The History of History (23 page)

There was something strange about the birds. Even if they were not the hawks, there was something unsettling. It took Margaret a moment to identify what the irregularity was, but finally she realized: the birds were silent. These birds did not make a single cry. The effect was almost to make her feel as if she were bicycling in a muted digital rendering, or—another thought—as though the birds were in that phase of rage where speech becomes impossible.

Margaret stopped her bicycle on the wide square and watched. The edges of their swarm were camouflaged by the late shadows, and she could not see how far into the distance their numbers spread. In silence, they made slow circles, sweeps, and caesuras, their shapes so dark, they seemed to leave trails of smoke behind them.

And then, almost imperceptibly, there was a change. They began to spiral downward. They were circling toward the open square and the surrounding canyons and depressed rooftops; they were beginning to alight on the ground. And as they did, their black forms broadened and stretched. Each bird was elastic, each bird was lengthening. Each bird grew a face. Each bird stretched into a long, thick, humanoid shadow.

The masses of black shapes, the birds in human shadow form, they moved down out of the sky, floating like dry leaves into the streets, quickly gaining detail: men and women, old and young, all of them withered and tarnished silvery like daguerreotypes. Their garments reeked of mothballs—woolen, worn and ash-smeared. A watch chain on the body of an old man; two grey, moon-shaped faces—sisters—moving at a loping pace arm in arm, their hair curled into small circles ridging their brow; elsewhere a thin baby; a flirtatious pair of platform sandals on the small feet of an adolescent girl. Deeper and deeper into the throngs of shadows Margaret went, rustling with them across the square.

Here they were, Margaret thought. So they had not evacuated. So this kind of ghost was in Berlin too. For a moment, she felt the flushest sort of excitement it is possible to feel. They were coming for her.

She reached in front of her. She took an arm in her hand and looked down to see it. It was encased in plaid wool. She pulled on the sleeve and turned her eyes toward the place where a face should be, her vision
patched around on all sides, and saw as though through the wrong end of a telescope, the grey face of a young man, not fully mature, with wavy black locks.

The boy looked away from her in the direction of the spire of the town hall. He pointed to the clock. Then he too looked up at it with a steady gaze. Margaret turned her head. The hands and notched numbers of the clock rushed toward her eyes in a blur of movement. Whether the graphology had physically come free, or whether she had simply lost the ability to tell time, she could not say. The boy, for his part, shook her hand from his sleeve and walked backward into the throng, where he was lost from sight.

Margaret got back on her bicycle and pedaled furiously. She arrived at the archive. The fluorescent lights of the entryway were heavy on her face, and she stood for a moment to catch her breath. She closed her eyes.

There it was. Margaret saw the woman in the dress walking up the oval staircase. Margaret saw her from a blue distance, and then the fist of a thing crashing through the skylight, coming down from the roof above. And it fell, fluttering like ash, through the central shaft of the stair’s helix down to the mosaic on the basement floor. Her inner eye’s lens darted down now toward the fallen thing and she could see it, she could see what it was: it was a bird. It was just a bird. Light and small, it should not have broken the glass. Why did the bird break the glass?

Margaret went into the visitors’ reading carrels. The archivist looked up at her. Margaret was flustered, unkempt, her lips and cheeks were glowing with a distinct pulse of their own.

The archivist quickly disabused her of the idea that she would be granted permission to see Magda Goebbels’s birth certificate. It was against data protection laws. But Margaret noticed that the sound of the name, Magda Goebbels, after she had spoken it, was hefty and cumbersome in the room. Her eyes drifted away from the archivist to the windows; suddenly she was full of loathing. Margaret muttered something bitterly, about the archive making nothing, but nothing at all, available to the public, bureaucratically keeping everything, even very old and senseless things, under lock and key. At the end, she even mumbled a phrase that she knew was taking things too far—she said something about the archive “protecting the guilty.”

The archivist set her face. For a moment both she and Margaret
were quiet. Finally the woman puffed her blouse out and pointed emphatically to the shelf. The museum, she said, with prim emphasis, recently made the collected Schöneberg police logs available to the public—everything up until and including 1966. Margaret was very welcome to look at that.

This was a shameless non sequitur.

But still, Margaret’s rage dissipated. She had other worries. The shadows she had seen outside, she felt they were pressing against the window glass, beginning to beg her for something. So now, embarrassed and clumsy, Margaret indeed hoisted down a police logbook; she chose the one from 1943.

At first, Margaret only pawed through it without reading it. She thought she would wait until the archivist was in the other room and then quickly leave. But, despite herself, Margaret became involved. She read through January 1943, and already, something of interest caught her eye. There was a letter of complaint from a middle-aged woman who had walked her cat on a leash in the Kleistpark. She was peacefully making a round in the late afternoon when a policeman set upon her and beat her with a stick, merely because cats were forbidden in the park. Was it possible, Margaret thought, for everyone in a society to be variously psychotic, all at the same time? She got out her notebook and pen. She copied the letter of complaint in its entirety into her notebook.

She moved into the records of February and March. These were mostly concerned with the police seizure of apartments recently “abandoned” by Jewish families. There were entries concerning the looting of Jewish homes, many reports of calls from neighbors complaining that the loot had not been equally divided. Also many entries concerning Jewish suicides. The suicides coincided with the mass deportations, the period when Berlin was undergoing its “cleansing” by Goebbels.

Then Margaret came to the log of Police Revier 173, and all of a sudden her breath, which had been even, stopped, and her heart, which had been loping, sped up to a trot. The first entry, on page 143, was this:

Margaret froze. She did not think immediately that this entry would bring a revolution to her life, but one of her fingers, which had been winding a strand of hair, went still, and a long, breathless moment passed.

