The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  Margaret’s face was pale. She did not speak. Then she said hoarsely, “But, Doctor, I do think it’s unbearable.”

  “Precisely! You think it’s unbearable, and that is important for your uses of it, and yet it is not unbearable to you, else you wouldn’t think of it.”

  The doctor waited for Margaret to reply, but Margaret was silent, twisting in her chair. She coughed painfully.

  “You’re not well, are you,” the doctor said.

  “I feel sick.”

  “I think you’ve gone a bit off. But this is natural. The remnants of an ethical system are holding you back from adopting your notion of beauty, corrupt as it is. And a sense of beauty, my pet, to each his own, is the weir that staunches the flow of madness.”

  Margaret was silent. She pulled fitfully at the pills on her violet sweater.

  The doctor spoke again. “When you first came here, I thought that moving your own life into the space directly in front of your eyes would just be a matter of brightening up your mind. I did not realize to what degree you’ve allowed other people’s lives to hijack your own.”

  “But, Doctor, I’ve been trying to tell you that all along. I said it before. I’d like a reversal. I don’t want—whatever this is—I don’t want to do it any longer. Whatever you began in me, I don’t want to continue.” Margaret raised her voice further. “And I’m not who you think I am. You call me Täubner every single time, but all along I’ve been someone else.” She began to rummage in her bag. “Look, here is my passport”—and Margaret took it out and pushed it across the desk. “Get your magnifying glass and read it,” she cried. “Read it! Taub!”

  The woman made no move. Her shoulders were slack and her hands still. The passport dropped heavily on the table. “Take your passport? Idiot child!” she whispered. “If only I could get my hands on that jezebel of a mother you have. You’re not entirely a Täubner, as we know well.”

  “What?” Margaret looked at the doctor.

  “And I did not show you the film because I thought you were like the youth at the university, nor to make you feel yourself any sort of cannibal. On the contrary, my dear, my reasons were much more prosaic. I knew you had already seen it. I thought it would remind you of our common past.”

  “Our common past?”

  “Yes.”

  Margaret sat down quickly. She looked at the doctor. She began to feel as though she really would be sick after all. Her mouth watered and her eyes too, then her ears tingled and the tips of her fingers went to sleep and her stomach lifted. She was embarrassed, her hair was cold with sweat.

  She was forced to run out of the room, but she only made it into the hall, where an extravagant wave of weakness overcame her.

  “Abandon reading!” the doctor yelled. “Go directly to the source. Go and meet the killers! See if they still call to you, when you see them in their stinking flesh!” The doctor’s voice was getting hoarse, “And if you can find a way to join the victims without gassing yourself, then go to them too! Go as close as you can!”

  Margaret was already in the WC, hanging her head. After a few moments, the nurse receptionist appeared at the open door behind her. She did not enter. She looked at Margaret with wide eyes.

  Walking through the waiting room, Margaret was still queasy. It was the heat of the place, she decided. It was the heat of the place that had made her sick.

  Stepping out into the cold city, she breathed the pricking air, and her nausea abated.

  Margaret did not want to think about the doctor’s suggestion of a “common past.” Indeed, she pushed the Taub-Täubner opposition out of her mind entirely.

  What resounded in her beseechingly, however, in the hours after she got home, was the idea that she had no right to her interest. She was a cannibal licking the bones of the past clean of flesh—she told herself this, as if it had not been the doctor’s idea, but her own.

  TWENTY-FOUR • The Children of Grimm

  Margaret still smarted from the blow of the doctor’s lurid insinuations the next day. But it cannot be said that the following catastrophe was in any way related to her grief.

