The History of History (36 page)

It wasn’t that Erich had any ill will toward the tenants. They were nice people, always cordial when they passed Erich on the stairs. However, the Croatian couple had been resisting the installation of anti-pigeon spikes along the wide stucco railings of their balcony. They preferred to use the ledge as a sort of breakfast table for their coffee
tray in the summers and as a place to air musty carpets in the winter. They also claimed that no pigeons roosted here, they had never seen a single one. Erich knew better. He was finding ways to convince them gently, rather than picking a fight. He felt it was important that he do this while it was still early in the spring, when they wouldn’t yet think of eating outside.

After he had gone into his garden house and washed his hands, he set to work digging up the hard ground and putting flower bulbs in the courtyard. He was only putting in one bulb per meter—a minimalist look that he had seen in a gardening magazine once. It struck him as very economical.

As for the American, Erich had seen her on the subway earlier that same day. Erich almost never took the subway, preferring his mountain bike, but this had been a special trip to see his lawyer—he had had good enough reasons to hire one. Not suing anyone, not exactly at least.

He had seen Margaret right away, but she had not seen him. Typical of her. She was sitting with her head thrown back; her eyebrows drawn up in a peak of amusement; her gaze on something off to the side; her mouth in a knowing half grin. Even at a glance from the other end of the car he had recognized her—she was identifiable by the adolescent’s bravely pathetic habit of believing herself to be masking best her insecurities precisely at those moments when she most revealed them. Look at her legs, side by side in that simpering, pinup-girl position. He had thought his own mother was a generation too late for such stylization. Margaret’s body was tall, thin, and limbs gangly—it wasn’t right for her to make those coy moves! She kept her shoulders hunched up so high that the blades cut sharply out of her skin. It looked like she would keel over with eagerness to please. When she got out of the train at Rüdesheimer Platz, she wobbled her head. Margaret always walked in a way that made it look as if she knew she were being watched, her arms swinging, her head bobbing up and down, winningly cheerful, like an ingénue or a nymphet.

The problem with the show, Erich thought—what made it ridiculous,
some
would say—was that Margaret’s face didn’t fit the part, when she was motionless she didn’t look at all like a puppy or nymphet of any kind. She had a very high forehead and a pointed, knowledgeable chin. Her dark eyes, on those rare occasions when she revealed
them completely, were sensitive. She should have been reasonable. Erich would not have minded being her friend.

Erich was on his way home when he ran into Margaret on the subway. At just that moment, he had nowhere he needed to be. So he followed Margaret off the train. It wouldn’t do any harm to see what she was up to.

Margaret walked by the Justizkammer and Erich followed. Margaret walked and walked, and Erich followed and followed. Finally they were almost at Nollendorfplatz, and lo, Margaret went into the St. Matthias Church. Erich ducked inside as well, almost catching up as he caught the heavy door before it closed behind her.

The church was empty. Margaret, in the still, moist, cold air, knelt in one of the back pews. Erich was surprised. And then surprised to see her face in an expression broad with the laxness of despair, the way of looking when there is finally no one left to look at.

Erich thought of one of her diary entries, one he had read a trifle too absentmindedly, not really taking care to decipher it; it seemed like more of the same gushing nonsense that filled the rest of the journal, albeit a trifle more overwrought, with slightly more self-satisfied, mysterious references. In retrospect, these were easy enough to decode. He had simply lived a long time outside the society of women. In any case, he grasped its meaning now in the church, and he began to think of the large men’s coats Margaret had begun to wear.

More than two years ago, Erich found what appeared to be the entire contents of Margaret’s wardrobe in the trash—girlish, coquettish clothes. And once, too, he saw Margaret throw something yellowy-gold out of the window and into the chaos of the neighboring courtyard. (Over there, they had no
Hausmeister
.) Later, Erich went and rummaged through the wet dead leaves and rusted coat hangers and garbage lids. In amongst, he found a simple brass key, single-toothed, as though for a piece of furniture. It had been in the autumn.

Now that he was beginning to understand, he felt sorry for her.

M
argaret awoke the day after she met Philipp. Philipp in his green alligator boots, Philipp with his toy soldier’s gaze—and she was sick with memory.

She did not want to think.

With exhaustion, she heaved herself back toward Regina and the Family Strauss. She knew what she was doing. She was finding a way to think about herself that did not involve herself and, what’s more, involved finer, more gracious people.

She became
something like a detective; it was an Indian summer. She looked a second time at the date of the Strauss family’s suicide. She opened a clean notebook, turned to a white page. March 5, 1943, she wrote down in block letters at the top. She double-checked—the date coincided with the so-called
Fabrikaktion
—the factory action—at the beginning of March 1945, when the Gestapo rounded up Berliner Jews from the factories where they were enslaved. They were forced into cattle cars bound East, the point after which Goebbels declared Berlin
judenrein
. So the suicide must have been an evasion of deportation, as Margaret had first believed.

She turned to the biographies and journals of Jewish women living in Berlin with non-Jewish husbands.

She suspended her tours and read under the feather bed at home, leaving the house only to buy cans of kidney beans and frozen spinach.

