If Margaret were going to take a stand against Magda Goebbels, it must be right now.
Margaret stuttered, buying time. “Did you—?” she began, uncertainly.
Again, however, Prell did not wait to hear the rest. He cried out as though she had already accused him outright: “It wasn’t for me! I did as I was told.”
He was helping her along.
Margaret was quiet, her palms burning. Her muscles locked.
Prell gambled: “But sure, it was a shame.” Margaret sat with her head down.
Prell began again. “Next to the site of the bunker they’re putting up the big memorial for the Jews right now. Two thousand seven hundred concrete blocks—they’re allowed that. But I say, how would it be if over there around the corner by the bunker, we put in six blocks, just six? The children of Goebbels were murdered, killed, deliberately murdered. Couldn’t they be honored, the children? It won’t do them any good now, but at least we could honor them, put up a sign that says, ‘Here died six murdered children.’ Two thousand seven hundred blocks for the Jews, but six children can’t be honored?”
“What about the neo-Nazis who would make it into a shrine?” Margaret’s voice came out in a squeak. She began to dash lines on her notepad. She drew a lighthouse with a black stripe twisting around it.
Oh, if Margaret were going to grab the demon and pull it by the nose, it must be now.
“Ach, ‘neo-Nazi.’ No such thing,” said Prell. “What does neo-Nazi mean? New Nazi, right? There aren’t any. That’s just a buzzword. What you have are nationally conscious people, people who say, ‘my fatherland,’ right or wrong. ‘My fatherland,’ nothing more, am I right? You Americans say it, the Swiss say it, the Israelis say it—‘My country,’ they say. ‘And I’ll fight for it.’ The Israelis are nationalistic people, they defend their territory, they defend their people. They have as much right as anyone.”
He looked at Margaret over the tin of chocolates she had brought him. Then he tilted his head toward her conspiratorially.
“I’ve got an idea for what the memorial for the kids could look like. A sort of design. I do some of that on the side.”
Margaret’s face was red. She was breathing hard. She didn’t look at him.
“I’m thinking there would be six blocks and each one would be the height of the respective kid when it died. So one meter thirty, one meter ten, and so on. Pretty good, I think.”
Margaret started to cough. The air in the room was very dry.
Prell was on a roll. “You can’t talk about guilt, you know.” (But she had not.) “All these things they write about Hitler nowadays. If he had really done all the terrible things they say he did, how could he have been our Führer?”
Margaret coughed harder. Prell ignored her. “Let’s think about it. I’m telling you, one way or another, the war would have come, the war would have come ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, it didn’t take Hitler to make the war, the Jews now, they declared war on Germany in the 1920s, and then again at the end of the 1930s, The war right now in Iraq isn’t about Saddam Hussein, it’s about Israel! That Israel, it can’t exist on avocadoes and oranges, a nation lives from business, they have to have money, and the Americans always pay in, don’t they? This is just my opinion, but why did they occupy Iraq? Supposedly because of atomic bombs!” He laughed straight from the belly. “In my opinion Iraq is a wealthy oil region, and with this money they can support Israel; they can’t keep pumping in their own money forever. There’s something I’ll tell you about Israel …”
And on and on he talked. Margaret looked at the tin of chocolates she had brought him. These sat next to the artificial roses, petals adorned in drops of plastic dew. I bought him expensive chocolates, she thought to herself. It was a tough bludgeon and knocked his voice right out of her head. And foggily, it seemed the blood and dust that rose in the cloud afterward dampened her will to fight. The chocolates—bought before she ever arrived at this house—were a pivotal battle already lost days before, on some distant front, news of it coming back to the capital over the radio only now.
She lifted her head. He was still moving his jaw muscles, his thick tongue flickering in and out of his mouth.
She watched him, but his voice was whitening out, a volume dial had been rotated down, and now not only could she not hear him, but even his physical form grew blurry in her eyes. When she strained to bring him back into focus, bulging her eyes out of her head, she saw him before her again, but this time his clothes had begun to drip off his body in scales. He was molting. Finally, the hulking, chanting body sat before her in its slate-white skin.
