Margaret climbed and her mind cleared. And then, as if out from the rising movement in her legs, came the memory of another staircase, to test her newfound strength. The oval staircase. She remembered climbing that one as well.
She was going to see Amadeus, her body not large yet, although already she could feel the child moving. His terrible letter had still not come, but would soon, after this event.
On this day, she had looked up above her and seen him smoking at the top of the stairs, leaning over the banister. His wife did not allow him to smoke in the apartment, and he was not meant to smoke in the stairwell either, but sometimes he did. Margaret could smell his Gauloises Rouges, and the red flax runners, and see the ash fluttering down. She called up to him. He did not answer.
Margaret was almost at the top, and she called to him again. He heard, but the door slammed. He heard her and he was gone.
She was spurned.
The slam of the door. Nothing would ever be the same.
Just when her spleen was most suffocating—when the death of hope was purest—a bird flew into the convex skylight lifting plump out of the roof. The glass shattered and fell in drops of light, oh the solidified rain!, and the bird—it must have died at the moment of impact—it landed all the way on the basement level, coming down softly like crêpe. Margaret saw it fall down to the tiles, defeated at last. She saw it fall all the way down, from high above.
The falling bird marked her mind.
Soon after, Amadeus’s letter came. A green-white mold began in her. Whether or not she was her lover’s child—an affair within the family, that had happened. Ecstasy, submission to a homeland messiah, a pollination between flowers of the same plant, a country slimy with the Heimat semen of its father, rejecting outsiders violently for the sake of a love affair with its own blood—that had happened. It was as unbearable as anything in memory.
So Margaret did not think about Amadeus. She wiped him from her head. His letter about the affair with Sarah, her mother—she threw it out, she washed it out.
But the eradication brought a disease. The more Margaret did not think of it, the more she thought of other things—the bird, for one—breaking the glass. Each time she did, her throat went tight. She choked. The birds of Berlin began to twitter in poison-tipped chorus then, truncheoning her, and when she pressed away all memory once and for all, it was the birds that flew into the holes left behind. The pigeons stoppered the pocks on the faces of the houses; the birds of Berlin did not cease their chatter.
Margaret braced herself against the graduated walls of the church stairwell. Yes, the birds had marked her mind, moved in where memories should have been, and holding on to the railing to prevent her dizziness from toppling her, Margaret posited a new idea. “A sleeve of time” she called it, a carousel of amnesia, in which all moments are fixed for eternity as soon as, and precisely because, they are forgotten. Fixed eternally and so eventually, when they do return, as return they always must, swallows from Africa, they will be reincarnated as exotics—flies and trees and monsters and trams.
If meaning cannot be assigned to the things of the heart—the things from which meaning springs and to which it belongs, then it will come unmoored and swim unspecifically. And if it swims unspecifically, it is not only the flies and trams and birds and architecture of Berlin that will be impregnated. The entire general world will become heavy with the structure of the private mind. The ghost enters the inanimate and the inanimate enters the ghost. The doctor had said it long before Margaret had ever wanted to hear it.
What the doctor had not described, but which gripped Margaret now, was the consequence. When nothing is assigned a specific hook on which to hang itself, nothing is outstripped. The sleeve turns itself inside-out then rolls rightside again, only to go inside-out once more: a merry-go-round world, a world of hyper-meaning, a world of eternal return at once heartbreaking and estranged: a history of ever-returning history.
Margaret ran her hands along the sloped brick walls of the throttling spiral of the church stairwell, narrow and full of dust, its walls leaning toward her as though a traveling and slanting vortex, and felt her dizziness pass. Margaret’s mind opened like a night flower.
She reached the top of the belfry and came out into the air. The day on which her bicycle chain fell from the back gear had not yet died, although she felt as if she had been underground for years. She leaned against the railing and the afternoon sun leaned with her, at an acute angle to the city. In the sharp light, she could see the three-dimensionality of things. She looked down at the palace courthouse in the Kleistpark, looming in shades of bright and dark, and at the high-windowed Gymnasium standing next to it, and the hulking bunker from the Second World War that stood behind them both. She saw the fresh green of the leaves catching fire on the orange light.
