The History Of History Part 22

Now Margaret looked at Prell's crucifix.

The icon of the man collapses him into the instrument used for his torture, the means of his death becomes the symbol of his life; the sacrifice is snapped into the flesh. And then Margaret thought, in a wave of hopelessness, that crime was more powerful than tenderness, that death was more memorable than life. She felt a rage rising. She thought of this man who stood next to her now, as he had once stood goat-like outside a room while children were killed.

Prell invited her into the living room. She sat down by a little side table that was dressed in a white linen cloth. He bustled into the kitchen, came back to her, and stooped to serve tea from a pot.

But Margaret caught him by surprise. She raised her arms and took the old man's face in her hands, her fingers becoming spider's legs, squeezing vise-like. The loose skin on either side of his face doubled.

"How could you?" Margaret gasped at him, losing control of her voice.

Prell's giant, horse-like body lurched back; his neck extended and Margaret, holding on to him, was jerked forward. She reared up from her chair. Prell tried to prevent the tray in his arms from falling, and this confounded his self-defense.

But soon the tray smashed to the ground. He fumbled and caught the cream pitcher, but the teapot broke on the ground and the hot water splashed over Margaret's feet, scalding her ankles. It must have scalded Prell as well, for he cried out in pain and pulled away from Margaret's iron grip forcefully. With one heavy arm, he swiped at her shoulder.

But Margaret held his face ever more tightly on either side with her thumbs and forefingers, and her ears rang. She pushed hard into his jowls and temples. Her fury surged to a peak, and for some reason, Prell finally went limp under her hands.

"How could you?" Margaret let out again.

"How could I what?" Prell breathed hard.

A sound came out of Margaret's mouth. And then another. "How could you have lost faith?" she stammered at last.

"Let me go," he said.

But she held his face longer, and the power was in her and had gone out of him, as a rabbit freezes at the end of its life. He was doubled over, cradling his cream pitcher.

But then at last he turned his face up, and Margaret looked into his eyes, eyes that darted and flicked about, the navy-blue orbs revolving, and she felt a ripping in her chest. She saw, buried far beneath the reflective sheen of his pupils, in the embers of the rods and cones there, the eyes of the infant she had lost.

The moment collapsed. Prell let go of the pitcher and punched at her stomach with his fist, and although he did not hit hard, her stomach made as though to burst in pain.

She released him. He lumbered heavily upstairs to the toilet, roaring threats of litigation. Margaret felt she was burning into black strips; she did not know what she had done, where to put her shame. She had read-it was Jung who had written-that the more evil is contemplated, the more it enters you, and she wondered under what circ.u.mstances she could ever learn how to live, she who had betrayed, or had been betrayed by, every hope and every idea and every icon of redemption, she whose very understanding of these things was in rubble.

THIRTY-FOUR * * Reconciliation with Vitaly

The morning that followed was very still. Margaret gave a tour. All the while, she quivered. She reached and touched the hands of the customers who came along, and they felt the beseeching tremor in her fingers. They looked Margaret in the face and saw the enormous question there. She was reading their features with her eyebrows peaked like gables, as if she wanted to know the hour and minute they were born. When she had a moment to herself, she tried to soothe her uncertain heart. She thought: I did not kill him yesterday, and I will not kill him today.

In the afternoon, she went to the university.

I will not kill him, she told herself. Not now, and not tomorrow. In a heat of feeling, she spoke with devil-may-care directness to Vitaly Velminski, protege of Meitler. She managed to convince the smooth and pretty young man, with whom she was not even acquainted, to take a coffee with her in the cafeteria, under the wide modern skylights, under the reaching, new-green trees.

They spoke of humanism. They spoke of capitalism. These were the wires that were fashionably live at the time.

At some point it was a question of whether a free-market society is more attracted to sacrificial lambs than a socialist one. Margaret's idea, which she outlined to Vitaly chokingly, with embarra.s.sed excitement, was this: Older societies, she said, are still religious and altruism is ritualized, and socialist societies redistribute the burden of excess riches through taxation! But other societies, neither religious nor socialist, have hardly any idea what to do with the sleeping guilt that laces the fringes of wealth-ama.s.sing hearts, and so the more a little child, a perfect lamb, will be needed for the nailing, for the rendering up to the pedophiles-for the various slaughters, and the people will vaunt their communal obsession with the sacrifices, and find absolution there.

Vitaly, his usual cool and unflappable self, inclined his head in response. He mentioned many interesting names, thinkers who had combed the beach of such a theme for all its many sh.e.l.ls.

