The History of History (19 page)

“Quite right,” the doctor said.

“But I can’t sleep anymore. I feel guilty.”

“You feel guilty?”

“Yes,” Margaret said. “Yes, I would say that. But I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said quickly, her voice rising involuntarily.

“Then why do you feel guilty?”

“Because the residue comes off on me. My job has become horrible. I feel sick.” Margaret was not willing, even now, to mention the hawk-woman.

The doctor was quiet for a moment, seeming to consider. “It’s history you work with as a guide, and history you study at the university?” she finally asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you considered that might be the trouble?”

“No,” Margaret said.

“But of course that’s the trouble!” And again the doctor became excited. “Let me explain it to you this way. History, for an amnesiac—comrade, my pet—is a shill, a stool pigeon, a decoy, a trap. All these years, you’ve been charming yourself with the dry bone, not the bloody flesh. For the sake of the bone, you have danced and been entertained. You’ve been reading history so that it will be easier to shed your own flesh. That is the history of history—the violence against the body for the sake of the skeleton.”

Margaret drew her head back as if she’d been struck. Oddly, the doctor’s words made instant sense to her. And she was defensive. “You don’t know anything,” she said. The presumptuous doctor didn’t know her. She thought of her apartment, the hallway of which was like a rope bridge over a great gorge of knowledge, with its many piles of books on either side—biographies, histories, sociologies, old telephone and address directories stacked so high it could only cunningly be traversed—used books bought over the Internet from dealer-collectors, new books from the fair in Frankfurt, books from the
Antiquariat
on the corner. And then she thought of her painting of Magda Goebbels. No one could say she, Margaret, of all people, had been gesturing frivolously at the past.

But the doctor went on. “You want to drain the elderly fluids so
you can march hypnotized into the future!” she said. “Your living, breathing, fleshy Berlin—ha-ha! I’ll tell you what that is!” the doctor laughed. “A step back from disingenuousness! For nothing living can ever be completely misunderstood. If you have to see the buildings alive, then it will put a stay of execution on your murder of time.” The doctor beamed. “Everything is going according to plan, comrade—your defenses are breaking down. My way,” she said, “is winning you over!”

Margaret was dizzy with anger. “You’re most certainly
not
winning me over, doctor. I’m here to say it’s not working!” She stood up. “This was supposed to be a cure for amnesia. But my amnesia is not cured.”

The doctor’s voice lowered to a purr hardly louder than the sound of her rasping breath. “I know you feel guilty, my dear, I know it hurts you. Regardless of whether you remember what you’ve done, you will still feel guilty, for guilt is not a matter of deed but a matter of character. Therefore a contagion. It is very difficult to become connected to someone else’s crime, but never difficult to become connected to someone else’s heart. You can always stop seeking the truth of life, but you can never stop seeking the truth of character! You can never stop worrying over the shadows of your own riddling heart!”

The doctor waved her hands in the air. “Bid the history of history adieu, comrade! The living apartment houses are eager to have their way. A new sun is rising, the time of the anesthetized past is drawing to a close.”

Margaret clutched the lip of the desk. “Doctor, I have
never
tried to
anesthetize
the past. On the contrary.”

“Oh, I’ve been on your ‘tours of Berlin,’ ” the doctor said.

Margaret cried out. No she hadn’t! She would have certainly remembered an ancient, goggle-eyed German woman.

Or would she have? Recently she had been so distracted … But the doctor cut her off. “If you are not in the habit of anesthetizing the past, then how do you explain that you don’t remember one bit of your
own
past?” She wrapped her knuckles against the desk.

Margaret pulled at the bottom of her sweater. “I have nothing to remember.” Her cheeks burned.

“Yes, you do.”

“In that case, why don’t I remember it? Why don’t I find it? It doesn’t make sense!”

“My dear, let me answer that question with another question: what
is the difference between having a knife thrown at your head and reading a story about having a knife thrown at your head?”

Margaret hid her face. She wanted to get up, but her whole body was leaden; she suspected that she was rooted to the floor as a rabbit freezes in hopes of camouflage. So many animals believe predators cannot see them when they are still. She didn’t say anything, her nostrils sick with the task of breathing. The clock ticked in the corner. With little warning, the heavy handle of one of the knives in the door won out against the blade, and it fell to the ground with a clatter.

“Dr. Arabscheilis,” Margaret said. “Did you throw a knife at me?”

“I did not throw a knife at you,” the doctor said. “But come, come. That won’t do. What’s the difference?”

“Any number of differences,” said Margaret, breathing heavily.

“No, there are two.”

“There are more than two,” Margaret said.

“No, there are precisely two differences,” the doctor said. “The first is this: in the story, there is a
multiplicity
of things—the door opening, the doctor in her white coat, the doctor launching her weapon, the knife flying, the sound of the knife lodging in the corkboard, the cowering girl—I am merely assuming you cowered. Did you cower? Well, never mind. But in the experience, by contrast, there are only
two
things. There is
confusion
, and there is
fear.
”

Margaret shifted in her chair.

“And then there is the second difference,” the doctor went on. “Can you guess what it is?”

“No,” said Margaret.

“Really? Not a single guess?”

“No,” Margaret said. She was nauseous.

“Did you guess
Dido and Aeneas
, comrade?
Dido and Aeneas
is the correct answer. In the story, the sound of Dido’s aria flowing through the room changed the style and tone of
everything
. But in real life, the music made no difference.”

Margaret was silent, shielding her head.

