The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  Margaret went into the visitors’ reading carrels. The archivist looked up at her. Margaret was flustered, unkempt, her lips and cheeks were glowing with a distinct pulse of their own.

  The archivist quickly disabused her of the idea that she would be granted permission to see Magda Goebbels’s birth certificate. It was against data protection laws. But Margaret noticed that the sound of the name, Magda Goebbels, after she had spoken it, was hefty and cumbersome in the room. Her eyes drifted away from the archivist to the windows; suddenly she was full of loathing. Margaret muttered something bitterly, about the archive making nothing, but nothing at all, available to the public, bureaucratically keeping everything, even very old and senseless things, under lock and key. At the end, she even mumbled a phrase that she knew was taking things too far—she said something about the archive “protecting the guilty.”

  The archivist set her face. For a moment both she and Margaret were quiet. Finally the woman puffed her blouse out and pointed emphatically to the shelf. The museum, she said, with prim emphasis, recently made the collected Schöneberg police logs available to the public—everything up until and including 1966. Margaret was very welcome to look at that.

  This was a shameless non sequitur.

  But still, Margaret’s rage dissipated. She had other worries. The shadows she had seen outside, she felt they were pressing against the window glass, beginning to beg her for something. So now, embarrassed and clumsy, Margaret indeed hoisted down a police logbook; she chose the one from 1943.

  At first, Margaret only pawed through it without reading it. She thought she would wait until the archivist was in the other room and then quickly leave. But, despite herself, Margaret became involved. She read through January 1943, and already, something of interest caught her eye. There was a letter of complaint from a middle-aged woman who had walked her cat on a leash in the Kleistpark. She was peacefully making a round in the late afternoon when a policeman set upon her and beat her with a stick, merely because cats were forbidden in the park. Was it possible, Margaret thought, for everyone in a society to be variously psychotic, all at the same time? She got out her notebook and pen. She copied the letter of complaint in its entirety into her notebook.

  She moved into the records of February and March. These were mostly concerned with the police seizure of apartments recently “abandoned” by Jewish families. There were entries concerning the looting of Jewish homes, many reports of calls from neighbors complaining that the loot had not been equally divided. Also many entries concerning Jewish suicides. The suicides coincided with the mass deportations, the period when Berlin was undergoing its “cleansing” by Goebbels.

  Then Margaret came to the log of Police Revier 173, and all of a sudden her breath, which had been even, stopped, and her heart, which had been loping, sped up to a trot. The first entry, on page 143, was this:

  March 3, 1943, circa 9:00 p.m., the married couple Franz Strauss, born 11/5/06 in Gross-Strenz, and Regina Sara Strauss née Herzberg, born 11/20/09 in Schwedenhöhe, living in Berlin-Schöneberg, Salzburgerstr. 8, committed suicide by natural gas. They took their three children, Rahel Strauss born 7/5/32 in Berlin, Gerda Strauss born 2/27/39 in Berlin and Beate Strauss born 4/3/42 in Berlin, with them into death.

  Margaret froze. She did not think immediately that this entry would bring a revolution to her life, but one of her fingers, which had been winding a strand of hair, went still, and a long, breathless moment passed.

  When she came to herself, it was as if she had stepped behind a curtain hitherto hiding the harshest lights in the world. Red spots glowed before her eyes; the lights coming in from the street contained parts of the spectrum that she had never seen before. She felt her chest begin to tighten, and a clever fever, a madness, a vast energy flickered in her.

  She stood up. The energy made her nauseous. Standing bent over, she read the passage a second time. Her fingers, controlled from afar, brushed over the print of the logbook; she had a hallucination that the letters were made of loosely strewn sand; sand that could be swept away with reverent fingers. Something told her, whispered to her, that there would be pictures beneath.

  She rubbed. She rubbed harder, feeling split into two persons—one who knew this was madness, and one who believed that there were pictures underneath the print. The second person would reveal them. She would expose them come what may.

