“No, there are two.”
“There are more than two,” Margaret said.
“No, there are precisely two differences,” the doctor said. “The first is this: in the story, there is a multiplicity of things—the door opening, the doctor in her white coat, the doctor launching her weapon, the knife flying, the sound of the knife lodging in the corkboard, the cowering girl—I am merely assuming you cowered. Did you cower? Well, never mind. But in the experience, by contrast, there are only two things. There is confusion, and there is fear.”
Margaret shifted in her chair.
“And then there is the second difference,” the doctor went on. “Can you guess what it is?”
“No,” said Margaret.
“Really? Not a single guess?”
“No,” Margaret said. She was nauseous.
“Did you guess Dido and Aeneas, comrade? Dido and Aeneas is the correct answer. In the story, the sound of Dido’s aria flowing through the room changed the style and tone of everything. But in real life, the music made no difference.”
Margaret was silent, shielding her head.
“If you read some scrap of history,” the doctor said, “you are doing nothing but replaying your own life, only in heavy makeup. The world is pregnant with your own face, and it will never give birth to anything else. You know nothing but this life of yours, which is plain and pure emotion, stripped of all gratification of meaning—just a whimper in the dark. A story, by contrast, is a symphony blooming in the sunlight, trying to draw you away from chaos. Anyone who doesn’t know this has been nursing herself with lies plugged into her consciousness, as the symphonic sound track is plugged into the films in the dark of the movie theater, trying to make us believe that all experience carries an emotion familiar and long since invented, making a case for religion, trying to prove—foolishly, comrade, so foolishly!—that we all know the same beauty.”
Margaret held her head tightly in her hands, trying not to open her mouth and scream. Her mind was going black and white and black and white again, as if there were a strobe light pulsing the room.
She sat for a while so, but then with sudden brightness something suggested itself to her, and she lunged across the desk at the doctor. “That’s not true,” she broke out. “It’s not true about Dido and Aeneas. It’s not incidental at all. When I came into the room and the knife went by my head, Dido sang, ‘in my breast.’ And that’s all I remember about the knife now. Just those three words. And if I were to remember what happened later, I might think the knife went into my breast instead of the door!”
“Only because you’d already be remembering it, which is to say mythologizing it. It has nothing to do with the actual event.” The doctor was not necessarily reasonable, but she was quick.
Song lyrics—thinking of them, Margaret’s thoughts jerked over to the moment on the train on the way to Sachsenhausen, when she had remembered her father. The song he used to sing. “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind,” he had sung to her in German, a language she did not know as a child. He sang, and the German words sounded in the child’s ears like radio static. But sitting here now, she could remember it, she could remember his voice and his song, and to her mind now it was full of meaning. The German words could be dropped like coins into the new slots cut into her mind in the years since, and decoded by their very grooves. He had sung:
Du bist verrückt, mein Kind,—and now she knew it meant: You are crazy, my child,
du musst nach Berlin,—you must go to Berlin,
wo die Verrückten sind,—where the crazies are,
da gehörst du hin—that’s where you belong.
Du musst nach Plötzensee—you must go off to Plötzensee,
wo die Verrückten sind—where the crazies are,
am grünen Strand der Spree.—on the green banks of the Spree.
The meaning of the lines touched icy fingers to Margaret’s back.
She remembered more: he had sung it at a party. She was wild with delight, he was drunk. She was running in loops with the other children; he plucked her out of circulation, took her in his arms and held her up above his head, and she looked into his light eyes, which were small behind his glasses, and he sang to her.
However, the doctor was right in a certain way. Her memory was foreign to the experience of the child, who did not understand German, who did not know how to recognize drunkenness, who did not know her father would one day disappear into a mental hospital, where he would make thinking of the time before he had gone away from home into an act of nostalgia.
The doctor seemed to regard Margaret very closely, but with her ears rather than her eyes—her head was cocked. “Writing history, reading history, my dear, a person will always try to stage a symphony in a cave where nothing but a whimper dwells,” she said, “but at the end of your life, perhaps even sooner, you’ll realize that there’s nothing to chronicle, nothing to remember, or even to know, that bears any relationship to experience at all. Eventually there will be no more pantomimes, only the acute attunement to the whimper.”
“But if there’s nothing to chronicle, then why do you care whether or not I remember?”
“Comrade! I am not opposed to the ideal—the ideal of the remembering human mind! I’m only opposed to false expansions of same. Meaning is private, puny, and constructed artificially. If you recognize that fact once and for all, the meaning you will eventually have no choice but to construct will be proportionate. That is to say, it will be very small. You will know it to be essentially provisional, even fraudulent!—and then, as a result, it will be powerless, and remembering all things unbearable will become bearable to you.”
“Will it?”
“Yes.”
“And is that good?”
“What?” asked the doctor.
“To remember unbearable things.”
“Of course it is,” said the doctor. “Truth is a worthy cause, even if it is wildly limited in scope. You’ll get but a penny from your copper mine.”
Margaret took a step toward the door. She saw that the doctor was not going to help her escape; on the contrary, the doctor was part of the nightmare. Margaret opened the door. One of the knives was still stuck in it.