As Margaret looked on, tattoos began to appear in his skin, rising to the surface like water mammals fountaining up for breath. Intricate tattoos they were—high-contrast black-and-white photographs. All over his body, the photographs began to nose up. Photographs of faces, almost mug shots, laid out like a map. A woman’s high cheekbones here and a child’s large cranium there.
Margaret squeezed her eyes shut.
She breathed in and out of her nose. Finally she felt herself coming down. She opened her eyes again and there he was before her in his polyester golf coat and cardigan. He reminded her of her grandfather. She smiled brightly and he smiled back.
By the time she got home to the Grunewaldstrasse, she had only one question. Why had she given him chocolates?
Margaret had not been able to stand up to him. Her spaniel fidelity meekly fed the tortoise-man chocolates!
She had not asked the key questions, she had not begged for the key answers. The next day, she would go to the university, continuing her search for the Meissner biography, bumptiously searching for Magda Goebbels’s “true” character; yes, this she knew she would do, but none of it would have anything in the balance. She had given Arthur Prell chocolates, and the results were already in.
It was the chocolates, in the end, that wore the yoke of her shame.
FOURTEEN • Sweet Vitaly
The doctor was not Margaret’s ally, to Prell she had brought chocolates, and Magda Goebbels—who somehow for a moment she had borrowed to play for a finer spiritual division—was becoming a more threatening type of ghost by the day.
At the university, her worst fears regarding Magda Goebbels were catastrophically confirmed.
It happened at the Rostlaube: the central building of the Freie Universität, a metropolis of a structure. Previous to the change in Berlin, it had looked like a massive collection of junked cars piled into a glinting mountain. Stretched over acres, it was dissected by narrow hallways. All the hallways looked exactly alike; inside it quickly became labyrinthine in the modernist way: every path and room was exactly the same as every other, so there were no locations at all.
Since it had turned into human flesh, however, the building had taken on personality. It was pulsing—the most active building Margaret had yet seen since the change, and it seemed the great size of the structure made the difference. In contrast with other architecture, which tended to be only bodies abbreviated, one could make out, in this instance, what sort of identity the flesh carried. It was a giant redheaded adolescent boy—the roof sprouting with orangeish hair—a boy of enormous virility despite bad health. Where there had been rust on the old Rostlaube, today there was acne, and an atmosphere of melancholy strength and hope wrapped in mourning for the recently lost happiness of childhood—these were recognizable in the walls. This building, Margaret saw, was a node of power.
On her way to class, Margaret entered N street, with its bright orange carpeting and ramps zipping up to low balconies and rubber floors, bright with the white light of sky from the windows in the roof. Students were everywhere, students of the German kind: men and women no longer in their first youth. They were clustered in the smoking area, or marching along the low corridors, or sloping themselves up the ramps. They moved quickly and their faces were closed, so beautiful and unknowable they looked like goblins. They flowed with certainty—no, it was more than certainty: with st
yle. They had so much style that they were alarming to Margaret, who thought—looking at them now as though she herself were an inert rubber doll in their midst—that the purpose of style was to release reference into its natural habitat, that good style had a jubilant, horrifying freedom to it, at once attractive and repellent, like a jungle cat liberated from a concrete zoo loping back toward the forest, returning to itself; style was as monolithic as character.
Margaret was afraid she would see the wizard of the students, the king of the Berliner panther style: Vitaly Velminski. Vitaly had been studying philosophy and history at the university for ten years. It was known that if Vitaly ever finished his Magister—he was a dawdler in the intellectual bath like everyone else—since he was both a brilliant mind and an adequate politician, he would become the heir to Meitler, Wolfgang Meitler, founder of Meitlerian metaphysics, center of a buzzing hive. Vitaly had achieved a closeness with all his professors, but with Meitler in particular, that was reflected in Vitaly’s ancient leather shoes, his dark three-piece suits, his cat-like eyes, his cutting, staccato voice that he barely raised above a whisper of precision when he spoke in class. There was excellent loose tobacco in his breast pocket along with rolling paper, and this he feinted into cigarettes when standing outside talking with one of his friends in intimate, casual tones.
