The History of History (28 page)

Not long after she picked him out in the crowd (he told her on the phone what he would wear) she waved at him. Amadeus saw her do it. And already then, something strange occurred. He saw her wave, and he recognized her, but he looked away.

As he came closer to her, too, there was something overcharged. The first thing Margaret thought was: What beautiful eyes he has. And the thought was perhaps too simple and pure for their relationship. A single note had been sounded bell-like and left to vibrate a long time on its own.

She moved her mouth and said hello; he nodded and inclined his head away from her. Yes, it was an awkwardness too much for strangers. She filled the silence—babbled about coming to Berlin to study history, and Amadeus laughed quickly, made a derisive comment
about the field attracting “the morbid pedants of the world,” although she knew he was himself a history professor and he must know that she knew it, and the second thing she thought about him was, How diffident he is, and how sour, but it did not stop her from following his face with her attention, her body frightfully still.

From Ostkreuz they walked together to Treptower Park. And in some subterranean part of her she began to feel, walking next to him, as though she were attractive and delightful to men. Who knows from what source such feelings well up in some company but not in others.

On that Sunday, the entire population of the Eastern city seemed to have rejoiced at its freedom from the cave of the indoors and taken to the park along the river. They passed
Biergartens
where the old ones in their polyester were dancing to oompah-pah, small children went by on tricycles at astonishing speed, almost knocking down the lumbering flâneurs in their paths, the ducks were back, and when they stopped, Amadeus festively bought two
Currywurst
from a stall, claiming
Currywurst
a great delicacy, and even too, whatever it was between them disappeared for a moment; we should not overstate the initial attraction. A few minutes long, Margaret looked at him and briefly thought him ridiculous; he seemed foreign in a foolish, foppish way.

But finally they came to the Soviet War Memorial, the object of their wanderings, and it was here, beneath the Russian soldier–ogre with German babe in arms, so large that directly beneath it you could not even see it, that everything went irrevocably awry. Specifically, Margaret asked Amadeus to explain the names and platforms of the German political parties, and while he spoke, he looked once into her eyes. It took him a long time to explain, and their eyes met several more times after that as well. Margaret’s entire chest began to expand, and a sense of unbelievable suspense and fear and almost painfully sharp anticipation overtook her. It is only illicit love that causes such gargantuan arousal, and that is a great misfortune.

By the time they were climbing through the bushes and over a fence to get into an abandoned amusement park, Amadeus, a bit out of breath but eager to appear fit, had begun to incandesce toward her, with a bright firefly gleam of attention. Breathlessly he declared that she was “very well read,” although later he would insinuate that she was just good at fluffing.

And then once as she climbed over a barbed-wire fence partially
caved in—they were trying to get back out again—she smiled particularly broadly over at him and he said, “You know, you look very much like your mother when you smile,” and Margaret said, “You don’t know my mother,” and he said “
Doch
, once I met her. Before you were born, your father brought her back with him one summer,” and Margaret was surprised at this and shivered. She had not known her mother ever made such a trip; her mother had never mentioned it. But it made Margaret feel all the more of a pounding in her chest, that he was no stranger to her history. He had known both her parents in the time before she was born.

Later that day, the two of them still together although night had come—chapters of time fell by so quickly, it was extraordinary—first in the park and then later a friend of his joined them in a café: a short, bristle-haired man named Florian. Then in another café, then in a restaurant and then in a bar, Amadeus made money quickly appear and fly into the waiters’ hands before Margaret could move to pay for herself and like magic, a relationship of dependency sprang up between them. After the comment about her likeness, Amadeus never again mentioned her mother, nor, more strangely, did he ever again mention her father. It became—how can it be explained? It was not even as if he and Margaret had met by chance. At least that would have been mentioned. The reason for their meeting was left so unspoken that it was as if the circumstances had been some terrible crime.

Margaret misunderstood this. She took it to mean he was uncomfortable talking about her father’s troubles: most people did not know how to talk about mental illness, and Margaret was used to that. Also, she sensed Amadeus was the sort of man who could not address death and other stirring things—exile, separation, and betrayal. He was both too soft and too hard for it. When the heat is too high in the oven, the bread becomes stone-hard on the outside while still almost liquid in the middle, and later when she got to know him better, she found this intuition regarding his character had been correct, and so she left it alone. (To her later regret.)

That night already it began—the love affair in his freezing, coal-heated second apartment, where Margaret’s little envoy of the heart to a world free of advertisements found its perch, in those loose, cool, summery years after the end of Communism and before the beginning of true capital; a society breathing out at the end of state control but not yet fighting toward wealth, light-headed, perhaps slightly flaccid and all-embracing, a slacker student of the new, like Margaret herself.

In those early months
, Margaret began spending the night with Amadeus regularly. She remembered in particular how very cold his place was, even in the spring, and how he still needed to feed coal into the oven, which he would often forget to do, so the corner room, with its high balcony over the silent street, at the far eastern end of Friedrichshain, gave off an odor of cold, and of unforgiving, oxblood-painted, dusty wooden floors. She remembered that his bookshelf held
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics
by Bakhtin, and this book fascinated her. It was also in these months that she began to wear a perfume that smelled like freesia flowers, but ritualistically: she only wore it when she knew she was going to meet him. Then to lie in the coal-smelling room with the book, on the sheets which were cold to the touch but clean-smelling, over the mattress on the floor which was even colder against her bare feet, and lined with coal powder mixed with the smell of freesia, and he would speak to her of his other women, and she felt safe and coddled despite that, or maybe because of it—she thought to hear of his other women drew her into a society with them, and all of them were foreign and hidden and preserved outside of time, like flowers pressed into oil. It is terribly seductive to have a style in which to think of oneself.

