The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  In the next weeks, however, the baby thrived against all expectations. And although I never would have expected it, I too survived the birth. We named the baby Beate, a Catholic name, not wanting her to suffer as Rahel had.

  To my relief Franz got a letter from the labor department soon after, and started having to go to Fromm in Köpenick. There was a factory there. It took him so long to travel, and he was not paid, we got only the ration cards. But now I felt at least some assurance that he would not be on one of the lists. He spent all day in a room with two massive ovens and a terrible heat, and from morning to night he had to shove a two-ton metal frame in and out of the oven, ruining his fine violinist’s hands. Despite my protests, he shared his meat, fruit, and vegetable rations with me, as I only got Jewish rations, which did not include these things. The result was that he became increasingly thin. But otherwise, he said, how was I to nurse our child? I think it was now becoming clear to Franz that he and I would not survive the war. But he always thought our children would.

  Shortly after little Beate’s birth, the Nazis passed an ordinance that Jews could not have household pets, and this included dogs, cats, and canary birds. I was so tired now, I think it was because of that—I “forgot” this ordinance. Ferdinand and Sarto continued to sit in their cage in the living room, cared for with loving constancy by Rahel, who was growing up so quickly.

  But Sarto was nothing if not a powerful singer, audible in those early spring months with a trill that blew like dark smoke out our windows. It wasn’t long before I found a note under our front door from Frau Schivelbusch, saying in pinched phrases that it would be better for us if we were to “cease and desist to harbor beasts and fowl reserved for Aryans,” as if we were keeping a zoo! I did not think I could stand another visit from the Gestapo, but I should not have busied my head. The Gestapo came anyway.

  Let us simply say: they came and after they left both canaries were gone, the robust Sarto and the ailing Ferdinand. Rahel cried and cried.

  What happened in the next days is interesting to me still. For a while an unaccustomed silence reigned. But! Then I began to hear birdsong again. And not only the song of Sarto, but also the song of Ferdinand.

  I did not speak of this to anyone.

  As I washed our ever-regenerating piles of dirty linen, I could hear it—I was still bleeding since the birth, the baby’s diapers, little Gerda’s wet nights—I listened to the singing birds. Sometimes it is so clear one is going crazy. I remember hearing the bird twitter when Franz told me of the first large deportations. I heard the birdsong while I listened to Rahel recite her square roots and European capitals. I heard the birdsong and I thought of my home in Posen, now burnt down in war. I heard the birdsong and thought about what could and could not be. With the sleeplessness of the baby and the ever-returning air-raid siren, waking up, shaking Rahel awake, carrying Gerda and little Bibi, as I called my Beate, downstairs with our always-ready suitcases of diapers and toys and blankets, nights spent in the basement, and then the worry, always the worry. I hardly had any sleep, and it didn’t surprise me that I should be in a world outside worlds, a funny, dizzy, drunken place, a place in which birds carried off by the Gestapo return to sing inside the walls, and in the stairwell, in hidden places in the courtyard, and in the garden.

  The birdsong was so fragile, so difficult to hear. One day as I was washing the dishes, Rahel said to me, “Mother, why is it I still hear Sarto and Ferdinand singing?”

  I gave her the broadest smile—and looking down at her I wiped from my face soap bubbles that had floated up and stuck to my skin. I dropped to my knees and said, “My darling.” And then we both stopped and stood very still and listened, and sure enough, in a moment we both realized that we could hear it distinctly outside of our mind’s ear, with a sudden clarity of sensation.

  And so, almost giddy with the feeling of not being crazy, I led Rahel down and out into the courtyard, and we stood at attention with our heads tilted up toward the house around us, which was in a U-shape, the two wings cradling the garden. Now it was clear enough that the sound was coming from our wing. And we both looked at each other and gave a sort of laugh because we thought the sound was coming from our own apartment. It was beautiful to see Rahel’s face change with the perception. She looked up to our open kitchen window and looked back at me with her eyebrows raised. It was beautiful because I could see in her face that the world affected her the same as it did me. Even if she was only a child.

  It sounded like the bird was in our flat but we knew the bird was not in our flat. We went back up the stairwell of our wing. We stood near the doors of the apartments as we went further up into the house. Finally we had passed our own floor and had come to the top, and of course it was from behind the door of Frau Schivelbusch’s apartment that the sound of canaries trickled.

  So Frau Schivelbusch had the canaries.

  It was very difficult to calm Rahel once we realized what had happened. The little girl was beside herself. She wanted to go up to Frau Schivelbusch at once and kick in her door. I reasoned with her, explaining that we were unlucky to live in these times, that we had to do our best to hold on to our dignity, and didn’t she want to grow up to be a dignified lady? But even I was not convinced. I wondered if I was not destroying her.

  As for me. There came a time when the choir I sang with at the cathedral protested my presence, even if I stood in the back, although my conversion to Catholicism was many years past. Father Loewe asked me to leave, and then, after that, I ask you, what more could I do to preserve my faith? What of my hope for the future?