For that was the point about Vitaly—he had many friends. He was a friend to anyone of any stylistic note; his human aesthetic was impeccable. He knew, and sometimes flung an arm around, the long-haired professor of philosophy who swept in on the wings of a great black cape and streaming green scarves; he was friends with the stiff man from the south, the one with curling, fleshy red lips and fiercely enunciated accent, whose trench coat was starchily belted and whose knowledge of Hegel seemed to be in his bones. Vitaly was friends with the icy and diminutive Frau Beitsch, who wore nothing but black lace and looked to weigh no more than ninety pounds, painting her skin white and her lips scarlet, but who had the broadest and deepest familiarity with Deleuze this side of the Rhine. Yes, Vitaly knew and inclined his tall head toward all of them. And yet he was also at ease with the run-of-the-mill boys of certainty, who were not noticeable, but who would still go far, because knowledge gave them no trouble—no trouble at all.
Vitaly—there he was: she had spotted him a level above her, outside the doorway to Koerfer’s classroom, standing in conversation with a man who looked like a rabbinical student. Margaret felt hungry when she came into Vitaly’s orbit. But she felt this hunger as though she were also on morphine. The students, Vitaly included, seemed so distant from her that if she were ever to open her mouth and speak to them, they would disappear. And in point of fact, whenever someone in class asked Margaret if she had an extra pen, say—or if she had the time, or the handout—her voice always became so hoarse, her German so stilted, that it was assumed she was on an Erasmus exchange and did not know the language. Over time, Margaret thought, her aura had become clear even to the naïve, and they had left off trying to speak to her.
The class was on media and assassinations in Weimar Germany, and after they were all sitting down—Koerfer was a celebrity, so the “seminar” had over ninety people smashed into a room meant for no more than fifty—Koerfer began to talk about the Berliner pneumatic dispatch, the Rohrpost.
There was something nightmarish about this to Margaret.
Also making the hair stand up on the back of her neck was the presence of Vitaly. She and he were among the last students to enter the classroom, and so now, in the crunch, he was directly behind her, his body smelling of sea salt and hills. She could not see him, but every breath he took made her feel something.
“Does anyone know how it worked? So far as I understand a dual propellant system was used,” Koerfer was saying, warming them up with facts before the theory. “The projectiles containing the letters or cards to be transported were pulled in one direction by means of compressed air, then later the same projectile was brought back to its starting point with rarefied air, through suction.
“I’ll show you a map.” With magnets he put it up on the white board and began to point. “The Berliner system was radial. From the main telegraph office a series of tubes branched to the most important post offices throughout the city. At each of these offices the projectiles were then unpacked and sent on their way again to smaller offices, where they were again unpacked, the cards and letters sorted and carried to the homes of the recipients by telegram couriers. Thus if a letter needed to go from one end of the city to the other, it had first to be sent to the central office, and only from there would it travel on to the other side. The exceptions were the direct lines between the main telegraph office and the Reichstag and eventually the chancellery, and this is where the system became important to the press, who could and did, on certain occasions, tamper with the pneumatic lines. Journalists tunneled underground to dig out the receptacles and read the classified contents. Members of the press weren’t the only ones.”
Margaret began to imagine journalists tunneling underground like moles, their eyes bleary and dim. She rested her head. This bright, low-ceilinged room did not face out onto a courtyard as most of the others did, but instead onto the empty land beyond the Rostlaube, land that was filled with scotch pines. The pines crowded up against the windows. As the professor talked on, the pines brushed against the glass. The branches lashed, insistent. Margaret pushed the side of her face against the glass, as if to rest it there, and then she could almost feel the skeletal fingers, the whispering smoke of the pine needles against her face. She turned to look out. Deep in the tree closest to her, near the cloistered trunk, she saw, looming in the darkness, a great bird of prey with legs in pants of feathers. The bird did not have any traces of womanliness, and its talons were yellow and orange against the black tree. It cocked an eye at Margaret, a glint of topaz fire. Margaret looked directly at the bird, then turned and looked at Vitaly behind her, to see if he had seen.