Once, she remembered, he told her that his favorite novel was Lermontov’s
A Hero of Our Time
, and gave her his extra copy. She took it home to her much warmer, more modern apartment, and read it through in one afternoon and evening.

She remembered the night after she finished reading this book; it was very late and she was alone, the light glowing yellow around her like a sickness. A horrible sensation of fear and misgiving crushed her, a certain knowledge that in choosing this man she had chosen wrongly; that any man who loved such a book, where a cavalier draws all his romance and exultation from the bittersweet moment when he leaves his beloved behind, could only be rotten at his soft core—what she knew from her boarding school days Mary McCarthy would have called a “dangerous neurotic.”

But what did it mean? What was the ailment? She thought that night for a long time about Amadeus. She thought about his tendency to love her more, chase her with greater consistency and desire when she was running away from him. She had wanted to give it a name, to
know whether she herself was at fault for having dived into the shallows of a heart such as his.

But at the same time, even after that night—and mark, she never completely forgot the realization of that night—
her love for him only grew
. That was the contradiction. The love became a world unto itself. It was both the liability and the fallback plan; her undoing but also her reward for bearing up under the undoing, the forest of pain, but also her comfort as she wandered lost in that forest. The itch of it, the painful itch of the love that would not cease; the inability to think of anything else when inside such a circle of longing and incomplete satisfaction and longing again—none of it was capable of coming to an end.

Margaret opened
her eyes in the closed-up
Biergarten
, now returned to herself. Several types of pain snaked through her at once. The day in Treptower Park wavered, the tail of it at least, before her eyes, and then fled. In its place, her eyes filled with a blackness the color of pressure. She was on a folding chair in the cold night air, in the defunct
Biergarten
by the railway tracks.

Slow on her feet, she walked back to Schöneberg, her mind gone black and old.

She thought: I was wrong to remember. To remember is wrong. Memories—true or not, enactments of any kind, attempts at experience inside the head, playacting with neurons hidden behind the bones of the skull, are the enemy of life. It was the doctor who first taught her that.

On the Hauptstrasse
, a 148 bus passed by her in the night, and she looked into its aquarium lights as it passed. In the back of it, she saw a girl sitting in a black overcoat over a sailor-striped shirt. She and the girl had the same wide-set eyes, the same long bones, the same skin dotted with moles. The passenger’s veins had the same streaking presence behind the freckles. Margaret saw with absolute clarity and certainty this time: it was Margaret, another Margaret, it was no one but Margaret herself. She was riding up toward Prenzlauer Berg to visit her lover, the older man, the friend of her father’s. She was still traveling
up there! And the bus passed by and the young woman was gone, but Margaret was left on the street shivering and shaken.

Curtains closed around Margaret’s eyes, there on the pavement. Through the diaphanous fabric she could see the alternating shadows, the correspondence between prisms. She heard a radio far away in a high window, playing a tin melody she thought she already knew.

There was something else, Margaret thought, something else she was meant to remember.

T
he next day Margaret woke up to another changed city. Even before she went outside, chords at the bottom of her mind—and dark they were, dark and in a minor key—suggested that her memories had wrought shadows. Her insanity was slavishly returning.

It was the sky this time, the sky that was rich, the sky that was moving. Specifically, from the heavens, and all over Berlin, dangled rope ladders. Many thousands of rope ladders, and the day was overcast, so these ladders swayed down from the iron-white sky like silken threads of rain, all through the air, over the rooftops, jangling and swinging with life, coming to a ponderous end several meters above the surface of the earth, although some of them dragged against shingles, dipped into chimneys, obstructed the paths of pedestrians.

The rope ladders had an effect on the city’s flesh. The long, rainy skeins of rope caressed and flicked the rooftops, and there were spasms and convulsions.

The effect on Margaret: the ladders drew her eye up into the sky. A dangling rope ladder is nothing if not an invitation. Berlin seemed infinitely expanded—its coordinates recast, a new dimension beckoning.

And now shall be told of an adventure of Margaret’s mind that had the result of making her fright, which until then had been uncertain and porous, become tight—acting as a sealant, as it were. The rope ladders were an invitation, and Margaret did not turn it down.

She looked and wondered why no one was climbing the rope ladders into the sky—such a natural thing to do! Okhan at the Döner bistro, and the tiny woman with her giant husband who ran the bakery, the Armenian woman hanging out her cobwebbed window, and the bushy blue-eyed dogs at the Internet café—all were going about their business. Except, unlike last time, Margaret saw this, took it in quickly, and did not miss a beat. This is what she had come to expect—she and the world would always diverge.

One ladder near her hung alluringly in front of the art supply store, and she let her eyes drift up, let her head flop back. High up, the ladder was lost in the low clouds.

Margaret had a dizzy feeling when she looked up there. She felt herself reflected as in the endless glass world opened by two mirrors facing each other, a sentinel glimpse into the featurelessness of eternity. Margaret took off her felt hat and clapped it over her chest. She wiped her hair away from her face but the wind blew it back into her eyes.