The History of History (40 page)
Read The History of History Online
Authors: Ida Hattemer-Higgins
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Iron Waves
H
is eyes—blue, blue, the color of lake water, ringed with black lashes. His skin: brown and pink with dark moles.
She had told
Amadeus she was expecting a child.
It was late spring of 2002, and they were sitting on a bench in an overgrown corner of the Volkspark that runs along Weinbergsweg, where the earth smells of worms and poison ivy and broken beer bottles. They had just had sex in the dark, on a bench. Margaret had not allowed him to get her drunk and Amadeus could never relax when a woman was not drunk, and he had dropped all semblance of courtship. Revelers were coming out of the bars on the hill and their voices were loud, but they couldn’t see Margaret and Amadeus through the thick of the bushes.
Amadeus suspected instantly that this was the thrust of a well-planned dagger. How could it have been accidental, when he had been so careful? At least, almost always he had been so careful.
Maybe
it was an accident. But he had seen the witch, the vixen, the succubus, with her hand covered in ejaculate, and he shuddered at where she put her fingers. He knew. He knew what this was, despite her play of guilelessness.
He offered her two thousand euros, an abortion, and a one-way ticket to New York City.
He was angry, this man who had never before wanted a lover to leave his neighborhood. It was not merely because Margaret was such a ruthless shrew in her destruction of his marriage. His marriage was brittle, and its existence, at this point, arbitrary. Nor was his anger because of her duplicity. What would have been the crucial point for most men, the thing that would have destroyed all hope of happiness—that she had tricked him into having a child—was not what
most bothered Amadeus. He expected this kind of thing from women. No, what made him livid, turned him against her with the full force of his personality, was that she was trying to make out of their love affair a small human being.
Amadeus had
never
wanted a child, never under any circumstances, not with his wife, and not with anyone else.
There was a story one could tell, a story of a family, the mother’s birth in the Ukraine followed ten years later by the grandfather’s deportation to Siberia. One could tell of how the grandfather was never heard from again—or at least not until fifty-five years later when one found out he was remarried and living in Vladivostok. You could tell of how the grandmother, with three children at the time of her husband’s disappearance, made her way alone to Brandenburg overland on foot with the children in wartime, how she had turned hard, when she didn’t have enough to feed them. Of how since then she had not once been back to Volhynia, where she was born, where she bore her children, where her family had worked the land for five generations. Of how her oldest daughter married a certain Heinrich whose father was killed outside Leningrad; Heinrich, who fled from Königsberg to Leipzig in 1945, and never once went home. Of how at Amadeus’s birth, father and mother did not react to the child. One could tell of how Heinrich stopped looking Amadeus in the face when he was nine years old, the same age Heinrich was when his father was killed outside Leningrad. One could tell of how Heinrich hanged himself in the garage—one fine day—and Amadeus found him after school.
One could tell a story of an uninsulated family. One could say that Amadeus had no desire for children because non-disappearance of people and continuity of home were lacking in the family’s blood, and these are the things that make children welcome: home and non-disappearance of people.
One could ask what happens to people who never go back.
One could ask what becomes of the children of people who never went home. One could say the family had been in a lock-dance with the twin forces of death and not-coming-home for as long as anyone could remember, a dance whose steps were of the same pattern as Amadeus’s relationship with women—beckon and retreat, beckon and retreat. His was the life that doesn’t entirely want to live, the desire that never finds its ease, the thirst for a milk that you are poisoning even as you drink. That a family that never looks back creates a son
like Amadeus—a man who looks back always, but on things painless and far away, insulates himself from knowing how close to the surface of the skin his blood runs.
Yes, one could say all of that, or one could drop the topic and say instead that Amadeus simply didn’t like children and never had.
And whatever story one chose to tell, the fact was that Amadeus desperately did not want whatever was growing inside Margaret’s young, non-European body.
She had caught him off guard.
When she told him about the pregnancy, Amadeus slapped her across the face. He was a little drunk.
When he hit her, Margaret looked as if she had swallowed a silver dollar; it was caught in her esophagus.