  There were some days during the months when I was planning our death when I didn’t suffer at all. That’s a funny thing: you domesticate fear. I only cried in anticipation of the worst, but somehow during the worst itself, I only thought about this or that part of now. It was through a series of very soft, gradual changes that I became accustomed to a new trajectory for my life and the lives of my children. When I was young I had thought I would live with a family, a community, someday likely have grandchildren. Now I did not have these ambitions any longer. Instead I thought, Perhaps tomorrow I’ll make a doll out of the red velvet of the sofa cushions for Gerda. We don’t need the sofa cushions anymore. And these small things rather than the large things kept me in the habit of moving forward. And on some lighthearted days I even thought that the ambitions could be halved forevermore without a change in my moment-to-moment happiness, like the mathematical paradox of a man crossing half a room, and then half the remaining length, and so forth, and thus never reaching the other end of the room. The idea of a changed period of time for my life, once it was established, filled me with neither fear nor intense loathing—fear is rooted in uncertainty, and unlike Franz, I had no uncertainty.

  I don’t mean to say that’s the way I look back on my life now from up here. In the nightmares I sometimes have while sleeping in eternity, I know horror, disgust, and hatred over what was done to us—and these feelings are truer because they see the tragedy in its entirety. It is with these feelings, too, that you should remember us.

  But I will still insist that often in my daily life at the end, every change in our circumstances took on that muted quality that gently colors the life of any sane person, for good or ill. No matter how misshapen or how terrible true life becomes, it is always calmer, less emotionally vibrant than in those vivid dreams that prepared me for our death.

  As for why we killed ourselves the way we did: we thought better to die like the canary than to die like the hunted. Every day is a good day to be born, every day is a good day to die.

  From those years, what I remember most is our picture book, Du Mein Tirol, with the photographs of the fresh alpine air, and the thickness of the grass on the mountainside. The sound of the waterfall, the smell of cow dung.

  When Margaret woke, she was lying on the ground next to the goldfish pond at Salzburgerstrasse 8. The hair on her head was matted and wet.

  She had been so
deeply concentrated for so many hours, her body had gone lost. The fatigue, the limpness, that comes of such concentration broke over her. She sat up very slowly. Her face was ashen. She felt as though there was less oxygen in the air than there had been before, and her throat was full of lumps.

  •

  After she got home, she went around for a while as if nothing had happened. She was terribly hungry. She opened a can of kidney beans and another of peeled tomatoes and dropped them into a pot. The apartment around her smelled of old musty carpets; the smell reached her sharply. She chopped onions and fried them. She browned a fist of hamburger. She glanced under the toaster as she searched for the wooden spoon. She saw the crumbs there. She added the meat to the pot. Looking down into it, she felt a nausea.

  She left the food simmering and went into the bedroom.

  She searched through the titles on the bookshelf, Yes, there was a book called Du Mein Tirol in her own shelf. It was part of a series of travel picture books from the 1930s. She had bought them at the flea market for pennies. She fingered the yellowed, fraying pages.

  What she had just heard in the Salzburgerstrasse, was it a communication from beyond the grave?

  Or had she dreamt the whole thing herself?

  She desperately wanted it to be a communication from beyond the grave.

  She looked more closely at Du Mein Tirol. For the first time, she noticed that on the frontispiece of the book, the name “Karla” was written in a script both childish and old-fashioned. She looked through all the books in the series and saw that Karla had signed her name in each one. The signature was a little different in each book, and in different colors of ink, as though Karla had written each signature at a different time. The variation seemed to breathe life into the name: a rag on a clothesline animated by a breeze, the variation of the script whispered “Karla.”

  Margaret put the books back into the shelf. She looked out the window. She sat down on the bed. She got up and thought through the story she had heard from the beginning to the end, from the canaries, to the birth, to the grass on the mountainside.

  The window to her bedroom was open, and the white cotton curtains moved slowly, swaying to their own dirge. Something about the movement of the curtains made her think of her life with the hawk-woman, Magda Goebbels. A very slight shudder ran through her. Regina Strauss’s voice—how could she be sure of the sound of it? Had it really been her? She could not help but recognize the presence in that story of a book she owned. It made the entire thing suspicious. Perhaps it had all been her own madness. Now, in her mind, the sound of the woman’s voice was filled with a crackling, obstructing static. The static obstruction was Margaret’s life.

  And there had been more than one such trace.

  But Margaret wanted it to be a real communication from beyond the grave. The desire rose in her, very hard and very strong, steam-rolling her consciousness. She put her head on the desk and strained to remember one last detail of the story, the detail that could not possibly be invented, the detail that would be both the proof and the borrowed rib.

  Instead, all at once and without warning, she began to cry. She cried and cried. Margaret cried because she could not remember any such detail. She cried because their lives had been stolen then and forever. She cried for what had happened in her own night’s yard, for the deprivation. She cried because their lives had been thrown away senselessly and they had no memory except this moribund memory she had lent to them herself.

  She cried. She had water coming out her mouth and nose. The sobs began to rack her as though she were shaken by a foreign body—a three-hundred-pound angel come to beat her into submission. The effort of holding her body upright at the desk, her white fingers gripping the polished wood, took all her strength.