  She was giving a very early morning tour of the city’s main attractions. Not quick to introduce himself, like a sly, lone wolf, running along behind and beside her, was a dedicated type: a young German academic. This was odd for two reasons. The first was that Germans almost never came along on the English-language tours. The second was that this German man knew a great deal more about German history than Margaret did. He was writing a dissertation on nineteenth-century Italian battle paintings: “panoramics,” he told her. But walking around Berlin, he slowly exposed the many years of his youth dedicated to German military history, and this included everything to do with both the old Prussian capital and the Third Reich. He had a wide, calf-like face, listened to her with an earnest, energetic ear. He was very tall, with a pronounced version of what some people call O-legs, over which he wore high-waisted black jeans. A little kepi from the First World War sat on his head. “Please call me Philipp,” he said to her, in excessively enunciated English.

  Margaret saw quite soon that this man was one of the perennially shut-out of this world, who are so often the most knowledgeable and the most disciplined, but look unfairly ridiculous when they go out in society because they do not know anything about matters of the heart.

  She moved the group down that street in central Berlin that was once called Hermann-Göring-Strasse. She felt ill at ease and exposed. The visit to the doctor had left Margaret’s self-esteem in ruins, and now here was this officious man—his face thrumming like a pocket calculator, checking and rechecking the accuracy of her tour.

  So today Margaret did not go into any trance at all and even made an effort not to lie.

  They came to the large raked-earth building site, where the new Holocaust memorial was under construction.

  The monument was almost finished now, and only a few of the concrete slabs had yet to be installed, mostly down at the southern end. The rest, in their thousands, heaved up into the morning light.

  Margaret frowned, looking backward into the light from the east. The monument was equal parts Black Forest and English garden maze, cast in shades of ash, slate, and metallic. The highest blocks rose up and caught the light and glowed white like chimneys. Margaret, squinting, caught sight of a little cat sitting on top of one of the concrete monoliths, crouching in wait. But she looked again and it seemed as if it were only the white morning sun cresting a slab. She moved along the flank; the group followed. They came abreast of each long aisle, trapezoids appeared, flattened, and then disappeared as the perspective changed, each long, empty aisle a reminder of emptiness to come. It made for a visual addiction, and Margaret could hardly tear her gaze away.

  She directed the group to the observation platform, gave them ten minutes to themselves, and they clambered up, obedient. Margaret stayed below. She walked down the side of the memorial, glancing absently down its aisles, as in the stacks of an outsize library.

  Unexpectedly, she detected movement from inside the site. Margaret looked. It was two small children. They walked hand in hand, parallel to Margaret, but far away from her along one of the distant aisles, progressing in small but determined children’s steps toward the end of the site to the south, appearing and disappearing as they went behind the blocks and reemerged again, two small people, alone in a labyrinth of towering blocks—a vast warehouse of darkness and light.

  In their slow progression, they were dropping behind them a stream of white—it was maybe snow, maybe Styrofoam, maybe the Moscow pollen of poplar trees—Margaret couldn’t guess. In any case, the cottony white blanketed the ground behind them as they walked and marked their narrow path. The figures, so brave and so young in their earnest trajectory, were in shadow, disappearing and reappearing behind the pillars.

  At first they walked slowly. Then, still hand in hand, they began to run, faster and faster. Soon they lost hold of each other’s hands, and in the
ir desperation ran increasingly apart from each other, losing each other in the maze. Margaret, trying to keep up a view, ran along the side, her shoelace untied and her wet pant cuffs flapping. Now it was the taller child coming closer to her as the smaller one got farther away. Margaret could hear—a small, frail voice. As the child neared she could see its hair—it was grey. The child was falling and stumbling now on the rough earth; the other one vanished. And then Margaret could see—almost, at least, for her view was partly obstructed by one of the stone pillars—as the larger child fell into one of the empty holes.

  Margaret cut in to the memorial and ran to the empty grave.

  She looked down inside it. The child was not there, and not at the next, and not in the next after that. Margaret, breathing heavily, sat down at the foot of one of the blocks beside a yawning, waiting hole.

  She sat several minutes. She could not seem to collect herself.

  She went back out, finally. She almost collided with the German student, Philipp. He took hold of her arm. He touched her with an awkward, formal gesture that was nevertheless far too intimate. It made Margaret queasy. She wrenched her arm away.