Then he offered her money. He might have wasted time doubting the child was his, but he knew about Margaret and her self-sacrificial gambits. She was too careful to accidentally get pregnant by the wrong man. He zipped up his pants and went home. He transferred the money into her account, and he made sure he never saw her again.
Margaret fell behind
at the university. She stayed up late thinking of the baby and wondering what kind it would be.
She was still in love with Amadeus.
She was married to her body now. Part of him was in it. She should have thought of how to care for herself, but instead she was still staring at Amadeus in her mind, wondering when he would come back to her. For the life of her, she could not leave the city where he was.
At some point during the pregnancy, she received a letter from him. The letter told a story of her own mother and father. It was more than a lock-dance with death and not-coming-home, she thought then. It was more than a fear of children. He had never loved her, he had never even seen her. At least, this was how she understood it. Her world unlaced.
He wrote:
Dear Margaret,
I’m not willing to meet you. Do you hear? Don’t come by here like that.
I want you to listen to me. I’m going to tell you something that will make you flinch, but you deserve it. Maybe it will make you understand. You have forced me to the wall. It’s something to do with your mother and father.
In 1979, your parents spent the summer in West Berlin. Your father was doing research, and sometimes they came over to the East to see his mother. It must have been five or six times. When they did, I used to go and meet them. I’d wait outside of the checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse, cool my heels on the other side of the river, trying to be a bit discreet. (Even being seen with them—Westerners, and your father a dissident—it was a liability for me. That was back when I was trying to get into the Party.) So I waited on the Northern side, under the big old copper birch trees that stand on the chalk banks there. I could see the station, and the border patrol on the other side of the river through the leaves, and the S-Bahn trains would curve in from the West. I could make them out through the trees.
I’m just trying to paint a picture for you, so you understand.
I’d sit and smoke, and at some point they’d turn up. Out of the Tränenpalast they’d be coming, looking rumpled and triumphant. Sometimes they would have been waiting in line to get through and sometimes it would have taken quite a long time.
Their clothes always looked so nice to me though, that’s something I’ll tell you. You could peg Western clothes from at least half a kilometer away. What a fine duet they were, your mom and dad! Sarah always with high color in her cheeks, and Christoph next to her was just as tall and skeletal and morose as ever, but a fine-looking man, distinguished, a bit of the medieval knight about him. And me, I’d feel silly—that summer we had nothing but rainy weather and I’d have wet hair, water dripping from the leaves of this damn tree I’d sit under, and my glasses would fog up as soon as we went inside. (God I love contact lenses! No more of that sort of thing now.)
Anyway, they’d come up to me, smiling, I’d get up from my bench. First I’d put out my cigarette, then I’d shake Christoph’s hand. Christoph was like a brother to me, I loved him, but that summer it wasn’t very good. I could tell from the first time they came over that it wasn’t going to be any good. He didn’t even feel like a friend—there was just a ringing sound in my ears when I tried to talk to him.
Well, but I’m exaggerating. We had a good time. He’d been gone for seven years, mind you, and seven years is a long time. That was the bulk of the problem. We were only nineteen when he got out, the lucky
bastard, traded out after his imprisonment. The Stasi used to make those sorts of trades. I guess you must know this. I can’t say I ever found out how he ended up in New Jersey, though, or why he went to Princeton like that. Can’t say I cared very much, although now he’s dead and I wish I knew.
Oh, but who cares. It’s
Wurst
to me now. Better to forget.
The thing is, we were both studying Russian history, and that commonality, if you will, was pleasant at the time. By the time we’d get into my car (my dad’s actually), we’d be filling up the silences by, you know, joshing each other about Karamzin, making jokes about Lermontov. Your father fancied himself a great hero of his time. We both sort of thought of ourselves that way. I’d say something like: “You should have stayed here, Christoph, if you wanted to study Russians. We have plenty here.” He’d nod his head and frown in a serious way, wouldn’t show any recognition that my testicles were on the chopping block. He didn’t seem to take any of it in. This was the summer after the Wolf Biermann affair, and I wasn’t doing so well.
I will say this: maybe we didn’t pay enough attention to Sarah. Sometimes I think that was why things turned out the way they did. Women will go at your throat if you don’t give them attention. The thing was, she didn’t study Russian, and so she couldn’t catch the jokes. There was no help for it. Come to think of it, her German was a floperoo as well.
