The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  Now that he was beginning to understand, he felt sorry for her.

  February 3, 2002

  Oh, dear God forgive me, but I have the most wonderful, most wonderful news! Amadeus was not careful with me, and to be entirely frank, I was not careful with myself and now things have gone all the way. Oh gracious, sweet God! Let it work out and be good for both of us. I must tell you and only you, silent journal, that this was unplanned for Amadeus but not really unplanned for me. For months now I’ve been trying to make things happen accidentally. I don’t think Amadeus suspected anything, and the second two weeks of this month have been a time of perpetual suspense. Looking out my window I’ve seen so many women with round bodies walking by, as if taunting me. This morning I almost killed myself biking over to the drugstore to buy a test, I didn’t pay attention to the traffic at all, and a woman called out to me: Junge Frau, sind Sie lebensmüde? And that’s the one thing I’m not, see, I’m not tired of life! But sometimes life is so alluring that in rushing toward it you rush over the edge of it, and so when I changed lanes directly in front of the car coming up behind me, it was one of those moments where I was gripping so firmly at the quick of life that I couldn’t even consider the possibility that it could come to an end.

  Oh, let Amadeus leave Asja, and come to us!

  I’m so happy. I wonder if it will give my life meaning. I imagine it will. How nice to have something to work for. I am so good with things that don’t demand that I divide my attention—I love activities that allow me to stay at home and focus on what I can see clearly in front of me. Which is such a good description of what this will be like! I’m teetering on the verge of the most perfect happiness.

  TWENTY-SEVEN • The Lake of Fire

  Margaret awoke the day after she met Philipp. Philipp in his green alligator boots, Philipp with his toy soldier’s gaze—and she was sick with memory.

  She did not want to think.

  With exhaustion, she heaved herself back toward Regina and the Family Strauss. She knew what she was doing. She was finding a way to think about herself that did not involve herself and, what’s more, involved finer, more gracious people.

  She became something like a detective; it was an Indian summer. She looked a second time at the date of the Strauss family’s suicide. She opened a clean notebook, turned to a white page. March 5, 1943, she wrote down in block letters at the top. She double-checked—the date coincided with the so-called Fabrikaktion—the factory action—at the beginning of March 1945, when the Gestapo rounded up Berliner Jews from the factories where they were enslaved. They were forced into cattle cars bound East, the point after which Goebbels declared Berlin judenrein. So the suicide must have been an evasion of deportation, as Margaret had first believed.

  She turned to the biographies and journals of Jewish women living in Berlin with non-Jewish husbands.

  She suspended her tours and read under the feather bed at home, leaving the house only to buy cans of kidney beans and frozen spinach.

  She learned a great deal.

  Although officially exempted from deportation, mixed families, who were deprived of all chances of work, were on the verge of starvation in 1943. Jews were denied the papers that would allow them not only to work but also to travel, that would allow rations for meat, dairy, and vegetables. If the non-Jewish spouse did not divorce his spouse, he was in a terrible position. He was called a Rassenschänder—race defiler—usually denied work, denied food, marginalized and isolated as much as, or in some cases even more than, Jews themselves, mobs sometimes being even more enraged by their own kind “gone astray.” Denunciations to the Gestapo were a daily occurrence. Mixed families were hounded by continual visits from the police and random, inexplicable deportations of entire families. Although the non-Jewish half of the couple could easily divorce his spouse, the consequence was grave—the Jewish half would be starved to death or slaughtered. In Berlin at least, this consequence was known full well. So despite the official exemption of mixed families, Margaret began to see very well how the Strausses might have been driven to kill themselves.

  But still the question of the children. Why, at least, wasn’t there anywhere to send them? Weren’t there non-Jewish relatives’ homes where the children could be sent, passed off as war orphans, camouflaged? The question would not leave her mind.

  Margaret reread her copy of the entry in the police log yet again. This time she focused on the places of birth. Fritz Strauss, born 11/5/06 in Gross-Strenz, and Regina Sara Strauss née Herzberg, born 11/20/09 in Schwedenhöhe.

