The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  And what immediately followed stopped Margaret short. It seemed that not long after she complained to Ello, the right side of Magda’s face became paralyzed. This was verifiable, and not exclusively based on Ello’s testimony. Trigeminal neuralgia, said the doctors. Margaret looked up the diagnosis in the encyclopedia. “The condition can bring about a paralysis of the facial muscles, and stabbing, mind-numbing, electric-shock-like pain from just a finger’s glance to the cheek. Believed to be the most severe type of pain known to human beings …” And then in May of 1943, a full year later, after Goebbels declared total war and the Wannsee decision went into effect, Magda was operated on, but the operation was unsuccessful: the right side of her face remained paralyzed, the muscles gone slack. Her beauty was gone. Her friends said she looked unwell, her enemies said she looked like a corpse.

  Margaret lay in bed for a long time. The minutes passed slowly, and she could not stop her galloping mind.

  Shortly after three in the morning, despite exhaustion, Margaret was awake. A light came into the bedroom from the courtyard. The room was quiet and the light was sharp. Margaret could hear the bang of the trash lid and the thud-whisper of falling papers—someone had turned on the timed lights and was unloading newspapers. Then footsteps moved away. All went quiet.

  Without warning a flicker came. Margaret jerked up. A shadow was on the wall, on the right side of the room. At first Margaret thought it was the hawk-woman—maybe she had come nearer, outside the window. Margaret’s heart began to pound. But soon she saw that the shadow was not the shadow of a bird.

  It was the shadow of a pair of hands, dexterous and sinister. The hands were moving: they made figures—a duck and a dog. Then one changed, now it was a dog and a stork. Bowing and twittering, miming, putting on a show in the path of the light, a restless pair of hands unable to sleep. The shapes of the animals were vivid and animal-like—adept at the pageant, while at the same time remaining human fingers, as if human flesh could mirror any creation under the sun. Margaret huddled under the covers, watching the movement of the hands on the wall. Her fear froze her for a moment, and then suddenly it was gone. In each thing, she thought, all things are to be found, and this is innocence—the world bundled into the head of a pin, in the fist of a hand, in the brain of a human, in the sun and in its microcosmic imitation of the universe; all patterns existing potentially in all other patterns, the world full of the energy of things it does not yet know, in its insides and in how it projects itself to the out. Design flows into design, every thing perceives and mirrors every other thing, and becomes more like it.

  And then Margaret thought of Magda Goebbels, and of how that woman had been still while patterns moved and changed around her. Magda Goebbels could never be called innocent, no matter what she might have said to Ello Quandt. No matter what she might have said.

  After sleeping, Margaret thought, she would have likely forgotten this, as she so often forgot the illumination that came to her during the night.

  She heaved herself up from the bed and went to her desk. She thought she would write down what she had learned about innocence.

  But instead of beginning to write, she was still and unmoving, and then her hands began to wander on their own, and she found herself opening a book and looking again at the Russian mortuary pictures of Magda’s children at Plötzensee. She looked at their waxen faces. Their nightgowns were white, their faces were still. Margaret pushed her fingers against her head. She thought: Magda Goebbels drank it in. Magda Goebbels knew everything and absorbed it and became stiller and stiller.

  Margaret touched her own face. The skin of her forehead felt scaly, unanimated.

  Woe to the unthinking, woe to the empty-headed, woe to the unremembering, she thought. For they are the static, the blanketed, the uniformed, the shrouded, the dead in spirit.

  TWELVE • The History of History

  Margaret went back to the doctor. Three days after Sachsenhausen, and there were still dark circles under her eyes. She was dizzy from lack of sleep. That hanging, grey-headed sibyl: she had not been able to pull away from it, nor from the scampering mice.

  The small green door in the ivy was unlocked, and before long Margaret was sitting by the tall plastic plant in the waiting room, her body taut and ready. She had a handkerchief in her hands; she wound it around her fingers.

  After a while, the doctor’s voice warbled from down the hallway. “Margaret Täubner.”