  Margaret was out of control. She felt a keening pity for what she had read, and also a terrible pain. At the same time, she was knocked hard by a sense of tyrannical exclusion. She pushed her chair back with a suffocated gesture. She gathered her books and threw them in her bag. At first she thought she would simply run, but then she looked at the police logbook lying there on the table and could not bear the thought of leaving it behind. She quickly searched for change, made a ten-cent Xerox copy, feeling all the while as though she would be sick.

  Outside the archive, the headlamps and neon signs cast snakes of light over the Hauptstrasse, striking Margaret’s eyes with lasers menacingly futuristic.

  The lay of the land here is very important in what happened next. Precisely: the old villa housing the archive was close up against the road. Behind the villa, a modern annex had been built, which held a small branch library. Farther still, behind the library, was a broad and sloping pasture of a city park, opening out toward the north. The park was reached by a wide and graveled path. It was this path that Margaret turned down now, her legs numb, meaning to cut home in the blessed darkness, for she was in a state of extreme light sensitivity now.

  As she moved through the twilight, however, she came to the entrance of the branch library, squat under the sunset and, as she looked over at it, her head bounced in surprise—it seemed to be staring at her with a single glass eye. Above it, the last light of day was a wide yellow stripe on the far horizon. Without knowing why, Margaret pulled the handbrakes of her bicycle, and it skidded. Before she could think, she was lofted into the air.

  The back tire’s brake had not been properly able to grip since the late summer, and when the front tire stopped so abruptly on the loose gravel of the path, the rear of the bike kept spinning and swung out.

  Margaret’s limbs pumped the air. She tried to heave herself away from the bicycle and land on her feet, but her legs were numb and disobedient as in a dream, and her head was spinning. She went down sideways, falling heavily on her left shoulder and hip.

  And then, an entirely marvelous thing happened. Everything began to tilt. Margaret looked into the night sky, and the stripe of yellow seemed to grow three-dimensionally above the low roof of the library. It blew up rhapsodically with color and warmth.

  The pain in Margaret’s limbs and the emotion in her heart clasped, coming together like the teeth of a zipper. Margaret’s eyes would not move from that thick, warm stripe of yellow. Now it was beginning to billow like smoke, to represent something terrible and beautiful at once, and she stood up. The hurt in her body, the inflammation, ballooned—she was on fire, and she began to yaw toward the dimensionalizing yellow stripe. Three uncertain, swaying steps toward the giant color that was bleaching now, losing its heat—and Margaret felt convinced that before the yellow light disappeared, it would let her float into the center of it. She put her arms up high and wide—she felt her arms lengthening and strengthening around the entire earth. All the way around, her arms might reach, all the way to the hidden yellow sun. If only the night sky, that bleachworks, would not destroy the yellow king! And then as though possessed—she startled herself terribly—her lower jaw dropped open, and like water from a tipped bucket, sound came glistening out. Which is to say that she began to yell, and simultaneously she began an almost comical clenching and unclenching of her fingers—she was both surprised and amazed—the grasping had a frightened, unnatural quality to its rhythm, and she gave a series of high and imploring cries.

  On the slate staircase leading up to the library’s blind eye, she threw herself down, in sudden and total capitulatio
n.

  But the new position did not put an end to it. With her eyes closed, the black letters in the police log, telling her of the Family Strauss, came swimming to Margaret. The letters gushed closer, lost some of their darkness, and soon melted into the shape of a strange man, it looked like a monk, a monk dressed in hay-colored robes. Margaret could see him. His hair was like transistors and his earlobes dangled pendulous. He too was falling down before the setting sun, and this was all at once vivid: the monk in his hay-colored robes and swinging earlobes, prostrated before a sun that was as red as an animal’s heart, beating and loping.

  Here was Margaret in Berlin, where only the last, pale yellow stripe smarted against the bleachworks of the sky, and there was the monk in some world far away—he saw it all burn, he saw it all burn bright as a furnace fire.

  And then Margaret knew.