Vitaly saw her looking at him and turned his face to the professor, crossing his long haunches. He did not look at her again.
Margaret turned back and there was the bird—she almost had assumed that just as suddenly it would be gone—but in the meantime it seemed to have gotten much larger, now maybe the size of a ten-year-old boy. Through the heavy shadows of the darkening pine needles, Margaret saw the flutter of falling feathers. The bird was losing its mantle. She saw the sheen of gabardine, and before long, Magda’s heavy-browed face was grinning at her, grinning and winking, her smile broad. Her teeth looked like old piano keys. Margaret turned her head away quickly and tried not to look out the window again, although she could not help but glance back once or twice, and always the bird was there.
After class, Margaret sat down on a bench outside the classroom to summon her strength. She looked the length of the long hallway. It gently sloped down.
She saw a girl come out of an adjoining corridor and turn south, away from Margaret. Margaret watched the young woman’s back. She thought she recognized it. It was Margaret’s own long body, with its awkward calves.
Just then, Margaret felt her light blocked and looked up to see Vitaly Velminski standing before her. He leaned in. Her heart stopped. She waited. But his eyes were not on her. His eyes were on the department’s course listings for the coming semester, inside a glass box above her head. Vitaly leaned in further. Margaret’s excitement boiled to the point that it was no longer pleasurable, it was only painful, the proximity. The pleasure itself was the pain.
After Vitaly moved away, Margaret wanted to slam her fist into the glass box on the wall. She wanted to break her head against it. She wanted to shatter the glass, and shatter her porcelain self into bits. She hated her invisibility and muteness, she hated the attraction, the stimulation. She would flay and beat and destroy the vestiges of desire. She hated Vitaly for attracting her, and she hated him.
At the library, things only got worse. She was not insane, she told herself, but the frequent bouts of m
adness were beginning to add up.
When she found the Meissner biography of Magda Goebbels, the one with quotes from Ello Quandt which had made Magda Goebbels appear so sympathetic, Margaret read only three pages before she broke the spine of the book in a rage. She pushed it off the table and onto the floor. She stood up, almost unable to see.
For she had seen enough. The book was a slavering hagiography, Meissner was a sycophant. She had been led by a golden hoop in her nose straight over a precipice. Again and again, there were descriptions of Magda, a woman “of breeding and distinction,” “pretty, angelic-looking even, with her pale, gold, silken hair, milk-white complexion and sparkling blue eyes, graceful, dainty and slim,” worst of all, as de facto justification for her involvement with Nazis: “mistress of the feminine virtue of adjusting to different mentalities.”
Margaret remembered what she had read about Magda’s several affairs, the ones she had had to distract herself from Goebbels’s womanizing: many were with men who worked in the Propaganda Ministry with Goebbels himself, and wouldn’t it not be the most unlikely thing, if the man who decided to write a biography of the dead woman were one of her former lovers?
The most obvious lie in the book was this: Magda Goebbels, who in other biographies was said to have been born to a ladies’ maid out of wedlock, was here described as having been “the offspring of a happy marriage.”
Margaret was betrayed. The quotations in which she had put so much hope, which had rendered Magda cognizant and remorseful and mercilessly executive in her attempts to avenge herself against herself, not simpering, not silly—these were being discredited and crumbling into piles of fakery before her eyes. So Magda had been nothing but a fanatic, nothing but a deranged patriot when she killed her children, and all ideas that she had been a lone Nazi tribunal, turning the principles of inheritance of evil inward on the family of evil itself, were nothing but fantasies. Margaret had been singled out, chosen for tailing by a rapacious falcon, a lunatic, a fanatic, a spy.
The History of History Page 16
