The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  She had tempted and received a miracle, and now she was paying a certain kind of price—the price of living with its fickle power. Bringing a god down to earth, one must always pay a similar price.

  •

  So Margaret saw that it would be necessary after all to return to the territory of the unequivocally real, at least for a while. There had to be some extra element of real-world information with which she could moor the ghost. In the spirit of finding that information, she sent five e-mails to the Centrum Judaicum in the center of the city. They would have information about Jewish families who committed suicide during the war; they must know something real about the Strausses. But the archivists were not answering her queries, and Margaret grew distraught. She could not wait. She would go to the archive in Mitte herself.

  Frau Jablonski from the archive greeted Margaret after Margaret came sweating through the metal detectors of security. The young woman was small, spoke with an effervescent flourish. She led Margaret up a dark staircase and into a little office that at first appeared to be a closet.

  “I’m not sure what I can tell you,” she said. “You’ve written us six e-mails over the last three days, but you should know that there’s no information about a case like this. Suicides of this type were very common. Hundreds of Jewish families in Berlin committed suicide at exactly that time. What do you want us to tell you?”

  Margaret was distracted. “I want photos, or to know what jobs they might have had, whether there was any family that survived, what year they married, if either had any previous marriages, names of siblings, what became of their belongings, whether they had any children other than those who died with them, what synagogue they attended,” Margaret said, all in rush.

  “Yes, I understand. But none of those questions can be answered—by this archive at least, with the exception, theoretically, of finding the surviving family. But the unfortunate coincidence here is that both the name Strauss and, let me see your e-mail”—she turned to the computer—“yes, and Regina Strauss’s maiden name, Herzberg, are very common. There are thousands with those names.”

  Margaret’s eyes flashed back and forth and all around the room, desperate.

  The woman watched her. Margaret caught her doing it. But the woman was kind to her. She said, as though not caring whether Margaret was insane or not: “There is something I can help you with. I can tell you where they are likely buried.”

  Margaret shot up from her chair.

  “Go up to the Jewish Cemetery at Weissensee, and there, in Field D, you’ll find the graves of Jews who committed suicide in Berlin to escape deportation. There are over a thousand in that cemetery alone.”

  “Oh!” said Margaret. “Oh, thank you!” She got out her notebook and wrote in large black letters, Weissensee Friedhof, Feld D.

  “Why are you so interested in this family in particular?” asked the archivist, looking at her.

  “Oh,” Margaret said. Her cheeks were hot, her mouth dry and hungry. “Who can answer such a question.” She fled toward the door. “Thank you, thank you very much.”

  Out on the street, it started to rain. The air smelled of earth and damp granite. Forgetting her bike in her excitement, Margaret ran through the rain down the bottleneck sidewalk to Hackescher Markt. She got onto the Number 4 tram just as the doors closed. The yellow centipede went up the Greifswalder Strasse, passed through Prenzlauer Berg. She cursed herself for not having thought to buy flowers—if she were visiting a grave, she should have bought flowers!

  On the tram the passengers were dripping with rainwater, and the air soon became humid. The tram climbed onto higher and higher ground, emerged in Weissensee, where the city’s density unfurled and dissolved. The sun reappeared, and the part of East Berlin that is still so much as it was before the change—it spread its arms.

  The tram stopped in the new sun, and someone stood to get off—a young woman. Margaret could only see her from behind, but something about her figure caught Margaret’s eye. The girl was tall, with a narrow back and long hair—the curl of it in the humid weather—Margaret recognized the hair, just as she knew the gait, just as she knew the posture: the way the young woman held one shoulder higher to keep the handles of her bag hooked onto it. It was just like Margaret. Margaret had a sensation of red curtains closing around her head, a sense of light passing through prisms; she felt hopeless and warm at once—the sensation of a story coming to an end, a movie finishing, and she stood up and tried to follow the girl. She wanted to see her face.

  But she had recognized her too late. The girl was off the tram and Margaret was still on it as the doors closed. Margaret went all the way to the back of the car and looked out the rear window, and now she could see the girl raise her face into the sun, seeming to float as the tram moved away from her. It was Margaret’s face.

  Margaret got off the tram in Weissensee and turned into a side street. Her head was still dazed—she was empty and fresh as though she had slept.

  Then she had luck: she spied a little flower shop on her way to the cemetery. One of the Vietnamese establishments that only has a couple of bouquets, the rest of the vases empty but for a few bundles of artificial flowers. Margaret found a little potted rosebush. It cost almost nothing. She felt so light; a happiness like sugar-water bubbled in her throat. The pink nubs were small and perfect enough to be mistaken for the flowers painted on china, and she convinced herself that the children of the Family Strauss would be pleased.

  Out here in Weissensee, the apartment houses’ flesh was old, almost grey. These buildings were set far back from the street, and the gardens in front had high brick walls and arched iron gates. In some places the skin of the flesh seemed to have become dry and fallen away, and the red muscle beneath was exposed, what might have once been the redbrick of inner walls, and it was a ruinous beauty. Margaret made her way to the cemetery over the cobblestones, hurrying along with the potted rosebush. At the end of the road the buildings stopped, there was an open bramble. The blond, healthy skin of the cemetery’s entrance rose over the near horizon. Margaret could hear birds calling, water gurgling in the fountain of a hidden garden. The street was deserted. Margaret drew closer. She noticed the absence of the usual guard for Jewish institutions, and the place seemed enchanted.