Margaret spoke hotly, her eyes ablaze, looking often into Vitaly's seagreen gaze. After several hours had pa.s.sed-more coffee fetched, professors evaluated, eviscerated, and even a long period spent in heavy-breathed silence-Vitaly, in his tweed suit, his penny-green oxford shirt, misinterpreted Margaret's intensity. He opened the palm of his hand. He touched the side of her face.

Margaret flinched sharply.

There might have been a time, very long ago, when, at such a touch, Margaret would have dropped her eyes so that her long lashes spread fanlike over her upper facial bones. She would have made herself into a picture.

There might have been a time more recently, when her flinch, so disengaged, would have extended into a reflexive uppercut to his jaw.

Today, however, she only put out two quavering fingers and slid them under his reliable chin. She turned his face some sixty degrees to the side. She did not know exactly what she was after. She thirsted to see his face from a previously unseen angle, in a previously unseen light, according to a previously unconsidered code of ethics. It was hers, the power of description. She would do the telling.

She looked a long time, and Vitaly laughed a little at first, but then regarded her and went still. Margaret breathed in and out.

Soon after, she stood up and left the cafeteria.

When Margaret was gone, Vitaly sat for a little while longer on his own. A radicalized person, he thought she was. There was a woman, he told himself, who had gone through some kind of education.

Under the fir trees outside the Rostlaube, on the pebbled path between the cafeteria and the U-Bahn station, Margaret came upon a woman with a narrow white scarf pushing a pram. outside the Rostlaube, on the pebbled path between the cafeteria and the U-Bahn station, Margaret came upon a woman with a narrow white scarf pushing a pram.

In the pram, a large, fat, sleeping baby lay on its back with its face to the side. The baby had gone sheet-white, as some children go white during sleep. Its translucent eyebrows were raised, pockmark of a mouth closed. Because it was inert, it seemed to Margaret both less living and also younger than it likely was, for even more than size, it is animation that betrays age.

It was terrible for Margaret to see. For a moment there was a knife turning in her heart, like the pitting of a cherry.

However, as Margaret drew abreast of mother and child, light rain began to fall. Margaret was later amazed at the serendipity of it, for if it had not rained at just that instant, she might have missed the essential gesture. The woman in the white scarf leaned over the pram and drew the flannel of the infant's blanket over its face, so the rain would not wake it.

In that movement, the fabric's edge drew a line across the small white face, and Margaret felt the world spin, and a sensation of radiance.

When she had first begun to remember, when she first knew that her old life was beginning to return, she began to think in vague and later less vague terms that she could not bear it. She could not forgive herself, and if she also would not be allowed to drench herself in forgetting, then she could not go on, and a wild and decisive kind of self-annihilation was the only choice.

But today she developed a thought-it had the following heart to it, although it was wordless: Even if you cannot forgive yourself, and by some poor luck you cannot forgive anyone else either, and there is no vengeance to be had in this baneful world that is slowly suffocating on its own past, there might still be a paradox of goodness.

In the movement of the woman's hand, the line of flannel rising, Margaret's head revolved, and it was an ugly thing that the gesture brought her to remember, but still, the radiance of the coming completeness stole her breath away.

THIRTY-FIVE * * The Glow

The next day, the day everything came into its own, was a sunny day. The sky over Berlin pulsed clear as an unmolested snow globe, with the same magnifying fisheye. All was calm. In the Kleistpark, on her way to buy a liter of milk, Margaret saw a large animal, what may have been a Newfoundland dog.

The buildings around her-it was not clear any longer of what they were made. Sometimes Margaret looked at them and they seemed to shudder slightly as they had in the old days, even blush, and then one or the other might heave a sigh. This seldom happened, however. The architecture of Berlin was more convincingly of stone and stucco and steel than it had been in a very long time.

Had her bicycle chain not fallen off the back gear, Margaret might even have thought that all was coming back into order. She was forced to get down to pull the chain back on, however, and the sun shone hotly on her back. She crouched on the sidewalk, her hands smudging with the dried-out grease, her face twitching, and it was then the thing came.

She nudged the chain around the back gear and there it was. A long, dark, barreling shadow flashed under the ground. The earth was translucent-a two-way mirror. Shadows moved underneath it, and Margaret could see through it.

This is the nature of guilt-foreboding emanates from all things. Everything inexplicable will be understood as a promise of looming punishment. Guilt will change every last aspect of behavior, if you let it.

The chain took to the back gear at last, and Margaret began to ride toward home, but again as she crossed Martin-Luther-Stra.s.se, the shadow pa.s.sed under the earth from west to east at high speed, and Margaret could see down through the asphalt to the dark thing below.

Even as her heart raced, she was reminded of something. What did this remind her of?

She knew. The way the black shadow revealed the transparency of the earth was the way a mouse running under the ice at Sachsenhausen reveals the transparency of the snow. What might today's shadow be if not a displacement of time? For a moment, Margaret had a feeling of profluence.

