The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  Margaret felt weak, unsteady. The farther down the spiral staircase they went, the less clearly she could think. Her thoughts became muddier and muddier, and shortened, too. The underground, it seemed, was the place where long thoughts came to die.

  The spiral went on. Margaret’s mind waned. Her feet fell against the stone steps, and she had no prospect or expectation. Something went lax within her.

  The stairs opened on a passageway and Margaret’s powers of observation dimmed even as the lights grew brighter. Along the corridor, there were candles in holders that made the green walls shine tacitly, like emeralds in the rough. Margaret was now behind the hawk-woman and followed her through corridor after corridor, turning many times.

  At last, the hawk-woman turned into a doorway.

  Margaret peeked in. It was a hot, blazing chamber that she saw over the threshold, a small room filled with many burning candles. And not only candles. Floor to ceiling, stacked, were thousands of tin cans. They were piled in giant cubes and pyramids like houses of cards, cans with labels marking sardines, marking green beans, marking coconut milk and olives, and cans of paint too, and bicycle oil, and gesso—and cans without any labels at all. Some cans had labels in styles of ages long past, others were modern, all preserving hermetically everything that can possibly be preserved. On top of the cans sat candles, flames flickering, each one dancing to its private tune. The candles dripped wax liberally—and made a cheaply chemical, floral perfume.

  In the very center of the room, there was a railing made of tin cans welded together. Inside was a dais, also built of cans. And finally, on top of this dais was an enormous chair, high-backed and imposing like a throne.

  The hawk-woman climbed up and sat down in it.

  Perched up there, affectedly, her knees drawn tightly together and toes pointed mincingly side by side, the hawk-woman took a golden cigarette etui out of her alligator-skin pocketbook and also a fine lighter of the same metal. With her manicured hands, she put a cigarette to her lips, struck the lighter’s cap, inhaled, and let out a puff of smoke, the hanging, left side of her face shivering with the effort. She turned her head. Her heavy brow hung low over her eyes. Her grey suit was of a fine moiré (gone was the gabardine), and the waving water patterns of the moiré shook Margaret’s eyes.

  The hawk-woman spoke.

  “Margaret darling, you pretty little thing.” She inhaled sharply. “You’re to stay with us here now. Congratulations. This is quite the club.”

  The cans, the light, the wax—they ate the oxygen in the room, and Margaret thought perhaps this was the reason she could not breathe or think.

  Through the cotton of her muffled mind, fear took her.

  The hawk-woman pulled out a pair of pince-nez, put them over her half-slack face. She looked up at Margaret. “You’re such an obstinate little gnat. You insist on repressing your merry little life.” She reached into a short cabinet that stood next to her tall chair. “But I’ll help you, Margaret, I’ll help you to be mindful of who you are.” On her crenellated tongue, Margaret’s given name corrupted the air like a curse.

  Already now, Margaret began to draw her neck away from the hawk-woman, but the creature’s hands were moving, she was pulling out a glass cylinder of the type used inside of pneumatic tubes. She was checking a long label down its spine; first she rejected one glass tube, and then another, holding each one up to the light. Finally she let out a sharp breath of air.

  The woman’s hands lifted the glass tube in triumph, and her veins, in the heat of the room, were popping out of her skin. They were emerald green veins like the walls in the underground corridor.

  The image of the woman’s hands was too much for Margaret. It crossed another image—a ghost image in her mind. In that moment, a gentle minor chord sounded. Two negatives were projected onto the same piece of silver nitrate. The two images crossed, matched, glowed, sang.

  “I don’t want it,” Margaret began. “I don’t want to see anything.” But her eyes misted over as if to become one with her misted inner eye and her clouded mind. She could hear the hawk-woman’s voice, but fading now—“Then don’t read it, little ninny, you needn’t read anything you don’t want,” she was saying, but her voice was growing fainter and fainter. The woman’s hands were dancing still in Margaret’s mind, losing all but their lacings of emerald veins. Skeletons they were, skeletons made of arterial vessels carrying blood back to the heart.