  She walked through the arch and into the cemetery.

  First came the feeling of sudden darkness, not as when the sun is behind a cloud but rather as when it goes flat behind the discus of the moon, and the birds grow dull. The trees grew up higher than the eye could see, in a heavy halo. The impression was of islands of bone, as in a great blond-brown archipelago rising out of the sea. The aisles between these tumbledown graves crept away into the haze, around bends toward a missing horizon, and the darkness of shadowless moss seemed to grow seamlessly into the darkness of decrepit mausoleums.

  Margaret moved uncertainly. She saw a sign: Field A. She followed the path, going by graves from the nineteenth century and then, just as soon, graves from only the year before. She curved with the high wall around the inside edge of the cemetery, circling.

  At first she thought she was alone in the entire place, but when she passed Field C she heard a regular scraping sound. Shovels and plastic buckets were left askew on the ground. She looked down the long aisle. In the distance, two bright specks twinkled: old women. They were raking gravel.

  She came up on Field D, and here the graves were not marked in Hebrew but in German. Margaret began to read the names on the gravestones. In the second row there were stones so tightly grasped by the roots of ivy that names could not be made out. She worried that one of these graves might be that of the Family Strauss and she would miss them.

  She walked more slowly. Her only hope was that she would sense the graves if she did not see them. It was in that spirit that she focused on the complex pattern of the cobbles under her feet.

  She passed into the fourth row, and there it began: gravestones very small and flat, on each nothing more than a lone famil
y name and an endless repetition of the same years of death: 1943, 1944, 1945. Ivy drew back and exposed names: Stein, Schwarz, Moses, Rosenberg, Benjamin—and on and on, the suicides went.

  Under a tall elm, toward the back wall of the cemetery, Margaret pushed back a creeper of heavy ivy. With no warning at all, there they were.

  On one side lay Franz, in the middle a single grave with the names of the three little girls, Rahel, Gerda, and Beate, and on the other side Regina. All three short mounds were covered in ivy, puffed and waxy, like feather beds fluffed and tucked at the edges. As soon as Margaret rustled the ivy with her hands, she could see hundreds of red dots—the ivy was rich with bright, red berries.

  At this sight, a quotation wove in her mind: They seemed like sleeping children, struck by fever, for their bodies, arms, and faces were covered in red spots. A faint spasm ran through Margaret. This is what had been written by a journalist, but not about these children. That was about the Goebbels children.

  Margaret sat down heavily on the ground. She felt an enormous fatigue.

  The silence of their absent breath. She shifted on the hard ground.

  She looked at Regina Strauss’s grave and opened her mouth. She wanted to say something. She was not sure how her voice would sound in the open air. She spoke haltingly. “I wanted to find you,” she said aloud. “I wanted to ask you what to do.”

  She took out a handkerchief and rubbed her nose. She looked off down the long aisle. She stood up. She took the rosebush and nestled it into the ivy near the head of the girls’ grave, just under a gnarled little elm. The red lips of the roses brimmed into view, the ivy forming a high collar around the flowers.

  Margaret’s temples throbbed, and her back ached. She thought: Now I should go. But then she looked at the little rose plant and thought that it would not survive. Wouldn’t it be better if she could plant it in the ground? So she reached into the ivy again and looked for a place to dig with her nails. But the roots of the ivy had spread into all parts of the soil, and the earth was as tight as a trampoline. She straightened up and made as if to leave again, but as she walked away, she thought of the plant dying.

  She heard a repeated sound, slow and rhythmic in the distance. Far off, the two old women were raking gravel, almost at the vanishing point. Margaret squinted her eyes at them. It occurred to her that they would know what to do about the rosebush. She followed the long aisle. As she got nearer, she saw that they were stooped, fat women in housecoats, their cheeks red. Their hair was tied up in handkerchiefs in the old-fashioned, servile style.

  They both stopped raking and looked at Margaret when she neared.

  “Excuse me,” Margaret began. “I’ve brought a little bush with me and I’d like to plant it. There’s so much ivy on the grave though, I don’t know how to get it in,” Margaret said. Her American accent became stronger than usual.

  The women stared at her.

  “What’s that you say?” The one woman looked over to the second old woman for help.

  The other one nodded. “She’s asking us if we know how to plant a flower.”

  “I don’t know,” said the first woman.

  “We don’t know,” said the second.

  “Oh,” said Margaret. There was a long silence.

  “Over there is Frau Schmidt. She’s the one who does the gardening. She’s Frau Schmidt. She does the gardening. Look—there she is.” And the two pointed both at once down another aisle that sloped deep into the bowels of the cemetery. Margaret saw, indeed, another of their number in the distance.

  She went. Even from afar, she could make out that this third woman’s back wasn’t straight, and she had grown crooked. Margaret got closer. Under her quilted coat, the woman wore a formless cotton dress with large daisies printed on it. Her hair was dark and her nose tipped up. Beneath this nose, on her upper lip, a downy black mustache grew.