Again she thought of the sleeve of time. She had been still, and the city, rich unto itself, had moved inside-out.
She blinked, and it came upon her that now she might have the strength to find out the twist of things. She could begin to discriminate what was horror and what was romance, what was myth and what was life; which were signs of despair and which were signs that the city, polyphonic and great, had become a single, monotonous expression of her yearning for things elusive and lost.
With her gaze draped over the roofs below her, Margaret felt a hidden door, tangled in her mind’s ivy, come free and crack wide. All around her, the city was dancing for her a last time.
Across the quiet, humanity-scrawled land, the steep auburn roofs of the Martin-Gropius-Bau reared up; the Landwehr Canal, winter swans in the crooks of its banks, turned and shifted its course. For Margaret’s inner eye, the swinging afternoon sunlight in the empty upstairs ballroom at Clärchen’s Ballhaus glowed upon something hidden: a parallel life behind mirrors. The faces of the dead rose into the bark of the sycamores along Puschkinallee, and Georg Elser, shot to death in the weedy prison yard of Sachsenhausen, moved gently in the sleep of the grave—as if to tell Margaret he knew it all; the houses on Grosse Hamburger Strasse grew steeper and taller out of their chrysanthemums, and the iron eagle on the Weidendammer Bridge rustled its wings; the Wall fell and fell eternally, the crowds surging through the carnival night; the small, broad body of Rosa Luxemburg landed in the canal with a platsch; and although Margaret could not see him, she could hear him: the Brazilian man who had come to Berlin just to see the Stadtpark where his mother once played under the golden stag as a girl—as he opened his mouth to sing tra-la-la.
Warm curtains closed and opened around her mind. Through the fabric Margaret could see alternating shadows, a correspondence between prisms.
She blinked. The sun was down. Now, only the dusty wooden floor of the belfry porch hissed underfoot in the dark.
But in that moment, a feeling of beauty took hold of Margaret—a feeling so rich it dwarfed death. The door in her mind opened and the narrow glimpse turned a magnet key in her eye; she felt light seeping out from the base of her skull. A heavy stone shifted, and the warm curtains billowed no more than by the breath of an insect, but exposed for a brief instant, in the heart of the city before her: a red jewel with a flame inside it, red at its core, arching corridors raying in every direction, toward every fine thing, every decipherment.
Margaret breathed and was flooded. When she would have to die, it would be remembering this.
The sleeve of amnesia holds a mystery—a shadow, an innuendo—that is a weaponry of beauty; it makes of the mind an arboretum, the inkling of lost and hidden things a wind shaking down all the tears left unshed, like fruit from a storm-rustled tree. For good or ill, whether it be necessary to outgrow it or not, the mystery inside the ever-inverting sleeve is an engine to power the task of living, or conversely, a form of deathlessness.
And a ghost, a ghost is the leftover resonance of a style of being, the intense and prolonged sympathetic vibration, in this world, of a life in the next. Once, caught in the sleeve of time, Margaret split herself
in two and released a ghost of herself. The ghost went lost and wandering. But now here it was, coming home again.
THIRTY-SIX • Margaret
Margaret lay her head back. She could see.
In the early hours of an already darkening evening, she could see how a young woman had walked down the slope of a cobblestone street in Prenzlauer Berg.
The young woman was carrying a sleeping baby, the child that had emerged from her body in the most recent days. She carried it in a car seat they had given to her at the hospital—a donation for low-income single mothers. She was dressed in heavy clothing made for a man: an overcoat, a slouch hat, and wool trousers, although underneath, a pair of high-heeled boots. The autumn night was mild. Her long, fine hair was unbrushed and matted. Under her eyes, her transparent face was dark, and the child’s miniature face too had the papery lacing of acne some babies are born with. From both of them came an odor of sour milk, and from Margaret, sleeplessness. Nearing Number 60, from her vantage point on the other side of the street, she looked up at a set of two balconies belonging to the apartment on the fifth story, and she was crushed at the sight of unlit, lifeless windows. She crossed over and sat down on the stoop of the next house.
