The History Of History Part 12

At first, Margaret tried hard. She smiled back at her. She smiled and nodded, encouraging the apparition to speak, trying to follow her lips and divine what it was the woman was telling. But the words she was repeating over and over did not grow clearer.

Margaret strained hard, but she could not make them out.

After a while, Margaret began to feel chilled.

She spent the latter half of the day at the public pool. In the echoing hall, she swam up and down until she was hypnotized and could not think. On the way back home, she looked up at the sky.

She would later call it a spiritual aftershock. She looked up; she saw a complex grid in the sky. A grid of quasicrystals on the ceiling of the world, like the ceiling of the shrine of Darb-i-Imam, only deeper, only ghostlier, etched into the filling night. And at first Margaret was full of fear. She looked up into the quasicrystal heavens and was frightened that there was a pattern there was a pattern, there was a design governing behavior on earth. Past and present, a repeating pattern always circular, knowing no progress that does not loop back again. The heavens were a bureaucracy, cycle-bound, administering life on earth-playing fast and loose with Margaret's red lips and tearing heart. And her head went weak.

That night, Margaret slept badly. She woke up several times, wondering when morning would come. Each time, she was afraid of returning to her dreams. At around six o'clock, just as dawn was breaking, she opened her eyes with Regina's lips before her, and now, with a certainty so heavy, she felt as if she were being forced through the bed, she could finally hear the words that Regina had repeated in the mirror: the words that had been moving on her lips-retten Sie uns. Save us.

EIGHTEEN * * They Played Hearts They Played Hearts

Margaret played for the ghost of Regina Strauss, and her pa.s.sion welled higher and higher. It kept spouting until finally it welled over and spilled the cup.

In the morning she had heard Regina's message, retten Sie uns retten Sie uns, and in the afternoon the excess began. Margaret decided to go out and buy a deck of cards.

Oh, she would buy a deck of cards. Under the right conditions, going out to buy a deck of cards can be the most exciting journey of your life, a.s.suming you think the cards will bring you communication with a ghost. And in fact, the entire walk to the shop sent quivers down her back: the close, tight streets, dodging what dogs have done, the smell of bakeries and the cool discs of faces bobbing in stride above dark clothing draped over swinging, mortal forms, the angles raying out from the vanishing points of sentinel avenues-those angles cut sharp as scissors, and all of it was promising, and all of it was fine. Margaret went down Akazienstra.s.se and stopped at a tobacco shop that also sold leather goods; there was a counter made of dark oak that smelled of shoe polish and another bright counter for the sale of lottery tickets and another place for the sale of cigars.

When she got home, Margaret opened the cellophane wrapper at the kitchen table. The table stood at the end of her long, narrow kitchen under a single window, and the cold light fell on the table like a spotlight.

Margaret challenged Regina Strauss, the mother of the three dead girls, she challenged her to a game of Hearts. She was not quite insane-it was not the fever, for it cannot be said she did not know this was an absurdity: trying to make a ghost play cards with her in the kitchen. But she saw herself a scientist conducting a perhaps overly ambitious experiment that was nevertheless not unwarranted by certain suggestive trends in the data. She knew the woman might be a matter of her mind, she knew it. But now she also thought she had been given a glimpse of where the ghost resided-whether physically or psychically, she chose not to try to decide.

Here is what she thought: the woman-as-ghost was present in patterning. It had first occurred to her after seeing the sky the night before, when she looked up and saw the grid of quasicrystals carved in the heavens. The pattern in the sky was a sign of the ghost's recent visit-or at the very least, a sign that Margaret's mind was receptive to such a wonderful illusion. When the royal standards fly over the castle, the monarch is at home. Now, if Margaret wanted to communicate with Regina, all she had to do was concentrate on quasicrystal grids, or on photographs of the ceilings of medieval mosques, or on the gilt edges of fine china where the curlicues go click-clack; the fugues of Bach in which the tonic subject loops and repeats. There was Regina, there was the very idea of a Regina, of a good visitor from the past who infiltrates the present and makes a beating counterpoint there, delivers meaning there, by way of her intricate regularity of personality. Margaret grew sure of this, and various things began to dance and tighten in her mind. The iron grates of balconies, the engraving on the lid of a silver pocket watch, the handles of rococo forks and spoons, the scabrous plaster molding around the upper edge of her bedroom, and now the playing cards and their promise of a game-it all opened up before her, conduits to a better life.

