The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  Was it the foreign smells that had made her so in love? Or was it being in love that had made her adore the scent of French smoke and German preening?

  His face—drove her mad. The high forehead and skin dark and freckled, the bright, bright eyes the color of lake water, ringed with black lashes, the red-grey cheeks—his face looked like Hölderlin’s, but attached to the body of a man ready to die. One shoulder was higher than the other and this gave him a romantic gait; his legs were long and powerful, his chin had begun to double. The impression was of a man who had an old, sad story to tell. That was the first point. Not everyone looked to Margaret as if he represented a history of love and death. Secondly, whatever it was he represented was a cryptogram, a grotto shrine dedicated to a religion she did not understand but in which she yearned to believe. When he moved toward her in a crowd, and she saw his head disappearing and reappearing as he came closer to her, it was the ultimate kind of perception—slowed and stately and musical—as if she were the groom standing at the front of a church watching the approach of his bride, his woman of destiny, eyes filling with tears. This kind of perception happens infrequently, but if at all, then usually at the cinema. If it happens outside the cinema, then it is remembered forever. There is beauty everywhere at such times, you could cry when it comes, and the world around you resonates with one whining and perfect harmonic. Nothing can compete with so beautiful a feeling, and Margaret’s addiction followed naturally.

  One mild, sweet summer evening in 2000, Amadeus called Margaret and suggested that they go to the outdoor cinema in the Volkspark Friedrichshain. It was showing a Russian film. Amadeus was brusque with her. He did not mention outright that his wife was gone to visit her sister on Lake Constance, and so Margaret was uncertain. It was rare that he was willing to go to a public place with her in his own neighborhood.

  “But are you sure? Can we really meet there?”

  “I just told you, shnooky. I wouldn’t have suggested it if we couldn’t.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Don’t think.”

  “Aren’t you worried that—”

  “I’m worried about nothing.” He cut her off. “There have been vacations taken by certain people. There. Does that make you happy?”

  “Vacations?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great!” Margaret said, as she understood. She began to laugh, overjoyed.

  She knew how she was supposed to feel, as the other woman. She was meant to feel conniving, bitter, fiercely competitive. And sometimes, it was true, she did feel that way. But most of the time, her role as the other woman was quite different than anything she might have projected before it all began. She saw herself as completely helpless, so helpless, in fact, that her womanly status was accentuated and forced out like a pink flower blooming too early, with sadness and tragedy. She felt desperately, fatefully female, like a Titian Leda raped by the swan. And sometimes she knew it. Sometimes she would suspect, in very clear terms, that Amadeus’s marriage was the single most potent source of her happiness, for it was the strong arm that took all power out of her hands. This powerlessness lent her body femininity, her love fatality.

  There are two kinds of passionate love. The first is when lovers collapse into each other. Two identities flow together. Oh, there are issues of autonomy to be resolved for a while. But later, after everything finds its balance, the slightest glance from the other is an encouragement, an enhancement of self, and both lovers become stronger than they would have been alone.

  But this is not what Margaret knew. She knew the other kind.

  In the second instance, one lover collapses under the other. The crusher sucks a bit of strength from every moment in power, and the crushed one becomes crazy with desire and thirst after lost ego. While this latter type is clearly a perversion and a misfortune, it is also somehow—can you understand this?—a pleasure for the one who is crushed. There is something about this crushed passion that suspends reality, and elevates a trance in its place. It brings the crushed one into contact with a divinity—and the bliss, the Rausch, comes in awesome spikes.