  Gathering the customers together, she led them around the corner to the site of Hitler’s bunker. She had gathered her wits somewhat, but still the Communist apartment complex in front of her in flesh form looked almost like chanterelle mushrooms.

  “The first thing you’ll notice here is that there’s nothing to notice,” Margaret began, looking down at the tarmac. “But directly under our feet, Hitler’s bunker is sinking deeper into the earth.”

  Some people took out their digital cameras.

  “Hitler moved into the bunker in the middle of March 1945 and was far from lonely here,” Margaret said. She breathed hard. “The twenty-room bunker was occupied by his dog, Blondi; the puppies she gave birth to during this time; his vegetarian cook; his three female secretaries; six bodyguards; his valet; his girlfriend, Eva Braun, come up from Munich; and ultimately the Family Goebbels as well, with their six children, who were between the ages of four and twelve. It was a rowdy life, down in the bunker, in those final days.

  “Where you see the orange barrier,” Margaret said, turning to gesture behind her at the entrance to the parking lot, “was the center of the bunker.”

  But at her turn, high up behind her, in one of the windows of the chanterelle block of flats, there she was: the hawk-woman, with her heavy brow and clothes of black gabardine. She beamed down at Margaret—sunnier and brighter than ever before—a smile for professional photographers, a rapacious smile, designed to make Margaret cower. And then she was calling to Margaret, loudly and clearly—“Yoo-hoo!”

  Margaret pretended not to hear.

  Margaret turned back to the group before her and her mouth worked automatically. She jabbered on about Hitler’s dental records. At some point she could not help herself and looked back at the hawk-woman in the window again, and she was still there, she with her gleaming water-waves of blond hair, her rich bun. Magda Goebbels was still looking down at her indeed—this woman, who was bird of prey and rich man’s wife rolled into one—with the widest and most welcoming of grins.

  “We simply must meet again!” the hawk-woman called. “I won’t take no for an answer!” She lifted her hands, these hands, which, white like seashells lobbed heavenward, caught Margaret’s instant dazed admiration, and she began to wave enthusiastically with both of them. “Yoo-hoo!” she called again. “Don’t you hear me?”

  Margaret turned her back. She patched together a final few words about the bunker and asked if there were any questions. She lived to regret it. A raised hand. “What happened to the six children?”

  “Which?” Margaret asked, knowing full well.

  “You said there were six children in the bunker.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Well, that’s a sad story, actually.” Margaret looked over her shoulder at the high window again. The cold air was blowing through the lace curtains. The hawk-woman was gone.

  “The children were given poison, apparently by their mother, and all of them died.”

  “Oh.”

  Now Margaret looked north and saw something only a few meters away.

  The rival walking-tour company, Berlin Hikes, had a group of tourists standing not far off. Picking his way around the back of the group, peering now over this shoulder, now over that, was a tall, gangly old man. He yelled: “Ich bin der Prell! Ich war dabei!” The old bodyguard, Arthur Prell.

  “Let’s continue, shall we?” Margaret asked. She felt a wind pick up the back of her coat and move up her spine. And let us admit that within Margaret now, a powerful hatred was growing—a hatred for that spry old man. She despised his saucy, challenging way, his horsey face, his reeking polyester suits.

  At the end of the tour, Margaret glanced up from her wallet of tour tickets and change. The German student was still standing before her. The man who said his name was Philipp had punched his chest forward, his boyish face, astonishingly, on the verge of tears. He spoke in a low, intense whisper, his syllables clipped and short, straining with injured pride. “Margaret, why do you insist on continuing this charade?” Philipp breathed in and out through his nose, his mouth pinched in self-conscious valiance. He was like a toy soldier.

  Margaret turned her head and looked at him strangely. She smiled, however, with an effort at pacification. “I don’t know what charade you mean. I’m often tired after a tour. I hope you don’t mind—I’ll be going home now.”

  “Margaret. Stop. Just stop.” His voice was artificially deep, and he had switched into German.