These cards. First there was the fact of their flip-side pattern-a circular snowflake in the center seemed to be exploding with mathematics before Margaret's eyes. Surrounding it were stylized interlocking oak leaves. In both of these, Margaret saw the soul of Regina Strauss sleeping, promising enlightenment, Enlightenment.

And then once she had shuffled and cut the deck, she turned it over and it happened: she found to her joy she had bought a French deck. The queens bore names in Gothic letters: Judith, Argine, Pallas, Rachel. Margaret stared at their brocade robes. The queens had been wearing the same robes for over six hundred years-was there anything more constant in culture? Even religious rites are not so stable as playing cards. Margaret's eyes began to swim.

She dealt out the entire deck between herself and Regina.

Easily one might say it was senseless to play Hearts with only two players-it meant you always knew what your opponent could and would do-if your opponent had any sense. But that was just the idea. Margaret wanted to play a game of cards with Regina precisely in order to allow the ghost an opportunity to make sense. To give her an opportunity to be rational.

This is how Margaret began to be greedy in her good fortune: she began, despite all intelligent ideas, to suspect that she was one of the lucky ones, one of the chosen who have been allowed contact with the Divine, and now she could not stop herself from testing it, from testing the divine idea, like a deliriously happy yet previously insecure lover demanding ever more extreme displays of romance. Margaret felt nervously triumphant, sure the ghost would jump at this chance, but that did not mean she was not teetering precariously.

Margaret went over what she knew. It happens that in the game of Hearts, the card to be avoided at all costs is the Queen of Spades. It happens that according to Diderot's encyclopedia, the four queens in the deck-Rachel, Judith, Pallas, and Argine (anagram of Regina!)-symbolize the four means of ruling: by beauty, by piety, by wisdom, and by right of birth. It happens that the four suits are a matter of caste: hearts of the clergy, diamonds of the merchants, clubs of the soldiery, and spades of the serfs. It happens that the Queen of Spades is called Pallas, the queen who rules by wisdom. It happens that the four kings, David, Alexander, Caesar, and Charlemagne, are emblems of the four great monarchies: Jewish, Greek, Roman, and German. It happens that the husband of the Queen of Spades, that is, the King of Spades (or is he her husband?) is David, king of the Jews. It happens that the Queen of Spades is sometimes called the Black Maria. It happens that Black Marias were the vehicles used to take away Stalin's victims during the purges. It happens that the Queen of Spades holds a tulip in her hand, a crimson flower, with its bell-like blossom inclining heavily toward her Roman nose. It happens that the Queen of Spades is the only one-eyed queen.

Margaret took her half deck in her hand, and for her Regina, she put the other half in a neat pile across from her. The chair there was a black folding chair. As soon as she put the cards down in front of it, this chair seemed to grow quieter and appeared to be weighed down, with an expression on its chair-face of an interested though uncomprehending dog. Margaret laughed at herself for thinking this, but she was not unserious.

She held her twenty-six cards in her hand. She looked-among them she did not find the Queen of Spades. So Regina must have the Queen. She looked further through her own cards. She did not find the two of clubs either.

So she wrote in large letters on a slip of paper: Two of clubs begins the game.

She pushed the paper to the middle of the table, put her own cards in the inner pocket of her jacket, and went out of the room, quivering. She was not so far gone that she did not think: What am I doing? Do I really think it is possible to play a hand of cards with Regina Strauss?

Did she?

Her belief in Regina's miraculous power to intervene in her life was strong, but it was not invincible; no, let us not say that it was a perfect faith. It had only taken on a certain hue: her need for the woman was so great that she was going to press her into being, ram her mind to its limits and will a miracle of intervention out of-if necessary-nothing.

It need not be described how, the next morning, Margaret woke up, and how the game of Hearts flew back into her mind, how she crept down the hall toward the kitchen full of expectancy, how she did not enter the kitchen feet-first, but peeked around the corner, leading with her head. There she saw: Regina's half deck still in its place on the edge of the kitchen table, in front of the black metal folding chair. In the middle of the table, however-could it be? A card. Margaret went closer. A card had been played. be described how, the next morning, Margaret woke up, and how the game of Hearts flew back into her mind, how she crept down the hall toward the kitchen full of expectancy, how she did not enter the kitchen feet-first, but peeked around the corner, leading with her head. There she saw: Regina's half deck still in its place on the edge of the kitchen table, in front of the black metal folding chair. In the middle of the table, however-could it be? A card. Margaret went closer. A card had been played.

The two of clubs.