  The monk was an ancestor, a visitor come to her bearing tidings, a visitor sitting somewhere along a line that ended in—prostrations before this Family Strauss. They, they and only they—they had conquered the setting sun. They were the true conquerors of the disappearing light.

  What had they done? Faced with deportation, the Family Strauss had chosen to kill themselves and their children rather than go through the hell served to them. They had chosen to die privately rather than in the chambers in Poland. These people killed themselves and their little daughters on the shoulders of God, to escape soul-destroying torture, the humiliation of death at the hands of dog-men. Nothing could be higher than that, nothing more elect.

  Margaret was resolute and sure. She thought of them and believed. The Family Strauss in March 1943 was where innocence was active. Innocence had been in a coma, but now here it was, coming back to life. The idea of active and effective innocence was the bright light behind her eyes; it was the voluminous stripe spreading its cloud into her mind. This was the hidden, ever-disappearing goodness. This she had yearned for so long. This was the friar’s lantern.

  Here is how I will go about it, she said to herself. Here is how I will save myself. People—for once, people—who acted cataclysmically in the service of love.

  That was how Margaret saw it, and horsemen of joy came riding to her.

  She closed her eyes tighter so as to better see, buried her face further into the gravel and pinched at her heaving flanks, trying to see more clearly. The monk slowly dissolved, and another image bore down in its place: already she could see a girl, it must be one of the Strauss children, the oldest girl, ten years old, almost eleven when she died, a child with a face like roses and sandpaper, her head surrounded by light. The girl was wearing yellow cloth, the same color as the almost disappeared sunlight, and she was coming closer. She was filling Margaret’s eyes and quenching her ears. The child spoke clearly. This is what she said.

  On that day Mother made us come out for a walk in the park. We didn’t want to. Not even Father. We are hungry. We think only of sleep. Mother said we would like the snow. The storm was coming all day, and now it was here and the flakes were very large like moths against our cheeks. We went to the Stadtpark by the Rathaus. Mother says it looks like the Jardin du Luxembourg. Once she was there, in Paris. She says it is beautiful. Mother is beautiful. I walked behind with Gerda. Mother carried Beate and walked beside Father. Mother and Father argued about something and the snow was thick, I couldn’t hear what they said. Gerda was tired. I let her ride on my back. I became breathless. Up ahead, I saw the golden stag on its pedestal, surrounded by dark snow, bright like a moon in the afternoon that was much more like night. Mother and Father slowed down and I caught up and then I saw Father was crying. Father did not cry when he lost his position at the conservatory and he did not cry when he lost his job at the factory, and when he began to sleep all day or sit looking out the window after he had finished giving me my lessons, he did not cry. He taught me French and mathematics and he taught me the violin.

  Mother is beautiful. She has a friend who gave us money when Jews weren’t allowed to work. We were hungry. Mother couldn’t buy food with the money without ration cards. She decided to use the money to make her hair blond so she would have an easier time finding a private position as a maid in a rich person’s house. In the beginning it looked hideous. Very orange. But she went back to the salon every ten days, and soon it was gold blond and yellow. Some people said she should have used the money differently, but Mother always said that now that Jews weren’t permitted to emigrate, the best way was camouflage.

  I trusted Mother. Mother promised she would never let them take away any of us like they had taken away Berthe and her mother. She didn’t care what anybody said and she fixed the collar of my coat so that I could wear it so the star didn’t show when I wanted, and we would go to the pictures or look at the fabric in a fancy store. Father always said that nothing bad would happen if we would just learn to follow the new rules, for God’s sake! It would blow over. But mother said, it’s too late for that now, Franz.

  Two weeks before the day it snowed, Mother came home from the Tombanzens’. She said she didn’t have to go back the next day. They were kind to Mother, but now Mr. Tombanzen had to go off to war and they would have to do without help. Then Mother couldn’t find anyone to give her or Father any work.

