The History of History (33 page)

She directed the group to the observation platform, gave them ten minutes to themselves, and they clambered up, obedient. Margaret stayed below. She walked down the side of the memorial, glancing absently down its aisles, as in the stacks of an outsize library.

Unexpectedly, she detected movement from inside the site. Margaret looked. It was two small children. They walked hand in hand, parallel to Margaret, but far away from her along one of the distant aisles, progressing in small but determined children’s steps toward the end of the site to the south, appearing and disappearing as they went behind the blocks and reemerged again, two small people, alone in a labyrinth of towering blocks—a vast warehouse of darkness and light.

In their slow progression, they were dropping behind them a stream of white—it was maybe snow, maybe Styrofoam, maybe the Moscow pollen of poplar trees—Margaret couldn’t guess. In any case, the cottony white blanketed the ground behind them as they walked and marked their narrow path. The figures, so brave and so young in their earnest trajectory, were in shadow, disappearing and reappearing behind the pillars.

At first they walked slowly. Then, still hand in hand, they began to run, faster and faster. Soon they lost hold of each other’s hands, and in their desperation ran increasingly apart from each other, losing each other in the maze. Margaret, trying to keep up a view, ran along the side, her shoelace untied and her wet pant cuffs flapping. Now it was the taller child coming closer to her as the smaller one got farther away. Margaret could hear—a small, frail voice. As the child neared
she could see its hair—it was grey. The child was falling and stumbling now on the rough earth; the other one vanished. And then Margaret could see—almost, at least, for her view was partly obstructed by one of the stone pillars—as the larger child fell into one of the empty holes.

Margaret cut in to the memorial and ran to the empty grave.

She looked down inside it. The child was not there, and not at the next, and not in the next after that. Margaret, breathing heavily, sat down at the foot of one of the blocks beside a yawning, waiting hole.

She sat several minutes. She could not seem to collect herself.

She went back out, finally. She almost collided with the German student, Philipp. He took hold of her arm. He touched her with an awkward, formal gesture that was nevertheless far too intimate. It made Margaret queasy. She wrenched her arm away.

Gathering the customers together, she led them around the corner to the site of Hitler’s bunker. She had gathered her wits somewhat, but still the Communist apartment complex in front of her in flesh form looked almost like chanterelle mushrooms.

“The first thing you’ll notice here is that there’s nothing to notice,” Margaret began, looking down at the tarmac. “But directly under our feet, Hitler’s bunker is sinking deeper into the earth.”

Some people took out their digital cameras.

“Hitler moved into the bunker in the middle of March 1945 and was far from lonely here,” Margaret said. She breathed hard. “The twenty-room bunker was occupied by his dog, Blondi; the puppies she gave birth to during this time; his vegetarian cook; his three female secretaries; six bodyguards; his valet; his girlfriend, Eva Braun, come up from Munich; and ultimately the Family Goebbels as well, with their six children, who were between the ages of four and twelve. It was a rowdy life, down in the bunker, in those final days.

“Where you see the orange barrier,” Margaret said, turning to gesture behind her at the entrance to the parking lot, “was the center of the bunker.”

But at her turn, high up behind her, in one of the windows of the chanterelle block of flats, there she was: the hawk-woman, with her heavy brow and clothes of black gabardine. She beamed down at Margaret—sunnier and brighter than ever before—a smile for professional photographers, a rapacious smile, designed to make Margaret
cower. And then she was calling to Margaret, loudly and clearly—“Yoo-hoo!”

Margaret pretended not to hear.

Margaret turned back to the group before her and her mouth worked automatically. She jabbered on about Hitler’s dental records. At some point she could not help herself and looked back at the hawk-woman in the window again, and she was still there, she with her gleaming water-waves of blond hair, her rich bun. Magda Goebbels was still looking down at her indeed—this woman, who was bird of prey and rich man’s wife rolled into one—with the widest and most welcoming of grins.

“We simply
must
meet again!” the hawk-woman called. “I won’t take no for an answer!” She lifted her hands, these hands, which, white like seashells lobbed heavenward, caught Margaret’s instant dazed admiration, and she began to wave enthusiastically with both of them. “Yoo-hoo!” she called again. “Don’t you hear me?”