She learned a great deal.

Although officially exempted from deportation, mixed families, who were deprived of all chances of work, were on the verge of starvation in 1943. Jews were denied the papers that would allow them not only to work but also to travel, that would allow rations for meat, dairy, and vegetables. If the non-Jewish spouse did not divorce his spouse, he was in a terrible position. He was called a
Rassenschänder—
race defiler—usually denied work, denied food, marginalized and isolated as much as, or in some cases even more than, Jews themselves, mobs sometimes being even more enraged by their own kind “gone astray.” Denunciations to the Gestapo were a daily occurrence. Mixed families were hounded by continual visits from the police and random, inexplicable deportations of entire families. Although the non-Jewish half of the couple could easily divorce his spouse, the consequence was grave—the Jewish half would be starved to death or slaughtered. In Berlin at least, this consequence was known full well. So despite the official exemption of mixed families, Margaret began to see very well how the Strausses might have been driven to kill themselves.

But still the question of the children. Why, at least, wasn’t there anywhere to send them? Weren’t there non-Jewish relatives’ homes where the children could be sent, passed off as war orphans, camouflaged? The question would not leave her mind.

Margaret reread her copy of the entry in the police log yet again. This time she focused on the places of birth.
Fritz Strauss, born 11/5/06 in Gross-Strenz, and Regina Sara Strauss née Herzberg, born 11/20/09 in Schwedenhöhe
.

She began to search. She took out her atlas of Germany. Oddly, neither city was in the index.

She looked at the names again. Perhaps she had misspelled or mis-remembered. But no. She went to the computer. She put Gross-Strenz into Google and found only one reference—on a genealogical page tracing an American family’s origins—to Poland.

All was given away. Both places must be in the eastern realms lost to Germany during the war. Margaret took out a world atlas from 1938 and turned to the pages showing the old Germany. She found Gross-Strenz near Wohlau, a tiny place in lost Silesia, not so far from Breslau, in today’s Poland.

Then she looked for Schwedenhöhe. Today, it seemed, the place was called Szwederowo, in what was once Posen. But in the 1938 atlas, even after looking at Posen until her eyes ached, she found no trace.

She sat back in her desk chair. Half of today’s Poland was once German. This family that with such cunning laid itself into a mute and message-less grave to escape the Nazis—not only were they wiped away without a trace, but both husband and wife came from towns that no longer exist.

From the suicide note of a Jewish wife and mother married to a
non-Jewish husband in 1943, Margaret copied the following into her notebook.

Margaret read this. Her eyes flicked back and forth.

She would return to the Salzburgerstrasse, she decided. If there were a secret door that might crack open and let her approach the Family Strauss, then it would be there.

At the Salzburgerstrasse, she would look for the ghost of Regina Strauss one more time.

Having made up her mind to go, Margaret longed to already be there.

That afternoon
, on her way out of the flat, she pushed her hand into the cabinet by the front door, looking for the second key to her bicycle lock. The old one’s shaft had broken off, that cheaply made thing.

So this was how it happened.

As she pushed her hands about in the drawer, she found a little perfume bottle, marked on one side with the word
freesia
. Margaret’s face darkened. She hoped it would not be raining outside. Where was her umbrella? The days were so dark, with all the clouds.

Over Western Schöneberg
a heavy fog was floating. Margaret waited for someone to come out of the outer door at Salzburgerstrasse 8. She sat on the stoop. Her back curved with fatigue, her head she held down, her hands she tucked under her thighs. After a while there was a rain so light that although she could not feel it against her cheeks, the earth around her began to crumble with it.

The time of her life that had belonged to Amadeus was present beside her, coiled like a snake. It flushed her with a certain smell
of hopelessness, a piece of moss stuck to a shoe tramped indoors—impropriety and shame. The trouble was this: she felt that the young woman who had loved Amadeus was not she—it was someone else. Or no, not someone else! But it was a character in a play for which she had only memorized the lines, nothing more than a dramatic idea she had had—an idea that she had given power over her tongue for one long, endless summer that went on for years. But it had never been more than an idea. She had been high on love, how could it have been woven into life?

Finally an old woman came out of the house and Margaret caught the door. She stepped into the foyer. The light in the foyer—the soft, rich foyer—was milkier than last time. It was almost melting in the rain. Margaret looked for a long time into the mirrors at her gently doubled and tripled reflections.

She looked for the ghost, she looked for Regina Strauss. But there was no motion in the mirror. The silence was strong; it hurt her ears. She moved her hands to break the stillness. The silence crept.

She went out the back door of the foyer and into the courtyard. She followed the little path that led farther into the greenery. She emerged in the back garden where the goldfish pond nestled in the high grasses, surrounded by tall juniper. All the plants whispered, rustling, given voice by the rain. She looked into the pool and saw the goldfish under the
plink-plank
of the drops; they were of the darkest orange, like strips of fire.

The rain slowed to a drizzle, and then stopped. The pond was dark, but even with the grey light, here too was a reflection, and Margaret saw a bit of herself shaking in the ripples. And then for a moment, she thought she saw herself, but underneath the fish—deep underneath the fish.