The History of History (44 page)

“But why didn’t you tell me this at the beginning, instead of wasting all this time?” Margaret was coughing and could not catch her breath.

“Do you take me for a fool?” the doctor asked.

“What—?”

“Deranged! Deranged is what you have been, my shining pet, and the first principle in the treatment of the shell-shocked is this: no sudden moves. You were not ready, perhaps you are not ready still.”

Margaret ran out the door and did not look behind her. As she went down the hallway, she heard the doctor’s echoing voice.

“You’ll be back, my dear. You’ll be back to see me. I am not the worst mentor for a girl in your position.”

Margaret ran into the courtyard, her chest caving in.

O
n the U7 line to Rudow, the trains are nearly empty. The unemployed, the weary, the angry, and the immigrants sit only sparsely. It was here, three days later on this subway line to nowhere, that Margaret rode, bound for the home of the aging Herr Prell.

The minutes on the train dragged like years. Hermannplatz went by, a yellow station. A woman got off the train with difficulty, using a walker. Margaret looked on, from under the brim of her slouch hat. She had pulled it very low over her eyes.

Why did no one help the woman? Margaret did not rise to help her either. She didn’t want to call attention to herself. She was reckless, careless, vengeful, but she knew she must remain inconspicuous.

Since the visit to the doctor, Margaret had become an accordion of ill humor, unfolding, wheezing with heavy, distempered sounds. Now, as the woman stumbled her way out of the train on her own, Margaret wondered darkly whether she would not be reborn after the death of Prell. It seemed doubtful, but then, she had nothing to lose.

Rathaus Neukölln came and went, the ceilings hung low and royal blue. The seconds dragged.

Karl-Marx-Strasse station drew close. The train halted and a man made ready to get off. Before he did, he emptied his pockets—they were full of shreds of paper—and the white and yellow bits fluttered to the floor. How could he throw his trash on the ground so flagrantly? If only she were a man, Margaret thought, she might challenge him physically. For a moment, she riffled through all the ideas of who she might be, if only she were someone else.

Neukölln station followed in its bright yellow tiles. It occurred to Margaret that there was no rebirth, no changing of character, only momentary evasions—and that was never enough.

Grenzallee trickled by. It was painted a stale green color like algae, and Margaret thought she could smell the algae. She was desperate,
her head was hot, she could not go on as she had been going. As for the doctor: she wanted never again to think of her.

And then came Blaschkoallee, and it was horrible, the worst of all. On the wall was the graffiti: “The woman maintains the house and the mood of her man.” The station itself was grey, the lights painful to the eyes.

Margaret was in a mood of rage, then, by the time she arrived. She was worked into a lather. She rang the bell at Prell’s house. When he came to the door, he did not recognize her, but Margaret said she had come for a follow-up interview, and he smiled sheepishly, proudly. He let her in.

His house was stuffier than it had been before. It smelled powerfully of old age. On the wall in the hallway was a wooden crucifix. Right away, already then, in that very first twenty seconds, Margaret thought of her grandfather, who had made films, who had taken pride in the film of a boy’s death. When he came to stay with them in New York, he slept through the daytime. Her mother fixed up the back bedroom for him, and he, in the wide guest bed, kept the venetian blinds almost opaque, the sounds of ambulance sirens circling up to the twelfth floor. On the wall across from the bed, he hung an oak crucifix like Prell’s, with a Christ figure carved out of the same dark wood as the cross, spine bucking away from the vertical.

And the old man, he slept under an image of unbelievable suffering, breathing regularly.

Margaret had been small, skulking about. She had found his pictures of naked ladies in a metal box he kept in the closet. She found his reels of black celluloid tape.

Now Margaret looked at Prell’s crucifix.

The icon of the man collapses him into the instrument used for his torture, the means of his death becomes the symbol of his life; the sacrifice is snapped into the flesh. And then Margaret thought, in a wave of hopelessness, that crime was more powerful than tenderness, that death was more memorable than life. She felt a rage rising. She thought of this man who stood next to her now, as he had once stood goat-like outside a room while children were killed.

