The History of History (31 page)

The doctor was silent. She stared at Margaret. It was as though she thought the longer she trained her blind eyes on her, the better she would see her.

Margaret knew her own head was not right; she knew that today
she was going to behave in ways suspect and irrational, but her fear was too strong now; she held on to the chair, racked by vertigo. She whispered—she did not want the nurse outside to hear—“I think I’m attracted to them.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, overloudly. “To whom? Of whom are we speaking?”

Margaret kept her head down, talking past the doctor, her cheeks hot. Even as her vertigo grew, her only hope was to reveal herself. She must reveal the workings of her mind even if it damned her straight to hell. “To the—to
them
. Sometimes when I read their memoirs and biographies, they seem normal, and often ingenious. I imagine them moved by an emotion like nobility.”

The doctor laughed.

Margaret startled.

“Comrade, we’d all like evil to be simple and obtuse, but it’s wieldy and intelligent.”

Margaret looked at the doctor for a moment, but she barely saw her. “There’s more,” she went on instead. “It’s almost as if I like them
because
they are killers. I read about them instead of the victims because it seems less painful. Just for having been killers I am hungry for them, and feel soothed by them. For that reason alone, I’m willing to follow them down any path they devise.”

The doctor remained silent, her blank eyes fixed now on a spot on the upper wall as if she were waiting for something.

Margaret’s voice became louder, ringing in the wide room. She was leaning forward over the doctor’s wide desk, supporting herself on her fists. “But I’m lying.” Her brow pulled together. “I think it’s something worse.” Her eyes were narrow. “I notice—” she stuttered. “I notice similarities. Similarities between myself and them. I think—they might be my own kind.”

The doctor laughed hoarsely. “Come, come,” she said. “Is this not a sort of hypochondria?”

Margaret’s face was puckered. She paused for a long moment, gathering herself together, and the clock in the room ticked louder than before. She thought: Because I am as passive as their women, and as zealous as their men. Then she wiped her head where the sweat had begun to bead, and she thought, And I am as zealous as their women and as passive as their men.

Fearing the worst, she took the German copy of
Mein Kampf
out of
her backpack. Yes, she had brought
that
with her. She loathed herself. She began to read to the doctor in a loud, deep voice that had a brassy quality. She was terribly upset.

“
The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this feeling is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially.
”

“Do you know what it means to me,” Margaret said, “to have to live with
those
words having been written by
that
man? What am I supposed to do with it? How am I to go on living? To have been diagnosed by him—he was right! This is what I am!” Margaret spoke quickly, it might even be said: hysterically.

“Comrade. Calm yourself. It sounds like the boilerplate of any armchair political strategist. There’s nothing shocking in that. Surely you can find something more hard-hitting in that book of yours.”

“It’s not boilerplate
to me!
” Margaret shouted. And then she muttered more quietly: “And even if that’s true, wouldn’t it be significant if we discovered his strategies were just like everyone else’s?”

“Comrade.” The doctor knocked her knuckles on the desk impatiently. “There is something you’re hiding from me,” she spoke in no more than a whisper, “hiding from me very mean-spiritedly, as is your wont. You demonstrate a marked tendency to aggravate your illness. But we’ll leave that for the moment. I see clearly, now, why you lost your memory.”

Margaret glanced up at her.

The doctor went on: “It is because you have no system of ethics.”

“I’m not sure I follow.” Margaret’s vertigo redoubled.

“You, my pet, are having an identity crisis that has become moral despair. It is impossible for the human animal to remember his or her own life without cleaving a line, a line of some kind, however capriciously zigzag, lazy, narcissistic, arrogant or, on the other hand, self-blaming and unforgiving, between right and wrong, credit and blame. Why? Because this is what makes it possible to distinguish between nostalgia and regret. The border between the two is of pivotal importance in the formation of continuous memory. Eventually, all of us will stop thinking back, if we don’t know with what attitude of the soul to do so.”

