margaret, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Benjamin began.

  “Neither did I,” Margaret replied aimlessly and at once.

  “I won’t say I wasn’t fine with that.”

  “Benjamin—” Margaret longed to touch him. But everything about the way he stood, about his rigid expression, suggested he did not trust her.

  “Are you still living in Schöneberg?” he asked.

  “Same place,” Margaret smiled up at him.

  “That’s a surprise.”

  “It’s not so easy to change,” Margaret said.

  “No?” He raised his eyebrows in his burlesque grimace. “Well,” he said, in a falsetto. He brought two beers over to the table and sat down. “Margaret Taub,” he said, still in the falsetto, opening his beer. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Well,” she hesitated. She swept the dust off the unused end of the table. “I wanted to talk to you about something in particular.”

  “Oh yeah? I wanted to talk to you about something in particular too,” he said.

  Margaret sensed this was not good.

  “Do you want to know if I ever went to Gau-Algesheim?” he asked.

  “To where?”

  “The dumb monkey, eh?”

  “What?” Margaret looked at him.

  “It was scummy of you, Margaret.”

  “Benjamin—”

  “Don’t try to Benjamin me. The answer is no. I didn’t go. You said you’d interpret for me, I was on the platform, the train came. No Margaret. No one came. Margaret cut out. Now the old man is dead.”

  “The old man?”

  “I guess you knew we had to go down there before the asshole died. Now my father won’t ever get the house back.”

  “Benjamin, Benjamin,” she said plaintively, trying to buy time. What was he talking about? “Benjamin,” she stuttered. “The thing is, I never leave Berlin. I haven’t gone outside the city limits in years.” She said it, and realized with a start that, except for Sachsenhausen, which was still part of the Berliner public transport network and so hardly an exception, it was true.

  “Now I know that. I found out the hard way. You could have told me before I bought the tickets. Three hundred and seventy five euros each, nonrefundable. My father’s sure not coming over to Germany, I can tell you that. You were our chance.”

  Margaret tried to mask her confusion. “But you always behave so badly, Benjamin,” she said. It was the only honest statement that occurred to her.

  “They did not give me German citizenship for my charm, Margaret, they gave it to me because they killed half my family.”

  “Okay,” Margaret said. “Okay.” She swallowed. Something jogged her. She remembered a time—waiting in line with Benjamin at the ticket office at Zoo Station. He was smoking a cigar; she was worried about the smoke, then an altercation with the station police. Of course, she must have been preparing to make a trip with him. A trip to the south, it seemed to her, fuzzily. Why hadn’t she made the trip?

  “Do you still want to go?” she asked. “I’ll go,” she said. She wanted terribly to befriend him.

  “Now you want to? Well—” He looked at the calendar on the wall next to them. It displayed June 2001; it too was covered in dust. “The bastard is dead now anyway,” he said. “There’s no point. We’d have to sue the state. The fun part would have been tearing it away from the anti-Semite.” He took a bite of sauerkraut. “What did you want to talk to me about, Margaret?”

  Margaret drank her beer. The single bulb on the ceiling cast a light that fatigued the eyes. “Benjamin—” she began, but stopped.

  The fact was that in this location—with the old, precariously tilting stacks of records around her, the smell of curry and mildew, Benjamin’s kind, impossibly familiar face—the events of the last weeks seemed remote. She wondered if she had really seen any hawk-woman. She wondered if she had not perhaps been inwardly exaggerating about the flesh, the transformation, the bird. Now, picturing everything in her mind, it all seemed unlikely.

  But that had been the entire reason for coming—so that Benjamin could bring her back to reality. So Margaret spoke up. “Do you have any idea what I was doing, say, about two or three years ago?” she asked. “Any idea at all?”

  “What? You want
me to tell you about your own life?”

  “Well—” she said, her face starting to itch, “there’s this time I can’t remember. I know it’s odd, but—that’s how it is.” Margaret caught her breath.

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Well, back when we were friends, for example. After that, there’s a foggy time. It’s like when you think back on your childhood. Sometimes you can remember when you were six years old, but weirdly, not very much from when you were seven.”

  Benjamin pulled on his mustache. “Okay,” he said.

  Margaret leaned over the table and kissed his cheek, trying to solidify any goodwill he might have toward her. Benjamin put his hands on the table and licked his lips.

  “You lived down in Schöneberg,” he said. “What about that guy? You were in love with the German guy, right? Not with me, that’s for sure.”

  “A German?”

  “You’ve got to remember that guy. Even I remember him.”

  “Benjamin, I told you, I don’t remember anything.”

  “What, not even the German? You were crazy about him.”

  “Really?”

  Benjamin looked at her and became still for a fraction of an instant. Then he began to chew the inside of his cheek. “Are you sure you’re okay, Margaret?”

  “I think so,” she said, but her eyes stung. This seemed to mortify Benjamin, and he pulled on his whiskers.

  “Well, all I can tell you is what I know, Margaret. The thing is, you were always secretive. You never introduced me. I thought you were embarrassed of him. I only saw the two of you once, on Weinbergsweg, and it was dark, and you didn’t see me. He was older, I remember that. And then after you didn’t show up to go to Gau-Algesheim, it was like you’d dropped off the face of the earth. You never called, your phone number went out of service. I figured you’d left Germany.”

  “You were angry at me.” Margaret rubbed her face. So there had been a man. She looked at the beer in front of her, picked it up, and drank almost the entire thing down in one go, wincing. Her eyes began to water in earnest.