The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  So she took red wine. Somehow, shortly after, when three or four more guests had arrived, as she was tripping gaily down the long corridor to the kitchen with the wineglass, she managed to spill it all down her white dress, in a long vertical stain the color of a pig’s kidney.

  She went back into the kitchen, where Asja was working on the last of the dinner preparations. Asja said to Margaret, in a voice that Margaret would never forget, “Oh, you’ve spilled your wine.”

  They looked at each other. Margaret wanted to laugh at the clarity. It seemed so keen, the rightness of her red humiliation—the scarlet, organ-shaped stain marking her brand-new dress, the obvious, quiet pride and womanly satisfaction of her hostess. But Margaret too felt satisfaction, though it only lasted a short while—not the pleasure of the masochist, not in this case at least, but rather of the eager gamester, who sees that the gauntlet, thrown down, has been registered, the challenge accepted. The show will go on. Nothing has been canceled, far from it. Asja said in the same flat, slow voice: “You must use salt, otherwise the stain will be permanent.” And she handed Margaret, with a slow hand, a box of sea salt.

  From then on, Margaret lost all control. She treated the stain on her dress with almost the entire box of salt, most of it ending up on the floor of Asja and Amadeus’s bathroom, the little pointillist crystals bouncing merrily away. Margaret began to cry then, drunkenly, with sarcastic self-pity, feeling that her eyes were crossing, or the room was moving up and away, or her sinuses were imploding. She cried easily and without strain or shame, like an actress. She cleaned herself up and headed back toward the study, noticing on the way a handmade calendar with a snapshot of Amadeus in his youth on the month of July. This she tried to rip off for herself and put in her handbag when no one was looking, but found she couldn’t detach it from the construction paper without tearing the photograph, so she left it with just the corner pulled loose. She wept to herself: You’ve just pulled the corner loose, he’ll never come free from her handmade calendar.

  By midnight she had to be sent home; she was crying openly by then, looking like a little girl, her streaming hair framing her face in tenebrous curtains. She told no one why she was crying, but everyone looked at her quizzically, then down into their wineglasses, then back at one another, smiles about their own conversations reemerging already on their lips. But Amadeus reached through the door and squeezed her hand as she was leaving. She left the cold thing for a moment in his hot grip—soft and motionless.

  It was after that night that Margaret began to go out with another man: the upstanding Philipp. Chivalrous Philipp, who, when he learned of her affair with Amadeus (his love for Margaret having grown obtrusive; he broke into her e-mail account one starry night when she did not come to him), surprised everyone by going up to Prenzlauer Berg to find Amadeus. When Philipp found him, he beat him. He raised his limp fists and punched him and kicked him several times with his green crocodile boots, until Amadeus had taken to the floor, panting, his arms over his head in a theatrical pose, frightened out of his wits but not actually hurt. For that, Philipp was too much man of his milieu. Afterward, Margaret looked at Philipp and he looked like a gargoyle. From then on she would not meet him, and there were no more breakfasts of black bread and eggs, and Margaret’s attachment to Amadeus took on a renewed desperation.

  As for Amadeus—troublesome triangulations with women were the stuff of his entire life. So when Philipp beat him, he howled—but resignedly, as if he had almost expected this to happen all along.

  When Amadeus was a young man in Gymnasium, just cutting his teeth with girls, he had a virulent case of macho pride and a mild case of cerebral palsy. The palsy left him weak, and thus also with the sensation that he was entirely at their mercy—the mercy of women: too much man not to be spared their attentions, not enough man to be sure he could satisfy. His homunculus damaged during birth, the palsy left the right side of his body frail, and he compensated by building up the muscles on the left side, hobbling with the force of a beached swordfish that will regain the water after all. He played soccer until he fell into bed exhausted after the afternoons on the field, and he was very good at the game. He had managed that. But he never got rid of his daily physical intimidation. He was afraid of branches falling from trees when he stood under them in the summer, afraid of icicles falling from eaves in the winter, and after the Wall came down, afraid of foreigners, because their males were so often tough.

