The History of History (37 page)

A movement caught her eye. Under the water, there was a white and moving face. Pale, silken hair, and dark, pooling eyes.

The black reflection of the tree branches cut into the woman and seemed to bind her at the bottom of the pond. The flame-like fish swam above her eyes.

Margaret put out her arms and reached down in the water, deep down. She touched the woman’s shoulders. She could feel the collarbone under the cold. Under the skin, the bone was seashell; it cut upward, and the woman’s elastic skin contracted.

Regina Strauss turned her face up to Margaret, her neck dripping back. Her dark pupils widened into rabbit-hole mirrors.

Margaret leaned forward toward the little pond. When she found Regina’s wet arms under the water, she was moved by instinct: she dragged them out into the air, and laid them, dripping, over her own head. She assumed the posture of a supplicant: she knelt and pushed her forehead against the muddy bank.

She bowed down to the water.

She bowed down to Regina.

She prayed to Regina, to the woman who was near.

And then she began to hear a sound, rising out of the water. She put her ear toward it. She heard a moan; she heard the woman’s voice crying out three-dimensionally. She could hear the voice, thick with bubbles, and she submerged her ear to listen as it gradually became intelligible. Regina was speaking quickly.

L
isten, Margaret, listen. When it first started I began to say to Franz, lying beside him at night, “We’re pressed so! If we were made of carbon, we’d already be squeezed into diamonds”—making light of it, you see. And he would kiss my hand, call me “my diamond.” Now that it’s all over, here we are, it’s come to pass: We’ve flown up. We’ve come and gone. We’re diamonds of the night sky.

I came from Posen. I came from Posen to the big city. I came to my husband, we were married, we had a child, and when the government changed, I took refuge in a new church, the church that would save me but did not.

Where to start the story of how things went wrong? It began much earlier, but I’ll start in the summer of 1939, as that is when, for me at least, our death began seeping in.

Nineteen thirty-nine we got a canary for Rahel’s birthday. She was turning seven years old, old enough to care for the bird herself, we thought, a precocious little girl. Gerda had been born that winter, I was often tired, the baby didn’t sleep through the night. Rahel could use a little amusement at home. Many of her friends had left Germany already. She was at the school with the gentiles, but they knew she was of mixed birth, and did not play with her. She was a lonely, quiet child. Our apartment was often as silent as if we had never had any children.

We went to a place. You could buy birds there, on the corner of Fuggerstrasse and Motzstrasse, in a fine, stylish apartment house. The bird seller lived all the way at the top, under the roof, in a sort of garret with a winter garden built out of glass. Being on the corner and up under the roof, the place was struck with sunlight, and it was dreadfully hot, with large, blazing windows. It smelled wretched. A Jewish man by the name of Apfelbein who had been run out of business by the Nazis was trying to make a living in secret; he was thin. Officially he merely had a lot of birds that he cared for, and sometimes he gave them to his friends who wanted them as pets. If we made him a gift of some money in return, then no one had to be the wiser. In the old days before
’38 he had had a large pet shop on the Kurfürstendamm that even sold fancy-breed ponies in the courtyard behind.

We asked for Herr Apfelbein’s advice, but he did not speak to us in reply, he spoke to Rahel directly, told her about birds in a way she could understand. Rahel was a shy child. There weren’t many who could draw her into conversation, but he seemed to have a way with children, and soon she was speaking freely with him. He pointed out several birds in the row of cages, and she became excited. She was already quite overstimulated—it being her birthday. She liked two of the canaries. You could see why she chose them. They stood out—one was a vibrant yellow and the other a bright white. In the spirit of the occasion, her father and I told her she could choose whichever one she liked. She went back and forth between the two, talking to each bird in a soft, singsong voice, asking, “Would you like to come home with me, little bird?” She even went so far as to name them both—the white Sarto and the yellow Ferdinand. But she made no move to choose. After half an hour, we felt embarrassed—Gerda was starting to cry in my arms—and Herr Apfelbein began to look at us with interest to see what we would do.