  There was a vacancy like hunger in her chest—the desire to give herself to them by believing. Isn’t that all that’s left to give the dead? What a slight gift. But no, she thought, it’s not slight. (This was a wail, heartbroken rage.) Anybody on the street—if you ask: Would you like to be remembered after you die?—the answer will always be yes. Immortality is desired more than food and air. It is not so terrible to assume no one wants to die. The Strausses should be real, she thought, and they should have a mind wrapped uncritically around them in an embrace, a mind that doesn’t panic—so they won’t have to scrounge or connive in lust or anger—someone giving their lives the floating, crystalline perfection of angels riding on white horses above the waves of this worldly storm—someone to catch them in a net!, her heart screamed. I will catch them in a net, and even if the thing in the net is nothing but a cipher, the net will be real, and the net will be beautiful.

  How she longed to hear the voice of Regina Strauss again, if only for a moment. This was her longing now. The voice was the meaning, the voice was the ghost.

  Margaret recognized a ghost for what it was: a ghost is the resonance of a life. A ghost is the intense and prolonged sympathetic vibration for the dead in the world of the living. A ghost is something in which everyone can and must believe.

  Margaret drank a glass of water. She breathed in and out. She looked at the blue glass in her hand. There were many tiny air bubbles caught in the glass. The water, too, was full of points of light. The movement of water from the blue glass to the muddy pink flesh of Margaret’s throat occurred to her as something significant and great, and in a wave of happiness, she ate some thick bread with pieces of carrot in it; she cut up a tomato and ate that too, and then she drank more water. Her head was clearing at the pace of a tide, at the pace of the sun moving across the sky.

  She felt clean—the tears still wet on her face were made of the salt and water of her body, a body that was—finally—not entirely bad, a body that was full of concern and full of care.

  I love them, she thought, and she realized right away that she had loved the Family Strauss for a long time. She had never allowed herself the identification, but she now saw that it didn’t matter whether she was worthy of it, it was still there—this love that made her eyes again fill with tears.

  The stew had burned in the meantime; it didn’t matter. Margaret was full of joy, full of recognition. And tonight she went so far as to think that perhaps she did not deserve to die.

  PART III

  TUNNEL

  The addiction to a center, above all to the human center, usually ends in the four-hundred-year-old cell between witness and perpetrator. You sacrifice yourself again in the figure of a black reflector. And then they have you just where they wanted you. You are the center.

  —SASCHA ANDERSON

  TWENTY-NINE • Iron Waves

  His eyes—blue, blue, the color of lake water, ringed with black lashes. His skin: brown and pink with dark moles.

  She had told Amadeus she was expecting a child.

  It was late spring of 2002, and they were sitting on a bench in an overgrown corner of the Volkspark that runs along Weinbergsweg, where the earth smells of worms and poison ivy and broken beer bottles. They had just had sex in the dark, on a bench. Margaret had not allowed him to get her drunk and Amadeus could never relax when a woman was not drunk, and he had dropped all semblance of courtship. Revelers were coming out of the bars on the hill and their voices were loud, but they couldn’t see Margaret and Amadeus through the thick of the bushes.

  Amadeus suspected instantly that this was the thrust of a well-planned dagger. How could it have been accidental, when he had been so careful? At least, almost always he had been so careful. Maybe it was an accident. But he had seen the witch, the vixen, the succubus, with her hand covered in ejaculate, and he shuddered at where she put her fingers. He knew. He knew what this was, despite her play of guilelessness.

  He offered her two thousand euros, an abortion, and a one-way ticket to New York City.

  He was angry, this man who had never before wanted a lover to leave his neighborhood. It was not merely because Margaret was such a ruthless shrew in her destruction of his marriage. His marriage
was brittle, and its existence, at this point, arbitrary. Nor was his anger because of her duplicity. What would have been the crucial point for most men, the thing that would have destroyed all hope of happiness—that she had tricked him into having a child—was not what most bothered Amadeus. He expected this kind of thing from women. No, what made him livid, turned him against her with the full force of his personality, was that she was trying to make out of their love affair a small human being.

  Amadeus had never wanted a child, never under any circumstances, not with his wife, and not with anyone else.

  There was a story one could tell, a story of a family, the mother’s birth in the Ukraine followed ten years later by the grandfather’s deportation to Siberia. One could tell of how the grandfather was never heard from again—or at least not until fifty-five years later when one found out he was remarried and living in Vladivostok. You could tell of how the grandmother, with three children at the time of her husband’s disappearance, made her way alone to Brandenburg overland on foot with the children in wartime, how she had turned hard, when she didn’t have enough to feed them. Of how since then she had not once been back to Volhynia, where she was born, where she bore her children, where her family had worked the land for five generations. Of how her oldest daughter married a certain Heinrich whose father was killed outside Leningrad; Heinrich, who fled from Königsberg to Leipzig in 1945, and never once went home. Of how at Amadeus’s birth, father and mother did not react to the child. One could tell of how Heinrich stopped looking Amadeus in the face when he was nine years old, the same age Heinrich was when his father was killed outside Leningrad. One could tell of how Heinrich hanged himself in the garage—one fine day—and Amadeus found him after school.