The History of History (11 page)

The
Sperber
, according to the book, was “a bird of prey with long, pointed talons that nourishes itself on smaller birds. These it hunts with lightning-quick loops and dives, knowing how to rip them out of the air in mid-flight with its beak.”

At this description, a sharp and bracing sort of panic took hold of the room, and Margaret had to shut her eyes.

That evening
, as she sat over her books, the memory of a friend crossed her mind. Or perhaps he should be called an acquaintance; in any case, she remembered someone. It was a certain Benjamin, a fellow expatriate, a music critic, with whom she had once spent a good deal of time. She had never known him well, but she had liked him; he let her sit in his kitchen for hours with a newspaper while he went about his other business, entertaining women in the living room and making loud international calls to magazine editors. He claimed
having a silent and strange woman in the house put everyone on edge, and he was eccentric enough to like the idea of putting his guests on edge. As for Margaret, she was permitted to eat his canned bratwurst and sauerkraut, and so for her part she had never complained.

It was not until ten in the evening that she finally made up her mind to go to him. It had been years since she last saw him, she did not even have his telephone number any longer. Late at night, too, there was a risk he would not be at home—he had been in the habit, she recalled, of spending every night at some hidden club or other. She would have to take her chances.

She traveled half an hour on the U2 line, all the way up to Prenzlauer Berg. She went through a concrete courtyard to a rear building where Benjamin’s dark apartment house decayed. All this, she remembered well. She rang the bell, and praise be—her heart skipped a beat with gladness—Benjamin himself came to the door.

He was a portly man, almost forty. He had the air of a ringmaster or a butcher, his cheeks a deep pink, his muttonchop whiskers thick and black. His eyes were white like hard-boiled eggs, the irises friendly and burlesque. Now he narrowed these eyes at the young woman in his doorway.

There might have been some question as to whether he recognized her. Before the night in the forest, Margaret knew, her features had been soft, as though one were seeing her through a grease-smeared lens. Now she had become sharp—the bones of her face had floated up to the surface, and her oversized men’s clothing too moved about her in harsh shapes. After a long glance, however, Benjamin’s eyes relaxed, and he opened the door.

“Margaret Taub,” he said. He was in his pajamas and a tattered smoking jacket, reeking of garlic.

“Benjamin.”

“Do you wish to visit me now, Margaret?”

“Yes, Benjamin.” She tried to take him in her arms, but he stiffened.

“It’s been a long time, Margaret.” He looked down the stairwell to see if anyone was with her. “After three years, all of a sudden Margaret Taub shows up.”

Margaret, excited, headed straight for her old spot in the kitchen. Benjamin followed. His eyes widened, the whites waxing larger. “You know what, Margaret? You’re in luck, I was about to eat a can of sauerkraut.”

“Oh, yes.” Margaret breathed a sigh of happiness, although she was speechless for lack of socialization. She sat down at the table in the kitchen and looked around her.

Just a moment before, standing in the hallway ringing his bell, she had had no image of his apartment; the door to his flat seemed as if it would open onto nothing at all, as though part of a stage set. But now inside, she discovered she knew the place in every detail, was sure that almost nothing had been moved since she was last here. The same dusty, poolside furniture in orange-and-white plastic was scattered here and there, the same album covers were thumbtacked to the walls featuring lounge lizard girls in blue lipstick; the electric organ; several lamps made out of coconuts; tall piles of CDs and LPs, white-and-green-striped wallpaper falling off the walls for the moisture. Benjamin took an open can of sauerkraut out of the refrigerator and brought it to the table.

“To be honest, Margaret, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Benjamin began.

“Neither did I,” Margaret replied aimlessly and at once.

“I won’t say I wasn’t fine with that.”

“Benjamin—” Margaret longed to touch him. But everything about the way he stood, about his rigid expression, suggested he did not trust her.

“Are you still living in Schöneberg?” he asked.

“Same place,” Margaret smiled up at him.

“That’s a surprise.”

“It’s not so easy to change,” Margaret said.

“No?” He raised his eyebrows in his burlesque grimace. “Well,” he said, in a falsetto. He brought two beers over to the table and sat down. “Margaret Taub,” he said, still in the falsetto, opening his beer. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Well,” she hesitated. She swept the dust off the unused end of the table. “I wanted to talk to you about something in particular.”