  Margaret rose and walked down the length of the flat. As she neared the doctor’s door, music flowed loud from inside the chamber, a stereo playing at high volume—harpsichord, violin, cello, and soprano.

  Somehow—and mark well, it was merely by chance—Margaret had an impulse to open only one panel of the French doors. She turned her shoulders and slipped into the room, and she caught a glimpse of the old woman behind her desk, upright, her giant head wobbling on her narrow neck. The music blared: something seventeenth-century, pure, operatic, without vibrato. What was it? Margaret thought she knew the melody. Yes, it was Dido and Aeneas.

  Just at the moment of recognition, a very quick and confusing series of stimuli bore down on her. The music reached a height of emotion—the words “in my breast” were sung, full of pain. A dim, silver light passed at high speed across her left shoulder by her ear, from fore to aft, and the air was displaced; a flicker of a breeze puffed her hair. In a fraction of an instant, there was the sound of a thunk at the French doors behind her, loud enough to be heard over the ballooning music, followed by a vibrating twang. She spun around in the direction of the shuddering.

  A small knife quivered in the wood—the panel of the French door that Margaret had left closed—in a target made of cork attached at eye level, a red- and yellow-striped bull’s-eye. There were two other small steak knives also standing in the target perpendicular. At the sight of the knives, Margaret cried out. She ducked her head in a belated reflex. There was a sense of the room coming apart, as if it had been thrown, the entire box, into black space. The doctor, for her part, held her head rigidly, facing the door. Margaret yelled to the doctor, “Did you just throw a knife?”

  “What?”

  The music blared painfully beautiful harmonics, shaking the room in a tumbling stretto. And then Margaret could make out the words remember, and fate plummeting over each other in polyphony.

  “Did you throw a knife at the door?” Margaret yelled.

  “Comrade! I’m going to have to turn down the music. I can’t hear you.” The doctor trailed her hand against the wall, leading herself to the stereo in the cupboard, where she finally managed to turn off the CD.

  In the silence that followed, the rogue knife, long since home in its target, still quivered like a tuning fork. The doctor’s rasping breath marked the time.

  “I turned on the music when I heard you were here because I thought you’d help me with the lyrics. I can’t make out what’s being said. You’re a native speaker of English.”

  “Yes,” Margaret said, breathing heavily. “I suppose I can.”

  “All the music is in English these days. In exchange, now that I’m your mentor, I would help you with the Wagner librettos.”

  “I don’t need any help with the Wagner librettos,” Margaret said.

  “Oh.” There was a quiet. “The part I’m wondering about is in the beginning of Dido’s lament. It sounds as though she’s saying”—and here the doctor spoke in an English so heavily accented Margaret almost did not recognize it as English—“ ‘May my ahms create no trouble in thy breast.’ ”

  “ ‘May my arms,’ ” Margaret corrected. “Is that what you said?”

  “Yes. Ahms.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know,” the doctor agreed. “What are ahms?”

  “Arrrrrms,” Margaret said, emphasizing the American r. And then in German: “Arme.”

  “Oh!” the doctor said with excitement. “Comrade, you’re very clever.”

  “But still
it doesn’t make sense,” Margaret said. “ ‘May my arms create no trouble in thy breast’?” The doctor was now busily scanning the CD. She played the section of track again, and Margaret listened. “May my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast,” Margaret said, when she realized what it was.

  “You’re lovely, my dear. Very efficient.” The doctor sat down.

  But Margaret remained standing, still trembling like the knife. “Did you throw a knife at the door just now?” she asked.

  The room around her was dusty and lush. The only light was from the windows, which, with their thick curtains on either side, and their inner blinds of parchment muslin, let through only a dusky light. Margaret noticed that now, in contrast with last time, there was a potted orange tree with lush foliage taking up much of the free space to the left of the examination table, growing halfway to the ceiling. Its leaves seemed to rustle now and then.

  “I was practicing my aim,” said the doctor.

