The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  That night, when she sat partially undressed—she was bathing the children in a tub it had taken her much labor to fill with hot water—Franz looked at a mole on her back and he remarked on it.

  And in that instant she felt under his eyes like an old and ugly and dirtied woman and a flickering came before her and her head twisted. Regina’s mind threw itself against the bars of its cage with all its weight then. Outwardly she set her mouth and spoke to Franz all at once, in a strange voice she did not recognize, about how they would have coconut cakes after the war.

  And her husband might have noticed her humiliation.

  When the children were breathing evenly, after her husband was laid to bed on corduroy cushions by the kitchen window where he had exiled himself—his white face, his open mouth, the children too sweet for this world—the branches of the naked trees tapped at the frozen glass. Regina was frightened and grasping. She was stubborn and feverish and her other chest—where was her true chest, where was her true heart?—her other chest was plugged with the thirst for vengeance, not only against her husband but against this mad and ugly world. His eyes fluttered as he slept and his cheeks were deep rose. What happened as they died, here in this house, was something like the spinning claws of a cornered bear—if you take them with you, no one shall live.

  So together, they died.

  All the gentleness in Regina’s face was dissolved. As she spoke to Margaret now, all the broad wisdom was revoked.

  It broke Margaret’s heart.

  “I barely lied.” Regina breathed heavily. “I only lied about how I felt. About how I wish we had been. About the feeling within the family, about our psychic life. I did not lie about what happened. If you recall, I never claimed Franz took any part in it.”

  Margaret struggled to clear her mind. In fact she made an effort to correlate the details of this story with the other one. She saw this was true, perhaps not exactly, but more or less—the main difference was indeed the feeling, the emotional shades.

  “But,” said Margaret, her voice weak. She thought of how this new story might be taken apart; about how the variations, the fabrications, might continue in layer upon layer forever. “But can you tell me …” and now Margaret spoke haltingly, hoping to catch Regina out. “The gas was in the kitchen, you say?”

  “I already told you. I didn’t move him. For weeks Franz had been sleeping in the kitchen anyway, on a bed he made up for himself by the window. We did not get along. As for the children—they slept with me in the bedroom, but children are easy to carry without waking, once they sleep.”

  “I see,” Margaret faltered. “What about the birds?” She shuddered. “Was that true?”

  “That was true, every word,” Regina said. She smiled. The way her eyes moved, it seemed she was drugged—her pupils were unnaturally large. “With one difference. After they went to Frau Schivelbusch, I did something. I broke into her apartment when she was at church, and I killed them both—strong Sarto and weak Ferdinand. And Frau Schivelbusch—I would have killed her too.” Regina paused. “We were not weak,” she said. “We were not the kind of birds—who don’t give a second fight.”

  Margaret cast her eyes down.

  Something was happening inside her. Something that was directed not at Regina but at herself.

  She felt the chills that accompany a fever. She wrapped her arms around her chest but still she was terribly cold. An involuntary refrain rose in her: Despite everything, I believe in the good of humanity. It was a cold, cold refrain. She thought—and now the coldness, the causticity of her thoughts grew further still—of Walter Benjamin, living just a few blocks from this apartment house, as he wrote: “Kitsch is nothing more than art that has absolute, one-hundred-percent, immediate use-value.” She shivered horribly. To herself, she said: My love has been greedy. My love has had use-value. Her face froze in shame. The Family Strauss—she had latched onto them and used them. She had made them into the perfect sacrifice, just as—her thoughts blackened, swirling in mud—a needy world used Anne Frank, that sweet and self-complete girl, as precisely the sacrifice it needed. To have sacrificed the best, Margaret thought—that was what was craved. Old man history never gets away without surrendering up his prize roses—his hostages of myth and time.