  And so they carried blood back to the heart of Margaret. They reminded her—a memory floated toward her as though a ship doubling in size astonishingly on the far horizon, growing into a nocturnal glacier before her eyes—they reminded her of a letter from her mother. She had read a letter two years ago, when she, Margaret, was enormous, ready to give birth. She had been so staggered by the thing, she had linked it with the undesired child. She had never wanted to see anyone in her family again after that letter, including, even including, the child—her nearest kin. The letter from her mother—Margaret’s head swam. She remembered, as though it had always been burnt on her retina, the letter of August 2002, when she had been told that she had not always been Margaret Taub.

  An envelope, postmarked New York City:

  Dear Margaret,

  I haven’t heard from you in a long time. I know you’re hurt. I’ve done my best. I’ve really done everything. But you have hurt me too, you know. You can’t imagine what it does to me, that you insist on living in that city.

  I found the enclosed letter in his things. I’m sorry I only found it now—perhaps it would have been a consolation to you to have it earlier, but after the funeral I couldn’t bear to go through his papers for a long time, and before that, well you know how he was when he came home from the hospital. Actually, I don’t think I ever told you the worst of it.

  Please get in touch. It’s horrible for me that you won’t get in touch.

  Love,

  Mother

  Another sheet of paper, folded into a small, tight triangle at the bottom of the envelope, was recognizable by Margaret’s father’s usual habit. Across the triangle, MAGGIE was written in block script.

  Hi there, Girl!

  Summer’s winding up. How’s camp been treating you? Your mom says you like it there.

  Gas prices are sky-high. I happen to be very familiar with the topic of rising gas prices. Your mother took me on a vacation. Two weeks outside the hospital! Back now from 1½ weeks in Vermont. Great trip. Alphonse is reputedly dead (he was an old dog), not there with us in the flesh, but regardless of that arguable supposition, we routinely get Alphi’s point of view on most everything during the trip. He slept a lot less than usual (as we hear from him at the hospital as well). Some say I shouldn’t tell anyone. But we really experience Alphi with us daily everywhere we are, because he’s really there. But then, you are family, and so I’m sure you understand. Alphi doesn’t really care that gas prices are so high just so long as we get up and go someplace “good.” “Good” he defines as where there’s swimming. He likes to play in the shallows.

  Anyway, there I go running off at the mouth, forgetting the subject at hand. Unpardonable given the gravity. I want to tell you about my old dad … your Opa. I found the paperwork.… They had him on trial during the war. They let him go free. But here’s what they wrote about him before they did. This is what the Nazis wrote up about him, just so you know.… Even the Nazis knew what he was … and this is just a sample … although my bad translation.

  In Riga the SS-Sturmmann Wüstholz ordered the Jews to beat each other to death, at which time it was promised that the survivors would not be shot. The Jews did knock each other down, but not to death. The defendant [my old dad] got in the fray and beat the Jews and also hit Jewish women in the face with a whip. When a break was taken, he played on the harmonica the song “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind!” [You Are Crazy, My Child].

  He used to play that song to me, Margaret. That’s how I got singing it to you, before I knew any of this. Before I had done
“research.” Anyway, this is why your mom and I changed the last name. That asswipe can rot in hell, and I won’t hear his screams. Otherwise, with my special hearing, you know I hear very well. Sometimes I hear the real pine needles in the forest, and the pins and needles as they go into my old dad’s sides. I always hear him screaming down there. Even the devil feels the heat of the fires they’ve got down there, and when it’s your own dad especially, you can hear him scratching and clawing and just trying to get out of the lakes of fires they’ve got down there. But I won’t hear the screams, I haven’t heard them since we changed the name. It was a simple thing. When you were four years old, I guess you were too little to notice, a few days after your birthday, we did it. Just from Täubner to Taub, but doesn’t it fit? We became the Taub family. (You know what Taub means, right? Deaf.) I know it’s hard for you to understand. I thought I was helping you if I didn’t explain. If I didn’t tell Maggie what kind of an old Opa she had, she wouldn’t hear the screams like her dad did. Little Maggie, you were a good girl. We used to have another name but maybe you can accept that and love the new one as I do. Your mom is the one who told me to tell you. She said you were old enough now. Don’t give your mom any trouble, okay?