The shape underground was many times larger than a mouse. Margaret considered what it could be. Of course, it should have occurred to her at the start: it was the subway train. The U7 line runs east-west under the Grunewaldstra.s.se, so it was the train, like the dark mouse, that betrayed the earth's translucence.

Margaret studied the earth for a while, and then she looked up. When she did, something caught her attention as it moved along the sidewalk in the distance. An enormous form. It came from down along Barbarossastra.s.se, near the dark, shaded fountain that runs in the middle of the roundabout, so sibilant under the sycamores. The thing was slow on its feet, picking along with head lurching rhythmically forward and back, like a great avian camel.

It held Margaret's gaze. She recognized it. As it came nearer, all was confirmed: it was that enormous bird of prey, none other than the aquiline Magda Goebbels herself.

The hawk-woman was approaching.

Margaret would have had time to remount her bike and quickly pedal away if she had chosen. But she froze, she froze. She knew she must stay. If she did not face the bird now, the bird would stay with her all her life.

There was the hawk-woman, large and ugly, picking its way down the street, and there was Margaret, ready for her. And now, just as before, the bird began to shrink and molt as it got close to her, leaving a trail of sooty feathers in its wake. By the time Margaret was standing face-to-face with the being, it had become the woman in her moldy, old-fashioned clothes, the long-dead Magda Goebbels.

"Margaret!" the woman screamed in her bird-voice, "You ninny! Have you been avoiding me?"

"No," Margaret said. "You know I haven't."

"What is it then? Are we pals?" Before Margaret could answer, the hawk-woman answered for herself. "Of course we are. We're thick as thieves. I've got somewhere fantastic to take you now. Somewhere I know you'll like."

"Well-" Margaret began.

But already the woman was growing and expanding, ballooning back into her bird shape-and next thing Margaret knew, the bird was pushing her giant head into the s.p.a.ce between Margaret's legs. She had come at her from behind-so Margaret was somersaulted onto her wide back, and by the time Margaret was righted, they were rising above the city.

The air struck Margaret's face not unpleasantly, but the journey did not last long. They came down already on Mockernstra.s.se, in the weed-strewn vacant lot just behind the n.a.z.i-era post office.

"Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig!" the bird screeched. She dropped Margaret to the ground in the back, by the muddy pool of water-the bomb-crater pond. The side entryway to the building was gaping.

The figure-half bird, half woman now-beckoned to Margaret. It seemed they would enter the ruinous post office through a gaping, windy hole where there had once been a door. Margaret stepped over the high threshold.

Through rotting floorboards, weeds were growing. Slips of light came in the smoked windows. The hawk-woman led Margaret to a large round hole in the floor-it was the beginning of a spiral staircase that was hidden in the twilight. The stairs circled down into the ground.

At first Margaret resisted, but the hawk-woman came up behind her in the gloom and pushed insistently, until finally Margaret went, the hawk-woman close behind. Deeper and deeper they twisted into the underground.

Low and even light came from the walls of the stairwell. These glowed with a soft, green luminescence. Margaret put out her hand and touched the wall to steady herself. She lifted it to her face and saw the hand was covered in dissolved powder-a shimmering green.

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 pa.s.sageway 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 moire (gone was the gabardine), and the waving water patterns of the moire shook Margaret's eyes.

The hawk-woman spoke.

"Margaret darling, you pretty little thing. 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 m.u.f.fled 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 gla.s.s cylinder of the type used inside of pneumatic tubes. She was checking a long label down its spine; first she rejected one gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 MAGGIE was written in block script. 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 1 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 experience Alphi with us daily everywhere we are, because he's Alphi with us daily everywhere we are, because he's really really there. But then, you there. But then, you are 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. 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 n.a.z.is wrote up about him, just so you know.... Even the n.a.z.is knew what he was...and this is just a sample...although my bad translation.In Riga the SS-Sturmmann Wustholz 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 Verruckt, mein Kind!" [You Are Crazy, My Child].

He used to play that song to me 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 a.s.swipe can rot in h.e.l.l, and I won't hear his screams. Otherwise, with my special hearing, you know I hear very well. Sometimes I hear 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 Taubner to Taub, but doesn't it fit? We became the 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 Taubner to Taub, but doesn't it fit? We became the Taub Taub family. (You know what Taub means, right? family. (You know what Taub means, right? Deaf 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 DadP.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 gla.s.s cylinder around in her emerald fingers like a baton, laughing raucously, although Margaret could barely hear her for the pain. her father's letter. The hawk-woman on her throne was still murmuring and hissing. The woman made sentences, spinning the chubby gla.s.s 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, thin," in a tone of vain and humbug envy.