When she came to herself, it was as if she had stepped behind a curtain hitherto hiding the harshest lights in the world. Red spots glowed before her eyes; the lights coming in from the street contained parts of the spectrum that she had never seen before. She felt her chest begin to tighten, and a clever fever, a madness, a vast energy flickered in her.

She stood up. The energy made her nauseous. Standing bent over, she read the passage a second time. Her fingers, controlled from afar, brushed over the print of the logbook; she had a hallucination that the letters were made of loosely strewn sand; sand that could be swept away with reverent fingers. Something told her, whispered to her, that there would be pictures beneath.

She rubbed. She rubbed harder, feeling split into two persons—one who knew this was madness, and one who believed that there were pictures underneath the print. The second person would reveal them. She would expose them come what may.

Margaret was out of control. She felt a keening pity for what she had read, and also a terrible pain. At the same time, she was knocked hard by a sense of tyrannical exclusion. She pushed her chair back with a suffocated gesture. She gathered her books and threw them in her bag. At first she thought she would simply run, but then she looked at the police logbook lying there on the table and could not bear the thought of leaving it behind. She quickly searched for change, made a ten-cent Xerox copy, feeling all the while as though she would be sick.

Outside the archive, the headlamps and neon signs cast snakes of light over the Hauptstrasse, striking Margaret’s eyes with lasers menacingly futuristic.

The lay of the land here is very important in what happened next. Precisely: the old villa housing the archive was close up against the road. Behind the villa, a modern annex had been built, which held a small branch library. Farther still, behind the library, was a broad and sloping pasture of a city park, opening out toward the north. The park was
reached by a wide and graveled path. It was this path that Margaret turned down now, her legs numb, meaning to cut home in the blessed darkness, for she was in a state of extreme light sensitivity now.

As she moved through the twilight, however, she came to the entrance of the branch library, squat under the sunset and, as she looked over at it, her head bounced in surprise—it seemed to be staring at her with a single glass eye. Above it, the last light of day was a wide yellow stripe on the far horizon. Without knowing why, Margaret pulled the handbrakes of her bicycle, and it skidded. Before she could think, she was lofted into the air.

The back tire’s brake had not been properly able to grip since the late summer, and when the front tire stopped so abruptly on the loose gravel of the path, the rear of the bike kept spinning and swung out.

Margaret’s limbs pumped the air. She tried to heave herself away from the bicycle and land on her feet, but her legs were numb and disobedient as in a dream, and her head was spinning. She went down sideways, falling heavily on her left shoulder and hip.

And then, an entirely marvelous thing happened. Everything began to tilt. Margaret looked into the night sky, and the stripe of yellow seemed to grow three-dimensionally above the low roof of the library. It blew up rhapsodically with color and warmth.

The pain in Margaret’s limbs and the emotion in her heart clasped, coming together like the teeth of a zipper. Margaret’s eyes would not move from that thick, warm stripe of yellow. Now it was beginning to billow like smoke, to represent something terrible and beautiful at once, and she stood up. The hurt in her body, the inflammation, ballooned—she was on fire, and she began to yaw toward the dimensionalizing yellow stripe. Three uncertain, swaying steps toward the giant color that was bleaching now, losing its heat—and Margaret felt convinced that before the yellow light disappeared, it would let her float into the center of it. She put her arms up high and wide—she felt her arms lengthening and strengthening around the entire earth. All the way around, her arms might reach, all the way to the hidden yellow sun. If only the night sky, that bleachworks, would not destroy the yellow king! And then as though possessed—she startled herself terribly—her lower jaw dropped open, and like water from a tipped bucket, sound came glistening out. Which is to say that she began to yell, and simultaneously she began an almost comical clenching and unclenching of her fingers—she
was both surprised and amazed—the grasping had a frightened, unnatural quality to its rhythm, and she gave a series of high and imploring cries.

On the slate staircase leading up to the library’s blind eye, she threw herself down, in sudden and total capitulation.

But the new position did not put an end to it. With her eyes closed, the black letters in the police log, telling her of the Family Strauss, came swimming to Margaret. The letters gushed closer, lost some of their darkness, and soon melted into the shape of a strange man, it looked like a monk, a monk dressed in hay-colored robes. Margaret could see him. His hair was like transistors and his earlobes dangled pendulous. He too was falling down before the setting sun, and this was all at once vivid: the monk in his hay-colored robes and swinging earlobes, prostrated before a sun that was as red as an animal’s heart, beating and loping.

Here was Margaret in Berlin, where only the last, pale yellow stripe smarted against the bleachworks of the sky, and there was the monk in some world far away—he saw it all burn, he saw it all burn bright as a furnace fire.

And then Margaret knew.

The monk was an ancestor, a visitor come to her bearing tidings, a visitor sitting somewhere along a line that ended in—prostrations before this Family Strauss. They, they and only they—
they
had conquered the setting sun. They were the true conquerors of the disappearing light.

What had they done? Faced with deportation, the Family Strauss had chosen to kill themselves and their children rather than go through the hell served to them. They had chosen to die privately rather than in the chambers in Poland. These people killed themselves and their little daughters on the shoulders of God, to escape soul-destroying torture, the humiliation of death at the hands of dog-men. Nothing could be higher than that, nothing more elect.

Margaret was resolute and sure. She thought of them and believed. The Family Strauss in March 1943 was where innocence was active. Innocence had been in a coma, but now here it was, coming back to life. The idea of active and effective innocence was the bright light behind her eyes; it was the voluminous stripe spreading its cloud into her mind. This was the hidden, ever-disappearing goodness. This she had yearned for so long. This was the friar’s lantern.

Here is how I will go about it, she said to herself. Here is how I will save myself. People—for once, people—who acted cataclysmically in the service of love.

That was how Margaret saw it, and horsemen of joy came riding to her.