“Oh yeah? I wanted to talk to you about something in particular too,” he said.

Margaret sensed this was not good.

“Do you want to know if I ever went to Gau-Algesheim?” he asked.

“To where?”

“The dumb monkey, eh?”

“What?” Margaret looked at him.

“It was scummy of you, Margaret.”

“Benjamin—”

“Don’t try to Benjamin me. The answer is no. I didn’t go. You said you’d interpret for me, I was on the platform, the train came. No Margaret. No one came. Margaret cut out. Now the old man is dead.”

“The old man?”

“I guess you knew we had to go down there before the asshole died. Now my father won’t ever get the house back.”

“Benjamin, Benjamin,” she said plaintively, trying to buy time. What was he talking about? “Benjamin,” she stuttered. “The thing is, I never leave Berlin. I haven’t gone outside the city limits in years.” She said it, and realized with a start that, except for Sachsenhausen, which was still part of the Berliner public transport network and so hardly an exception, it was true.

“
Now
I know that. I found out the hard way. You could have told me before I bought the tickets. Three hundred and seventy five euros each, nonrefundable. My father’s sure not coming over to Germany, I can tell you that. You were our chance.”

Margaret tried to mask her confusion. “But you always behave so badly, Benjamin,” she said. It was the only honest statement that occurred to her.

“They did not give me German citizenship for my charm, Margaret, they gave it to me because they killed half my family.”

“Okay,” Margaret said. “Okay.” She swallowed. Something jogged her. She remembered a time—waiting in line with Benjamin at the ticket office at Zoo Station. He was smoking a cigar; she was worried about the smoke, then an altercation with the station police. Of course, she must have been preparing to make a trip with him. A trip to the south, it seemed to her, fuzzily. Why hadn’t she made the trip?

“Do you still want to go?” she asked. “I’ll go,” she said. She wanted terribly to befriend him.

“
Now
you want to? Well—” He looked at the calendar on the wall next to them. It displayed June 2001; it too was covered in dust. “The bastard is dead now anyway,” he said. “There’s no point. We’d have to sue the state. The fun part would have been tearing it away from the anti-Semite.” He took a bite of sauerkraut. “What did you want to talk to me about, Margaret?”

Margaret drank her beer. The single bulb on the ceiling cast a light that fatigued the eyes. “Benjamin—” she began, but stopped.

The fact was that in this location—with the old, precariously tilting stacks of records around her, the smell of curry and mildew, Benjamin’s kind, impossibly familiar face—the events of the last weeks seemed remote. She wondered if she had really seen any hawk-woman. She wondered if she had not perhaps been inwardly exaggerating about the flesh, the transformation, the bird. Now, picturing everything in her mind, it all seemed unlikely.

But that had been the entire reason for coming—so that Benjamin could bring her back to reality. So Margaret spoke up. “Do you have any idea what I was doing, say, about two or three years ago?” she asked. “Any idea at all?”

“What? You want me to tell you about your own life?”

“Well—” she said, her face starting to itch, “there’s this time I can’t remember. I know it’s odd, but—that’s how it is.” Margaret caught her breath.

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“Well, back when we were friends, for example. After that, there’s a foggy time. It’s like when you think back on your childhood. Sometimes you can remember when you were six years old, but weirdly, not very much from when you were seven.”

Benjamin pulled on his mustache. “Okay,” he said.

Margaret leaned over the table and kissed his cheek, trying to solidify any goodwill he might have toward her. Benjamin put his hands on the table and licked his lips.

“You lived down in Schöneberg,” he said. “What about that guy? You were in love with the German guy, right? Not with me, that’s for sure.”

“A German?”

“You’ve got to remember that guy. Even I remember him.”

“Benjamin, I told you, I don’t remember anything.”

“What, not even the German? You were crazy about him.”

“Really?”

Benjamin looked at her and became still for a fraction of an instant. Then he began to chew the inside of his cheek. “Are you sure you’re okay, Margaret?”

“I think so,” she said, but her eyes stung. This seemed to mortify Benjamin, and he pulled on his whiskers.

