The History of History (27 page)

Her bicycle she had forgotten in town, and the heel of her shoe was coming loose as she walked back to the tram stop. It flapped against the cobblestones, flip-
whack
. She walked down the cobblestone road. There were sparrows on the ground by a high chapped-flesh wall, little tan and twig-colored nothings, picking at seeds. Margaret felt her chest hardening with pain.

The same day
, Margaret returned to the Schöneberg archive. She thought, at the very least, she could find out what Herr Strauss had done for a living, or where the family lived before they moved into the apartment on Salzburgerstrasse. Her desire to know more felt like a heavy hunger, a longing for milk and oil, and in any case still desperate.

The archivist with her dancer’s body silently took down two heavy address directories from 1939 and 1941. Each listed address and occupation of Berlin residents by name, and together they peered at the Gothic script. There were twenty-three Franz Strausses listed in Berlin in 1939, and sixteen in 1941. None of them resided at Salzburgerstrasse 8. Just to be sure, Margaret checked the 1943 directory as well. Nothing.

As Margaret prepared to leave, her heart sinking, she said to the archivist, “The name is so typically German. It hardly seems like a Jewish name at all.” The archivist, like most educated Germans scrupulously careful when it came to what sounded and looked Jewish, gave Margaret a glance of feigned incomprehension. After a brief silence, however, she chanced an observation: “It isn’t really a Jewish name. What did you say the full name was?”

“Franz Strauss.”

“Just listed as Franz? No second given name?”

“None.”

“Well then, he most probably wasn’t Jewish.”

Margaret caught her breath. Her face became hot. She saw what the archivist meant. The police would have recorded him, according to Nazi law, as Franz “Israel” if he were Jewish, just as his wife was listed as Regina “Sara.” The family must have been mixed.

Margaret knew she should not be, knew it was nothing more than a detail, but still, she was crushed. When she got home, she looked at her photocopy of the police logbook page where the family’s death was registered, and saw confirmation in the margin. A longhand note, so baroque as to be almost illegible, which she had not before even bothered to decipher, read: “
Bericht an Stapo mit dem Hinweis, dass Nachlaß dem A.G. Schb. übergeben wurde, weil der Haushaltungsvorstand Arier war.
” So it was even specially noted that the head of house was “Aryan.” Margaret had been blind.

In light of this new information, it was unclear why the family would have had to die. She had checked already: mixed couples were not rounded up with the others, not in Berlin. Officially, the decision at the Wannsee Conference was to wait until after the war before considering the eventual extermination of the mixed and the mixed-married, a dangerous position for the Strausses, but not deadly, not in 1943.

How was Margaret to understand their decision?

They could have saved the children, she thought. It went through her mind again and again. Wasn’t there anywhere they could have sent the children? It was common, she had found in her reading, for the children of mixed families to be sent to non-Jewish relatives, where they were passed off as war orphans, of whom there were in any case so many, particularly after the bombings of cities began.

And then Margaret was reminded of something else. When she was a child, a friend told her at a roller-skating party (this was a friend with eyes like a forest sprite) that she, Margaret, was a “mongrel.” When she went home, she told her mother. But her mother did not, would not, tell her what the word meant. But she looked at Margaret and said, “Maybe you are a mongrel.”

Her mother was tired and unpredictable. At least, that was how Margaret remembered it.

That night
, Margaret was awoken abruptly from a dream.

There was someone in the bedroom.

She could hear the noise of frantic and uncaught breath.

In a ball of fear, she lay quiet.

It took her some time to realize she herself was the one making the sounds. She was lying in bed, breathing hard. Her fingers were rigid, stuck in claw-like shapes, her body curled.

Sometimes, before he had gone to the hospital and stayed to live there, her father had shut himself in his study and would not come out, even if Margaret beat on the door and called to him. His breathing behind the door—he sounded as though he were on the verge of death, and her mother led her away, and explained to her that her father was panicked and afraid.

Such sounds frightened Margaret badly. She felt her own panic creeping when she heard her father’s panic, and in her place under the desk in the long apartment on the Upper East Side, she began to escape.

At first it had been a picture in a book that was the portal. It was a picture of an old woman riding in a basket in the night sky, surrounded by the moon, planets, and creatures with pointed heads. The picture frightened Margaret, but not like life frightened her. Life, when it frightened her, made her feel that all the edges of her body were under attack, a kind of arachnophobia: a sensation of infection and infiltration.

But when the picture frightened her, it was kind. Its terrors had power, and depth, and even scent, yet at the very same time, it all remained far away. And if she looked at it correctly, the picture could be seen to have more than one surface. It was into this picture that Margaret began to disappear, filling in more and more detail of the world beyond the depicted, where the woman hurtled through the night sky—up and up, rising toward the moon, visiting cities made of lapis and alabaster, floating palaces with mile-long hallways and trapdoors. After some practice, Margaret could enter the picture without the book. She closed her eyes and saw the road into the sky. It was very smooth, with a surface like Chinese lacquer. She slid along the colors away from the brown apartment, at first with vague participation but
later much more completely, so that when she came back from the reverie, it was as if she had slept.

And so now, Margaret could feel it: she wanted to ride the rainbow, to again have the sensation of riding through the night in a basket on a band of vivid color.