  The peaks of these spikes were dear to Margaret, and they were pushed even higher by other aspects of their affair. Amadeus never spent any time with Margaret that wasn’t charged with the fullest secrecy and co-conspiracy. There were no sporty walks in the woods, no vacations to peaceful, pressure-releasing locales, only the thunder of city life with its heavy, woolen veil of architecture, its gin tonics and endless subway rides under the fluorescent lights. And at the beginning of the night neither of them ever knew whether they would end up in the same bed—never once—whether the game would yield happiness, and so every single evening was full of suspense—an elaborate game of chess in which his heart was his king—she was trying to knock it over, and her intelligence was her queen that she was using tactically, and pawns they were, the glasses of wine that he bought her and watched her drink, making soft contact with her knees. And when it was her king—which was the soft access to the place between her legs—that was eventually knocked down, for that was what he wanted and the point at which he considered himself the victor, she never minded. That was the release, the mysterious prize. Could this subway ticket, bought for a couple of deutsche marks in a sleeve of inebriation, longing, and electricity, be the ticket to bliss?

  While she waited for Amadeus the evening of the Russian film, she read Gogol on the platform. But even after all the years of their affair, she was only pretending to read—in part because she would not have missed those first glimpses of him for the world, and in part because her heart still beat too hard. There had been times in the past when she had deliberately made herself late in order to be sure that he, instead of she, would be the one to stand forlorn and searching on the platform, but she had found that although this was a kind of victory, she had been the one to lose. Of course it was so. When she was late, the anticipation of meeting him was soured by worries that he would have already left, or that he would be offended by her extreme tardiness (she had to be very late in order to be later than he was), and most of all, she missed those sweet moments of joy when she first picked him out, as he neared her in the crowd.

  Amadeus was not the kind to greet her with more than a pat on the head, a tousle of the hair. He gave her a wink and put his finger under her chin, not as if he would kiss her, but to bring her chin up.

  That night they took the streetcar up the hill along Greifswalderstrasse. They sat in the overgrown park, in the Communist-era amphitheater with the giant screen. It was not dark yet, but previews were already coming on. Amadeus got up right away after they sat, having said very little to Margaret since he first met her, and went to the concession kiosk. When he came back he handed her a Czech beer and put something in a gold wrapper on her lap—an ice cream bar. He smiled at her and pulled her earlobe, whistling to himself as he opened his beer. He did not ask her whether she wanted a beer or an ice cream bar, nor had he asked her what kind she would like—almond or vanilla, Czech or German. Indeed, he never asked her such things. He had no idea what she liked. But he knew what he liked, and he knew what he wanted for her, and he knew he was paying. And in point of fact, Margaret looked up at him gratefully when she was presented with these gifts. She thought he was like the tomcat that leaves dead birds on the doorstep.

  She was beautiful when she was near him. When she went to meet him she wore the perfume that smelled of freesia blossoms.

  Margaret found it impossible to concentrate on the film that night, as she always found it impossible to concentrate when he was there. All she knew later was that the cinematography had been brown and gold, that the dialogue was slow, and the film almost silent. This was the sort of film they always chose, he always chose.

  Later they found themselves in one of the nearby beer gardens, where the honeysuckle grew up trellises. They talked for a long time about Walter Benjamin. Amadeus did most of the talking, since Margaret didn’t dare say much in German on a topic th
at meant so much to her. Going around in life using German, which Margaret had learned only a few years before, was like walking around in high heels—although it drove up the aesthetic rush of going out on the town, it was dreadfully uncomfortable after a while, and there were certain places you couldn’t go.

  Later the conversation shifted to university gossip, and Amadeus said something Margaret didn’t like. He said that really, but for the fact that they were so stupid and he wouldn’t want them, the girls at the uni were wild about him, looked at him with doe eyes, he could have any one of the young things.

  Margaret went silent. Amadeus didn’t notice. He kept talking.

  “What exactly does your marriage mean to you?” Margaret finally broke out. “Anything at all? Do you hate her? Do you hate Asja?” She spoke the name to hurt him. Amadeus didn’t like Margaret to use his wife’s name. Never had he used it himself in her presence, referring to his wife only as “die Mitbewohnerin” (“the roommate”) or simply: “other people.” If it hadn’t been for a bit of detective work, looking at the last name on the mailbox at their apartment and then a series of Internet searches, Margaret might never have found out Asja’s name at all. So Amadeus winced at the question.

