One could tell a story of an uninsulated family. One could say that Amadeus had no desire for children because non-disappearance of people and continuity of home were lacking in the family’s blood, and these are the things that make children welcome: home and non-disappearance of people.
One could ask what happens to people who never go back.
One could ask what becomes of the children of people who never went home. One could say the family had been in a lock-dance with the twin forces of death and not-coming-home for as long as anyone could remember, a dance whose steps were of the same pattern as Amadeus’s relationship with women—beckon and retreat, beckon and retreat. His was the life that doesn’t entirely want to live, the desire that never finds its ease, the thirst for a milk that you are poisoning even as you drink. That a family that never looks back creates a son like Amadeus—a man who looks back always, but on things painless and far away, insulates himself from knowing how close to the surface of the skin his blood runs.
Yes, one could say all of that, or one could drop the topic and say instead that Amadeus simply didn’t like children and never had.
And whatever story one chose to tell, the fact was that Amadeus desperately did not want whatever was growing inside Margaret’s young, non-European body.
She had caught him off guard.
When she told him about the pregnancy, Amadeus slapped her across the face. He was a little drunk.
When he hit her, Margaret looked as if she had swallowed a silver dollar; it was caught in her esophagus.
Then he offered her money. He might have wasted time doubting the child was his, but he knew about Margaret and her self-sacrificial gambits. She was too careful to accidentally get pregnant by the wrong man. He zipped up his pants and went home. He transferred the money into her account, and he made sure he never saw her again.
Margaret fell behind at the university. She stayed up late thinking of the baby and wondering what kind it would be.
She was still in love with Amadeus.
She was married to her body now. Part of him was in it. She should have thought of how to care for herself, but instead she was still staring at Amadeus in her mind, wondering when he would come back to her. For the life of her, she could not leave the city where he was.
At some point during the pregnancy, she received a letter from him. The letter told a story of her own mother and father. It was more than a lock-dance with death and not-coming-home, she thought then. It was more than a fear of children. He had never loved her, he had never even seen her. At least, this was how she understood it. Her world unlaced.
He wrote:
Dear Margaret,
I’m not willing to meet you. Do you hear? Don’t come by here like that.
I want you to listen to me. I’m going to tell you something that will make you flinch, but you deserve it. Maybe it will make you understand. You have forced me to the wall. It’s something to do with your mother and father.
In 1979, your parents spent the summer in West Berlin. Your father was doing research, and sometimes they came over to the East to see his mother. It must have been five or six times. When they did, I used to go and meet them. I’d wait outside of the checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse, cool my heels on the other side of the river, trying to be a bit discreet. (Even being seen with them—Westerners, and your father a dissident—it was a liability for me. That was back when I was trying to get into the Party.) So I waited on the Northern side, under the big old copper birch trees that stand on the chalk banks there. I could see the station, and the border patrol on the other side of the river through the leaves, and the S-Bahn trains would curve in from the West. I could make them out through the trees.
I’m just trying to paint a picture for you, so you understand.
I’d sit and smoke, and at some point they’d turn up. Out of the Tränenpalast they’d be coming, looking rumpled and triumphant. Sometimes they would have been waiting in line to get through and sometimes it would have taken quite a long time.
Their clothes always looked so nice to me though, that’s something I’ll tell you. You could peg Western clothes from at least half a kilometer away. What a fine duet they were, your mom and dad! Sarah always with high color in her cheeks, and Christoph next to her was just as tall and skeletal and morose as ever, but a fine-looking man, distinguished, a bit of the medieval knight about him. And me, I’d feel silly—that summer we had nothing but rainy weather and I’d have wet hair, water dripping from the leaves of this damn tree I’d sit under, and my glasses would fog up as soon as we went inside. (God I love contact lenses! No more of that sort of thing now.)
Anyway, they’d come up to me, smiling, I’d get up from my bench. First I’d put out my cigarette, then I’d shake Christoph’s hand. Christoph was like a brother to me, I loved him, but that summer it wasn’t very good. I could tell from the first time they came over that it wasn’t going to be any good. He didn’t even feel like a friend—there was just a ringing sound in my ears when I tried to talk to him.
Well, but I’m exaggerating. We had a good time. He’d been gone for seven years, mind you, and seven years is a long time. That was the bulk of the problem. We were only nineteen when he got out, the lucky bastard, traded out after his imprisonment. The Stasi used to make those sorts of trades. I guess you must know this. I can’t say I ever found out how he ended up in New Jersey, though, or why he went to Princeton like that. Can’t say I cared very much, although now he’s dead and I wish I knew.
Oh, but who cares. It’s Wurst to me now. Better to forget.
The thing is, we were both studying Russian history, and that commonality, if you will, was pleasant at the time. By the time we’d get into my car (my dad’s actually), we’d be filling up the silences by, you know, joshing each other about Karamzin, making jokes about Lermontov. Your father fancied himself a great hero of his time. We both sort of thought of ourselves that way. I’d say something like: “You should have stayed here, Christoph, if you wanted to study Russians. We have plenty here.” He’d nod his head and frown in a serious way, wouldn’t show any recognition that my testicles were on the chopping block. He didn’t seem to take any of it in. This was the summer after the Wolf Biermann affair, and I wasn’t doing so well.