  The doctor’s pronouncements had planted the seeds, and now they were pushing up. If we find a lamb, Margaret was telling herself spittingly, a suitable lamb, and look at it very hard, and agree as a people, as a civilization, that we have, during one long and terrible night of the soul, given up the finest thing to the devil—rendered up the dearest, most gracious, most openhearted thing to the devil, then all human rivalry will be dissolved at its acme; all guilt paid for in one stroke. The finest thing dissolved before it can be owned.

  Margaret felt this horribly, and in her bitterness the entire thing struck her as defiled and unforgivable, as a crime of the living against the dead. And it was not even because this was why people being murdered now, in other parts of the world, are not rescued—because no one knows yet whether they are the kinds of victims that are needed: the pure, the innocent, and the humble, and so we will wait with our hands steepled, and let them go it alone, calling them up for service only after their throats are slit.

  No, it was not even this that crushed her.

  It was the symbolic itself. Abruptly, Margaret rebelled against—for she could not bear it any longer—innocence by proxy. She could not stand atonement through metaphor.

  She looked back into the mirror at Regina standing next to her own reflected face.

  “You lied to me,” she said.

  “I could not have lied,” Regina said, and in a new, deeper voice, almost a growl: “I could not even speak.” Her words were slurred.

  “You murdered your children,” Margaret said.

  There was a hissing sound. Words rose as though sizzling in fat.

  “I would have cut out their hearts.”

  Margaret drew back. Shivers ran up and down her and up and down her sweat-drenched face. She wanted to flee—to flee for the rest of her life. It is impossible to describe how searingly Regina’s words burnt her mind.

  Margaret raised her arm to shield her face, but she could see the woman was changing. She was darkening, broadening, and seemed covered in fat and fur. A pelt had grown on her. And more than anything now, it was the smell of grasses. A smell of grasses in the body of a fine and splendidly muscled animal. She was taller than Margaret now, far taller—she was filling out into the most dangerously mothering animal of all—she was a brown-black member of the ursine family, a rearing bear, with paws like hands, eyes like pinecones, and mouth sweet and dandy and deadly.

  Margaret covered her face.

  She heard a low moan. It may have been her own.

  Regina’s usual delicate body—all at once it reappeared. Her face was gentle and serene, her presence next to Margaret’s image in the mirror was warm and grave, a Solomon, a bearded patriarch.

  “Don’t cry,” Regina said.

  Margaret looked up at her.

  “It was only a test.”

  But if it was only a test—Margaret blinked. And then she thought: No. It did not matter what Regina said, the wise and gentle woman was gone, and the bear had come to stay. The bear was truer. The bear, if it were ever encapsulated, would not be the sugar pill.

  Margaret looked in the mirror and saw a bear on all fours on the floor of the foyer, beginning to rise up again, opening its darling and terrible mouth—an ursine clown—hungry, on top of its hoisting thighs, for Margaret’s life.

  THIRTY-ONE • The Isolation of the Fanatic

  Of course, it was only a dream.

  But some dreams will not easily die. In the weeks afterward, a leftover chirring, a fly in the room, an intermittent itch on Margaret’s cheek—it remained. The fly’s legs chafed her consciousness like the wires of a bugging device that can be discovered but not removed.

  Margaret had to find her way back to the old Regina.


  A long, long time, she had occupied herself with pageants—she saw that now. Her alliances and identifications were the pseudo-involvement of the sleeping dog that moves its paws as it lies, dreaming of the hunt.

  But she had to take sides now. And not take sides quixotically, but by loving the right Regina actively, committing herself through some irrevocable sign. And like so many people whose rage has too long been impotent, Margaret Taub was vulnerable to fantasies of vengeance.

  One of the unstillable horrors of the Holocaust is that there is no vengeance to be had. Millions killed by millions more—there is no justice there. There will be no restitution. The victims are too many; the perpetrators are legion. The perpetrators are in every yard, in every government that provided police support, in every town that cast Jews out of knitting circles and marching bands, out of guilds and pensions, that starved neighbors out to the cattle cars all across Europe. Before and after it was a political policy, the Holocaust was a social movement. Not civilian cooperation but civilian enthusiasm was the sine qua non of the Shoah. A wave of genocidal anti-Semitism washed the Western world during the first twitches of modernity, and the Nazis rode the crest of it as it crashed; gave it forever a German face. But the dagger of revenge lies unused in the drawer. There is no body into which to plunge it. Margaret had been flailing against the stone-cold wall of vengeancelessness—she had been flailing against that nonsense-truth for a long time.