NINETEEN * * Roses for Rahel Roses for Rahel

And then there was a long period when Margaret was both manic and unwell. Every morning for three weeks she went into the kitchen to find a different card played. Eventually they had broken every suit, and it was dazzling to Margaret, dazzling. Sometimes Regina took the tricks, sometimes Margaret took them, and when Regina took a trick, Margaret placed it, with ecstatic reverence, in a little pile next to the rest of the woman's hand. By and large Regina played intelligently; always by the rules, and Margaret rejoiced.

The one contradictory point was this: a number of times Margaret deliberately, self-sacrificially (for both she and Regina had already acquired hearts and she no longer hoped to shoot the moon), played a card that might have allowed Regina to slip her the Queen of Spades. Yet the Queen of Spades was never slipped. They were almost at the end of the game, and the Queen of Spades had still never been played. Margaret was too devout to peek at the pile of cards in Regina's remaining hand.

It must be noted that a strange thing happened when it came close to the end and it was almost one-hundred-percent certain this card was not going to be played. Despite Margaret's elation over the game, the absence of that card gnawed. It was mysteriously significant. The exact reason why it bothered her so much, she did not know. All she could say was that still something was not right, and it hurt her. Only a minor detail, really, but even one small detail out of alignment, one card not played that logically should have certainly been played by now, meant the ghost was distant, uncommitted, even unreal. Almost precisely because it was a trifle, the sort of thing it would have been easy to ask about if Regina had been alive, nothing awkward, nothing extreme, it made Margaret tremble with agitation.

She had tempted and received a miracle, and now she was paying a certain kind of price-the price of living with its fickle power. Bringing a G.o.d down to earth, one must always pay a similar price.

So Margaret saw that it would be necessary after all to return to the territory of the unequivocally real, at least for a while. There had to be some extra element of real-world information with which she could moor the ghost. In the spirit of finding that information, she sent five e-mails to the Centrum Judaic.u.m in the center of the city. They would have information about Jewish families who committed suicide during the war; they must know something real about the Strausses. But the archivists were not answering her queries, and Margaret grew distraught. She could not wait. She would go to the archive in Mitte herself.

Frau Jablonski from the archive greeted Margaret after Margaret came sweating through the metal detectors of security. The young woman was small, spoke with an effervescent flourish. She led Margaret up a dark staircase and into a little office that at first appeared to be a closet. from the archive greeted Margaret after Margaret came sweating through the metal detectors of security. The young woman was small, spoke with an effervescent flourish. She led Margaret up a dark staircase and into a little office that at first appeared to be a closet.

"I'm not sure what I can tell you," she said. "You've written us six e-mails over the last three days, but you should know that there's no information about a case like this. Suicides of this type were very common. Hundreds of Jewish families in Berlin committed suicide at exactly that time. What do you want us to tell you?"

Margaret was distracted. "I want photos, or to know what jobs they might have had, whether there was any family that survived, what year they married, if either had any previous marriages, names of siblings, what became of their belongings, whether they had any children other than those who died with them, what synagogue they attended," Margaret said, all in rush.

"Yes, I understand. But none of those questions can be answered-by this archive at least, with the exception, theoretically, of finding the surviving family. But the unfortunate coincidence here is that both the name Strauss and, let me see your e-mail"-she turned to the computer-"yes, and Regina Strauss's maiden name, Herzberg, are very common. There are thousands with those names."

Margaret's eyes flashed back and forth and all around the room, desperate.

The woman watched her. Margaret caught her doing it. But the woman was kind to her. She said, as though not caring whether Margaret was insane or not: "There is something I can help you with. I can tell you where they are likely buried."

Margaret shot up from her chair.

"Go up to the Jewish Cemetery at Weissensee, and there, in Field D, you'll find the graves of Jews who committed suicide in Berlin to escape deportation. There are over a thousand in that cemetery alone."

"Oh!" said Margaret. "Oh, thank you!" She got out her notebook and wrote in large black letters, Weissensee Friedhof, Feld D Weissensee Friedhof, Feld D.

"Why are you so interested in this family in particular?" asked the archivist, looking at her.

"Oh," Margaret said. Her cheeks were hot, her mouth dry and hungry. "Who can answer such a question." She fled toward the door. "Thank you, thank you very much."

Out on the street, it started to rain. The air smelled of earth and damp granite. Forgetting her bike in her excitement, Margaret ran through the rain down the bottleneck sidewalk to Hackescher Markt. She got onto the Number 4 tram just as the doors closed. The yellow centipede went up the Greifswalder Stra.s.se, pa.s.sed through Prenzlauer Berg. She cursed herself for not having thought to buy flowers-if she were visiting a grave, she should have bought flowers!