We thought maybe, since the birds were not expensive (Herr Apfelbein was ready to give them to us for almost any price), we would buy both. Franz was still working at the time. Rahel smiled at the idea and looked at us triumphantly. I remember she had most of her milk teeth still, being a little behind for her age. But Herr Apfelbein shook his head.

“Don’t get two birds, young lady,” he said, addressing Rahel, “unless you have a lot of space for two cages. If you have both in one cage, one of the birds will die. Not right away, but after one year, maybe two years—one of them will die.”

We looked down at Rahel, who showed no reaction to this news. She stuck her finger through the bars at the white bird and cooed at it softly.

All of a sudden, with the strict, schoolmarmish air I knew meant she was happy, Rahel spoke. “Which one?”

“You mean which one dies?” he asked her.

Rahel caught her breath and looked at me, all at once panicked by shyness.

But the shopkeeper went on good-naturedly. “That’s a funny thing. You’d think it would be the smaller one that would die, wouldn’t you? But it’s not always the smaller one. Sometimes it’s the healthier, larger
bird that dies, the one with the most beautiful song, and the funny-looking runt with the short legs that lives. It’s a simple thing only: the dominant bird lives.”

“The dominant bird lives,” Rahel repeated, breathing in and out. She was quiet for a while, and then just as suddenly as before, she spoke up. “How do you know which it is?”—this still shrilly, as if she were testing a pupil.

“You
don’t
know,” Herr Apfelbein replied. “That’s the thing. There’s not a dominant bird or any other kind of bird at the beginning. But then, when the moment is ripe, there’s a fight. And whichever bird wins the fight—he’s the one who
becomes
the dominant bird.”

Rahel paused, thinking about this painstakingly, I could see. In the end she asked, “And what about the second fight?”

“That’s precisely it: there’s never a second fight.”

“Why not?” the child asked.

“The bird who loses at the beginning thinks everything will be better for him if he lies low. Better he gets used to things how they are. Then he won’t involve himself in any more nasty situations, lose an eye, or tear a wing. In fact, the second bird knows that the dominant bird doesn’t really have a better life. They both can live well, you see. The new order is just an order like any other order. Each one has his place. An orderly birdland.”

“But if you say the second bird dies, I suppose he does get hurt,” said Rahel.

“Well, that’s true, young Fräulein, you have a point. But like I say, you’re not supposed to keep these birds in cages together. I’m referring to the ideal conditions in the wild that the birds were first used to; the conditions that taught them how to live.”

“But how will it die then? Will the other bird kill it?”

“No, no killings!” He raised his voice. “I’ll tell you. These birds are territorial. Do you know what that means? That means each bird needs his own living space.” Herr Apfelbein caught my eye.

“And he kills the other bird in his space!” Rahel said excitedly, with a certain gusto.

“No!” the man cried out, “I told you, no killings!”

“What then?”

“Well, it’s a slow process.” Herr Apfelbein became pensive. “The dominant bird feels like he has to oversee the other bird—not hurt him, you understand—just oversee him. Nudge him. Peck at him while he’s eating. The other bird can still eat, but probably not his fill.
The dominant bird screeches at him, sings louder songs, and sings more songs, and sings more often. Not so bad really. But the other bird—he won’t be able to move about the way he wants, drink water when he wants. The strain on his nerves—that’s what will kill the other bird.”

“It’ll break his heart,” Rahel said sadly, quick to understand.

“That’s right, it’ll break his little bird heart.”

Rahel didn’t say anything more.

Franz, for his part, hadn’t been listening. He was carrying Gerda around the shop and was now at the end of his rope. And can I tell you? He insisted on buying both birds after all, thinking that Rahel would be pleased with him in the end, but also eager to get out of the bad-smelling shop. Herr Apfelbein caught my eye again. He shrugged.

As you may be able to guess, I was not insensitive to the allegory, and neither, I am certain, was Herr Apfelbein. I was even interested in having both birds, as a test. It stayed with me, in any case. It became a marker in my mind. There is nothing like fear to make one begin to see oneself mirrored in animal life.

The problem came
with the woman upstairs, Frau Schivelbusch. She lived in the apartment on the top floor of the house, and back then we lived in the apartment beneath hers. She thought the canaries were too loud. And it was true, the canaries were unusually eager to sing, in competitive spirit with each other.