  “Excuse me, I’m trying to plant a rosebush,” Margaret started, breathlessly, “but I don’t know if I can plant it in the ivy.”

  “What sort of rosebush is it?” said the woman, leaning on a spade.

  “I don’t know. It’s very small.”

  “I mean—is it a groomer?”

  “A groomer?”

  “Yeah, a groomer.”

  “I’m not sure,” Margaret said.

  “Where is it?”

  “I’m sorry, I left it at the grave.”

  “Oh, let’s go see, let’s go see.”

  When they arrived the woman began to cluck.

  “It’s a groomer all right!”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes it is. Oh yes.” And with a violent motion she grabbed ahold of the plastic pot. It had become wet, sitting in the ivy, and it slipped from her hands and fell onto the path at her feet. The plant tumbled out, its soil molded—this began to fall away in clumps. It came to rest with its roots in the air.

  “Oh goodness!” said Frau Schmidt.

  “That’s okay,” Margaret said.

  “I’m awfully sorry. I’ll tell you what. I’ll plant it anyway. We can’t plant such a thing in the ivy. But we’ll plant it next to the grave.” She gestured toward the open space separating the Strauss graves from the neighboring ones.

  “All right,” said Margaret, looking doubtfully at the broken plant. She stood, biting her lower lip and looking at the graves, the plant, and the powdery white daisies on the blue cotton dress of the gardener.

  The woman tilted her head back and looked up at Margaret. Then she picked up the plant and plopped it back into its pot. “I’ll do it when I get to it,” she said. “I won’t be in Field D for a while yet.”

  “All right,” Margaret said. “That sounds good.” Margaret took care to again nestle the pot into the ivy.

  The woman hustled away at high speed, bobbing up and down.

  Margaret turned and walked out of the cemetery. She thought: Better not make any grand gestures again. She felt tired, and foolish. She rubbed her head. I have no place here, she thought. Again she saw the white daisies on the blue dress of the gardener. It represented something to her, something about the broad world with all its salt and pith getting funneled down into the strings that tie a sausage together. At some point, every person must make a pact with futility.

  Her bicycle she had forgotten in town, and the heel of her shoe was coming loose as she walked back to the tram stop. It flapped against the cobblestones, flip-whack. She walked down the cobblestone road. There were sparrows on the ground by a high chapped-flesh wall, little tan and twig-colored nothings, picking at seeds. Margaret felt her chest hardening with pain.

  The same day, Margaret returned to the Schöneberg archive. She thought, at the very least, she could find out what Herr Strauss had done for a living, or where the family lived before they moved into the apartment on Salzburgerstrasse. Her desire to know more felt like a heavy hunger, a longing for milk and oil, and in any case still desperate.

  The archivist with her dancer’s body silently took down two heavy address directories from 1939 and 1941. Each listed address and occupation of Berlin residents by name, and together they peered at the Gothic script. There were twenty-three Franz Strausses listed in Berlin in 1939, and sixteen in 1941. None of them resided at Salzburgerstrasse 8. Just to be sure, Margaret checked the 1943 directory as well. Nothing.

  As Margaret prepared to leave, her heart sinking, she said to the archivist, “The name is so typically German. It hardly seems like a Jewish name at all.” The archivist, like most educated Germans scrupulously careful when it came to what sounded and looked Jewish, gave Margaret a glance of feigned incomprehension. After a brief silence, however, she chanced an observation: “It isn’t really a Jewish name. What did you say the full name was?”

  “Franz Strauss.”

  “Just listed as Franz? No second given name?”

  “None.”

  “Well then, he most probably wasn’t Jewish.”

  Margaret caught her breath. Her face became hot. She s
aw what the archivist meant. The police would have recorded him, according to Nazi law, as Franz “Israel” if he were Jewish, just as his wife was listed as Regina “Sara.” The family must have been mixed.

  Margaret knew she should not be, knew it was nothing more than a detail, but still, she was crushed. When she got home, she looked at her photocopy of the police logbook page where the family’s death was registered, and saw confirmation in the margin. A longhand note, so baroque as to be almost illegible, which she had not before even bothered to decipher, read: “Bericht an Stapo mit dem Hinweis, dass Nachlaß dem A.G. Schb. übergeben wurde, weil der Haushaltungsvorstand Arier war.” So it was even specially noted that the head of house was “Aryan.” Margaret had been blind.

  In light of this new information, it was unclear why the family would have had to die. She had checked already: mixed couples were not rounded up with the others, not in Berlin. Officially, the decision at the Wannsee Conference was to wait until after the war before considering the eventual extermination of the mixed and the mixed-married, a dangerous position for the Strausses, but not deadly, not in 1943.

  How was Margaret to understand their decision?

  They could have saved the children, she thought. It went through her mind again and again. Wasn’t there anywhere they could have sent the children? It was common, she had found in her reading, for the children of mixed families to be sent to non-Jewish relatives, where they were passed off as war orphans, of whom there were in any case so many, particularly after the bombings of cities began.