  “My God.” He wiped his head. “How did we get on this topic?”

  “You’re thinking of getting yourself a mistress at the university, aren’t you?”

  “Gretchen (he called her that sometimes—always, always, Amadeus preferred the diminutive of any name), don’t be silly. You know that’s the last thing I want. Your demands are difficult enough, I’m halfway dead trying to keep up with you. Another woman would be suicide.”

  “Why do you do this to me? It’s been more than two years now. I know you love me, no matter what you say.” Unexpectedly, for all her happiness, Margaret began to cry. “Why do you do this?”

  “Come on, don’t cry. I do it because I can.”

  The tip of Margaret’s nose turned to ice. The summer evening had grown cool, and she had only her cotton sweater. “Because you can?”

  “It doesn’t hurt Asja, and it doesn’t hurt you. When you get tired of me you’ll grow up and get married yourself. I’m not doing anyone any harm. It’s just a matter of good management. Keep little wife number one happy. Keep little unofficial wife number two from getting upset. That’s all. Settle down now, unofficial wife of mine.”

  “I’m going to leave you.”

  At this, Amadeus was ruffled. He shrugged his shoulders, but she could tell he was hurt. “But you’ll always come back, we can’t stay away from each other.” He gave her a pained and serious look.

  “No, I’ll never come back,” Margaret said, her voice thick.

  “You’re vicious. How you women torture me. And you Americans are the most terrible. You learn it from the oil barons. You’re warmongers.”

  “Don’t talk to me.” Margaret said. Amadeus was quiet. Margaret spoke again: “I’ll leave you forever someday. And when I do, it will be terrible. Terrible things will happen.”

  “But not now,” and he threw a half a breadstick into her hair, which was curly and could catch things, and then reached to get it, as if he were drawing it out of her ear. “There now, look at that, you’ve got breadsticks in your ears. Why do you store your breadsticks there?”

  He winked at her and laughed uncertainly, catching her eye. At last, Margaret smiled.

  On Amadeus’s birthday, he threw a party. He invited Margaret, typical of his munificence when it came to sharing his life with both his mistress and his wife.

  The day of the party came and Margaret’s heart scratched at her throat from the early morning. There was something that had risen in her like an enchanted beanstalk overnight, with a great, muscular hydraulic push out from the ground. It was a burning jealousy. She thought of Amadeus’s wife, Asja—nowadays she knew a thing or two about her. The woman was also an academic. Her name had a von and her West German family had a large house on Lake Constance. Although Margaret sometimes thought she was as much in love with the idea of Asja as she was in love with the idea of Amadeus, she was not ready to cede him to her; she had been convinced for some time now that it was she, Margaret, that he loved, not his wife. So she planned her day carefully. First, she would go to the shops and buy herself a new dress—so that she would stun all who saw her. She repeated several times to herself, “She shall not look better than I.” Then, she would go and have a free makeover at the French department store where they were having a promotion, and then she would go up to Alexanderplatz and pick out a gift for Amadeus at the electronics store there, and finally she would stop by a bar and get herself a stiff drink to make the arrival easier.

  This was the breed of desperation that flourished throughout the affair.

  Margaret did go to the shops, but it took her a very long time to make up her mind about a dress, and she fell behind on time. In the end, she chose a white canvas one that grazed her self-consciously small waist, clutching close around her self-consciously well-shaped breasts. It closed with a red belt. She went home to change into it, and in the end had to race to Alexanderplatz, where once again the shopping took longer than expected. She ended up going down a side street to a junk shop, where she picked out an antique radio in a teak case. The radio was very heavy, and she worried that its grime would get on her white dress, so she carefully wrapped it in her trench coat, and became very cold as she lugged it uphill, north into Prenzlauer Berg. In those days the trip from Alexanderplatz into Prenzlauer Berg was still through unreconstructed factory buildings abandoned like silos, and walking up the empty streets, with their slopes and brown cobblestones, she was alone. She listened to the sound of swallows. She passed leafy residences and the brick water tower that rises into view from behind a gentle hill, and she realized that with the heavy radio in her arms, she could hardly go into a bar or rather, if she did, she would attract too much attention.