“Comrade!” the doctor cried out when she heard the door opening. “You have to go nearer before you can get farther away from it! Ascribe significance to everything, but only personal significance!”
The cry of advice sounded in the room, the doctor’s voice had grown hoarse and exalted.
At home, Margaret again heard the first bars of “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind” playing in her mind—an earworm of the most insistent kind. It wasn’t long before she began to feel the song around her like flames, licking at her feet, polluting the air, and there was a terrible moment. Because of a sense of rising chaos, she thought the fire would shatter the panes of the glass globe that had been around her head for so long.
She went over to the bookshelf. In the inferno of the earworm’s heat, a book flew at her eyes. It was a book that was fat with letters from her mother, some opened and others not, all left so long untouched that it was blurred into something almost imperceptible.
She wanted to escape the song. The song suggested damning things about her free will. She longed to pin down the specifics of her mother’s modest handwriting. It seemed that in comforting herself thus, she would draw something monstrous out of the sky.
She pulled the book out of the shelf—it was a Russian novel called Moscow-Petushki, and all at once a wave of bad feeling came over her again. Tick-tock, this is the end. Her hands shook. The veins in them had risen. She tidied the letters.
You are crazy, my child. You belong in Berlin. Her father had sung that to her when she was only a girl. He had danced with Alphi, his beloved Great Dane.
She could not go on. She put the letters back into the book, and the book back onto the shelf, all the while staring at her hands. Another wave of bad feeling pushed her back, with a mighty shove to her solar plexus.
So she did not read the letters from her mother. And it shall be noted, much to the frustration of anyone who might be wishing to tether her tale to a rational mast, she also did not bother to look and see that one of the letters, written in a cribbed hand, contained all the lyrics of “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind.” It was postmarked August 2002—that is, it came from the period that Margaret herself was in the habit of designating as “lost time.”
THIRTEEN • Face Tattoos
There was a day in January that began in the yellow phone booth outside the supermarket on Gleditschstrasse. Margaret pulled open its heavy door. She needed a phone book.
She opened the city phone book in the sweaty little box, and when her finger hit his name, it jumped. There was Arthur Prell, Hitler’s own bodyguard, woven into modern Berlin by the good offices of the telephone book. In 2005, his name stood in blameless black letters. Beside it, an equally modest number stood, only five digits. She dialed. The phone rang. It rang until the possibility of an answering machine was eliminated.
A faraway voice sounded—the cottony, warbling voice Margaret remembered, the voice of a very old man.
“Hallo?” said the distant voice.
“Yes, hello.” Margaret invented herself on the spot. “I’m Margarethe Taub, journalist.”
“Yeah?” the voice said, sounding childish and confused.
“Yes. I write for—Smithsonian magazine,” Margaret said, haltingly. She wondered if the publication still existed. “I’d like to know if you’d be willing to give an interview.”
“Give a what?”
“Give an interview.”
“Why?”
“My understanding is that you were one of Adolf Hitler’s bodyguards,” Margaret said.
“Oh, yes. That’s true. So you want an interview. They all come to me for that. Well, I don’t have much time. But I can fit you in I guess, I can probably fit you in.” He sounded resigned and proud. His words, even more than when she had heard him at the bunker, were soggy and mucous-filled.
“Would you like to meet at the bunker?” Margaret asked.
“What?”
“Whether you’d like to meet at the bunker,” Margaret said loudly into the receiver. “I’ve seen you there before.”
“No.” He paused, and seemed to swallow thickly. He badly needed to clear his throat. “No, no. My knees, you see.” Margaret didn’t tell him that she had seen him there, hopping about on spry feet.
“Where would you like to meet for the interview, Herr Prell?”
“Well, I guess we can meet here at my place.”
And they set up a time to meet at his house, in Rudow.
Margaret went home triumphant. She discovered, online, that Prell was selling a CD: Songs from the Berghof, to raise money for his cause—the support of old SS officers who were “denied a pension” by the German government.
She reread several detailed accounts of Hitler’s last days in the bunker.
Later, she went to an electronics store down on the Kurfürstendamm and bought a cheap microcassette recorder.
After that, still feeling incomplete, she went to a brilliantly lit department store and walked around the candy department. She should bring Prell some small token, she thought. She decided on chocolates, but couldn’t decide what size box. There were small ones, and then there were large ones that cost a pretty penny. She spent a long time making up her mind. She chose a small one in the end. Waiting in line at the cash register, however, she looked at it and thought it appeared trifling, insulting even. She darted back to the glass wall and got an impressive tin of individually wrapped truffles.
The day of the interview arrived. Margaret spent a long time deciding what to wear. The skirt she eventually chose was short, but at the same time, very becoming.
A long and oppressive subway ride followed. Prell lived all the way at the far eastern end of the U7 line.
In Rudow, Margaret hauled her racing bike off the train. She peddled through the settlement of little homes, the gabled houses, the towering pine trees. The streets were named for flowers. She turned in at Eucalyptus, found the house number on the gate, and there it was, Prell’s little house. It had plastic white lace curtains, the wont of the elderly East, and a low wall around a little garden, with a gate that opened and closed on a remotely controlled lock. Margaret pressed the buzzer.