  Well, nice talking to you …

  Good luck with your life,

  Love you …

  Your Dad

  P.S. Any misspelled words are stickly (see, I typed strickly …) typos. And grammatical styling is for purposes of camouflage.

  Margaret remembered her father’s letter. The hawk-woman on her throne was still murmuring and hissing. The woman made sentences, spinning the chubby glass cylinder around in her emerald fingers like a baton, laughing raucously, although Margaret could barely hear her for the pain.

  Margaret closed her eyes. Fear and pain both know how to paralyze. Still and hard, the body careens to a stop; the rabbit’s heart slows its pound. When Margaret opened her eyes again, the white ink of the light in the room pooled around Magda Goebbels on her throne, her mouth flickering. She prattled on, and still that raucous little laugh was tinkling out of her. The light rose up, and her avian eyes were gemstones sitting in wax.

  All at once, she leaned in. Margaret’s breath stopped; she felt the hawk-woman nearing. Fear paralyzed her, but she was paralyzed too by what she had remembered—of her father, the spinning cyclone, and her grandfather, the harmonica-player, and of herself—she had carried a little child, and she could not bear it, she could not bear it.

  The sensation of the hawk-woman coming closer burnt Margaret’s skin. She had a sense of grand-scale entrapment.

  And now shall be told of something else. Now shall be told of how Margaret’s eyes were plucked entirely away from memories of her own kin and flesh, for the sake of the hawk-woman.

  It began when the monster spoke a single sentence, a sentence that caused the collapse of an essential support beam. At first, Margaret was sure she had misheard it.

  It sounded like the woman said: “Look at you, Margaret—you’re so thin,” in a tone of vain and humbug envy.

  Margaret looked up at her. She looked at Magda Goebbels through a veil of despair, but, still, something in this phrase was too familiar.

  Magda Goebbels’s antiquated pianola style had thrown Margaret off the scent. But abruptly, Margaret thought she knew her kind.

  It was a kind Margaret had run into many times. Always Margaret had associated it with chewing gum, flatulence jokes, and America.

  You meet her in every cafeteria, in every extended family, and beside every swimming pool. The woman is jazzy, and probably she’s rich. She makes a show of asking you about your sex life when she first meets you. She pulls you onto her lipstick team further by insinuating half-truths sotto voce about women of mutual acquaintance. Before she knows you, she says, “You and I have more in common than blood relatives, babe,” and if Margaret gropes for the right word, she interrupts to say, in a diction far younger than her years, “Wait, oh my God, are you one of those wicked smart people? You look like one of those.”

  But always with this type, soon the good feeling turns. It seems at first coincidental, but it is not: she has a husband. And although this viciously tennis-playing woman might speak irreverently of him to begin with, telling you something hilarious about, most likely, his penis, it invariably turns out she has a pedantic, mulish, pharisaical sense of submission to him. A prim and stiff-necked blackout in her sense of humor slams shut whenever there is discussion of his views. And if the marriage has gone sour, then the devotion will jump seats: to her political candidate, her pastor, maybe her thesis advisor. Whatever his title, tears will spring into her eyes when she speaks of “what he has done for me.”

  Always he has done a great deal. Because for herself, such a woman has no hope. In her own mind, she is as helpless today as she was at her birth. She has pinned her shadow to the wall of him, like a side of ham hung up to dry in a smokehouse.

  Yes, Margaret knew this kind very well, it is nothing at all, and the hawk-woman, as Margaret saw her now in a fine mist of bubblegum scent, no longer had the slightest riddle or sharpness or even spook to her venal, bawdy, sanctimonious grasp, and Margaret thought for a blistering instant: I am done with her.

  Some things have no meaning at all. The bright flames crested the sardine cans and danced. Margaret looked at the hawk-woman up on her dais. But now, recognized, she was for a moment not frightening at all, and a new energy filled Margaret. The cloud of ink light puddled and pooled, erasing the edges of the woman’s moiré dress. She sat huddled on her throne, crestfallen and poor. Margaret stepped sideways and moved back toward the door. She looked at the chamber and the rout of gleaming, dripping candles, and the still, waxy being—half woman, half hawk; half dead, half alive; half wax, half stone.

