The History of History (45 page)

She nudged the chain around the back gear and there it was. A long, dark, barreling shadow flashed under the ground. The earth was translucent—a two-way mirror. Shadows moved underneath it, and Margaret could see through it.

This is the nature of guilt—foreboding emanates from all things. Everything inexplicable will be understood as a promise of looming punishment. Guilt will change every last aspect of behavior, if you let it.

The chain took to the back gear at last, and Margaret began to ride toward home, but again as she crossed Martin-Luther-Strasse, the shadow passed under the earth from west to east at high speed, and Margaret could see down through the asphalt to the dark thing below.

Even as her heart raced, she was reminded of something. What did this remind her of?

She knew. The way the black shadow revealed the transparency of
the earth was the way a mouse running under the ice at Sachsenhausen reveals the transparency of the snow. What might today’s shadow be if not a displacement of time? For a moment, Margaret had a feeling of profluence.

The shape underground was many times larger than a mouse. Margaret considered what it could be. Of course, it should have occurred to her at the start: it was the subway train. The U7 line runs east-west under the Grunewaldstrasse, so it was the train, like the dark mouse, that betrayed the earth’s translucence.

Margaret studied the earth for a while, and then she looked up. When she did, something caught her attention as it moved along the sidewalk in the distance. An enormous form. It came from down along Barbarossastrasse, near the dark, shaded fountain that runs in the middle of the roundabout, so sibilant under the sycamores. The thing was slow on its feet, picking along with head lurching rhythmically forward and back, like a great avian camel.

It held Margaret’s gaze. She recognized it. As it came nearer, all was confirmed: it was that enormous bird of prey, none other than the aquiline Magda Goebbels herself.

The hawk-woman was approaching.

Margaret would have had time to remount her bike and quickly pedal away if she had chosen. But she froze, she froze. She knew she must stay. If she did not face the bird now, the bird would stay with her all her life.

There was the hawk-woman, large and ugly, picking its way down the street, and there was Margaret, ready for her. And now, just as before, the bird began to shrink and molt as it got close to her, leaving a trail of sooty feathers in its wake. By the time Margaret was standing face-to-face with the being, it had become the woman in her moldy, old-fashioned clothes, the long-dead Magda Goebbels.

“Margaret!” the woman screamed in her bird-voice, “You ninny! Have you been avoiding me?”

“No,” Margaret said. “You know I haven’t.”

“What is it then? Are we pals?” Before Margaret could answer, the hawk-woman answered for herself. “Of course we are. We’re thick as thieves. I’ve got somewhere fantastic to take you now. Somewhere I know you’ll like.”

“Well—” Margaret began.

But already the woman was growing and expanding, ballooning
back into her bird shape—and next thing Margaret knew, the bird was pushing her giant head into the space between Margaret’s legs. She had come at her from behind—so Margaret was somersaulted onto her wide back, and by the time Margaret was righted, they were rising above the city.

The air struck Margaret’s face not unpleasantly, but the journey did not last long. They came down already on Möckernstrasse, in the weed-strewn vacant lot just behind the Nazi-era post office.

“Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig!” the bird screeched. She dropped Margaret to the ground in the back, by the muddy pool of water—the bomb-crater pond. The side entryway to the building was gaping.

The figure—half bird, half woman now—beckoned to Margaret. It seemed they would enter the ruinous post office through a gaping, windy hole where there had once been a door. Margaret stepped over the high threshold.

Through rotting floorboards, weeds were growing. Slips of light came in the smoked windows. The hawk-woman led Margaret to a large round hole in the floor—it was the beginning of a spiral staircase that was hidden in the twilight. The stairs circled down into the ground.

At first Margaret resisted, but the hawk-woman came up behind her in the gloom and pushed insistently, until finally Margaret went, the hawk-woman close behind. Deeper and deeper they twisted into the underground.

Low and even light came from the walls of the stairwell. These glowed with a soft, green luminescence. Margaret put out her hand and touched the wall to steady herself. She lifted it to her face and saw the hand was covered in dissolved powder—a shimmering green.

Margaret felt weak, unsteady. The farther down the spiral staircase they went, the less clearly she could think. Her thoughts became muddier and muddier, and shortened, too. The underground, it seemed, was the place where long thoughts came to die.

The spiral went on. Margaret’s mind waned. Her feet fell against the stone steps, and she had no prospect or expectation. Something went lax within her.