  For their birthdays, he gave both Margaret and Asja escape ladders made out of rope with metal hooks at the top to go over windowsills, in case either were ever caught in a fire. He was afraid of fires. And there was a famous story of how once, late at night, on the subway with Asja, he abandoned her. A group of Russian men boarded the train and began eyeing Asja. Amadeus heard them say rude and lascivious things, thinking their language wasn’t understood. Amadeus, instead of defending her, changed to a seat where he did not appear to be her squire. He kept his head forward. When she berated him afterward, he said, “Better you get raped alone, than you get raped while I get beaten.” And then he laughed and laughed.

  But all the world’s dangers aside, women were frightening on their own. They had always seemed to Amadeus a prize too heavy to carry. They wanted everything, and they would suck out his hard-won strength, force him to procreate when all he wanted was to escape the tightening noose of life. When he didn’t call, they cried, and then what was he to do? It was unbearable, and then when he felt like crying himself, it was unbearable, he thought he would collapse. So, early on, he had discovered that he must take control of women in order to keep women from taking control of him. The extraordinary thing was that they seemed to like it that way, at least the ones who came back, and there were several of that kind.

  He had gotten into the habit already at eighteen or nineteen of having a stormy relationship with a strong and severe woman on one side, while at the same time sleeping with one or two soft and pliant women on the other. This was a habit he never broke.

  Amadeus sometimes felt sorry about the situation with Margaret. But then again, who was the victim? She wasn’t so weak. It was precisely her youthful strength that had first attracted him. She was very tall and long-limbed, her femurs looked like the kind of things one could use to defend oneself in time of war, solid as cricket bats, and that was what Americans were for, weren’t they? Ha-ha.

  Of course, it had then been a sort of surprise to discover how very fragile Margaret actually was, the young thing. And now, after the birthday party, she was fighting like an animal cornered, but again, was that Amadeus’s fault? Really she was crazy, she was a completely insane person, and sometimes he thought that that alone was a reason to keep his distance from her.

  On the other hand, from the beginning, he had never met a woman who wasn’t insane. It was the price of sex. They seemed to be strong, women, but then all you needed to do was to begin to withdraw intimacy, and they went mad. Amadeus always did pull back—it was a double satisfaction: allowing him to avoid an appearance of weakness, and at the same time making their desire shoot through the roof, destroying their strong exterior. He liked to see them like that. But she breaks just like a little girl. He thought of the song. It had become an act of his personality.

  His wife, Asja—he met her while he was getting a second Ph.D., a Western one this time, unassailable. He married her because she was the only woman he ever met who could unwrap a birthday gift and dismiss it in a single gesture, with the same haughty grace with which his mother had been able to do it, the sort of cruelty that only enhances beauty. Asja was the last child of her family, born late—in 1965—the very same year that her father was indicted for war crimes. After this father disappeared to a haven of which only certain other veterans of the Waffen SS knew the location, Asja grew up with only her mother and siblings, the mother having various peculiarities. She made the children peel the skin off their grapes before eating them and would not speak a word to them until they were done.
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  After Amadeus and Asja were married, they locked themselves into a strategy game of humor and ice. They were both very funny, and they were both very cold. It didn’t matter that she grew up on one side of the Wall and he on the other, those cultural differences were only fuel for their loving hatred of each other. One day he would pretend he didn’t hear her when she came home from work—even if she perhaps yelled to him some news, that she had been awarded, say, a coveted grant. He would pretend to be deep in his work, only greet her over an hour later. From Asja there was no exasperated “can’t you even say hello to me?” Instead, she simply put the fresh mozzarella and tomato salad he had made for their dinner down the drain, insisting even under duress that she had never seen such a salad—her face unimaginably blank. Later they would make fun of the neighbors together and the sex would be fantastic.