  So instead, her stomach rising into a collection of hasty insects, she stopped just before she got to Amadeus’s fine apartment on the Winsstrasse at a Döner kiosk, where she bought a little flask of vodka from a smiling Turk. He watched her as she drank. Margaret felt very conscious of being a girl in a white form-hugging dress. She quickly finished almost the entire little bottle, right there on the street. When asked, she made up a story: she told the Turk that she was about to see her beloved whom she hadn’t seen in many years; she was frightened of what he would think of her after all the time passed. He laughed. He offered her another bottle for free. She accepted, and by the time she arrived at the apartment on Winsstrasse she was quite beyond self-awareness in the conventional sense. In particular, she didn’t notice the time—in her rush, she had been too quick, and when Asja opened the door, Margaret found she was the only guest—it was just man and wife at home.

  With her dress and her fresh face, Margaret had been successful. She was tall, Grecian-formed. Asja was tiny beside her, blouse old-fashioned; and she wore no bra beneath it. Her breasts were visibly sunken. So Margaret, young, muscled, in her radiant white dress and upturned breasts, had trounced her opponent. But she saw right away that she had beaten her with far too rousing a gesture, as though she had raised a sledgehammer to kill a moth.

  Asja, standing indifferently before her, or perhaps with only a slightly sniffy dislike, had not even bothered to put makeup on her face, and her clothes were quiet, aged, poetic, asexual. Asja managed to have more class and style than Margaret would ever have.

  That was how Margaret saw it. Her yearning for Amadeus had never been divorced from her desire to live like Asja, to be just as Asja was.

  The two of them looked at each other, and then all at once began to fuss, in sugar-sweet voices, over the placement of the dirty radio, an item Asja eyed for a long moment once it was put down in the bedroom.

  The apartment had very high ceilings, shining parquet floors that buckled ever so slightly. These Amadeus had stripped and refinished himself. They gave off a golden glow now. The
moldings around the ceilings were broad and detailed, the balconies large, and filled with hyacinths, climbing roses, dill and basil. Amadeus’s study, where the party was to be held, had a large fireplace with a great Parisian mirror above it, bookshelves lining one wall, and a thick white carpet in the center of the room into which the feet sank with gratitude.

  The kitchen was down a long corridor all the way at the back of the flat. This is where Amadeus was, when Asja ushered Margaret in. She said he was putting together the salad—he knew how to make a good vinaigrette. Margaret had never known that Amadeus knew how to make a good vinaigrette. She had never seen him cook in all her years as his mistress.

  In Margaret’s drunken state, her embarrassment was both aggravated and mitigated, depending on how you considered it. Drunkenness only allows for one emotion at a time. The emotional thrust of the drunken mind has the wattage of the sun whose light burns out all other stars. So Margaret was sunk deep inside her excruciation. On the other hand, drunkenness also softens and blurs, so she found this excruciation much easier to tolerate than she might have.

  Amadeus came in to see her in the study in the blank instant after Asja left for the kitchen. If he had not been so big, and Asja so small, Margaret would have entertained the possibility that they were the same person, exchanging masks, to fool her. She tried mightily to hide her intoxication. Amadeus was in high spirits. He pretended she was not his mistress of course, saying in casual, avuncular tones, that she looked “like a model.” This was colder than any unkind words. But he was quite taken with the radio, his jowls bouncing with a warm smile when she led him to it. He spent a nice amount of time twiddling the dials and pretending he knew how to fix it, as it seemed to be broken in the end, although it made a humming sound and the board lit up when the knob was pushed. After a while, he offered her a drink. He said that so far it was only the red wine that was open.