The doctor sat back in her chair and paused, and when she spoke again it was in a louder voice. “There are pure paths that will lead you away from your troubles if you have the—the
talent
to find them. You must handle the historical idea, and also your own memory of life, like a delicate pancake you are trying not to rip.”

Margaret looked at the doctor.

“I’ll tell you a story,” the doctor said, “and then I’m afraid you must go.” The old woman with her giant head sank further into the chair. She appeared to be interested in other things this night.

“All right,” said Margaret glumly.

M
ore than twenty years ago, my brother died,” the doctor said. “But let me start even many years before that, when he was still a promising young man; this would be in 1938. Young people were in the youth groups they had then. My brother was an unusually talented, bright young man. Very high-spirited. There was nothing he couldn’t do, nothing he couldn’t do extremely well. He was with the HJ photographic society, and they were in the mountains, what we call Saxon Switzerland. They were taking pictures and making films for the Youth Sports and Games Party Congress Exhibition.

My brother was the sort beloved for his iconoclasm. He always could push through a new and startling idea—for a wild stunt, a fabulous show. He was also remarkable for his collectivist spirit, his indifference to danger, and his natural tendency to look out for the younger and the weaker. These were the days of ‘
Führung der Jugend durch die Jugend
’—in other words he was a natural leader, a lover of excitement and action at the helm of a happy, singing, strapping passel of young men. If he had a fault, it was his carelessness when it came to his personal well-being—his sweaty, relentless physicality. His indifference to pain and discomfort, and the pain and discomfort of others—it was something he simply couldn’t understand.

“And then there was the little issue of pyromania. He had a sort of arousal, an overweening vivacity that I often observed myself, at the mere thought of watching something go up in flames. And when he and his boys set something on fire they responded, I do not shy away from telling you, by jumping up and down, hitting their own faces with excitement and arousal.

“In any case, my brother had an idea, an elaborate vision that even in the planning phases brought him the most zealous admiration of his compatriots: he wanted to make a film that would depict the legend of a youth rising out of a lake of fire in a ring of flames, the half-human, half-god foundling child of the fire giants, Surtr and Sinmore, come with sword in hand to fight at the helm of the Wehrmacht. He chose a
point where there was a craggy, romantic outcropping of rock, and a slightly higher rocky ledge upon which the camera could be perched.” The doctor stopped for a moment. “Is this constellation familiar to you, my pet?”

“Yes,” said Margaret, darkly.

“Good,” the doctor said, beaming. “In any case, he convinced the boys of his group—and they were easily convinced, let me tell you—to trek the distance from Dresden to the mountains rather than ride via omnibus, so that he could appropriate the gasoline they would have used. He meant to set the lake on fire by pouring the petrol over it and dropping a lit match. Then, the next thing was, a boy was meant to walk backward off the ledge into the flaming lake and swim down under the water. The idea being that later the film would be played back in reverse, and the youth would appear to be rising out of the flaming depths. I myself was invited to come along on the trip,” the doctor said, with a little shake of her head, her lips drawn as though she tasted something sour. “I saw all of it.” She paused. She moved her tongue.

“The trouble, as it were, was in finding a suitable ‘actor’ to play the fire child. My brother felt it should be a boy of great physical beauty. Further complicating things, there were not many boys, when the day finally came, willing to walk backward into the fiery lake. My brother had only a few in mind who he felt had features fine enough to come into question, and of these, the first two bowed out.”

Margaret listened. The tips of her fingers grew cold.

“There was one boy in the group, a youth of sixteen, who was very beautiful and something of a maverick for those times. He let his hair grow long in black Indian waves, bucking every tenet of his milieu. He was unusually haunting of face and charming of spirit.

“Now it happened that about this boy, my brother had some special information. He knew that his father’s mother was Jewish and that his mother’s father’s mother was a Jewess as well, although up to this point the boy’s family had managed to keep it quiet. And taking this boy aside into a glade, on the day filming was meant to go forward, my brother told him—all in the spirit of realizing his creative vision, mind you—that if the boy didn’t volunteer for the stunt, my brother would have no choice but to tell the rest of the group about his mixed heritage.