  She began to search. She took out her atlas of Germany. Oddly, neither city was in the index.

  She looked at the names again. Perhaps she had misspelled or mis-remembered. But no. She went to the computer. She put Gross-Strenz into Google and found only one reference—on a genealogical page tracing an American family’s origins—to Poland.

  All was given away. Both places must be in the eastern realms lost to Germany during the war. Margaret took out a world atlas from 1938 and turned to the pages showing the old Germany. She found Gross-Strenz near Wohlau, a tiny place in lost Silesia, not so far from Breslau, in today’s Poland.

  Then she looked for Schwedenhöhe. Today, it seemed, the place was called Szwederowo, in what was once Posen. But in the 1938 atlas, even after looking at Posen until her eyes ached, she found no trace.

  She sat back in her desk chair. Half of today’s Poland was once German. This family that with such cunning laid itself into a mute and message-less grave to escape the Nazis—not only were they wiped away without a trace, but both husband and wife came from towns that no longer exist.

  From the suicide note of a Jewish wife and mother married to a non-Jewish husband in 1943, Margaret copied the following into her notebook.

  Please try to understand me. I am desperate, crushed, without hope. I can’t continue to breathe. I am afraid of the prison walls which await me … Forgive me that I leave you like this. I am powerless … my heart is tearing apart. I am perspiring with fright day and night.

  Margaret read this. Her eyes flicked back and forth.

  She would return to the Salzburgerstrasse, she decided. If there were a secret door that might crack open and let her approach the Family Strauss, then it would be there.

  At the Salzburgerstrasse, she would look for the ghost of Regina Strauss one more time.

  Having made up her mind to go, Margaret longed to already be there.

  That afternoon, on her way out of the flat, she pushed her hand into the cabinet by the front door, looking for the second key to her bicycle lock. The old one’s shaft had broken off, that cheaply made thing.

  So this was how it happened.

  As she pushed her hands about in the drawer, she found a little perfume bottle, marked on one side with the word freesia. Margaret’s face darkened. She hoped it would not be raining outside. Where was her umbrella? The days were so dark, with all the clouds.

  Over Western Schöneberg a heavy fog was floating. Margaret waited for someone to come out of the outer door at Salzburgerstrasse 8. She sat on the stoop. Her back curved with fatigue, her head she held down, her hands she tucked under her thighs. After a while there was a rain so light that although she could not feel it against her cheeks, the earth around her began to crumble with it.

  The time of her life that had belonged to Amadeus was present beside her, coiled like a snake. It flushed her with a certain smell of hopelessness, a piece of moss stuck to a shoe tramped indoors—impropriety and shame. The trouble was this: she felt that the young woman who had loved Amadeus was not she—it was someone else. Or no, not someone else! But it was a character in a play for which she had only memorized the lines, nothing more than a dramatic idea she had had—an idea that she had given power over her tongue for one long, endless summer that went on for years. But it had never been more than an idea. She had been high on love, how could it have been woven into life?

  Finally an old woman came out of the house
and Margaret caught the door. She stepped into the foyer. The light in the foyer—the soft, rich foyer—was milkier than last time. It was almost melting in the rain. Margaret looked for a long time into the mirrors at her gently doubled and tripled reflections.

  She looked for the ghost, she looked for Regina Strauss. But there was no motion in the mirror. The silence was strong; it hurt her ears. She moved her hands to break the stillness. The silence crept.

  She went out the back door of the foyer and into the courtyard. She followed the little path that led farther into the greenery. She emerged in the back garden where the goldfish pond nestled in the high grasses, surrounded by tall juniper. All the plants whispered, rustling, given voice by the rain. She looked into the pool and saw the goldfish under the plink-plank of the drops; they were of the darkest orange, like strips of fire.

  The rain slowed to a drizzle, and then stopped. The pond was dark, but even with the grey light, here too was a reflection, and Margaret saw a bit of herself shaking in the ripples. And then for a moment, she thought she saw herself, but underneath the fish—deep underneath the fish.