She would wait.
She glanced at the child in the carrier. She felt a blooming. There was a tug of pain on either side of her chest as her milk let down. The sensation was blocked out quickly by rebuke, however. She blinked, looked about, erased her mind, really a welcome alternative to despair, and closed her eyes. She tried not to fall asleep.
She sat for a half hour, until finally two boys emerged from Number 60, and she jumped up to catch the heavy door before it closed. She came into the stairwell. The thick oak banister was carved into a shining lion’s head at its curving base. The animal’s face was scowling and haughty. The stairs curved in an oval around a great shaft of light, lit from a multipaned skylight above. Margaret made her way up laboriously. She almost tripped on the red flaxen runner. Around and around she went.
She strained to keep the carrier from swinging into the railing although its burden was so light—so weak were her arms. On the landing of the top floor she stopped before the apartment on the left side and put the baby down next to the door. She knew when to expect them home, for she had long since been in the habit of tracking Asja’s comings and goings—anonymously calling her university office, in order that she—Margaret—might call Amadeus only when his wife was not at home. It was Thursday. Asja would come home at eight o’clock on the dot, less than an hour from now, and Amadeus, if he was not out drinking with his friends, must come home soon as well. She reached into her coat pocket and took out a letter in an envelope. It was labeled “Amadeus.” She tucked it next to the miniature body.
Dear Amadeus,
Perhaps you never loved me because I am twenty-five years your junior. Or perhaps it is because I come from the “superficial” new world and you have devoted your life to the archives of the old. You are a reverse Humbert Humbert, who cannot love his devoted Lolita, you neurotic, with your fear of airplanes, men, and tree branches—or why can’t you love the recipient of your craven choice of passion? (I can almost hear you insist: for a Lolita I am old, overeducated, that my skin is always white. Not the gold of the new world.) You insist that we cannot be together because of your attachment to your wife. But I ask you, if you were so attached to her, how could you visit me like you did, how could you dominate both my time and heart? I suspect you of misogyny or misanthropy or both.
I have never had any trouble loving you, you have always been easy for me to forgive. But there is one thing I cannot forgive. Why did you slam the door when I most needed you?
When you receive this letter, you will have our child in your arms, your arms which I know can be the most tender and compassionate in the world. And should you balk at your task, you won’t find me. I am leaving Berlin and won’t come back. I’ve found a job abroad. My plane leaves before you can find me.
I do not want him. He only came into this world as a bid for your love and he and I failed in that regard so dramatically that now he only reminds me of what a fool I have been. I would be ashamed to offer myself to him as a mother.
Sincerely,
Margaret
P.S. He doesn’t have a name.
P.P.S. Please don’t show him this letter when he’s older.
Margaret took a last look at the sleeping child. She put a drugstore-bought bottle and packages of formula beside him, and then made her way down the stairs.
She crossed the city, returning to Schöneberg, where she began to clean her apartment, a place of grime and filth. Of course she did not have a plane to catch, that part of the letter was a fabrication, but some weeks before she had already had her telephone number changed. She put a new last name on the letterbox. Schmidt.
She held out for two and a half days. On Sunday morning she hurried back to Number 60 Winsstrasse as soon as the subways opened at 4:30 a.m.; she had not slept the night. She had to go through an empty lot in the Marienburgerstrasse and climb over a fence (excruciatingly painful for her stitches) to get into the back courtyard of Number 60, but when she got up the stairs and reached the landing of the top floor, she found the baby was still in the car seat next to the door. The little infant was lifeless. She raised it to her chest. A heartbreaking silence slumped around her. She rang the bell of the apartment, over and over again. Had no one ever come home?