I will say this: maybe we didn’t pay enough attention to Sarah. Sometimes I think that was why things turned out the way they did. Women will go at your throat if you don’t give them attention. The thing was, she didn’t study Russian, and so she couldn’t catch the jokes. There was no help for it. Come to think of it, her German was a floperoo as well.
You know what else? I think Christoph was embarrassed by your mother, of all things. What a pretty woman she was! And so young. I remember in particular that she always wore these gold-rimmed earrings. There is a certain kind of man who’s embarrassed by having a pretty wife. Your father was that kind. These earrings, anyway, they had cameos of Lola Montez in them. Your father had given them to her. I really liked them on her.
I don’t care what Christoph thought—as far as I was concerned, your mother was fantastic. No, she was more than fantastic. She was Christoph’s prize. What he got for breaking free. Here I was, doing stinking work, slogging through theories of materialism I didn’t believe in one wit, making compromises with the university administration, and there was even this man from the Stasi whom they were making me have these meetings with from time to time; I was giving him some info here and there. I was trying hard to get into the Party, as I mentioned, although I never did get in, damn them. Ha-ha. It’s all so funny in retrospect. And maybe it was these ridiculous meetings with your parents that got in my way. I don’t know. I’m not going to read my file. To tell the truth, Margaret, I was more cynical when I was twenty-five than at any time afterward. The wound was freshest. I already mentioned Biermann. I took the whole thing very hard.
And you know what—the fact that your mother was Jewish, or her mother was Jewish, or whatever it was—that was r
eally something. The love of a Jewish woman! A damn interesting thing for a German man of my generation. A Jewish woman—never touched, never tampered with, family intact—there’s only one way to look at it: it’s a sort of exoneration from the inheritance. I mean, that’s how personally we took things. And with fathers like ours, well especially Christoph’s—why not personally? Oh, that Venus of a mother of yours, that Sarah, was the light flooding into the backseat of the Trabi after the rain. I was shy with women back then, but I kept glancing over my shoulder at her, and she would smile at me, although God, I admit it, Christoph and I were both kind of snubbing her; what can you do, she didn’t know German, and she didn’t know Russian.
Christoph, to hell with him, he’d reach into his bag and pull out such riches—poststructuralists, deconstructionists, all these big names. Books I could have sold a kidney and not managed to rustle up for myself in the GDR, not at that time. And then we’d be at a stoplight and he’d do that thing of his—he’d turn his face away but put out his hand, and he’d be pushing deutsche marks at me. It was great, he was a grand soul, but there was this part of me that wanted to bash his head in. How the deuce did he get the upper hand? When we were in school, I was the one with friends. My grades were even better. So how did he have the power of the gift? Who appointed him?
Oh, your mother was lovely. The thing about me is: I’ve never been entirely indifferent to the wives of my friends. There’s something delicious about them. Women I find on my own can’t possibly be as alluring. You might say there is no cathexis there.
I’m talking in circles around the hot broth. Here’s what you need to know: for a few weeks that summer, while Christoph was busy with his big, important research at the Stabi, I waited outside the checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse for your mother alone. I drove her in my father’s car to the apartment in Friedrichshain. Part of me would pretend she wasn’t Christoph’s wife. I never quite understood her English, for example. Man, she could talk to let the sow out! But at the same time, secretly, I liked her precisely because she was no stranger at all; she was like a sister to me, she was the wife of my brother-friend, Christoph (which, to be entirely honest, is part of why I got started with you too.)
As for your mother—I don’t know why she did it. She said something once—about Christoph. Since the wedding night, apparently, he had been lying in bed with his back to her. Wouldn’t even turn around. He said he was tired. Christoph was not thriving in New Jersey, for obscure reasons, but maybe precisely because so obscure, all-powerful. That’s my sense at least. Later she told me that Christoph was in love with me, things like that. I don’t know. Better let sleeping dogs lie. Let dead dogs lie. Ha-ha.
What this means for you, Margaret, I can’t say. I realize I should never have gotten involved with you. What’s done is done, and there are some pretty ticklish issues here, although—no—I am not your father, not unless your mother carried you for fifteen months. But still, I hope you’ll stay away from me, and from my wife, for that matter, and handle the matter of the pregnancy as you know you must.
Friendly greetings,
Amadeus
THIRTY • The Return of the Tundra
There was a time that followed Margaret’s communion with Regina Strauss. It was a time in which she knew only two things: One, she had once loved a man named Amadeus. Two, the redemption she felt in loving the Family Strauss was a relief.
She continued to give tours under flowering spring trees, and at first it was a warm time. Then, as if riding the waves of her love for the Strausses, memories began to come at an accelerated rate. Margaret remembered short, bright films, dreams from the missing time.
Vodka, subway rides, waking in strange beds, doctors’ appointments, clothing she had once owned, and vodka again.