  Margaret heard a shuffling: a trembling of wings. And then the figure on the throne gave a whimpering sigh, and all at once she was made of stone. She froze into soapstone, and the lower half of her—it began to turn to powder and stream away like sand flowing through the waist of an hourglass.

  Margaret’s heart lunged. She was released. She took three heavy steps backward, scraping hard on the stone floor of the cellar, and then she turned on her heels and ran. She ran, hard and fast.

  Out of the chamber and down the long hallway she ran. And although the hawk-woman just a moment before had grown shabby and disintegrated, now the figure had a final gasp of power over Margaret’s mind. The hawk-woman might transform herself again and come flying at the back of her, ready to fall on her and take her down from behind, hold her pinned to the ground in her domain. Margaret ran hard; she did not know how to get out, but she took a turn to the west whenever she sensed there was such a turn to take, thinking that in this way she would eventually reach home, through the catacombs reach Schöneberg, although it occurred to her—something—oh so terrible, made her shake: the basement of the old Nazi post office had been built with a tunnel connecting it to Hitler’s New Chancellery and, from there, the tunnel went on and led to the bunker underneath Gertrud-Kolmar-Strasse where Hitler spent his last days and where he died with Eva Braun, with his dog, and with his dog’s puppies. Although now the chancellery, thank God, was destroyed by the Soviets, Margaret thought that without knowing it she could run the wrong way, run underneath Anhalter Station and finally find herself in the collapsed bunker, and there perhaps take a false step and trigger a terrible and complete collapse of the remains, and nothing—nothing could be more terrible than to be buried alive in Hitler’s bunker, suffocating in the old Nazi mess, and she, Magda Goebbels, the hawk-woman, with her manicured talons, would welcome Margaret into the shadow life.

  Margaret went up and down short flights of rusted stairs, forced her way over loose rubble, peered into crannies, saw toilet bowls that had overflowed many decades ago.

  She ran through other chambers and recognized the walls from photographs—high murals there, depicting prick-legged SS officers with arms in deltoid shields draped lik
e fangs to the ground, standing over voluptuous maids: reclining nudes, amateur renderings of the Venus of Urbino.

  Margaret’s spirit was a March river as she ran, and the surface was floating with ice floes, thick as pontoons. Broken apart in a grid the ice was; waters churning and boiling under it; the great, bulky sheets slammed into one another with miraculous antagonism, with a natural hatred—wham, wham and again, and Margaret was afraid and kept running.

  Her heart thumped, the waters churned, the ice floes slammed. Finally, Margaret found herself in a basement that was neither the waterworks nor the catacombs, and at long last she saw a staircase going up.

  She came out in a crypt—a church basement. She came up even farther and saw where she was—it was the church of St. Matthias, at Winterfeldtplatz, and the nave was a cool breath over her head, a billowing arc. Margaret was panting hard and the stitch in her side had grown iron teeth.

  All she knew was this: she wanted to climb up into the cool air, away from the underground. She found the wooden door to the bell tower. It was locked, but Margaret threw her shoulder against it, her lungs burning. Again and again, she slammed herself into it; she was hurt, the pain in her shoulder was terrible, but the lock broke after all and the door flew open, and Margaret fell inward with it. She righted herself and began another long ascent, but this time into the soft sky—up into the tower and the clouds, and already she could smell a fresh wind.

  As she climbed the stairs, she looked up.

  It is remarkably easy to conflate one kind of guilt with another. Guilt is a quicksilver that loves its brothers; it flows naturally according to its own code of gravity, eager to rejoin its own, and in the final reservoir, there are no distinctions. But Margaret, ferocious now, would not let any hawk draw her into an alliance. If her father’s father had been that sort of man, then it was all the more crucial that she should not be that sort of woman, for strength of identity is the only protection against clannishness, nationalism, and other forms of incest.