  A movement caught her eye. Under the water, there was a white and moving face. Pale, silken hair, and dark, pooling eyes.

  The black reflection of the tree branches cut into the woman and seemed to bind her at the bottom of the pond. The flame-like fish swam above her eyes.

  Margaret put out her arms and reached down in the water, deep down. She touched the woman’s shoulders. She could feel the collarbone under the cold. Under the skin, the bone was seashell; it cut upward, and the woman’s elastic skin contracted.

  Regina Strauss turned her face up to Margaret, her neck dripping back. Her dark pupils widened into rabbit-hole mirrors.

  Margaret leaned forward toward the little pond. When she found Regina’s wet arms under the water, she was moved by instinct: she dragged them out into the air, and laid them, dripping, over her own head. She assumed the posture of a supplicant: she knelt and pushed her forehead against the muddy bank.

  She bowed down to the water.

  She bowed down to Regina.

  She prayed to Regina, to the woman who was near.

  And then she began to hear a sound, rising out of the water. She put her ear toward it. She heard a moan; she heard the woman’s voice crying out three-dimensionally. She could hear the voice, thick with bubbles, and she submerged her ear to listen as it gradually became intelligible. Regina was speaking quickly.

  TWENTY-EIGHT • Dreams During Illness

  Listen, Margaret, listen. When it first started I began to say to Franz, lying beside him at night, “We’re pressed so! If we were made of carbon, we’d already be squeezed into diamonds”—making light of it, you see. And he would kiss my hand, call me “my diamond.” Now that it’s all over, here we are, it’s come to pass: We’ve flown up. We’ve come and gone. We’re diamonds of the night sky.

  I came from Posen. I came from Posen to the big city. I came to my husband, we were married, we had a child, and when the government changed, I took refuge in a new church, the church that would save me but did not.

  Where to start the story of how things went wrong? It began much earlier, but I’ll start in the summer of 1939, as that is when, for me at least, our death began seeping in.

  Nineteen thirty-nine we got a canary for Rahel’s birthday. She was turning seven years old, old enough to care for the bird herself, we thought, a precocious little girl. Gerda had been born that winter, I was often tired, the baby didn’t sleep through the night. Rahel could use a little amusement at home. Many of her friends had left Germany already. She was at the school with the gentiles, but they knew she was of mixed birth, and did not play with her. She was a lonely, quiet child. Our apartment was often as silent as if we had never had any children.

  We went to a place. You could buy birds there, on the corner of Fuggerstrasse and Motzstrasse, in a fine, stylish apartment house. The bird seller lived all the way at the top, under the roof, in a sort of garret with a winter garden built out of glass. Being on the corner and up under the roof, the place was struck with sunlight, and it was dreadfully hot, with large, blazing windows. It smelled wretched. A Jewish man by the name of Apfelbein who had been run out of business by the Nazis was trying to make a living in secret; he was thin. Officially he merely had a lot of birds that he cared for, and sometimes he gave them to his friends who wanted them as pets. If we made him a gift of some money in return, then no one had to be the wiser. In the old days before ’38 he had had a large pet shop on the Kurfürstendamm that even sold fancy-breed ponies in the courtyard behind.

  We asked for Herr Apfelbein’s advice, but he did not speak to us in reply, he spoke to Rahel directly, told her about birds in a way she could understand. Rahel was a shy child. There weren’t many who could draw her into conversation, but he seemed to have a way with children, and soon she was speaking freely with him. He pointed out several birds in the row of cages, and she became excited. She was already quite overstimulated—it being her birthday. She liked two of the canaries. You could see why she chose them. They stood out—one was a vibrant yellow and the other a bright white. In the spirit of the occasion, her father and I told her she could choose whichever one she liked. She went back and forth between the two, talking to each bird in a soft, singsong voice, asking, “Would you like to come home with me, little bird?” She even went so far as to name them both—the white Sarto and the yellow Ferdinand. But she made no move to choose. After half an hour, we felt embarrassed—Gerda was starting to cry in my arms—and Herr Apfelbein began to look at us with interest to see what we would do.

