The History of History (41 page)

T
here was a time that followed Margaret’s communion with Regina Strauss. It was a time in which she knew only two things: One, she had once loved a man named Amadeus. Two, the redemption she felt in loving the Family Strauss was a relief.

She continued to give tours under flowering spring trees, and at first it was a warm time. Then, as if riding the waves of her love for the Strausses, memories began to come at an accelerated rate. Margaret remembered short, bright films, dreams from the missing time.

Vodka, subway rides, waking in strange beds, doctors’ appointments, clothing she had once owned, and vodka again.

She began to sink deeper; she began to remember the sorts of things that are too small to be endured—the sheerest grains of sand, they fall through the cracks of any defense. She remembered the bracelet Amadeus had given her—she broke it on the sidewalk the same day; the smell between his shoulder and his neck. And her life split into two films, two films that had nothing to do with each other. She longed to let water flow over the newly remembered second film, ruin the celluloid. She was having dreams of chickens trapped in burning yards, dreams of houses built on sand washing into the sea, dreams of cruelty from strangers.

Until finally, one night, she had a dream that was worse than the chickens.

It was the worst thing of all. She had a dream of the Salzburgerstrasse—the Strauss family’s last home.

In the dream
, it was raining outside. The foyer of Number 14 was hushed, and the foliage pressed against the glass from the mossy courtyard, leaves and branches thick as tongues, soaked in rain. Already everything was suffused with what was coming.

Outside, a few shrubberies and one or two puny saplings loomed lushly, deliriously so: a wall of pity-green flowers, drawing their tongues along the panes of glass in the aluminum wind.

Margaret went out to the courtyard, in search of the speaking pool, full of anticipation. She put her ear into the pool as she had done once before. All was murky. The goldfish were gone.

Beneath the water, only silence had its home. Margaret gave up at last. Her ear was cold. She went back inside, shaking droplets from her hair. She walked through the grey velvet interior to the mirror, to the place where she had first seen Regina.

The room smelled of dust. She went to the oval of the mirror and brought her eyes up.

The room was darker than it had been a moment before.

Margaret touched the frame and saw her fingers were shaking. She could hear a fluttering.

Oh, the shadow-woman appeared almost right away. Glowing, it moved in beside her, glowing, the woman in her faded hair and brittle, many-times-washed, starched lace collar. There was Regina, there she was, looking out at Margaret.

Regina was as Margaret remembered, only far more so. Her eyes were large and round and pooling and her glance was sweet and soft and reproachful. She was silent, and for a fraction of a second, Margaret felt herself begin to catapult on waves of the old ecstasy.

Almost right away however, the life inverted. First, it was the smell of mildew. Margaret saw something in the woman’s face. There was a glint of blood. A glint of blood in her cheeks—something grasping—hope or hatred or fear, Margaret could not tell, but it was the manifestation of a quickened heart.

Margaret spoke first. “I wanted to know about—our game of Hearts.” Her voice rasped in the silent room.

Regina looked to the side. She sighed. She looked around, but not at Margaret, and she flushed. Margaret repeated herself more desperately now. “Won’t you play?”

Regina sighed again, strangely, cryptically. She pulled at her hair, then she shrugged, and her eyes flashed in a way that spoke of some hidden passion. She looked at Margaret and seemed to muster her.

Margaret saw something bad in that look. In a rush, as if in a reflexive gesture of self-defense, Margaret brought her arms up toward those narrow shoulders beyond the glass, and her movement was two
things at once: both meant to hold Regina back from her, but also the beginning of an embrace.

Before her fingertips could touch the glass, Regina spoke, and her voice shattered the room. “I was lying, Margaret.
Ich habe gelogen.
”

In the foyer a smell of tundra rose, and then a smell like sweet grasses beginning to rot at the end of summer. The smell of herd animals and manure, and then the smell of wet, overripe clover. The room began to change; the streetlights’ bulbs, aloft in their cast-iron, came on outside; the glass at the front of the foyer and also at the back pressed toward Margaret; the walls of green flowers floated nearer. Each cupping blossom began to spin, cups of water glinting in the light, and the water carried the scent of tundra, the scent of an old and tired buffalo lying dead or ready to die near the water, the scent of fish on sparkling northern riverbanks that are eaten and later shat out.
Despite everything, I believe in the good of humanity
, came a whisper.