Prell invited her into the living room. She sat down by a little side table that was dressed in a white linen cloth. He bustled into the kitchen, came back to her, and stooped to serve tea from a pot.

But Margaret caught him by surprise. She raised her arms and took the old man’s face in her hands, her fingers becoming spider’s legs, squeezing vise-like. The loose skin on either side of his face doubled.

“How could you?” Margaret gasped at him, losing control of her voice.

Prell’s giant, horse-like body lurched back; his neck extended and Margaret, holding on to him, was jerked forward. She reared up from her chair. Prell tried to prevent the tray in his arms from falling, and this confounded his self-defense.

But soon the tray smashed to the ground. He fumbled and caught the cream pitcher, but the teapot broke on the ground and the hot water splashed over Margaret’s feet, scalding her ankles. It must have scalded Prell as well, for he cried out in pain and pulled away from Margaret’s iron grip forcefully. With one heavy arm, he swiped at her shoulder.

But Margaret held his face ever more tightly on either side with her thumbs and forefingers, and her ears rang. She pushed hard into his jowls and temples. Her fury surged to a peak, and for some reason, Prell finally went limp under her hands.

“How could you?” Margaret let out again.

“How could I what?” Prell breathed hard.

A sound came out of Margaret’s mouth. And then another. “How could you have lost faith?” she stammered at last.

“Let me go,” he said.

But she held his face longer, and the power was in her and had gone out of him, as a rabbit freezes at the end of its life. He was doubled over, cradling his cream pitcher.

But then at last he turned his face up, and Margaret looked into his eyes, eyes that darted and flicked about, the navy-blue orbs revolving, and she felt a ripping in her chest. She saw, buried far beneath the reflective sheen of his pupils, in the embers of the rods and cones there, the eyes of the infant she had lost.

The moment collapsed. Prell let go of the pitcher and punched at her stomach with his fist, and although he did not hit hard, her stomach made as though to burst in pain.

She released him. He lumbered heavily upstairs to the toilet, roaring threats of litigation. Margaret felt she was burning into black strips; she did not know what she had done, where to put her shame. She had read—it was Jung who had written—that the more evil is contemplated,
the more it enters you, and she wondered under what circumstances she could ever learn how to live, she who had betrayed, or had been betrayed by, every hope and every idea and every icon of redemption, she whose very understanding of these things was in rubble.

T
he morning that followed was very still. Margaret gave a tour. All the while, she quivered. She reached and touched the hands of the customers who came along, and they felt the beseeching tremor in her fingers. They looked Margaret in the face and saw the enormous question there. She was reading their features with her eyebrows peaked like gables, as if she wanted to know the hour and minute they were born. When she had a moment to herself, she tried to soothe her uncertain heart. She thought: I did not kill him yesterday, and I will not kill him today.

In the afternoon, she went to the university.

I will not kill him, she told herself. Not now, and not tomorrow. In a heat of feeling, she spoke with devil-may-care directness to Vitaly Velminski, protégé of Meitler. She managed to convince the smooth and pretty young man, with whom she was not even acquainted, to take a coffee with her in the cafeteria, under the wide modern skylights, under the reaching, new-green trees.

They spoke of humanism. They spoke of capitalism. These were the wires that were fashionably live at the time.

At some point it was a question of whether a free-market society is more attracted to sacrificial lambs than a socialist one. Margaret’s idea, which she outlined to Vitaly chokingly, with embarrassed excitement, was this: Older societies, she said, are still religious and altruism is ritualized, and socialist societies redistribute the burden of excess riches through taxation! But other societies, neither religious nor socialist, have hardly any idea what to do with the sleeping guilt that laces the fringes of wealth-amassing hearts, and so the more a little child, a perfect lamb, will be needed for the nailing, for the rendering up to the pedophiles—for the various slaughters, and the people will vaunt their communal obsession with the sacrifices, and find absolution there.