  But once he did not help her to the hospital when she had an attack of asthma. In retaliation, she secretly erased the article he had been writing diligently for weeks, both the copy on the hard drive and the one on the back-up disk. Then months went by without sex of any kind, or even any acknowledgment of the other’s existence.

  But as long as Asja was home, that was the main thing Amadeus cared about. He trusted that with her devotion to the church, she would never be unfaithful to him.

  Margaret Taub, on the other hand, not a religious girl, had never once lashed out or been unkind, never done a harsh thing, never even ribbed him. Her love for him had disarmed her, she said. This was gratifying to Amadeus, made him feel the conqueror, but also made Margaret a bit unexciting. Submissiveness had its uses, but she was certainly no “true love” as Asja was. When Margaret finally did begin to turn vindictive, her claws emerging, he found his passion for her growing for the first time.

  Amadeus knew that he was dependent on the lock-dance with women—deep down he believed he loved women more than life itself. What he couldn’t stand, couldn’t bear to even think about, was the prospect of losing any woman he had ever had. He made a point of trying to seduce each of his ex-lovers regularly, with even more dedication, not less, after his marriage. He became peeved if an ex-girlfriend left the country, or even left Berlin.

  There was one night when Margaret was going to Paris on vacation, threatening never to come back to Berlin, when he completely broke down. He invited her over, exceptionally, to the apartment on Winsstrasse (Asja was away visiting “family”), and he was unable to keep his eyes off her all through dinner and kept his hands on her knees under the table, and then afterward, in the bedroom, he drank vermouth straight from the bottle and sang “I Saw Her Standing There” in such a way that it was meant for Margaret and Margaret alone, and then he started crying and was not able to stop, and then he started drinking schnapps, and pretty soon he was sobbing. He got slaphappy, insisted that he wanted to sleep with her even though he was clearly too drunk—he danced naked to the Smiths and put his head under her skirt, and then undressed her and kissed her breasts but as he was kissing them, he started crying again, his tears running the length of these upturned slopes.

  Margaret was in transports.

  He kept saying: “I rejected you so many times, I don’t know why I did,” until Margaret began to cry too.

  But then the next day he wouldn’t go with her to the airport even though Asja was out of town and it was a Saturday, and Margaret’s face hardened and she took off the bracelet he had given her and threw it on the pavement in front of the café where they ate breakfast. Amadeus admitted to her that all the emotions he gave her were self-serving and cowardly, but he said it in proud defense. He said it was right of him—it was all he had ever meant to give to her. At least he was consistent.

  TWENTY-SIX • Erich

  Erich the Hausmeister stood across the street from the apartment house on the Grunewaldstrasse. He was hidden in the shadow of Number 54. From here he was leaning back on his heels, regarding Number 88 cannily. It huddled between two buildings more ornate than itself, but still it was apparent that Number 88 had once been a grand place to live, as Erich estimated with a certain paternal pride, although, precisely because his pride was of the paternal kind, not entirely approvingly. Number 88 was his adopted child—he would have told anyone that. The façade was covered in red brick; there were white balconies and crumbling white plaster moldings in the classical style. It was Erich who had made sure the moldings were restored after the old pattern, and he who had organized the repair of the balconies.

  Now Erich regarded the building cannily. He already knew who was at home and who wasn’t, but still he surveyed the windows for any sign of life. He had a grocery cart in front of him, borrowed from the nearby Lidl, and he was massaging clumps of almost dried pigeon excrement into fibrous balls. When he was sure no one was coming in any direction, and that the shadow falling on him was heavy, he lofted one of these clumps of droppings up and across the street in a tall arc, his sinewy arms surprisingly powerful, but unsurprisingly accurate. His thin, ropey arms, they looked as if they would be accurate. The first ball dropped down onto the lowest balcony. Erich couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard the plop of the ball doing what it was meant to do—that is, upon impact, splitting up into the many clumps of droppings it was composed of, so that the floor of the balcony would be strewn with the solidified excrement.

