The History of History (14 page)

The magpie on the balcony laughed a screeching, birdy laugh. And then it scratched at the ground twice, rustled its wide wings, flapped frantically, and was gone.

Margaret drifted back into sleep. When she woke up the next morning, Benjamin was still out. Margaret found the story of the whale ducks fresh in her mind, even fresher than when she had read it.

She reached down beside the bed. She thought she would read the story again straight through from the start.

She searched, but she didn’t find the book about the whale ducks.

And it was only after she could not find it that she thought how strange it was that Benjamin owned
The Whale Ducks
, a book in German, a language Benjamin did not speak or understand.

Margaret stayed
in Benjamin’s bed for most of the day. She was hung-over and ailing. In the kitchen she found that Benjamin had left her a note with his telephone number written on it in oversized digits, as if she were a child. She waited for him, but he never appeared. Finally she went home when the sun was going down.

For a while after she got back to Schöneberg she sat very still in a chair at the kitchen table. She looked out the window, down into the courtyard as the last of the light disappeared over the orange roofs. She sat, and the silence of the apartment became thicker. “Remember me, but ah, forget my fate.”

The story of the whale ducks wrapped tentacles around her mind. There were two models for how to behave if you were tried like Job.
Two models, each one so evangelical that Margaret would have a hard time not making a decisive choice between the two. There was only one trouble: Margaret herself had never been tried like Job. Why did she assume that she had been, with hardly any hesitation? Why did she assume it as a matter of course, that it was for her, too, to make such a choice, between the way of Minnebie and the way of her stubborn husband, the magistrate?

At the edges of everything, there came a whitening, as if some glassy being had drawn a circle in dust around her feet, curbing her thoughts and her world to here and here, but never
here
.

She was cooperating. If there was an invisible fence that had stunned her once, she only circled the perimeter now, avoiding the shock.

Now Margaret decided to act out. She went into the bedroom. She stood for a while. Then she began to take all of her clothing out of the wardrobe. She laid each piece on the bed, mustered it with her eyes. She fingered the seams; she checked the pockets. She methodically emptied two wooden trunks that sat on top of the wardrobe, also filled with old clothes, books, tennis rackets, and broken this and that, and there too, she looked at every item carefully. She was not looking for anything in particular, no, she was particularly looking for nothing. To prove to herself there was nothing to find—this was her purpose. Every box opened and found to be empty of significance was a little triumph, every half hour that passed in which she saw nothing unsettling was a half hour closer to victory. She went to the desk and reorganized the drawers. She piled and repiled the stacks of books in the hallway, shaking each one to see what loose paper would fall out. She went through the closet: old shoes, a basketball, a Frisbee, screwdrivers of different sizes, an old bag of planting soil. She began to weary, but still, she went through the pantry; she looked at all the canned goods. It occurred to her to look in the bathroom, too. The night drew on; she searched. The dawn broke; she was losing energy.

Finally, about to take apart the commode in the bathroom, jiggling the drawer whose key she had lost but which could easily be broken into, she was stopped by a powerful itch at her temples. She rubbed and rubbed the sides of her face. She felt light-headed. The room rocked back and forth. She went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed.

There, as the itching sensation diminished, dreams began to fly behind her eyes. She saw herself as a child—holding fireflies in a mayonnaise
jar with holes for oxygen punched in the tin lid. Another time, on a ferryboat with a wide paddle wheel hauling up the waters of a beef-fed river, and once too, sitting in a darkened theater touching the horsehair seat that lifted her toward the bright, warm beauty of the stage.

Oh, she had felt things, and smelled things, and lived things—all things that had a different feel, a different smell, a different organization, than this cold and forsaken life she was leading here.

The morning sun was burning brightly in the room. Margaret was still sitting on the bed, motionless. In the moments she had been there, her mind had wound around, considering every angle. And now—

She had made a decision. She would fold.

She did not want to find out anything at all. Job was an innocent—an innocent trapped between God and the devil. But she, Margaret—she did not know how or why, but she was guilty.

She must fold. The stakes were too high. Uncertainty was preferable to certainty, and although the peace she would win would be a shallow one, she need not play the dangerous game.

Yes, she would fold her hand. Let the others go on playing without her. Now she wanted to be still.

Because whether or not she found evidence, it did not matter. She could smell it on herself and on the wind, in how her heart raced every day, how her mind craved an escape: she was guilty. The wind came in the open window. The smell of it was nothing but threat.

H
ow to describe what happened next? The historical ones—Magda, but not only Magda—were rising around Margaret like ocean waters filling in cavities. They flowed according to the justifications already written in the land, deep where deep, curved where curved. Margaret’s self-examination was finished now, and the era of the dead Nazis had begun.