“Well, all I can tell you is what I know, Margaret. The thing is, you were always secretive. You never introduced me. I thought you were
embarrassed of him. I only saw the two of you once, on Weinbergsweg, and it was dark, and you didn’t see me. He was older, I remember that. And then after you didn’t show up to go to Gau-Algesheim, it was like you’d dropped off the face of the earth. You never called, your phone number went out of service. I figured you’d left Germany.”

“You were angry at me.” Margaret rubbed her face. So there had been a man. She looked at the beer in front of her, picked it up, and drank almost the entire thing down in one go, wincing. Her eyes began to water in earnest.

“True enough,” Benjamin said. “Let’s see. You always wore those little dresses back then, didn’t you. Not like now,” and he gestured at her oversized man’s trousers, whose cuffs had lately been dragging behind her in the sod, their hems unraveling, and the broadcloth shirt. “But okay. What happens when
you
try to remember?”

“I told you, Benny. There’s nothing. Nothing comes to mind at all.”

Benjamin poured her a shot of Unicum.

“I don’t want that,” Margaret said.

“Don’t drink it if you don’t want it.”

Margaret picked up the shot glass and drank it down. Then she began to laugh. “It’s all ridiculous!”

“It’s ridiculous all right.”

Margaret laughed on and on. Benjamin sat with his arms crossed, looking at her with an uncertain smile.

Finally she took a breath. “There’s one thing,” she said, swallowing. “I often see one thing. But it’s not a memory. It’s more of a picture. Maybe even more like a smell than a picture. I think I dreamt it or saw it on TV. It comes to me sometimes when I try.”

“That’s good, Margaret. That’s a clue. What is it?”

Margaret gave a last hysterical peal of laughter. The sound was shrill. “It’s a staircase in an apartment house,” she said, choking on saliva.

“Where?” Benjamin asked.

“I don’t know where. Nowhere I’ve ever been. But I can see it perfectly. The staircase curves in an oval spiral upward around an oval shaft in the middle. At the top there’s a skylight with wedged panes. I can see it all really well. The window is like a wheel with spokes. But oval-shaped, to match the shape of the stairwell. And because of the
skylight, the stairwell is bright at the center and shadowy around the edges.”

“Okay,” Benjamin said.

“And the stairs are covered in red flaxen runners, the kind that smell like straw.”

“So it’s probably Berlin.”

“What?”

“Red flaxen runners are mostly a Berlin thing.”

“Oh,” Margaret said. She had not thought of this.

“What else?” Benjamin asked.

“At the bottom, there’s a girl, about my age, walking up the stairs.”

“Bingo, Margaret,” Benjamin said. “That must be you.”

“No, no. Not me at all. She’s wearing a bluish dress. I don’t have a blue dress.” Margaret felt herself sinking in—seeing in her mind the narrow blue stripes of the faded fabric, the brown plastic belt made to look like leather. She let out her breath. “The girl is looking up, and she can see there’s a man up at the top of the stairs. The man doesn’t see her. He’s leaning both arms on the banister way up there under the skylight, he’s smoking a cigarette, almost at the top of the house, maybe four or five stories up, pretty far away from her. She can see the smoke from his cigarette, it’s curling grey against the skylight, and even sometimes next to her, she notices ash fluttering down. She calls up to him, but he doesn’t call back. She’s walking up the stairs, holding on to the banister, and calling. But every time she puts her head over the edge and looks up into the white light in the shaft, he’s never any closer, and she gets blinded by the brightness. When she looks back down at the stairs, the ovals are burnt on her eyes. She can see the shape of the skylight on the stairs, black spots like silverfish.”

“Like silverfish?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, that’s good. I should be taking notes on all this.” Benjamin poured himself another shot of Unicum, and then one for Margaret. She drank it down. “What else?” he said.

“Actually, there
is
something else.” Margaret swallowed. “Maybe it’s a different dream. Sometimes I think it’s a different dream. Or maybe it’s later. It’s probably a different dream. But in any case, on the same stairs, while the girl is still climbing, something actually crashes through the skylight. It crashes a hole in the glass up there in the roof and it drops down. Down past the fifth- and fourth-floor landings, all
the way down to the bottom. Once it’s down on the floor in the cellar, the girl knows something.
Nothing will ever be the same
. And the reason: she’s lost the fight.”