Margaret turned her back. She patched together a final few words about the bunker and asked if there were any questions. She lived to regret it. A raised hand. “What happened to the six children?”

“Which?” Margaret asked, knowing full well.

“You said there were six children in the bunker.”

“That’s right.”

“Where did they go?”

“Well, that’s a sad story, actually.” Margaret looked over her shoulder at the high window again. The cold air was blowing through the lace curtains. The hawk-woman was gone.

“The children were given poison, apparently by their mother, and all of them died.”

“Oh.”

Now Margaret looked north and saw something only a few meters away.

The rival walking-tour company, Berlin Hikes, had a group of tourists standing not far off. Picking his way around the back of the group, peering now over this shoulder, now over that, was a tall, gangly old man. He yelled: “
Ich bin der Prell! Ich war dabei!
” The old bodyguard, Arthur Prell.

“Let’s continue, shall we?” Margaret asked. She felt a wind pick up the back of her coat and move up her spine. And let us admit that within Margaret now, a powerful hatred was growing—a hatred for
that spry old man. She despised his saucy, challenging way, his horsey face, his reeking polyester suits.

At the end
of the tour, Margaret glanced up from her wallet of tour tickets and change. The German student was still standing before her. The man who said his name was Philipp had punched his chest forward, his boyish face, astonishingly, on the verge of tears. He spoke in a low, intense whisper, his syllables clipped and short, straining with injured pride. “Margaret, why do you insist on continuing this charade?” Philipp breathed in and out through his nose, his mouth pinched in self-conscious valiance. He was like a toy soldier.

Margaret turned her head and looked at him strangely. She smiled, however, with an effort at pacification. “I don’t know what charade you mean. I’m often tired after a tour. I hope you don’t mind—I’ll be going home now.”

“Margaret. Stop. Just stop.” His voice was artificially deep, and he had switched into German.

“Yes, I’ll be going,” Margaret replied in English.

“Margaret. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what? Everything is fine. Just go home. It’s time to go home now,” Margaret said, smiling broadly, although by now her heart was pounding.

“Margaret. It’s possible I was wrong—attacking, the way I did.” Again, he switched into German. “You were right, what you said about it afterward. I made an ass of myself. It was not right to attack Amadeus.”

At the sound of this word,
Amadeus
, everything changed. Margaret looked at him and would have believed anything at all. Even her hardest certainty disbanded into foam. “From where—how do you know that name?” she asked. Now it was Margaret who switched into German.

“Which name?”

“Which name?” she repeated, aghast. “Amadeus!” she whispered.

“Oh, be quiet!” Philipp said. “Are you trying to humiliate me?” His voice was peevish, precisely staccato.

Margaret looked harder. It was true that he had been showing an unnatural familiarity toward her throughout the tour. Margaret
looked directly into his face. Do I know this man? She looked him up and down, regarding his small, glittering eyes, his button-down shirt, his black, high-waisted jeans. Philipp remained before her with his eyes cast down, his brows drawn together, his nostrils flaring with pouting rage. Finally Margaret glanced down at his shoes, which were very stylish, of dark green alligator skin with Cuban heels. She looked at them. Her heart sank slowly. These shoes—she recognized. She had chosen them for him herself.

S
he looked at the shoes. Her eyes made haste from the shoes, over the belt, along the chest, and back to Philipp’s face. Now she saw his tight lips. This was Philipp, her Philipp. If she was not very much mistaken, this man had once loved her.

He had loved her and she had scorned him. Instead of loving him in return, she only played at a life with him, and she felt a perspiration of shame, looking at him now. She had eaten his dinners and borrowed his books, meeting Amadeus all the while. Philipp, who tucked his pajama shirt into his pajama pants at the same angle every night; Philipp, who every day waited to eat his morning egg until he had eaten his morning slice of black bread, because otherwise he might get a protein shock; Philipp, who as a man did everything exactly as he had been taught to do it as a boy—she had never loved him. Although she spent far more time with Philipp than she did with Amadeus up in Prenzlauer Berg, she was so entirely swept up in the chaos and power and irregularity of Amadeus that she never noticed her duplicity. Philipp was something that happened to happen to the shell of her, the unfortunate colonization of an underdeveloped nation.