  We thought maybe, since the birds were not expensive (Herr Apfelbein was ready to give them to us for almost any price), we would buy both. Franz was still working at the time. Rahel smiled at the idea and looked at us triumphantly. I remember she had most of her milk teeth still, being a little behind for her age. But Herr Apfelbein shook his head.

  “Don’t get two birds, young lady,” he said, addressing Rahel, “unless you have a lot of space for two cages. If you have both in one cage, one of the birds will die. Not right away, but after one year, maybe two years—one of them will die.”

  We looked down at Rahel, who showed no reaction to this news. She stuck her finger through the bars at the white bird and cooed at it softly.

  All of a sudden, with the strict, schoolmarmish air I knew meant she was happy, Rahel spoke. “Which one?”

  “You mean which one dies?” he asked her.

  Rahel caught her breath and looked at me, all at once panicked by shyness.

  But the shopkeeper went on good-naturedly. “That’s a funny thing. You’d think it would be the smaller one that would die, wouldn’t you? But it’s not always the smaller one. Sometimes it’s the healthier, larger bird that dies, the one with the most beautiful song, and the funny-looking runt with the short legs that lives. It’s a simple thing only: the dominant bird lives.”

  “The dominant bird lives,” Rahel repeated, breathing in and out. She was quiet for a while, and then just as suddenly as before, she spoke up. “How do you know which it is?”—this still shrilly, as if she were testing a pupil.

  “You don’t know,” Herr Apfelbein replied. “That’s the thing. There’s not a dominant bird or any other kind of bird at the beginning. But then, when the moment is ripe, there’s a fight. And whichever bird wins the fight—he’s the one who becomes the dominant bird.”

  Rahel paused, thinking about this painstakingly, I could see. In the end she asked, “And what about the second fight?”

  “That’s precisely it: there’s never a second fight.”

  “Why not?” the child asked.

  “The bird who loses at the beginning thinks everything will be better for him if he lies low. Better he gets used to things how they are. Then he won’t involve himself in any more nasty situations, lose an eye, or tear a wing. In fact, the second bird knows that the dominant bird doesn’t reall
y have a better life. They both can live well, you see. The new order is just an order like any other order. Each one has his place. An orderly birdland.”

  “But if you say the second bird dies, I suppose he does get hurt,” said Rahel.

  “Well, that’s true, young Fräulein, you have a point. But like I say, you’re not supposed to keep these birds in cages together. I’m referring to the ideal conditions in the wild that the birds were first used to; the conditions that taught them how to live.”

  “But how will it die then? Will the other bird kill it?”

  “No, no killings!” He raised his voice. “I’ll tell you. These birds are territorial. Do you know what that means? That means each bird needs his own living space.” Herr Apfelbein caught my eye.

  “And he kills the other bird in his space!” Rahel said excitedly, with a certain gusto.

  “No!” the man cried out, “I told you, no killings!”

  “What then?”

  “Well, it’s a slow process.” Herr Apfelbein became pensive. “The dominant bird feels like he has to oversee the other bird—not hurt him, you understand—just oversee him. Nudge him. Peck at him while he’s eating. The other bird can still eat, but probably not his fill. The dominant bird screeches at him, sings louder songs, and sings more songs, and sings more often. Not so bad really. But the other bird—he won’t be able to move about the way he wants, drink water when he wants. The strain on his nerves—that’s what will kill the other bird.”

  “It’ll break his heart,” Rahel said sadly, quick to understand.

  “That’s right, it’ll break his little bird heart.”

  Rahel didn’t say anything more.

  Franz, for his part, hadn’t been listening. He was carrying Gerda around the shop and was now at the end of his rope. And can I tell you? He insisted on buying both birds after all, thinking that Rahel would be pleased with him in the end, but also eager to get out of the bad-smelling shop. Herr Apfelbein caught my eye again. He shrugged.