The stairs opened on a passageway and Margaret’s powers of observation dimmed even as the lights grew brighter. Along the corridor, there were candles in holders that made the green walls shine tacitly,
like emeralds in the rough. Margaret was now behind the hawk-woman and followed her through corridor after corridor, turning many times.

At last, the hawk-woman turned into a doorway.

Margaret peeked in. It was a hot, blazing chamber that she saw over the threshold, a small room filled with many burning candles. And not only candles. Floor to ceiling, stacked, were thousands of tin cans. They were piled in giant cubes and pyramids like houses of cards, cans with labels marking sardines, marking green beans, marking coconut milk and olives, and cans of paint too, and bicycle oil, and gesso—and cans without any labels at all. Some cans had labels in styles of ages long past, others were modern, all preserving hermetically everything that can possibly be preserved. On top of the cans sat candles, flames flickering, each one dancing to its private tune. The candles dripped wax liberally—and made a cheaply chemical, floral perfume.

In the very center of the room, there was a railing made of tin cans welded together. Inside was a dais, also built of cans. And finally, on top of this dais was an enormous chair, high-backed and imposing like a throne.

The hawk-woman climbed up and sat down in it.

Perched up there, affectedly, her knees drawn tightly together and toes pointed mincingly side by side, the hawk-woman took a golden cigarette etui out of her alligator-skin pocketbook and also a fine lighter of the same metal. With her manicured hands, she put a cigarette to her lips, struck the lighter’s cap, inhaled, and let out a puff of smoke, the hanging, left side of her face shivering with the effort. She turned her head. Her heavy brow hung low over her eyes. Her grey suit was of a fine moiré (gone was the gabardine), and the waving water patterns of the moiré shook Margaret’s eyes.

The hawk-woman spoke.

“Margaret darling,
you pretty little thing.
” She inhaled sharply. “You’re to stay with us here now. Congratulations. This is quite the club.”

The cans, the light, the wax—they ate the oxygen in the room, and Margaret thought perhaps this was the reason she could not breathe or think.

Through the cotton of her muffled mind, fear took her.

The hawk-woman pulled out a pair of pince-nez, put them over her half-slack face. She looked up at Margaret. “You’re such an obstinate
little gnat. You insist on repressing your merry little life.” She reached into a short cabinet that stood next to her tall chair. “But I’ll help you, Margaret, I’ll help you to be mindful of who you are.” On her crenellated tongue, Margaret’s given name corrupted the air like a curse.

Already now, Margaret began to draw her neck away from the hawk-woman, but the creature’s hands were moving, she was pulling out a glass cylinder of the type used inside of pneumatic tubes. She was checking a long label down its spine; first she rejected one glass tube, and then another, holding each one up to the light. Finally she let out a sharp breath of air.

The woman’s hands lifted the glass tube in triumph, and her veins, in the heat of the room, were popping out of her skin. They were emerald green veins like the walls in the underground corridor.

The image of the woman’s hands was too much for Margaret. It crossed another image—a ghost image in her mind. In that moment, a gentle minor chord sounded. Two negatives were projected onto the same piece of silver nitrate. The two images crossed, matched, glowed, sang.

“I don’t want it,” Margaret began. “I don’t want to see anything.” But her eyes misted over as if to become one with her misted inner eye and her clouded mind. She could hear the hawk-woman’s voice, but fading now—“Then don’t read it, little ninny, you needn’t read anything you don’t want,” she was saying, but her voice was growing fainter and fainter. The woman’s hands were dancing still in Margaret’s mind, losing all but their lacings of emerald veins. Skeletons they were, skeletons made of arterial vessels carrying blood back to the heart.

And so they carried blood back to the heart of Margaret. They reminded her—a memory floated toward her as though a ship doubling in size astonishingly on the far horizon, growing into a nocturnal glacier before her eyes—they reminded her of a letter from her mother. She had read a letter two years ago, when she, Margaret, was enormous, ready to give birth. She had been so staggered by the thing, she had linked it with the undesired child. She had never wanted to see anyone in her family again after that letter, including, even including, the child—her nearest kin. The letter from her mother—Margaret’s head swam. She remembered, as though it had always been burnt on her retina, the letter of August 2002, when she had been told that she had not always been Margaret Taub.

An envelope, postmarked New York City:

Another sheet of paper, folded into a small, tight triangle at the bottom of the envelope, was recognizable by Margaret’s father’s usual habit. Across the triangle,
MAGGIE
was written in block script.