  “I thought you were blind.”

  “Yes, my dear, blind as a badger, which is to say, not entirely blind, but mostly. My dear child, I have to have regular practice sessions for myself: challenges, obstacle courses, tests, and self-maintenance drills. I’m keeping myself sensitive to the world. For example, the knife throwing. I put up the target; I feel its location very carefully with my fingertips. Then I back away from it, counting the steps and feeling the floor with my toetips as I go. Finally, I install myself behind the desk, and wham! I always hit it. I can hear the blade entering the cork. A wonderful sound!”

  Margaret looked back at the French doors. It was true that there were three knives in the target now, but she also saw around it, on both sides of the door, many gashes in the wood, most of them in the vicinity of the bull’s-eye—but not all. Margaret’s stomach turned. Funny, she had not noticed this on her last visit.

  “So, comrade,” the doctor began, her voice becoming more rasping, “have you remembered? Are you ready to talk?”

  “No,” said Margaret, irritated, despite her best hopes for the visit. The business with the knife, the lyrics—the doctor was rattling her in record time.

  “Really? Nothing at all?” asked the doctor.

  “That’s precisely what I wanted to talk to you about. That’s why I’m here.”

  “About what?”

  “The treatment is not what you said it would be,” said Margaret. “Not at all.”

  “What is it then?” asked the doctor.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” the doctor asked.

  “Well,” Margaret began. Although she would have liked to speak frankly, she found something rising in her, a column of secretive smoke, that forced her to speak in only vague and encrypted terms. “I haven’t remembered anything, but—there have been changes. In fact, everything has changed. But none of the things I remember are my own life.” Margaret said this and shuddered, thinking of the sibyl in her basket. Come to think of it, the swinging, grey-headed sibyl had borne a striking resemblance to Dr. Arabscheilis.

  “But that’s quite fine, my dear, quite fine!” The doctor, for her part, seemed encouraged. “What is it that’s changed?”

  Margaret swallowed. “Well, for starters, the buildings,” she said.

  “The buildings?” The doctor stopped her in surprise.

  “Yes, the buildings,” Margaret said. “They’ve turned into flesh. They’ve turned into flesh and they’re made of that now, instead of brick and stucco …” Her voice trailed off in embarrassment. “Flesh.”

  “Flesh!” the doctor said. “Fascinating!”

  Margaret was enlivened by the woman’s apparent ready belief. “Yes, they turned into flesh. So I think—in any case, there’s been a—malfunction of some kind. I’m not remembering my own life,” she repeated again, dumbly. And then very forcefully: “I want you to reverse the treatment.”

  “If I remember correctly, my pet,” the doctor said, “when I saw you before, you didn’t have any desire to undergo treatment for what was a startlingly acute case of retrograde amnesia, if I may say so. So if you truly have not remembered, what are you complaining about? Isn’t this just how you wanted it?”

  Margaret was surprised. She had assumed the doctor had not listened to her at all during the last visit. She cleared her throat. “Yes, that’s right. I was happy as I was.”

  “And now you say nothing has changed, and that makes you upset?”

  “Well, no. Something has changed! The city is made of fat. My life is poisoned.” This was truly how she felt in the days since the Sachsenhausen tour and the skittering mice.

  “Aha!” the doctor cried, a cat after a dangling string. “So! It worked after all! Tell me, why is your life ‘poisoned’ as you say?”

  “I’m doing the things I usually do—”

  “Quite right,” the doctor said.

  “But I can’t sleep anymore. I feel guilty.”

  “You feel guilty?”

  “Yes,” Margaret said. “Yes, I would say that. But I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said quickly, her voice rising involuntarily.

  “Then why do you feel guilty?”

  “Because the residue comes off on me. My job has become horrible. I feel sick.” Margaret was not willing, even now, to mention the hawk-woman.

  The doctor was quiet for a moment, seeming to consider. “It’s history you work with as a guide, and history you study at the university?” she finally asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you considered that might be the trouble?”