“So the boy—he conformed.

“The tragedy, however, was that walking backward, and deliberately
avoiding taking a strong jump away from the cliff, so as not to compromise the look of the thing when reversed, the young man, Albert was his name, did not manage to get far enough away from the edge. As he tumbled downward, because the cliff was not sheer, his neck snapped.”

The doctor got up from her desk and took several steps to the side of the room, away from Margaret.

“The story does not end there. After Albert’s death the fact of his partially Jewish roots came out, via an anonymous tip to the
Gauleiter
. Where the tip came from, we’ll never know, although I have my suspicions; I know my brother too well. In any case, the boy’s family quietly prevented an investigation into the incident, so as to prevent further misfortunes.

“As for my brother—the event never cast a shadow. He became ever more boisterous, more hail-fellow-well-met—more beloved than ever of his peers. Our villa on the Wannsee was the scene of picnics, barbeques, boat races. The basement den smelled of cigar smoke and the meaty sweat of boys. This was where my brother and his friends had their powwows. They played darts or table tennis.

“A year later, my brother volunteered for the Wehrmacht. He was sent first to Riga. I heard some stories about his life on the Eastern Front, or behind the front, as it happened—but let’s not make things complicated. The upshot is: after spending several years in Russian captivity, in due course he came home, one of the lucky survivors.

“Back in Germany, he did a bizarre thing. He made a sort of conversion. He had a strange and unexpected relationship with a bohemian, a floozy, a rabid socialist. No one could understand it. What did he want with the Marxist strumpet? Her skirts showed her hairy knees.

But I understood him. She was not so different from my brother. A theater director and “dance poet” she called herself. And in fact they quietly married, had a son together. Soon after, however, the radical woman insisted on moving to East Berlin, where she meant to be part of a new, socialist dawn. She took the child with her. My brother never spoke to her again.” The doctor focused her blind eyes on Margaret, with a slightly curling lip.

Margaret felt her fingers grow colder still.

“Well.” The doctor sighed, turning her head away. “My brother became a successful film director. In Munich. And although he never remarried, he gradually made a complete return to his old politics. He
made a series of successful films through the nineteen-fifties,
Heimat
films, sentimental tripe, mostly, but he made a name for himself and was ultimately invited to Hollywood, where he had a measure of success once again. And then in the early seventies, I don’t know what—something in the mood of the times, perhaps, moved him to make the second highly peculiar swerve of his life.

“He was invited to lecture at the film school at the University of California in Los Angeles. I believe the first lecture was there. When he came on the stage, the kids booed him because of the type of thoughtless films he made in Hollywood; he was considered very retrograde—but that’s an aside. In any case, my brother, he thought back on his life and what he could show the young people, what he was truly proud of—to teach them about filmmaking. And do you know what he pulled out? The old scraggly footage from the HJ. That is, the one hundred and thirteen seconds of Albert’s death.

“The film of this, the ever-so-silent film, my dear”—and she inclined her head toward Margaret—“had survived, of course. My brother saved it carefully, hiding it in a metal box at the back of his closet, with his pornography collection actually, as he told me once, not without some of his old bravado,” the doctor said, in a tone of great detachment. “He showed this film, still somehow proud of his creation—with its brazen swarms of light, the fire in the lake and, moving liquidly, in the center, the young Albert himself, floating up out of the lake and across the screen in a black-and-white haze. That’s how my brother described it—how it stood in such contrast of purity with the coed bunch in their modern lecture hall. That there was a pristine, Wagnerian horror-beauty to the sight of the boy in his medieval costume, his sword clutched tightly in his long-fingered hand, rising up from the fire below. The flickering of the flames twisting like lightning across the shimmering lake—” The doctor turned her head. She looked at where she could see Margaret as a dark shadow.