All was quiet.
She pressed again.
A door on the side of the house sprang open, and Prell appeared. He took the stairs sideways, apparently with a bad knee after all, but still he lunged toward her quickly, on spry, stilt legs, and opened the gate. They shook hands. Margaret blushed. She followed him inside. He took her coat.
She looked about the living room—artificial flowers in abundance, the smell of gumdrops and potpourri, paintings of spring bouquets and clowns dotting the walls in sloughs of stale color.
At the table, Margaret fumbled to get out her tape recorder. Prell’s eyes gleamed hungrily at the sight of it.
She took a deep breath. She asked a question, and they began.
It should have been interesting, the things he said. But the old man began to drone. He recited empty things, things that sounded as though they were memorized from books—freezer-burned, senseless chatter, and, most troubling of all, his answers did not correspond to her questions. She asked about his life before the war—he talked about the bunker. She asked about the bunker—he talked about his life before the war. He pulled out a shoebox that at first appeared to be full of photographs but was actually piles of laminated photocopies of photographs—of himself, at Berchtesgaden, with the Hitler-Braun dogs, in front of the door to the Berlin bunker, and at the Wolf’s Lair, in East Prussia. The only point of interest to Margaret was this: it was easy to recognize the face of the old man in the face of the young one at Berchtesgaden.
He was a drone, but he was not an imposter.
Through great effort, Margaret managed to finally steer the conversation to the Goebbels family. Prell began to speak of them, and at long last, Margaret became interested. Ever and again, she was the yo-yo and Magda Goebbels was the hand holding the string. Margaret sometimes flew away, but always she zinged back into that woman’s tight palm.
“Well, let me see,” said the old man, moving his lips thickly. “Goebbels and the kids arrived suddenly, about fourteen days before the end. Then Hitler’s doctor, Dr. Morell, had to move out so that Dr. Goebbels could move in, and his wife lived one story higher in the connecting bunker, with the children. But the children came down to play all the time, you know? When they were too loud we sent them back up.”
He laughed.
“Usually they were up in the New Chancellery; there were people around up there and they had freedom to move about. Anyway, I went up there too, shortly before the end, because the big kitchen was there. Goebbels sat down at a long table with the children. A young man played the harmonica. And Goebbels was saying goodbye to the civilians with the children; there were so many people there up in the New Chancellery, people looking to take shelter there. And it occurred to me for the first time that maybe I should say goodbye, too. That was the moment it became clear to me that Hitler and Goebbels would stay. And Eva Braun and Frau Goebbels had agreed they wouldn’t abandon their men either. They would stay to the end too. And then plans were made for the children. The other women in the bunker all offered—Frau Rindell for example, from the office, she said, ‘Frau Goebbels, if you want to stay here, that’s your business, but the children can’t possibly stay here—’ and Frau Graf said, ‘I’ll take them to Darmstadt to my sister, she can’t have children—she would be happy. Please!’ and she cried.
“You know, we, the service people, we all knew that the children were meant to stay, and what would happen. They would stay and they would die.”
Prell spoke so loudly Margaret had to draw her head back.
“Oh, and then of course the aviator, Hanna Reitsch, offered to fly them out. She said even if she
had to fly back and forth twenty times, she would fly them out. Of course, that’s not what happened.” He paused.
“Frau Goebbels, she had to come down to my room to get the children ready.”
“What do you mean?” Margaret interrupted. Her eyes dropped. She felt a glass hand on her shoulder.
“Well, she was going to give them a soft finish.”
“In your room?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Why there?” Margaret’s voice came out as a purr. It was not how she meant it at all.
“Up above there were so many people around, but down in our rooms there was no one. We ourselves weren’t even down there. We only slept there. So she could take care of them on her own. I went out of the room and waited outside. After a little while Dr. Naumann came out of the room. He said to me—he whispered in my ear—that if it had been up to him, Dr. Goebbels he meant, then the children wouldn’t still be in the bunker, they would be evacuated. And I had seen Naumann talking with Goebbels up above before, and he was probably right. I took him as a trustworthy representative. Goebbels didn’t want it. It was Frau Goebbels who wanted it. One must stick with the truth. That’s how it was!” Prell yelled, as though Margaret had challenged him.
Margaret breathed out. She looked at him. She saw his flashing eyes; she saw that he thought he was on trial.
But he was making it too easy for her. Because she wasn’t putting him on trial. He was waiting for her to rise up against him, but she—she didn’t know what she was doing at all. She looked at him.
When Margaret thought about the interview afterward, it was that moment, with Prell yelling, “That’s how it was!” which she would always remember as the point at which a blue sky went yellow-black. Because as far as Margaret was concerned, it was at that moment when it began to be not Prell who was on trial. Not Prell, but Margaret herself.
And Magda Goebbels, suddenly, was everywhere in the room. She was hovering against the walls and in the jars of potpourri; she was a black fume around the curtains and darkening the craft-fair paintings on the walls.
The History of History Page 15