She never found out whether her little baby had cried, if so, why no one had come, or whether the cause of death was something that crept up more quietly than dehydration. All that occurred to her was this: to take the body in the car seat on the S-Bahn with her across the city. She pulled the blankets up around it so no one would see. She borrowed a spade from a suburban garden. She buried the child in the still soft earth of the Grunewald forest. She buried her letter with the child. Around a tree, she latched a bungee cord, to mark the grave.
She had meant to go back home then, but sadness leached into her muscles and undid them, and she sat down against a tree. Her head fell forward.
THIRTY-SEVEN • Erich Again
Something was burning in Margaret’s apartment on the Grunewaldstrasse. From the courtyard of Number 88, Erich the Hausmeister could see smoke puffing out of the upper panel of Margaret’s kitchen window. The window was open, and the smoke flushed out of it, black and sturdy.
He knew that the American was out. He had seen her unlocking her racing bike. He knew that when she was bicycling in the neighborhood she did not wear a helmet, but when she was going a long distance, she did. Today, she had worn a helmet.
So now Erich climbed up the drainpipe next to the recyclables and hoisted himself onto the ledge. His agile body thin as a long-legged spider, he shimmied along the copper overhang that ran above the windows of the Döner shop. Margaret always left the window of her bathroom open, and now he went through it.
He fell into the room with a soft bounce and a ripple of popping bones, light as a ballerina. For a split second, Erich eyed a cabinet at the end of the long, lion-footed bathtub. Then he made his quick way into the kitchen.
It was only one burner that was on, and all the smoke billowed from a single pot—it was unclear what it had once been—the charred remains were perhaps lentils by the black outline.
The stove turned off, the pot under cold water, Erich began to look around the flat. Disarray, books, disarray, and more books. It was good he had come when he had. The whole place might have gone up like birch bark.
He returned to the bathroom. It happened that once he had seen Margaret leaning out the window of this bathroom, and believing herself unobserved, she had thrown something yellowy-gold out of it. Later, Erich found the brass key among dry leaves—it had been in the autumn—and it was ding-dong in his mind: here is Margaret’s secret.
As though he was meant for it, the first piece of furniture he tried—yes, yes, he brought the key with him, for it was always on his heavy ri
ng—opened under the key’s ministrations as though charmed. Of course a key opening a lock is not a matter of charm, but still the ease of it had a magic quality.
Inside the drawer of the cabinet was very little. Just a few documents, mostly health insurance forms. And then—a birth certificate.
Erich stood for a long time with his chin in his hand. He thought of Margaret; he thought of her face.
It made him sorry.
But none of this would do. None of it would do at all.
The first thing Erich did the next day: he checked the birth registry at the city hall, for confirmation.
A boy, born September 5, 2002. Christoph Amadeus Taub.
THIRTY-EIGHT • Arrival of the Valkyries
It was a lightning storm outside—the summer had come. The buzzer of the door went off. A clap of thunder fell like the knock of a hammer, the thunder clapped, the hammer fell, the door buzzed, and then there was another knock, and deep voices. It was the accent of Berlin that sent the alarm through Margaret, the deep and angry voice of Berlin at her door. Margaret sat on the floor in the bedroom and listened to the yelling. They were the police, they said, and they knew she was inside. The Hausmeister had told them. If the racing bicycle was in the courtyard, then Margaret was upstairs, and Margaret closed her eyes and thought of the summer nights in the outdoor theater with Amadeus. She felt the sepia tint of one Russian film they had seen. It hovered on the outside of her eyes. She opened them and looked out at the purple sky. The rains were coming. She did not resist, she went to the door and opened it but without releasing the chain at first, and through the crack, there were the police officers, a man and a woman in camouflage green were looming above her; they were enormous and blond, the woman, turned in profile on the landing and speaking into a radio, had long golden hair that fell in an elastic band to her waist, her thighs proud and broad. The man too stood on wide-set legs broad as Berliner chimneys. Margaret looked up into their eyes—the light in them glinted, like water winking and shuddering at the mossy bottom of a well. So the police were the Valkyries, she thought: the choosers of the slain. She opened the door to its widest. She lifted her wrists.
The History of History Page 36