She began to sink deeper; she began to remember the sorts of things that are too small to be endured—the sheerest grains of sand, they fall through the cracks of any defense. She remembered the bracelet Amadeus had given her—she broke it on the sidewalk the same day; the smell between his shoulder and his neck. And her life split into two films, two films that had nothing to do with each other. She longed to let water flow over the newly remembered second film, ruin the celluloid. She was having dreams of chickens trapped in burning yards, dreams of houses built on sand washing into the sea, dreams of cruelty from strangers.
Until finally, one night, she had a dream that was worse than the chickens.
It was the worst thing of all. She had a dream of the Salzburgerstrasse—the Strauss family’s last home.
In the dream, it was raining outside. The foyer of Number 14 was hushed, and the foliage pressed against the glass from the mossy courtyard, leaves and branches thick as tongues, soaked in rain. Already everything was suffused with what was coming.
Outside, a few shrubberies and one or two puny saplings loomed lushly, deliriously so: a wall of pity-green flowers, drawing their tongues along the panes of glass in the aluminum wind.
Margaret went out to the courtyard, in search of the speaking pool, full of anticipation. She put her ear into the pool as she had done once before. All was murky. The goldfish were gone.
Beneath the water, only silence had its home. Margaret gave up at last. Her ear was cold. She went back inside, shaking droplets from her hair. She walked through the grey velvet interior to the mirror, to the place where she had first seen Regina.
The room smelled of dust. She went to the oval of the mirror and brought her eyes up.
The room was darker than it had been a moment before.
Margaret touched the frame and saw her fingers were shaking. She could hear a fluttering.
Oh, the shadow-woman appeared almost right away. Glowing, it moved in beside her, glowing, the woman in her faded hair and brittle, many-times-washed, starched lace collar. There was Regina, there she was, looking out at Margaret.
Regina was as Margaret remembered, only far more so. Her eyes were large and round and pooling and her glance was sweet and soft and reproachful. She was silent, and for a fraction of a second, Margaret felt herself begin to catapult on waves of the old ecstasy.
Almost right away however, the life inverted. First, it was the smell of mildew. Margaret saw something in the woman’s face. There was a glint of blood. A glint of blood in her cheeks—something grasping—hope or hatred or fear, Margaret could not tell, but it was the manifestation of a quickened heart.
Margaret spoke first. “I wanted to know about—our game of Hearts.” Her voice rasped in the silent room.
Regina looked to the side. She sighed. She looked around, but not at Margaret, and she flushed. Margaret repeated herself more desperately now. “Won’t you play?”
Regina sighed again, strangely, cryptically. She pulled at her hair, then she shrugged, and her eyes flashed in a way that spoke of some hidden passion. She looked at Margaret and seemed to muster her.
Margaret saw something bad in that look. In a rush, as if in a reflexive gesture of self-defense, Margaret brought her arms up toward those narrow shoulders beyond the glass, and her movement was two things at once: both meant to hold Regina back from her, but also the beginning of an embrace.
Before her fingertips could touch the glass, Regina spoke, and her voice shattered the room. “I was lying, Margaret. Ich habe gelogen.”
In the foyer a smell of tundra rose, and then a smell like sweet grasses beginning to rot at the end of summer. The smell of herd animals and manure, and then the smell of wet, overripe clover. The room began to change; the streetlights’ bulbs, aloft in their cast-iron, came on outside; the glass at the front of the foyer and also at the back pressed toward Margaret; the walls of green flowers floated nearer. Each cupping blossom began to spin, cups of water glinting in the light, and the water carried the scent of tundra, the scent of an old and tired buffalo lying dead or ready to die near the water, the scent of fish on sparkling northern riverbanks that are eaten and later shat out. Despite everything, I believe in the good of hum
anity, came a whisper.
“You lied?” Margaret asked.
Regina nodded.
“About what?” asked Margaret.
“About almost everything.”
And then Regina began to tell a story. A different story. At first Margaret could not hear her; she had an auditory hallucination like a loud report. She thought: Everyone is full of danger, but this one person must not be changeable, this one person is my life. Regina’s white earlobes caught the light and Margaret could see little earrings on her lobes, what had once been pearls, although the globes of them had been crushed in some long-since-extinguished fury.
She had been enraged, Regina said. She had been panicked, eager, hopeless and blistering. She might have taken the children to her husband’s family in the country—yes, for a time, there had been that choice.
But when she still had the chance, she and her husband were quarreling. After her neighbors betrayed her, she could no longer make out the snowy peaks and icy brooks of the Alps—no, that had been a lie, and there was no thought of reading to the children. They had barely enough to eat. And he, her husband, was vile; his mother, too—she did not send them food packages though in the country she had more for one person than they had for five, and once even, several years before—it burned Regina’s mind, oh how it burned—she had flung one of Regina’s dishes to the ground for its pattern of roses, a pattern that did not match the dishes she had given them. The unmatched dish “injured her eyes,” the mother-in-law said. (“It was my dish,” Regina said. “It was my own dish.”)
Given the chance, Regina dragged her feet. She suggested first of all to her husband that perhaps she would not take the children to his mother’s after all. Just to see what he would say. And to her surprise he did not reply. He walked meekly to the park. Later that same day he came back. He said simply: I want a divorce. He said he would take the children with him.
The History of History Page 31