Even now, looking at Philipp, what she remembered most was her escaping mind, how every minute of sitting near him or listening to his breath, she had dreamt of Amadeus. Even after so long, Amadeus was the siren song. A trance of memory overtook Margaret, as she hunched over her bicycle on the way home, the tall man running after her, his kepi from the First World War fallen into the road, and it was not of Philipp she dreamt, but a memory of the other man, of the delirium.

She could see
the arching station of Alexanderplatz. She could see herself flying to meet Amadeus there.

From the station they would go to dinner, or out to a velvet bar; the night would drip, time would slow. The first glimpses of Amadeus, walking toward her on the station platform, were as beautiful later as they were the first day. It was these meetings in public places that were somehow the core of her happiness, happiness unbearably sweet.

Amadeus was always late, and it was always clear by his wet hair and soft cheeks that he had only just showered and shaved. He wore a clean shirt, usually pale—light blue or peach, with an embroidered black insignia, newly ironed. Over the fresh shirt he would wear a dark and dusty suit. The suits were ancient and worn-in, never once washed, permeated with the scent of Gauloises Rouges. He had always thought beforehand to touch himself at the corners with the products that made such an intoxicating perfume to Margaret. He put Wella hairspray in his hair, Nivea deodorant under his arms, and some sort of aftershave on his cheeks, Margaret wasn’t sure what, but she recognized it when she smelled it infrequently on other men, and she had the same feeling of weakness and submission, just as the advertisements presumably promised.

Was it the foreign smells that had made her so in love? Or was it being in love that had made her adore the scent of French smoke and German preening?

His face—drove her mad. The high forehead and skin dark and freckled, the bright, bright eyes the color of lake water, ringed with black lashes, the red-grey cheeks—his face looked like Hölderlin’s, but attached to the body of a man ready to die. One shoulder was higher than the other and this gave him a romantic gait; his legs were long and powerful, his chin had begun to double. The impression was of a man who had an old, sad story to tell. That was the first point. Not everyone looked to Margaret as if he represented a history of love and death. Secondly, whatever it was he represented was a cryptogram, a grotto shrine dedicated to a religion she did not understand but in which she yearned to believe. When he moved toward her in a crowd, and she saw his head disappearing and reappearing as he came closer to her, it was the ultimate kind of perception—slowed and stately and musical—as if she were the groom standing at the front of a church watching the approach of his bride, his woman of destiny, eyes filling with tears. This kind of perception happens infrequently, but if at all, then usually at the cinema. If it happens outside the cinema, then it is remembered forever. There is beauty everywhere at such times, you
could cry when it comes, and the world around you resonates with one whining and perfect harmonic. Nothing can compete with so beautiful a feeling, and Margaret’s addiction followed naturally.

One mild, sweet summer evening in 2000, Amadeus called Margaret and suggested that they go to the outdoor cinema in the Volkspark Friedrichshain. It was showing a Russian film. Amadeus was brusque with her. He did not mention outright that his wife was gone to visit her sister on Lake Constance, and so Margaret was uncertain. It was rare that he was willing to go to a public place with her in his own neighborhood.

“But are you sure? Can we really meet there?”

“I just told you, shnooky. I wouldn’t have suggested it if we couldn’t.”

“But I thought—”

“Don’t think.”

“Aren’t you worried that—”

“I’m worried about nothing.” He cut her off. “There have been vacations taken by certain people. There. Does that make you happy?”

“Vacations?”

“Yes.”

“Great!” Margaret said, as she understood. She began to laugh, overjoyed.

She knew how she was supposed to feel, as the other woman. She was meant to feel conniving, bitter, fiercely competitive. And sometimes, it was true, she did feel that way. But most of the time, her role as the other woman was quite different than anything she might have projected before it all began. She saw herself as completely helpless, so helpless, in fact, that her womanly status was accentuated and forced out like a pink flower blooming too early, with sadness and tragedy. She felt desperately, fatefully female, like a Titian Leda raped by the swan. And sometimes she knew it. Sometimes she would suspect, in very clear terms, that Amadeus’s marriage was the single most potent source of her happiness, for it was the strong arm that took all power out of her hands. This powerlessness lent her body femininity, her love fatality.