  Father cried in the park. When we got home, he was very tender to us. Mother was busy around the house, cleaning and putting things in order. She told us we would all sleep on the floor of the kitchen tonight, all together, and wouldn’t that be fun? At first we thought it was fun. Then after all the bedclothes were laid down on the floor, we felt strange. Mother closed the door of the kitchen. She used our extra pairs of underwear and some socks to plug the space at the bottom between the base of the door and the threshold and also around the edges of the window behind the blackout shade where it was loose. When Gerda saw her underwear were getting dirty in the window frame she began to cry, so baby Beate started crying too. Mother told us to hush and held us all three very tightly. Father turned his back and I saw his shoulders shaking. Mother said the bad people in the government would never find us. She said she was keeping us safe now, hush.

  On the ground in front of the glass branch library, Margaret hid her head in her hands.

  When she looked up, the sky was dark purple; the yellow stripe was gone, and the air around her was thick. People—she said to herself—people who acted cataclysmically in the service of love.

  She took lunging steps even as she hobbled with pain, and made it over to her bicycle. She rode back toward the Grunewaldstrasse. With every downward shove of the pedal, each more stabbing than the one before, she came further into a sense of grand-scale homecoming.

  Once in her apartment, she moved in a loop from living room to bedroom to hallway and back again.

  The child who had spoken to her was with her. Rahel Strauss’s young voice lapped at her ears, sweet as milk.

  With the voice playing, she saw the painting she had made of Magda Goebbels lying next to her bed. She laughed with a bitter contempt. It was inert, deactivated like a discarded toy. False prophets would no longer tempt her, she said to herself. Some people—at least once—had done something right. She had been blind to that. She had believed that every comprehensible human action was corrupt.

  She looped around the apartment, careening. What was Magda Goebbels? What was the hawk-woman? She was nothing but a shadow! The insanity of the last weeks hit her in the chest.

  She considered this apartment she had lived in for five years and saw it in every way reborn. The ceilings were very high here, the French doors opened between the rooms; each room flowed gently into the next: an apartment built at the end of the old century for graceful, romantic ways of living; you could hear Dvoák breathing through the floor plan. Margaret saw that it was possible to think of the lives that came and went in this apartment as expressions of a single spirit, her own life separated from the other lives that had passed in it only along a single axis, an axis of time, which she knew now, she knew for cert
ain now, could be collapsed like a telescope.

  She shook with the joy of the mercy-shown.

  Only seconds later, however, she went into a mild panic. She smelled the dust and mildew in the apartment. She considered the floors, once sleek parquet, now covered in musty wall-to-wall carpet. The scent of the carpet’s peculiar dust filled the nose. A leering sort of sadness took hold of her for a moment. These rooms, built spacious, gracious, and light, had almost nothing in them to remind of the fine old days. The few pieces of furniture Margaret had were picked off the street or bought at the shabbiest of flea markets. The former tenants—their ghosts—would laugh at the shambles, and they would laugh at her, Margaret. Berlin had fallen; Berlin had been destroyed. If Lucifer had once been an angel, he had long since gone down. Was anyone or anything in this city a continuation of what it had been—either for good or evil? Was there any continuity at all?

  Then she thought of the Family Strauss, the nobility of their decision, and the idea of nobility in general: its music, its architecture, its moral independence, and she asked herself with atrocious anxiety: Can I possibly follow them? Can I possibly be like them? Do I have the character?

  Character or not, she would try. She could not stop herself from trying.

  And if she could manage it, if she could manage to swim in their wake—Margaret lay her head back on the sofa and closed her eyes, her happiness swooping back in a rash of light. It came to her, chanted as though a triumphant rhyme, washing her with its purple, the lullaby of possibilities.

  The swallows would speak. The clock would take back its numbers; the balconies would resume the cradling of their lost, cupped lives. The faces of the living would contort to mirror the faces of the dead, the written words would fly like homebound bees to the spoken. The secret meaning of the city would manifest itself, the house numbers alight from the clouds of the mind to fix themselves to the permanent book written underground. The numbers would correspond to the forgotten names, the shadows to the bodies, the palimpsest ache to the threaded ruins.