  “No,” Margaret said.

  “But of course that’s the trouble!” And again the doctor became excited. “Let me explain it to you this way. History, for an amnesiac—comrade, my pet—is a shill, a stool pigeon, a decoy, a trap. All these years, you’ve been charming yourself with the dry bone, not the bloody flesh. For the sake of the bone, you have danced and been entertained. You’ve been reading history so that it will be easier to shed your own flesh. That is the history of history—the violence against the body for the sake of the skeleton.”

  Margaret drew her head back as if she’d been struck. Oddly, the doctor’s words made instant sense to her. And she was defensive. “You don’t know anything,” she said. The presumptuous doctor didn’t know her. She thought of her apartment, the hallway of which was like a rope bridge over a great gorge of knowledge, with its many piles of books on either side—biographies, histories, sociologies, old telephone and address directories stacked so high it could only cunningly be traversed—used books bought over the Internet from dealer-collectors, new books from the fair in Frankfurt, books from the Antiquariat on the corner. And then she thought of her painting of Magda Goebbels. No one could say she, Margaret, of all people, had been gesturing frivolously at the past.

  But the doctor went on. “You want to drain the elderly fluids so you can march hypnotized into the future!” she said. “Your living, breathing, fleshy Berlin—ha-ha! I’ll tell you what that is!” the doctor laughed. “A step back from disingenuousness! For nothing living can ever be completely misunderstood. If you have to see the buildings alive, then it will put a stay of execution on your murder of time.” The doctor beamed. “Everything is going according to plan, comrade—your defenses are breaking down. My way,” she said, “is winning you over!”

  Margaret was dizzy with anger. “You’re most certainly not winning me over, doctor. I’m here to say it’s not working!” She stood up. “This was supposed to be a cure for amnesia. But my amnesia is not cured.”

  The doctor’s voice lowered to a purr hardly louder than the sound of her rasping breath. “I know you feel guilty, my dear, I know it hurts you. Regardless of whether you remember what you’ve done, you will still feel guilty, for guilt is not a matter of deed but a matter of character. Therefore a contagion. It is very difficult to become connected to someone else’s crime, but never difficult to become connected to someone else’s heart. You can always stop seeking the truth of life, but
you can never stop seeking the truth of character! You can never stop worrying over the shadows of your own riddling heart!”

  The doctor waved her hands in the air. “Bid the history of history adieu, comrade! The living apartment houses are eager to have their way. A new sun is rising, the time of the anesthetized past is drawing to a close.”

  Margaret clutched the lip of the desk. “Doctor, I have never tried to anesthetize the past. On the contrary.”

  “Oh, I’ve been on your ‘tours of Berlin,’ ” the doctor said.

  Margaret cried out. No she hadn’t! She would have certainly remembered an ancient, goggle-eyed German woman.

  Or would she have? Recently she had been so distracted … But the doctor cut her off. “If you are not in the habit of anesthetizing the past, then how do you explain that you don’t remember one bit of your own past?” She wrapped her knuckles against the desk.

  Margaret pulled at the bottom of her sweater. “I have nothing to remember.” Her cheeks burned.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “In that case, why don’t I remember it? Why don’t I find it? It doesn’t make sense!”

  “My dear, let me answer that question with another question: what is the difference between having a knife thrown at your head and reading a story about having a knife thrown at your head?”

  Margaret hid her face. She wanted to get up, but her whole body was leaden; she suspected that she was rooted to the floor as a rabbit freezes in hopes of camouflage. So many animals believe predators cannot see them when they are still. She didn’t say anything, her nostrils sick with the task of breathing. The clock ticked in the corner. With little warning, the heavy handle of one of the knives in the door won out against the blade, and it fell to the ground with a clatter.

  “Dr. Arabscheilis,” Margaret said. “Did you throw a knife at me?”

  “I did not throw a knife at you,” the doctor said. “But come, come. That won’t do. What’s the difference?”

  “Any number of differences,” said Margaret, breathing heavily.