“You lied?” Margaret asked.

Regina nodded.

“About what?” asked Margaret.

“About almost everything.”

And then Regina began to tell a story. A different story. At first Margaret could not hear her; she had an auditory hallucination like a loud report. She thought: Everyone is full of danger, but this one person must not be changeable, this one person is my life. Regina’s white earlobes caught the light and Margaret could see little earrings on her lobes, what had once been pearls, although the globes of them had been crushed in some long-since-extinguished fury.

She had been enraged, Regina said. She had been panicked, eager, hopeless and blistering. She might have taken the children to her husband’s family in the country—yes, for a time, there had been that choice.

But when she still had the chance, she and her husband were quarreling. After her neighbors betrayed her, she could no longer make out the snowy peaks and icy brooks of the Alps—no, that had been a lie, and there was no thought of reading to the children. They had barely enough to eat. And he, her husband, was vile; his mother, too—she did not send them food packages though in the country she had more for one person than they had for five, and once even, several years before—it burned Regina’s mind, oh how it burned—she had flung one of Regina’s dishes to the ground for its pattern of roses, a pattern
that did not match the dishes she had given them. The unmatched dish “injured her eyes,” the mother-in-law said. (“It was my dish,” Regina said. “It was my own dish.”)

Given the chance, Regina dragged her feet. She suggested first of all to her husband that perhaps she would
not
take the children to his mother’s after all. Just to see what he would say. And to her surprise he did not reply. He walked meekly to the park. Later that same day he came back. He said simply: I want a divorce. He said he would take the children with him.

That night, when she sat partially undressed—she was bathing the children in a tub it had taken her much labor to fill with hot water—Franz looked at a mole on her back and he remarked on it.

And in that instant she felt under his eyes like an old and ugly and dirtied woman and a flickering came before her and her head twisted. Regina’s mind threw itself against the bars of its cage with all its weight then. Outwardly she set her mouth and spoke to Franz all at once, in a strange voice she did not recognize, about how they would have coconut cakes after the war.

And her husband might have noticed her humiliation.

When the children were breathing evenly, after her husband was laid to bed on corduroy cushions by the kitchen window where he had exiled himself—
his white face, his open mouth, the children too sweet for this world
—the branches of the naked trees tapped at the frozen glass. Regina was frightened and grasping. She was stubborn and feverish and her other chest—where was her true chest, where was her true heart?—her other chest was plugged with the thirst for vengeance, not only against her husband but against this mad and ugly world. His eyes fluttered as he slept and his cheeks were deep rose. What happened as they died, here in this house, was something like the spinning claws of a cornered bear—if you take them with you,
no one shall live
.

So together, they died.

All the gentleness in Regina’s face was dissolved. As she spoke to Margaret now, all the broad wisdom was revoked.

It broke Margaret’s heart.

“I barely lied.” Regina breathed heavily. “I only lied about how I felt. About how I wish we had been. About the feeling within the family, about our psychic life. I did not lie about what happened. If you recall, I never claimed Franz took any part in it.”

Margaret struggled to clear her mind. In fact she made an effort to
correlate the details of this story with the other one. She saw this was true, perhaps not exactly, but more or less—the main difference was indeed the feeling, the emotional shades.

“But,” said Margaret, her voice weak. She thought of how this new story might be taken apart; about how the variations, the fabrications, might continue in layer upon layer forever. “But can you tell me …” and now Margaret spoke haltingly, hoping to catch Regina out. “The gas was in the kitchen, you say?”

“I already told you. I didn’t move him. For weeks Franz had been sleeping in the kitchen anyway, on a bed he made up for himself by the window. We did not get along. As for the children—they slept with me in the bedroom, but children are easy to carry without waking, once they sleep.”