  The dream of the bear. To herself, Margaret said it had “broken her heart.” But in the days afterward, she thought she had dreamed the dream for this reason: she wished for such a Regina. She wished for a Regina who fought and killed. Not because she loved heroes, not because it would mean justice, but because she did not know how to live in a world where there was no second fight. In such a universe, she did not even know how to think.

  Now—mark what happened next. In the following weeks, the dice were loaded. Margaret was stuffed to the bursting point with a heavy desire for vengeance. And if it could not be on a grand scale, then it should be on a small one. And so there came a blind spin of fortune’s wheel, and when it came to a stop, the arrow rested on the only person it could have rested on. The only man who was still alive. Hitler’s bodyguard, the old man in his potpourri house, Arthur Prell.

  Are you surprised? But it could have rested on no other!

  This is how it went. The first days after Margaret’s dream, they passed slowly, tediously. It was as though, in her fascination with vengeance, Margaret was waiting for the arrival of hordes, an army gathering in the east, and she could not fight her ferocious fight until they arrived. She bided her time.

  And then, slowly, she began to think of him. She remembered how, when she had seen him near the bunker talking to skateboarding kids, she had remained still, even when she had wanted to flee or destroy him. And she remembered how, behind the veil of paralysis, she had felt forced to betray her own kin.

  She remembered bringing him chocolates, and this was the worst memory of all.

  And then at some precise moment, it struck her that Arthur Prell was the only place, in her own life, where the past was still alive. Could he be called a chink in the armor of vengeancelessness, could he be called a hole in the shield of lost opportunity and vanished time?

  One night in late April, when the evening outside wore a black and yellow cloak, Margaret looked out into the shadows. The streetlights were yellow fireballs in these days of fog, the trees were black stalagmites of wet dust. Elysian life hovered far above human eyes, and the primrose secondary maze—it was hidden. But somewhere in the darkness out there, that man was living.

  She did not know what it was she was meant to do. She was only sure of one thing: the beauty of the early Regina, the one she had first imagined, the unspeakable softness of her sweet story—like the spot on the crown of the head of a newborn baby where the bones have yet to knit together—was only something she could endure thinking of if there were some vengeance to be had in this life.

  Even if it was logically impossible, Margaret must have vengeance. She must mark the end of her stupefied, soap-statue innocence.

  She told herself: the end of such an innocence will be something hard and terrible. It cannot be otherwise. Because if restitution were made in some more usual way, by embarking, say, upon a life of devotion or altruistic acts, she would only appear to be reformed, while in reality never bending her character, never taking a scalpel to her personality’s infection, the infection whose name is passivity.

  Margaret looked out the window. The air knit tight together and the fog pressed forth a drizzle. A man on the Grunewaldstrasse—in the smeary ball of light under the streetlamp, he seemed to be dressed all in brown leather. Something about his posture reminded her of Arthur Prell.

  Margaret opened the window wide and put her head out into the moist night.

  The horselike face of the tall bodyguard, Arthur Prell, bore down on her mind’s eye, but when the man turned it was a stranger’s face that called its little dachshund after it.

  Arthur Prell deserved to be punished, Margaret thought. And she—she deserved to be guilty. What if Prell paid by becoming a victim, and what if she, Margaret, paid by becoming a perpetrator? Her heart beat harder. The man in brown leather disappeared down the street, gulped into the fog.

  Margaret drew her head in. She turned her bright eyes on the flat around her. She had a heat in her skull. And on that night, Margaret walked around the center of the living room in a slow circle, as though she would trace a spell, or consecrate a marriage.