  “Yes, I’ll be going,” Margaret replied in English.

  “Margaret. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? Everything is fine. Just go home. It’s time to go home now,” Margaret said, smiling broadly, although by now her heart was pounding.

  “Margaret. It’s possible I was wrong—attacking, the way I did.” Again, he switched into German. “You were right, what you said about it afterward. I made an ass of myself. It was not right to attack Amadeus.”

  At the sound of this word, Amadeus, everything changed. Margaret looked at him and would have believed anything at all. Even her hardest certainty disbanded into foam. “From where—how do you know that name?” she asked. Now it was Margaret who switched into German.

  “Which name?”

  “Which name?” she repeated, aghast. “Amadeus!” she whispered.

  “Oh, be quiet!” Philipp said. “Are you trying to humiliate me?” His voice was peevish, precisely staccato.

  Margaret looked harder. It was true that he had been showing an unnatural familiarity toward her throughout the tour. Margaret looked directly into his face. Do I know this man? She looked him up and down, regarding his small, glittering eyes, his button-down shirt, his black, high-waisted jeans. Philipp remained before her with his eyes cast down, his brows drawn together, his nostrils flaring with pouting rage. Finally Margaret glanced down at his shoes, which were very stylish, of dark green alligator skin with Cuban heels. She looked at them. Her heart sank slowly. These shoes—she recognized. She had chosen them for him herself.

  TWENTY-FIVE •

  A Lesson for Hussies Everywhere

  She looked at the shoes. Her eyes made haste from the shoes, over the belt, along the chest, and back to Philipp’s face. Now she saw his tight lips. This was Philipp, her Philipp. If she was not very much mistaken, this man had once loved her.

  He had loved her and she had scorned him. Instead of loving him in return, she only played at a life with him, and she felt a perspiration of shame, looking at him now. She had eaten his dinners and borrowed his books, meeting Amadeus all the while. Philipp, who tucked his pajama shirt into his pajama pants at the same angle every night; Philipp, who every day waited to eat his morning egg until he had eaten his morning slice of black bread, because otherwise he might get a protein shock; Philipp,
who as a man did everything exactly as he had been taught to do it as a boy—she had never loved him. Although she spent far more time with Philipp than she did with Amadeus up in Prenzlauer Berg, she was so entirely swept up in the chaos and power and irregularity of Amadeus that she never noticed her duplicity. Philipp was something that happened to happen to the shell of her, the unfortunate colonization of an underdeveloped nation.

  Even now, looking at Philipp, what she remembered most was her escaping mind, how every minute of sitting near him or listening to his breath, she had dreamt of Amadeus. Even after so long, Amadeus was the siren song. A trance of memory overtook Margaret, as she hunched over her bicycle on the way home, the tall man running after her, his kepi from the First World War fallen into the road, and it was not of Philipp she dreamt, but a memory of the other man, of the delirium.

  She could see the arching station of Alexanderplatz. She could see herself flying to meet Amadeus there.

  From the station they would go to dinner, or out to a velvet bar; the night would drip, time would slow. The first glimpses of Amadeus, walking toward her on the station platform, were as beautiful later as they were the first day. It was these meetings in public places that were somehow the core of her happiness, happiness unbearably sweet.

  Amadeus was always late, and it was always clear by his wet hair and soft cheeks that he had only just showered and shaved. He wore a clean shirt, usually pale—light blue or peach, with an embroidered black insignia, newly ironed. Over the fresh shirt he would wear a dark and dusty suit. The suits were ancient and worn-in, never once washed, permeated with the scent of Gauloises Rouges. He had always thought beforehand to touch himself at the corners with the products that made such an intoxicating perfume to Margaret. He put Wella hairspray in his hair, Nivea deodorant under his arms, and some sort of aftershave on his cheeks, Margaret wasn’t sure what, but she recognized it when she smelled it infrequently on other men, and she had the same feeling of weakness and submission, just as the advertisements presumably promised.