The History of History (24 page)
Read The History of History Online
Authors: Ida Hattemer-Higgins
She closed her eyes tighter so as to better see, buried her face further into the gravel and pinched at her heaving flanks, trying to see more clearly. The monk slowly dissolved, and another image bore down in its place: already she could see a girl, it must be one of the Strauss children, the oldest girl, ten years old, almost eleven when she died, a child with a face like roses and sandpaper, her head surrounded by light. The girl was wearing yellow cloth, the same color as the almost disappeared sunlight, and she was coming closer. She was filling Margaret’s eyes and quenching her ears. The child spoke clearly. This is what she said.
On that day Mother made us come out for a walk in the park. We didn’t want to. Not even Father. We are hungry. We think only of sleep. Mother said we would like the snow. The storm was coming all day, and now it was here and the flakes were very large like moths against our cheeks. We went to the Stadtpark by the Rathaus. Mother says it looks like the Jardin du Luxembourg. Once she was there, in Paris. She says it is beautiful. Mother is beautiful. I walked behind with Gerda. Mother carried Beate and walked beside Father. Mother and Father argued about something and the snow was thick, I couldn’t hear what they said. Gerda was tired. I let her ride on my back. I became breathless. Up ahead, I saw the golden stag on its pedestal, surrounded by dark snow, bright like a moon in the afternoon that was much more like night. Mother and Father slowed down and I caught up and then I saw Father was crying. Father did not cry when he lost his position at the conservatory and he did not cry when he lost his job at the factory, and when he began to sleep all day or sit looking out the window after he had finished giving me my lessons, he did not cry. He taught me French and mathematics and he taught me the violin.
Mother is beautiful. She has a friend who gave us money when Jews weren’t allowed to work. We were hungry. Mother couldn’t buy food with the money without ration cards. She decided to use the money to make her hair blond so she would have an easier time finding a private position as a maid in a rich person’s house.
In the beginning it looked hideous. Very orange. But she went back to the salon every ten days, and soon it was gold blond and yellow. Some people said she should have used the money differently, but Mother always said that now that Jews weren’t permitted to emigrate, the best way was camouflage.
I trusted Mother. Mother promised she would never let them take away any of us like they had taken away Berthe and her mother. She didn’t care what anybody said and she fixed the collar of my coat so that I could wear it so the star didn’t show when I wanted, and we would go to the pictures or look at the fabric in a fancy store. Father always said that nothing bad would happen if we would just learn to follow the new rules, for God’s sake! It would blow over. But mother said, it’s too late for that now, Franz.
Two weeks before the day it snowed, Mother came home from the Tombanzens’. She said she didn’t have to go back the next day. They were kind to Mother, but now Mr. Tombanzen had to go off to war and they would have to do without help. Then Mother couldn’t find anyone to give her or Father any work.
Father cried in the park. When we got home, he was very tender to us. Mother was busy around the house, cleaning and putting things in order. She told us we would all sleep on the floor of the kitchen tonight, all together, and wouldn’t that be fun? At first we thought it was fun. Then after all the bedclothes were laid down on the floor, we felt strange. Mother closed the door of the kitchen. She used our extra pairs of underwear and some socks to plug the space at the bottom between the base of the door and the threshold and also around the edges of the window behind the blackout shade where it was loose. When Gerda saw her underwear were getting dirty in the window frame she began to cry, so baby Beate started crying too. Mother told us to hush and held us all three very tightly. Father turned his back and I saw his shoulders shaking. Mother said the bad people in the government would never find us. She said she was keeping us safe now, hush.
On the ground
in front of the glass branch library, Margaret hid her head in her hands.
When she looked up, the sky was dark purple; the yellow stripe was gone, and the air around her was thick. People—she said to herself—people who acted cataclysmically in the service of love.
She took lunging steps even as she hobbled with pain, and made it over to her bicycle. She rode back toward the Grunewaldstrasse. With every downward shove of the pedal, each more stabbing than the one before, she came further into a sense of grand-scale homecoming.
Once in her apartment, she moved in a loop from living room to bedroom to hallway and back again.
The child who had spoken to her was with her. Rahel Strauss’s young voice lapped at her ears, sweet as milk.
With the voice playing, she saw the painting she had made of Magda Goebbels lying next to her bed. She laughed with a bitter contempt. It was inert, deactivated like a discarded toy. False prophets would no longer tempt her, she said to herself. Some people—at least once—had done something right. She had been blind to that. She had believed that every comprehensible human action was corrupt.
She looped around the apartment, careening. What was Magda Goebbels? What was the hawk-woman? She was nothing but a shadow! The insanity of the last weeks hit her in the chest.
She considered this apartment she had lived in for five years and saw it in every way reborn. The ceilings were very high here, the French doors opened between the rooms; each room flowed gently into the next: an apartment built at the end of the old century for graceful, romantic ways of living; you could hear Dvo
ák breathing through the floor plan. Margaret saw that it was possible to think of the lives that came and went in this apartment as expressions of a single spirit, her own life separated from the other lives that had passed in it only along a single axis, an axis of time, which she knew now, she knew for certain now, could be collapsed like a telescope.
She shook with the joy of the mercy-shown.