On the tram the pa.s.sengers were dripping with rainwater, and the air soon became humid. The tram climbed onto higher and higher ground, emerged in Weissensee, where the city's density unfurled and dissolved. The sun reappeared, and the part of East Berlin that is still so much as it was before the change-it spread its arms.

The tram stopped in the new sun, and someone stood to get off-a young woman. Margaret could only see her from behind, but something about her figure caught Margaret's eye. The girl was tall, with a narrow back and long hair-the curl of it in the humid weather-Margaret recognized the hair, just as she knew the gait, just as she knew the posture: the way the young woman held one shoulder higher to keep the handles of her bag hooked onto it. It was just like Margaret. Margaret had a sensation of red curtains closing around her head, a sense of light pa.s.sing through prisms; she felt hopeless and warm at once-the sensation of a story coming to an end, a movie finishing, and she stood up and tried to follow the girl. She wanted to see her face.

But she had recognized her too late. The girl was off the tram and Margaret was still on it as the doors closed. Margaret went all the way to the back of the car and looked out the rear window, and now she could see the girl raise her face into the sun, seeming to float as the tram moved away from her. It was Margaret's face.

Margaret got off the tram in Weissensee and turned into a side street. Her head was still dazed-she was empty and fresh as though she had slept. the tram in Weissensee and turned into a side street. Her head was still dazed-she was empty and fresh as though she had slept.

Then she had luck: she spied a little flower shop on her way to the cemetery. One of the Vietnamese establishments that only has a couple of bouquets, the rest of the vases empty but for a few bundles of artificial flowers. Margaret found a little potted rosebush. It cost almost nothing. She felt so light; a happiness like sugar-water bubbled in her throat. The pink nubs were small and perfect enough to be mistaken for the flowers painted on china, and she convinced herself that the children of the Family Strauss would be pleased.

Out here in Weissensee, the apartment houses' flesh was old, almost grey. These buildings were set far back from the street, and the gardens in front had high brick walls and arched iron gates. In some places the skin of the flesh seemed to have become dry and fallen away, and the red muscle beneath was exposed, what might have once been the redbrick of inner walls, and it was a ruinous beauty. Margaret made her way to the cemetery over the cobblestones, hurrying along with the potted rosebush. At the end of the road the buildings stopped, there was an open bramble. The blond, healthy skin of the cemetery's entrance rose over the near horizon. Margaret could hear birds calling, water gurgling in the fountain of a hidden garden. The street was deserted. Margaret drew closer. She noticed the absence of the usual guard for Jewish inst.i.tutions, and the place seemed enchanted.

She walked through the arch and into the cemetery.

First came the feeling of sudden darkness, not as when the sun is behind a cloud but rather as when it goes flat behind the discus of the moon, and the birds grow dull. The trees grew up higher than the eye could see, in a heavy halo. The impression was of islands of bone, as in a great blond-brown archipelago rising out of the sea. The aisles between these tumbledown graves crept away into the haze, around bends toward a missing horizon, and the darkness of shadowless moss seemed to grow seamlessly into the darkness of decrepit mausoleums.

Margaret moved uncertainly. She saw a sign: Field A. She followed the path, going by graves from the nineteenth century and then, just as soon, graves from only the year before. She curved with the high wall around the inside edge of the cemetery, circling.

At first she thought she was alone in the entire place, but when she pa.s.sed Field C she heard a regular sc.r.a.ping sound. Shovels and plastic buckets were left askew on the ground. She looked down the long aisle. In the distance, two bright specks twinkled: old women. They were raking gravel.

She came up on Field D, and here the graves were not marked in Hebrew but in German. Margaret began to read the names on the gravestones. In the second row there were stones so tightly grasped by the roots of ivy that names could not be made out. She worried that one of these graves might be that of the Family Strauss and she would miss them.

She walked more slowly. Her only hope was that she would sense the graves if she did not see them. It was in that spirit that she focused on the complex pattern of the cobbles under her feet.

She pa.s.sed into the fourth row, and there it began: gravestones very small and flat, on each nothing more than a lone family name and an endless repet.i.tion of the same years of death: 1943, 1944, 1945. Ivy drew back and exposed names: Stein, Schwarz, Moses, Rosenberg, Benjamin-and on and on, the suicides went.

Under a tall elm, toward the back wall of the cemetery, Margaret pushed back a creeper of heavy ivy. With no warning at all, there they were.