  It wasn’t that Erich had any ill will toward the tenants. They were nice people, always cordial when they passed Erich on the stairs. However, the Croatian couple had been resisting the installation of anti-pigeon spikes along the wide stucco railings of their balcony. They preferred to use the ledge as a sort of breakfast table for their coffee tray in the summers and as a place to air musty carpets in the winter. They also claimed that no pigeons roosted here, they had never seen a single one. Erich knew better. He was finding ways to convince them gently, rather than picking a fight. He felt it was important that he do this while it was still early in the spring, when they wouldn’t yet think of eating outside.

  After he had gone into his garden house and washed his hands, he set to work digging up the hard ground and putting flower bulbs in the courtyard. He was only putting in one bulb per meter—a minimalist look that he had seen in a gardening magazine once. It struck him as very economical.

  As for the American, Erich had seen her on the subway earlier that same day. Erich almost never took the subway, preferring his mountain bike, but this had been a special trip to see his lawyer—he had had good enough reasons to hire one. Not suing anyone, not exactly at least.

  He had seen Margaret right away, but she had not seen him. Typical of her. She was sitting with her head thrown back; her eyebrows drawn up in a peak of amusement; her gaze on something off to the side; her mouth in a knowing half grin. Even at a glance from the other end of the car he had recognized her—she was identifiable by the adolescent’s bravely pathetic habit of believing herself to be masking best her insecurities precisely at those moments when she most revealed them. Look at her legs, side by side in that simpering, pinup-girl position. He had thought his own mother was a generation too late for such stylization. Margaret’s body was tall, thin, and limbs gangly—it wasn’t right for her to make those coy moves! She kept her shoulders hunched up so high that the blades cut sharply out of her skin. It looked like she would keel over with eagerness to please. When she got out of the train at Rüdesheimer Platz, she wobbled her head. Margaret always walked in a way that made it look as if she knew she were being watched, her arms swinging, her head bobbing up and down, winningly cheerful, like an ingénue or a nymphet.

  The problem with the show, Erich thought—what made it ridiculous, some would say—was that Margaret’s face didn’t fit the part, when she was motionless she didn’t look at all like a puppy or nymphet of any kind. She had a very high forehead and a pointed, knowledgeable chin. Her dark eyes, on those rare occasions when she revealed them completely, were sensitive. She should have been reasonable. Erich would not have minded being her friend.

>   Erich was on his way home when he ran into Margaret on the subway. At just that moment, he had nowhere he needed to be. So he followed Margaret off the train. It wouldn’t do any harm to see what she was up to.

  Margaret walked by the Justizkammer and Erich followed. Margaret walked and walked, and Erich followed and followed. Finally they were almost at Nollendorfplatz, and lo, Margaret went into the St. Matthias Church. Erich ducked inside as well, almost catching up as he caught the heavy door before it closed behind her.

  The church was empty. Margaret, in the still, moist, cold air, knelt in one of the back pews. Erich was surprised. And then surprised to see her face in an expression broad with the laxness of despair, the way of looking when there is finally no one left to look at.

  Erich thought of one of her diary entries, one he had read a trifle too absentmindedly, not really taking care to decipher it; it seemed like more of the same gushing nonsense that filled the rest of the journal, albeit a trifle more overwrought, with slightly more self-satisfied, mysterious references. In retrospect, these were easy enough to decode. He had simply lived a long time outside the society of women. In any case, he grasped its meaning now in the church, and he began to think of the large men’s coats Margaret had begun to wear.

  More than two years ago, Erich found what appeared to be the entire contents of Margaret’s wardrobe in the trash—girlish, coquettish clothes. And once, too, he saw Margaret throw something yellowy-gold out of the window and into the chaos of the neighboring courtyard. (Over there, they had no Hausmeister.) Later, Erich went and rummaged through the wet dead leaves and rusted coat hangers and garbage lids. In amongst, he found a simple brass key, single-toothed, as though for a piece of furniture. It had been in the autumn.