  The night wore on and she could not dream, could not drink, could not stop moving her legs. The time of waiting was almost at an end now—she sensed it. She looped. Her mind worked.

  She had to go back to see Prell again. And she was terrified of the visit and of what would happen there.

  She circled. She did not begin to move straight until the next morning, when the first thing she did was this: she went back to see the good Dr. Arabscheilis.

  At the doctor’s office, padded walls of adrenaline buttressed Margaret. She was allowed to go directly through to the back room. She was light; she walked on water.

  The doctor was in her old place behind the heavy desk.

  The woman caressed the open pages of a book.

  “You once offered me mentorship,” Margaret began loudly. The room seemed to shudder under the blow of her voice.

  Too, the doctor’s head wobbled. The woman’s gaze remained fixed, startled by the volume. “Who is there?”

  “It’s me, Margaret. Margaret Taub.”

  “Ah, my dear Margaret Täubner.” The doctor breathed in her rasping, rhythmic way—an aural representation of honeycomb lungs.

  “Doctor, I want your advice.”

  “By all means, comrade. Please. Sit down.”

  “I want to kill a man,” Margaret said. “A bad person, a person whose existence is a travesty.”

  “My child, what are you saying?”

  “I want to kill a bad man.”

  “Do you mean there is a dangerous sort of person on the loose? Perhaps you should call in the law, comrade.”

  “No, no,” Margaret said. She had not foreseen this. “You don’t understand. Anyone would agree that the man should die, but—I would not say he’s a danger. Except as a corruption to morals. And he doesn’t happen to be at the mercy of any law.” Margaret was breathing hard, very much in her own mind. “But I would like you, as a doctor, as a citizen, to give me your blessing.”

  The doctor grimaced. “You sound like the danger, young Margaret. What are we talking about? A parricide? A vaticide?”

  Margaret blew out through her nostrils.

  “He’s an old Nazi,” she said. “He lives out in Rudow. He was with the SS.”

  “Ah,” the doctor said, very slowly.

  A moment passed.

  Then the doctor said, “There are many SS men still living today. There are many more that are dead already,
and many others that are dying as we speak, all without your help. They don’t need you to bring them to an early death. They don’t do anyone any harm anymore, Margaret.” The doctor looked at her. “Is this one particularly bad?”

  “He’s not particularly bad,” Margaret conceded, although only outwardly. “But he’s the one I know.”

  “Is he to be a token murder, or is he the first in a series?” the doctor asked. She touched her finger to her tongue and caught a page of her large, white book with it. The sound of the rustling page loaded the room.

  “A token murder,” Margaret said.

  The doctor, as always, was ruining everything.

  “For the crime of having been a member of the SS, a crime of association? Or did he commit particular atrocities?” the doctor asked.

  “He was not directly involved in any killing. And if you must know, he has already spent ten years in a Soviet prison.” Margaret pulled her opal ring on and off. It had been her mother’s. “He was tortured.”

  “So you would agree with me that this man is not dangerous?”

  “I would not say so. Not in particular.”

  “I see. And he himself never committed any particular … atrocities?”

  Margaret punched her head forward toward the doctor. “His existence is a crime. He may not be guilty, but”—Margaret spoke in a low voice—“it’s a gift, Doctor. I see it as a gift. That a killer is still alive for me to kill. There are still opportunities to carry out justice.” Her eyes glowed.

  The doctor did not respond immediately. Margaret breathed and waited. She looked eagerly at the doctor. The woman’s eyes were half closed.

  “It’s a gift that I only got by the skin of my teeth,” Margaret went on. “I may have been born late, but I was not born too late.” Margaret was almost shy in her excitement. “Everyone looks but no one acts,” she said. “I have been given a great blessing: an opportunity.”

  There was a long silence. Had the doctor fallen asleep? Her eyes were closed and her chest moved strangely. But all at once the woman spoke.