Frau Schivelbusch had been our friend for several years. Not the closest friend, but Frau Schivelbusch had an amiable face. Her eyes were wide-set and merry, her smile broad. She was a good woman. At first, the summer we got the canaries, everything was all right. She even let Rahel lead her to see the birds in the back bedroom shortly after we got them, while Rahel was still so excited. But then September came and the war began, and her son, Karl, who worked in the typewriter shop at Viktoria-Luise-Platz, signed up as a soldier right away. And while everything was going so well, Karl fell, in May of 1940 during the invasion of France. He got a posthumous Iron Cross, and she was proud; it was sent to her in a red velvet box, which she showed me, weeping. She added a lock of his hair to the box, that she had cut off while he slept when he was just a babe, and then she kept the whole
thing open on the sideboard, in the dining room where she no longer entertained. The dead son had been her only child, and his father was a fallen hero of the Great War, so Frau Schivelbusch was left very much alone.

Even then it was still not so bad with the birds and Frau Schivelbusch. It really only got bad with the first air alarms, when we started having to go into the cellar together. Frau Schivelbusch had taken in a war orphan by then, a young boy of twelve. His parents had given him the Nordic name of Björn. Frau Schivelbusch must have felt pity for the child because his mother had been killed in the early bombings, before there were really any significant fatalities. So they had this in common—both their losses were early losses, out of synch with the nation, which was just then on the cusp of glory. Squeezed by the public’s happy delirium, they both had no choice but to shut up—I saw that distinctly, how their Nazi friends made them hide their tears.

But Frau Schivelbusch changed after she took in the boy. She became a model of what was then called “good citizenship.” I saw the lonely widow carefully sewing a giant Nazi flag as big as a bedsheet, actually partially made from a bedsheet. And Frau Schivelbusch left off talking with us, and she cupped her hand on the side of Björn’s eyes as she and he walked past us in the stairwell, like blinders around the eyes of a horse. And so what could I do, I grabbed the girls’ hands and pulled them out of her path. But it was a betrayal; yes, it was a betrayal.

A year passed
. The birds, Sarto and Ferdinand, sang uninterrupted, in a fight to the death. In July of 1941 I discovered I was to give birth again, and I was not glad. But what could I do? Franz was so unhappy in those days, and suddenly he was happy about my pregnancy, naïve, still convinced no one could harbor ill will toward an expectant mother. And Franz also, I think, still hoped we would be granted a son. Of course, Frau Schivelbusch did not congratulate me—by the time my condition was obvious, the ordinance against friendly relations with Jews had already passed, and she, with her eagle eye, made sure that the other women in the building followed it to the letter. That winter, Franz was not allowed to perform concerts or give lessons at the conservatory any longer, and his brother, sister, and father cut off contact with him, thinking that in this way they would encourage us to divorce, not destroy his promising career. Only his mother
still spoke to us, and then by post. At this time, Franz was becoming sicker with the melancholia that had plagued him since 1935.

At around the same time, I saw that the white bird, Sarto, was flourishing, while the yellow bird, Ferdinand, was losing his gloss, looking smudged, the feathers of his breast spiky as if wet. By this time the shop at the top of the apartment house on the Motzstrasse had closed, and in any case Herr Apfelbein had disappeared.

So now I often said a prayer for the bird Ferdinand at the same time I was praying for my family.

When I was already quite large with the baby in January, the Nazis made an ordinance that Jews had to give up all clothing made of wool or fur—it was all the warm clothing I had. Franz and I discussed it and we decided that since I did not have to wear the yellow star, being privileged through my marriage, I should simply ignore this ordinance. That was really the best thing—just pretend as if I hadn’t heard about the rule.

But Frau Schivelbusch began to eye me, and I could see she was estimating my fur coat. It wasn’t long before she had given the tip to the Gestapo—I knew it was her by her eyes. They came banging on the door. Franz went to answer with Gerda in his arms. My little girl was two years old then.

When they left, they had my fur coat and all the wool sweaters with them. The sweaters I had knitted myself.