Vitaly, his usual cool and unflappable self, inclined his head in
response. He mentioned many interesting names, thinkers who had combed the beach of such a theme for all its many shells.

Margaret spoke hotly, her eyes ablaze, looking often into Vitaly’s seagreen gaze. After several hours had passed—more coffee fetched, professors evaluated, eviscerated, and even a long period spent in heavy-breathed silence—Vitaly, in his tweed suit, his penny-green oxford shirt, misinterpreted Margaret’s intensity. He opened the palm of his hand. He touched the side of her face.

Margaret flinched sharply.

There might have been a time, very long ago, when, at such a touch, Margaret would have dropped her eyes so that her long lashes spread fanlike over her upper facial bones. She would have made herself into a picture.

There might have been a time more recently, when her flinch, so disengaged, would have extended into a reflexive uppercut to his jaw.

Today, however, she only put out two quavering fingers and slid them under his reliable chin. She turned his face some sixty degrees to the side. She did not know exactly what she was after. She thirsted to see his face from a previously unseen angle, in a previously unseen light, according to a previously unconsidered code of ethics. It was hers, the power of description. She would do the telling.

She looked a long time, and Vitaly laughed a little at first, but then regarded her and went still. Margaret breathed in and out.

Soon after, she stood up and left the cafeteria.

When Margaret was gone, Vitaly sat for a little while longer on his own. A radicalized person, he thought she was. There was a woman, he told himself, who had gone through some kind of education.

Under the fir trees
outside the Rostlaube, on the pebbled path between the cafeteria and the U-Bahn station, Margaret came upon a woman with a narrow white scarf pushing a pram.

In the pram, a large, fat, sleeping baby lay on its back with its face to the side. The baby had gone sheet-white, as some children go white during sleep. Its translucent eyebrows were raised, pockmark of a mouth closed. Because it was inert, it seemed to Margaret both less living
and also younger than it likely was, for even more than size, it is animation that betrays age.

It was terrible for Margaret to see. For a moment there was a knife turning in her heart, like the pitting of a cherry.

However, as Margaret drew abreast of mother and child, light rain began to fall. Margaret was later amazed at the serendipity of it, for if it had not rained at just that instant, she might have missed the essential gesture. The woman in the white scarf leaned over the pram and drew the flannel of the infant’s blanket over its face, so the rain would not wake it.

In that movement, the fabric’s edge drew a line across the small white face, and Margaret felt the world spin, and a sensation of radiance.

When she had first begun to remember, when she first knew that her old life was beginning to return, she began to think in vague and later less vague terms that she could not bear it. She could not forgive herself, and if she also would not be allowed to drench herself in forgetting, then she could not go on, and a wild and decisive kind of self-annihilation was the only choice.

But today she developed a thought—it had the following heart to it, although it was wordless: Even if you cannot forgive yourself, and by some poor luck you cannot forgive anyone else either, and there is no vengeance to be had in this baneful world that is slowly suffocating on its own past, there might still be a paradox of goodness.

In the movement of the woman’s hand, the line of flannel rising, Margaret’s head revolved, and it was an ugly thing that the gesture brought her to remember, but still, the radiance of the coming completeness stole her breath away.

T
he next day, the day everything came into its own, was a sunny day. The sky over Berlin pulsed clear as an unmolested snow globe, with the same magnifying fisheye. All was calm. In the Kleistpark, on her way to buy a liter of milk, Margaret saw a large animal, what may have been a Newfoundland dog.

The buildings around her—it was not clear any longer of what they were made. Sometimes Margaret looked at them and they seemed to shudder slightly as they had in the old days, even blush, and then one or the other might heave a sigh. This seldom happened, however. The architecture of Berlin was more convincingly of stone and stucco and steel than it had been in a very long time.

Had her bicycle chain not fallen off the back gear, Margaret might even have thought that all was coming back into order. She was forced to get down to pull the chain back on, however, and the sun shone hotly on her back. She crouched on the sidewalk, her hands smudging with the dried-out grease, her face twitching, and it was then the thing came.