Only seconds later, however, she went into a mild panic. She smelled the dust and mildew in the apartment. She considered the floors, once sleek parquet, now covered in musty wall-to-wall carpet. The scent of the carpet’s peculiar dust filled the nose. A leering sort of sadness took hold of her for a moment. These rooms, built spacious, gracious, and light, had almost nothing in them to remind of the fine old days. The few pieces of furniture Margaret had were picked off the street or bought at the shabbiest of flea markets. The former tenants—their
ghosts—would laugh at the shambles, and they would laugh at her, Margaret. Berlin had fallen; Berlin had been destroyed. If Lucifer had once been an angel, he had long since gone down. Was anyone or anything in this city a continuation of what it had been—either for good or evil? Was there any continuity at all?
Then she thought of the Family Strauss, the nobility of their decision, and the idea of nobility in general: its music, its architecture, its moral independence, and she asked herself with atrocious anxiety: Can I possibly follow them? Can I possibly be
like
them? Do I have the character?
Character or not, she would try. She could not stop herself from trying.
And if she could manage it, if she could manage to swim in their wake—Margaret lay her head back on the sofa and closed her eyes, her happiness swooping back in a rash of light. It came to her, chanted as though a triumphant rhyme, washing her with its purple, the lullaby of possibilities.
The swallows would speak. The clock would take back its numbers; the balconies would resume the cradling of their lost, cupped lives. The faces of the living would contort to mirror the faces of the dead, the written words would fly like homebound bees to the spoken. The secret meaning of the city would manifest itself, the house numbers alight from the clouds of the mind to fix themselves to the permanent book written underground. The numbers would correspond to the forgotten names, the shadows to the bodies, the palimpsest ache to the threaded ruins.
Hands were stretching out to Margaret, offering every fine thing, every decipherment. And her breath was full of oxygen.
Just before she went to sleep that night, she thought of the doctor’s forest film and its so-called “perfect pregnancy.” It wandered into her mind after a long absence. She asked herself then, very seriously, whether the prophecy had not been fulfilled. Everything will be revealed, she thought. And meaning—meaning was not going to be a stranger to her after all.
•
An Expectation of Mirrors
T
he next day Margaret was soberer, but still, the first thing she did was think of the Strausses, and she acted immediately. She went to the apartment building where the family died. She knew the Salzburgerstrasse well: it had been nearby all along: a small, tree-lined street behind the town hall, beyond the cake-like Nordstern building.
She bicycled. Her body was still bruised, and in her joints, the fall of the night before was lurking. This might have brought her into a state of reflection: the pain as she felt it in Schöneberg’s dowdy day was so different than the pain as it had been in Schöneberg’s riddling night!
But she silenced all uncertainties. The voice of the child had been palpable, as shimmering as shimmering can be. It had filled her with an ecstasy larger than life. And so what was she to do? Once you’ve met something unimaginable you can never unmeet it again. It will never be disentwined from instinct.
And, all reasoning aside, whether she could justify it or not, she had known from the moment she woke that morning, under the rustling bedsheets, by her excitement and happiness and energy, that she was going to be riding high all day.
In fact, she fantasized for the greater part of the bicycle ride, hatching ideas of gifts she would bring to the Strausses’ memory and places she would go to find their traces.
She pedaled off west into Jewish Switzerland toward the Nordstern behemoth. She was excited, nervous. Never had she been so exuberant and frightened of rejection at once. Never had she been so preoccupied, and before she left home, she had not even noticed the absence of that incredible lurking bird who was usually outside her window.
Number 8
, when she pulled up in front of it, turned out to be a rich building with blushing white skin. Its fleshy balconies squeezed the
flanks of the building, like twin rolls of plumpness on a woman’s back, giving the place the simple, softhearted, motherly style of the Weimar era. All of it pleased Margaret.
Margaret waited, and after a while a man emerged from Number 8. Behind a tree, lost in fantasy, Margaret almost missed her chance. She dashed to the door and caught it at the last moment before it clicked shut. She moved into the foyer, her sensitivity to everything around her fantastically acute.
Inside, it was quiet, as the homes of the wealthy are always quiet, with thick, grey carpets over blue tiles. It’s just as I imagined it, she thought, just precisely as I imagined it.
The walls were decorated with elaborate plaster moldings. Muscled young heroes carrying horns of plenty curled themselves around mirrors. Margaret looked into the first one. She saw herself reflected in the milky glass in a miracle of integration. She felt flattered to be included.
She could hardly move, she was so pleased. And she noticed an extraordinary effect. The mirror changed her face. She was the same in every detail, but the sum total of the details was an expression her face had never carried before, and perhaps never would. An expression of serenity. Margaret’s face staring into its own eyes from across the mirror had a gentility and an equanimity to it, like a woman in a Vermeer, both as if she had no passions and as if she could go on living, softly and in the same way, forever. Margaret tilted her head to the side, considering this new, soft person. Maybe this face was caused by the light in the foyer. It was light soft and filtered; it was light like grey velvet.
And then Margaret noticed another effect. The foyer was slightly trapezoidal, and the mirrors were not positioned directly across from one another but at a slight angle, so that not only could Margaret see herself, she could also see herself reflected in copy after copy, extending far into the wall. In each copy she became more haloed by the soft light, more filtered and obscure. As she looked back into the wall at herself, so far away, the mirror corridor curved, and the tiny Margarets eventually went lost from sight. Margaret brushed her hand against her face. The dozens of Margarets in the hothouse of the glass did likewise and the synchrony of it blasted like an orchestra.
Margaret went out the back entrance of the foyer and into the courtyard garden beyond. The sun came through from above and the place was rich with pine. There were juniper, ferns, and rhododendron. She looked up at the side-wings and thought that the Family Strauss must
have lived here in the back. They could never have held on to one of the fine apartments in the front all the way through 1943.