Yes, when Margaret awoke the next morning, she went to the window, and the hawk-woman was standing at attention on the balcony across the way, even larger now, hulking and frivolous. The lady pulled a compact out of her kit and made up her face under its heavy, brilliantine waves, her attention directed languidly at Margaret’s three windows, and the sight burned Margaret’s eyes and could not be fled.

Margaret was looking at the hawk-woman through a single rotated slat of the venetian blind. She kept the blinds closed all day and checked after the monster only surreptitiously. The woman perched with a live mouse in her beak sometimes, and in those cases her face was all bird, her head cocking jerkily around, and around, and around, until she seemed to be looking at Margaret from behind. Sometimes she winked at Margaret conspiratorially.

And then, as the days went by, Margaret did not always close the blinds. As she fell asleep, she began to be not frightened but preoccupied—with the question of whether she would find the hawk-woman at her perch on the following morning. She began to develop methods of prediction, ideas halfway between superstition and science: when it rained and the street was empty, the bird was likely to be in attendance (but not always). When it was sunny and the street was full of traffic, the bird was likely missing (but not always).

And then Margaret found herself not afraid—not at all. Instead, when the hawk-woman was not there, she longed for her. She came home in the afternoon and if she did not find the enormous bird preening her feathers on the terra-cotta balcony cattycorner right away, she
ran back to the window again and again, to see if the bird had finally come.

She did not like it. She did not like that she was broken in. She said to herself that only a corrupt person could become a friend to a vision at the window of the deceased Magda Goebbels.

Yes. This was patently so.

But for the life of her, she could not arrest her fascination.

And so, seeking to justify herself, she began to study the life of the woman with great seriousness. She was looking to find something. Margaret wanted to find an element in Magda Goebbels’s biography that would make the hawk-woman’s presence outside the window proud and fine, not shameful, not wrong.

And who knows why, but it did not take her very long. Only a few days into her focused studies, Margaret made a crucial discovery regarding Magda Goebbels.

Margaret read what the woman allegedly said to a friend a few months before she killed her children.

Margaret jerked her head up from the book.

The Magda Goebbels of this quote was not the woman who so bombastically wrote to her son in North Africa. This was someone else. This was someone in an advanced stage of self-loathing. Margaret was sitting at the desk, but the book before her seemed suddenly lashed to the room around it, a beetle caught in an invisible web. And later, Magda Goebbels wrote to the same friend:

Margaret glanced sharply around the room, almost blushing, embarrassed at the enormity of it. She stood up and began to pace.

But she was too moved to walk. She took hold of her woolen trousers lying on the floor whose hems had come undone. She backed into the Biedermeier sofa. Straw butted out of its red velvet where the cushion had ripped, but she sat down hard. She grabbed the shoebox of thread and needles from beneath it. Her mind was clacking at high speed.

If Magda knew what the Nazi government was guilty of—it would mean everything.

Magda Goebbels wrote to her son stationed in North Africa that it was because her children with Goebbels were too good for the later world that they must die. But to her friend, she said it was because they were too soiled for it.

Margaret’s eyes narrowed onto the sewing before her. She felt something hardening in her throat.

She threaded her needle. Perhaps in a good and just world, children are not murdered for their parents’ crimes.

Margaret plunged the needle into the wool that was stiff, stiff as sycamore bark, where the hems had dragged in slush and dried. Perhaps in a good and just world, children do not die as payment.

Perhaps so, Margaret thought, but it is not Nazi justice. The Nazis saw humans as carrying political guilt in their blood, with their birth, before their naming. This was the very axiom of the Nazi crime.

Here is what Margaret knew. At Joseph Goebbels’s incitement, ninety percent of Jewish children—Jews under the age of twelve—who were alive in Europe in 1938 were dead in 1945. Ninety percent of the Jewish children of Europe were tortured to death. These tortured and murdered children will never have children, and these children will never have children. With every generation, there will be a new wave of the unborn.

Margaret began to stitch, her throat stricken, her eyes shaking, pushing the needle in and out guttingly.

And the world after the war—it left the children of Nazis alone. Only last week, she had read a firsthand account in Niklas Frank’s memoir. Oh, he went on and on with the following bitter cheer.

The very opposite of Magda’s fears! (Margaret took out a thimble, her finger already bleeding with rage and frustration.) Nazi children lived on, under the impression that it was democrats who died young. And young Frank’s experience was paralleled in the lives of the Bormann children; in the life of the medical technician, Edda Göring, in the life of the architect whose name is Albert Speer Jr., who even now, Margaret knew, was in the process of designing a stadium for the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Even the daughter of Heinrich Himmler—she, too, was smuggled, effortlessly snuggled, into everyday life. The actual retribution against the Nazis’ children, the penalty that would have been
meted out to Goebbels’s offspring had their mother and father not murdered them, was a pair of shamed ears once a decade or so, and this was assuming they ever developed a sense of shame, which was not a given by any means. Margaret’s stitches picked up the exterior fabric. Her eyes rattled.