“I see,” Margaret faltered. “What about the birds?” She shuddered. “Was that true?”

“That was true, every word,” Regina said. She smiled. The way her eyes moved, it seemed she was drugged—her pupils were unnaturally large. “With one difference. After they went to Frau Schivelbusch, I did something. I broke into her apartment when she was at church, and I killed them both—strong Sarto and weak Ferdinand. And Frau Schivelbusch—
I would have killed her too
.” Regina paused. “We were not weak,” she said. “We were not the kind of birds—who don’t give a second fight.”

Margaret cast her eyes down.

Something was happening inside her. Something that was directed not at Regina but at herself.

She felt the chills that accompany a fever. She wrapped her arms around her chest but still she was terribly cold. An involuntary refrain rose in her:
Despite everything, I believe in the good of humanity
. It was a cold, cold refrain. She thought—and now the coldness, the causticity of her thoughts grew further still—of Walter Benjamin, living just a few blocks from this apartment house, as he wrote: “
Kitsch is nothing more than art that has absolute, one-hundred-percent, immediate use-value.
” She shivered horribly. To herself, she said: My love has been greedy. My love has had use-value. Her face froze in shame. The Family Strauss—she had latched onto them and used them. She had made them into the perfect sacrifice, just as—her thoughts blackened, swirling in mud—a needy world used Anne Frank, that sweet and self-complete girl, as precisely the sacrifice it needed. To have sacrificed the best, Margaret thought—that was what was craved. Old man
history never gets away without surrendering up his prize roses—his hostages of myth and time.

The doctor’s pronouncements had planted the seeds, and now they were pushing up.
If we find a lamb
, Margaret was telling herself spittingly, a suitable lamb, and look at it very hard, and agree as a people, as a civilization, that we have, during one long and terrible night of the soul, given up the finest thing to the devil—rendered up the dearest, most gracious, most openhearted thing to the devil, then all human rivalry will be dissolved at its acme; all guilt paid for in one stroke. The finest thing
dissolved before it can be owned
.

Margaret felt this horribly, and in her bitterness the entire thing struck her as defiled and unforgivable, as a crime of the living against the dead. And it was not even because this was why people being murdered now, in other parts of the world, are not rescued—because no one knows yet whether they are the kinds of victims that are needed: the pure, the innocent, and the humble, and so we will wait with our hands steepled, and let them go it alone, calling them up for service only after their throats are slit.

No, it was not even this that crushed her.

It was the symbolic itself. Abruptly, Margaret rebelled against—for she could not bear it any longer—innocence by proxy. She could not stand atonement through metaphor.

She looked back into the mirror at Regina standing next to her own reflected face.

“You lied to me,” she said.

“I could not have lied,” Regina said, and in a new, deeper voice, almost a growl: “I could not even speak.” Her words were slurred.

“You murdered your children,” Margaret said.

There was a hissing sound. Words rose as though sizzling in fat.

“I would have cut out their hearts.”

Margaret drew back. Shivers ran up and down her and up and down her sweat-drenched face. She wanted to flee—to flee for the rest of her life. It is impossible to describe how searingly Regina’s words burnt her mind.

Margaret raised her arm to shield her face, but she could see the woman was changing. She was darkening, broadening, and seemed covered in fat and fur. A pelt had grown on her. And more than anything now, it was the smell of grasses. A smell of grasses in the body of a fine and splendidly muscled animal. She was taller than Margaret
now, far taller—she was filling out into the most dangerously mothering animal of all—she was a brown-black member of the ursine family, a rearing bear, with paws like hands, eyes like pinecones, and mouth sweet and dandy and deadly.

Margaret covered her face.

She heard a low moan. It may have been her own.

Regina’s usual delicate body—all at once it reappeared. Her face was gentle and serene, her presence next to Margaret’s image in the mirror was warm and grave, a Solomon, a bearded patriarch.