She knew the story of the Strausses was slowly fading and thinning for her. The mystery was not at work. The mystery should have made the story echo and resonate—mystery is the great enhancement of the unknown—but instead, the mystery was quieting them out. And the problem was this: she could have lived with any element of their story remaining unknown but one—whether they were right. If she did know their location in the moral world, then they would disappear from the physical world.

In the next days, the card game at the kitchen table came to a complete halt. Margaret herself was the one who stopped playing. Her mind was tired, and she thought the story was at an end.

T
he mistake was made: the muscle of her mind had slackened, and all it took was an instant: the beast sidled in. The tent poles fell and the tent too, and there was nothing to block the coming animal.

Restless, uneasy, Margaret went walking in the next weeks. One night she went east, walked away, out of Schöneberg. She crossed the railway lines that form the border with Kreuzberg. She stood on the bridge over the emptiness between the districts. Alexanderplatz sparkled distantly over in the center of town, and under her, the railway cut grooves ever more deeply into the land, like water over centuries chafing deeper into a riverbed.

On the Kreuzberg side, the apartment buildings were tenement-like, covered in tattoos. On the Schöneberg side, there were gold rings on the chimney-fingers, but also much crumbling bone. Looking off toward town, Margaret felt a wayward love.

Down in the ravine where the train ran, a wan field opened up on the side. A dilapidated
Biergarten
, shut for the winter, rested darkly. A narrow stairway led down from the street above. Up on poles, dark lights were strung around the tables and benches, and the dead wires looked skeletal; light too is a kind of flesh. So here: a skeleton of the summertime.

Margaret was drawn to it. She climbed over a low gate, and went down into the empty
Biergarten
. She sat on a chair and drew her body together for warmth. She closed her eyes.

It was no coincidence, the
Biergarten
. She had known it from before, from her earliest days in Berlin, her first attempts at independent spring living: people with beer mugs in their hands shivering in outdoor cafés, crowding themselves into blotches of kingfisher sunlight in the prickling early spring air. Margaret tightened her eyes. It was the skeleton of the summer, and she was younger then. She remembered her first days.

Nineteen years old
, a fresh arrival from the new world to the old, her eyes flashing. Her first day, she hoisted her suitcase off the baggage belt at Tegel, and already that same afternoon, an electric pulse in her fingers shocked anyone she touched, so great was her sense of possibility.

She was free, her father dead of cancer after years of frightening mental illness, a terrible quarrel with her mother behind her—and her bag hoisted from the belt and it was as simple as that: she was on her own. That first day in Berlin, her back arching, rising toward the sky, she was greeted by an old man in the subway station, a man she had never seen before, with the words, “
Mein Liebling! Ich liebe dich!
” and then kissed on the neck, on the platform with the train rushing by and the man gone before the train was. People seemed to sense intuitively that any overtures toward her would not only be welcomed but ratcheted up.

Margaret came to Berlin fleeing, but she also came to Berlin running straight into the arms of her dead father. Her father she had loved like some quintessential thing. He had been mentally ill, he had fought his cancer only weakly, but through all this, she had seen him as though he were cradled. Off in the haze, he was miniaturized but not diminished: he was a tiny, perfect figure so small as to be invisible, running back and forth in the palm of her hand.

Now she had come to Germany to study her father’s “soul,” as she called it. She was interested in everything he had been interested in. His paranoid mind shot like an arrow to the Stasi, to the CIA, to the KGB, to the postwar reconstructed Nazi party in South America, and so Margaret too was interested in these things. She did not put any stock in his paranoid fantasies, but her veneration for him coalesced with her estrangement such that his obsessions seemed dignified and only coincidentally wrongheaded. In fact, such organizations became, to Margaret, a form of evil nebulous and mythical, not terrible at all.

In any case, her first Sunday in Berlin, she was already trying to know him. She set off to meet an old friend of his, and she felt, in anticipation of this meeting, almost as if her father would come along with them, return from the dead out of old friendship. Her father had always spoken of this man with moist-eyed fondness: Amadeus Vilnius, Slavist.

The man on the phone, when Margaret heard his voice, did not disappoint, either: he sounded over the wires like pebbles brightly colored under water.

They agreed to meet in Friedrichshain. From there, they would walk to the Soviet Monument in Treptower Park. This destination, too, was chosen meaningfully: Margaret’s father had talked about it once. He spoke of it using both hands, his thickly lensed eyes and hoarse voice becoming emotional.

It was on the platform at Ostkreuz, then, that Margaret Taub first saw the man she would always want to see. Later, not a single thing about that first moment went lost. This was how it was: the station was nothing but a knot of criss-crossing platforms, and on that sunny, first-spring March day, the damp air was filled with coal dust left over from the winter. Crowds moved toward the ring trains on the overpass above and toward the East-West axis trains in the shadows below, and Amadeus got off the train in these shadows. At first, he too was in shadow. But as he drew closer to Margaret, he came into the light—she remembered it so well—and the world seemed to tilt into wonderful alignment. He was dressed like a student, in dust-covered black corduroy guild pants with two gold zippers, a coarse sailor shirt, androgynously shaggy hair, and a rosy face. Everything around him seemed to instantly become a part of him: on the whitewashed station walls, letters were stenciled—networks of exposed wires filigreed the sky, grids of windows gave a Bauhaus effect, and the world seemed to be smoking its grandfather’s pipe. The station felt as if it were held together with black electrical tape, and Margaret’s spirits rose like a baby’s hand toward the unfamiliar flame, automated beyond reason.