On one side lay Franz, in the middle a single grave with the names of the three little girls, Rahel, Gerda, and Beate, and on the other side Regina. All three short mounds were covered in ivy, puffed and waxy, like feather beds fluffed and tucked at the edges. As soon as Margaret rustled the ivy with her hands, she could see hundreds of red dots-the ivy was rich with bright, red berries.

At this sight, a quotation wove in her mind: They seemed like sleeping children, struck by fever, for their bodies, arms, and faces were covered in red spots They seemed like sleeping children, struck by fever, for their bodies, arms, and faces were covered in red spots. A faint spasm ran through Margaret. This is what had been written by a journalist, but not about these children. That was about the Goebbels children.

Margaret sat down heavily on the ground. She felt an enormous fatigue.

The silence of their absent breath. She shifted on the hard ground.

She looked at Regina Strauss's grave and opened her mouth. She wanted to say something. She was not sure how her voice would sound in the open air. She spoke haltingly. "I wanted to find you," she said aloud. "I wanted to ask you what to do."

She took out a handkerchief and rubbed her nose. She looked off down the long aisle. She stood up. She took the rosebush and nestled it into the ivy near the head of the girls' grave, just under a gnarled little elm. The red lips of the roses brimmed into view, the ivy forming a high collar around the flowers.

Margaret's temples throbbed, and her back ached. She thought: Now I should go. But then she looked at the little rose plant and thought that it would not survive. Wouldn't it be better if she could plant it in the ground? So she reached into the ivy again and looked for a place to dig with her nails. But the roots of the ivy had spread into all parts of the soil, and the earth was as tight as a trampoline. She straightened up and made as if to leave again, but as she walked away, she thought of the plant dying.

She heard a repeated sound, slow and rhythmic in the distance. Far off, the two old women were raking gravel, almost at the vanishing point. Margaret squinted her eyes at them. It occurred to her that they would know what to do about the rosebush. She followed the long aisle. As she got nearer, she saw that they were stooped, fat women in housecoats, their cheeks red. Their hair was tied up in handkerchiefs in the old-fashioned, servile style.

They both stopped raking and looked at Margaret when she neared.

"Excuse me," Margaret began. "I've brought a little bush with me and I'd like to plant it. There's so much ivy on the grave though, I don't know how to get it in," Margaret said. Her American accent became stronger than usual.

The women stared at her.

"What's that you say?" The one woman looked over to the second old woman for help.

The other one nodded. "She's asking us if we know how to plant a flower."

"I don't know," said the first woman.

"We don't know," said the second.

"Oh," said Margaret. There was a long silence.

"Over there is Frau Schmidt. She's the one who does the gardening. She's Frau Schmidt. She does the gardening. Look-there she is." And the two pointed both at once down another aisle that sloped deep into the bowels of the cemetery. Margaret saw, indeed, another of their number in the distance.

She went. Even from afar, she could make out that this third woman's back wasn't straight, and she had grown crooked. Margaret got closer. Under her quilted coat, the woman wore a formless cotton dress with large daisies printed on it. Her hair was dark and her nose tipped up. Beneath this nose, on her upper lip, a downy black mustache grew.

"Excuse me, I'm trying to plant a rosebush," Margaret started, breathlessly, "but I don't know if I can plant it in the ivy."

"What sort of rosebush is it?" said the woman, leaning on a spade.

"I don't know. It's very small."

"I mean-is it a groomer?"

"A groomer?"

"Yeah, a groomer."

"I'm not sure," Margaret said.

"Where is it?"

"I'm sorry, I left it at the grave."

"Oh, let's go see, let's go see."

When they arrived the woman began to cluck.

"It's a groomer all right!"

"Is it?"

"Yes it is. Oh yes." And with a violent motion she grabbed ahold of the plastic pot. It had become wet, sitting in the ivy, and it slipped from her hands and fell onto the path at her feet. The plant tumbled out, its soil molded-this began to fall away in clumps. It came to rest with its roots in the air.

"Oh goodness!" said Frau Schmidt.

"That's okay," Margaret said.

"I'm awfully sorry. I'll tell you what. I'll plant it anyway. We can't plant such a thing in the ivy. But we'll plant it next to the grave." She gestured toward the open s.p.a.ce separating the Strauss graves from the neighboring ones.

"All right," said Margaret, looking doubtfully at the broken plant. She stood, biting her lower lip and looking at the graves, the plant, and the powdery white daisies on the blue cotton dress of the gardener.