You know what else? I think Christoph was embarrassed by your mother, of all things. What a pretty woman she was! And so young. I remember in particular that she always wore these gold-rimmed earrings. There is a certain kind of man who’s embarrassed by having a pretty wife. Your father was that kind. These earrings, anyway, they had cameos of Lola Montez in them. Your father had given them to her. I really liked them on her.
I don’t care what Christoph thought—as far as I was concerned, your mother was fantastic. No, she was more than fantastic. She was Christoph’s prize. What he got for breaking free. Here I was, doing stinking work, slogging through theories of materialism I didn’t believe in one wit, making compromises with the university administration, and there was even this man from the Stasi whom they were making me have these meetings with from time to time; I was giving him some info here and there. I was trying hard to get into the Party, as I mentioned, although I never did get in, damn them. Ha-ha. It’s all so funny in retrospect. And maybe it was these ridiculous meetings with
your parents that got in my way. I don’t know. I’m not going to read my file. To tell the truth, Margaret, I was more cynical when I was twenty-five than at any time afterward. The wound was freshest. I already mentioned Biermann. I took the whole thing very hard.
And you know what—the fact that your mother was Jewish, or her mother was Jewish, or whatever it was—
that
was really something. The love of a Jewish woman! A damn interesting thing for a German man of my generation. A Jewish woman—never touched, never tampered with, family intact—there’s only one way to look at it: it’s a sort of exoneration from the inheritance. I mean, that’s how personally we took things. And with fathers like ours, well especially Christoph’s—why not personally? Oh, that Venus of a mother of yours, that Sarah, was the light flooding into the backseat of the Trabi after the rain. I was shy with women back then, but I kept glancing over my shoulder at her, and she would smile at me, although God, I admit it, Christoph and I were both kind of snubbing her; what can you do, she didn’t know German, and she didn’t know Russian.
Christoph, to hell with him, he’d reach into his bag and pull out such riches—poststructuralists, deconstructionists, all these big names. Books I could have sold a kidney and not managed to rustle up for myself in the GDR, not at that time. And then we’d be at a stoplight and he’d do that thing of his—he’d turn his face away but put out his hand, and he’d be pushing deutsche marks at me. It was great, he was a grand soul, but there was this part of me that wanted to bash his head in. How the deuce did he get the upper hand? When we were in school, I was the one with friends. My grades were even better. So how did he have the power of the gift? Who appointed him?
Oh, your mother was lovely. The thing about me is: I’ve never been entirely indifferent to the wives of my friends. There’s something delicious about them. Women I find on my own can’t possibly be as alluring. You might say there is no cathexis there.
I’m talking in circles around the hot broth. Here’s what you need to know: for a few weeks that summer, while Christoph was busy with his big, important research at the Stabi, I waited outside the checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse for your mother alone. I drove her in my father’s car to the apartment in Friedrichshain. Part of me would pretend she wasn’t Christoph’s wife. I never quite understood her English, for example. Man, she could talk to let the sow out! But at the same time, secretly, I liked her precisely because she was no stranger at all; she was like a sister
to me, she was the wife of my brother-friend, Christoph (which, to be entirely honest, is part of why I got started with you too.)
As for your mother—I don’t know why she did it. She said something once—about Christoph. Since the wedding night, apparently, he had been lying in bed with his back to her. Wouldn’t even turn around. He said he was tired. Christoph was not thriving in New Jersey, for obscure reasons, but maybe precisely because so obscure, all-powerful. That’s my sense at least. Later she told me that Christoph was in love with
me
, things like that. I don’t know. Better let sleeping dogs lie. Let dead dogs lie. Ha-ha.
What this means for you, Margaret, I can’t say. I realize I should never have gotten involved with you. What’s done is done, and there are some pretty ticklish issues here, although—no—I am not your father, not unless your mother carried you for fifteen months. But still, I hope you’ll stay away from me, and from my wife, for that matter, and handle the matter of the pregnancy as you know you must.
Friendly greetings,
Amadeus