“If you read some scrap of history,” the doctor said, “you are doing nothing but replaying your own life, only in heavy makeup. The world is pregnant with your own face, and it will never give birth to anything else. You know nothing but this life of yours, which is plain and pure emotion, stripped of all gratification of meaning—just a whimper in the dark. A story, by contrast, is a symphony blooming in the sunlight, trying to draw you away from chaos. Anyone who doesn’t
know this has been nursing herself with lies plugged into her consciousness, as the symphonic sound track is plugged into the films in the dark of the movie theater, trying to make us believe that all experience carries an emotion familiar and long since invented, making a case for religion, trying to prove—foolishly, comrade, so foolishly!—that we all know the same beauty.”

Margaret held her head tightly in her hands, trying not to open her mouth and scream. Her mind was going black and white and black and white again, as if there were a strobe light pulsing the room.

She sat for a while so, but then with sudden brightness something suggested itself to her, and she lunged across the desk at the doctor. “That’s not true,” she broke out. “It’s not true about
Dido and Aeneas
. It’s not incidental at all. When I came into the room and the knife went by my head, Dido sang, ‘in my breast.’ And that’s all I remember about the knife now. Just those three words. And if I were to remember what happened later, I might think the knife went into my breast instead of the door!”

“Only because you’d already be remembering it, which is to say mythologizing it. It has nothing to do with the actual event.” The doctor was not necessarily reasonable, but she was quick.

Song lyrics—thinking of them, Margaret’s thoughts jerked over to the moment on the train on the way to Sachsenhausen, when she had remembered her father. The song he used to sing. “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind,” he had sung to her in German, a language she did not know as a child. He sang, and the German words sounded in the child’s ears like radio static. But sitting here now, she could remember it, she could remember his voice and his song, and to her mind now it was full of meaning. The German words could be dropped like coins into the new slots cut into her mind in the years since, and decoded by their very grooves. He had sung:

The meaning of the lines touched icy fingers to Margaret’s back.

She remembered more: he had sung it at a party. She was wild with delight, he was drunk. She was running in loops with the other children; he plucked her out of circulation, took her in his arms and held her up above his head, and she looked into his light eyes, which were small behind his glasses, and he sang to her.

However, the doctor was right in a certain way. Her memory was foreign to the experience of the child, who did not understand German, who did not know how to recognize drunkenness, who did not know her father would one day disappear into a mental hospital, where he would make thinking of the time before he had gone away from home into an act of nostalgia.

The doctor seemed to regard Margaret very closely, but with her ears rather than her eyes—her head was cocked. “Writing history, reading history, my dear, a person will always try to stage a symphony in a cave where nothing but a whimper dwells,” she said, “but at the end of your life, perhaps even sooner, you’ll realize that there’s nothing to chronicle, nothing to remember, or even to know, that bears any relationship to experience at all. Eventually there will be no more pantomimes, only the acute attunement to the whimper.”

“But if there’s nothing to chronicle, then why do you care whether or not I remember?”

“Comrade! I am not opposed to the ideal—the ideal of the remembering human mind! I’m only opposed to false expansions of same. Meaning is private, puny, and constructed artificially. If you recognize that fact once and for all, the meaning you will eventually have no choice but to construct will be proportionate. That is to say, it will be very small. You will know it to be essentially provisional, even fraudulent!—and then, as a result, it will be powerless, and remembering all things unbearable will become bearable to you.”

“Will it?”

“Yes.”

“And is that good?”

“What?” asked the doctor.

“To remember unbearable things.”

“Of course it is,” said the doctor. “Truth is a worthy cause, even if it is wildly limited in scope. You’ll get but a penny from your copper mine.”

Margaret took a step toward the door. She saw that the doctor was
not going to help her escape; on the contrary, the doctor was part of the nightmare. Margaret opened the door. One of the knives was still stuck in it.

“Comrade!” the doctor cried out when she heard the door opening. “You have to go nearer before you can get farther away from it! Ascribe significance to everything, but only personal significance!”

The cry of advice sounded in the room, the doctor’s voice had grown hoarse and exalted.

At home
, Margaret again heard the first bars of “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind” playing in her mind—an earworm of the most insistent kind. It wasn’t long before she began to feel the song around her like flames, licking at her feet, polluting the air, and there was a terrible moment. Because of a sense of rising chaos, she thought the fire would shatter the panes of the glass globe that had been around her head for so long.

She went over to the bookshelf. In the inferno of the earworm’s heat, a book flew at her eyes. It was a book that was fat with letters from her mother, some opened and others not, all left so long untouched that it was blurred into something almost imperceptible.

She wanted to escape the song. The song suggested damning things about her free will. She longed to pin down the specifics of her mother’s modest handwriting. It seemed that in comforting herself thus, she would draw something monstrous out of the sky.

She pulled the book out of the shelf—it was a Russian novel called
Moscow-Petushki
, and all at once a wave of bad feeling came over her again.
Tick-tock, this is the end
. Her hands shook. The veins in them had risen. She tidied the letters.

You are crazy, my child. You belong in Berlin
. Her father had sung that to her when she was only a girl. He had danced with Alphi, his beloved Great Dane.

She could not go on. She put the letters back into the book, and the book back onto the shelf, all the while staring at her hands. Another wave of bad feeling pushed her back, with a mighty shove to her solar plexus.

So she did not read the letters from her mother. And it shall be noted, much to the frustration of anyone who might be wishing to tether her
tale to a rational mast, she also did not bother to look and see that one of the letters, written in a cribbed hand, contained all the lyrics of “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind.” It was postmarked August 2002—that is, it came from the period that Margaret herself was in the habit of designating as “lost time.”

T
here was a day in January that began in the yellow phone booth outside the supermarket on Gleditschstrasse. Margaret pulled open its heavy door. She needed a phone book.