The History of History (5 page)

At this last term of endearment, the doctor turned away from Margaret toward the projector, and at that moment, Margaret did not think about perfect pregnancy or perfect meaningfulness or anything of the kind. She was struck by something else—it must have been latent all along, but she only recognized it now. She was sure: the doctor did not like her. Or she did not like, at least, the person she believed Margaret to be. She spoke to Margaret kindly and with many loving names, but only as a self-discipline and camouflage. There was a movement in her neck, a slide of the gullet as she spoke, that Margaret saw now to be the jerky passage of pride being swallowed. Margaret considered again what the doctor had written in the letter: “You and I have not always seen eye to eye.” All at once, the phrase seemed ominous. Coolness licked her; she was bathed in a new flush of sweat.

The film projector began to tick, and the doctor was now circling the perimeter of the room, running her hands against the walls to find each window in turn and pull the tall brown drapes closed, until she
and Margaret sat in a chiaroscuro world. Margaret, from her vantage point on the examination table, where she was still coldly exposed, was compliant. She turned her attention to the wall across from the doctor’s desk. A small black-and-white film began to play there, its light glowing yellow.

It is fair to say that Margaret both watched the film and went to sleep. She saw the film in the same sort of trance in which she gave tours of the city, where all that is perceived is blown up so large that it crowds out other elements of consciousness. The darkened room, the buzzing light of the projector, her sudden freedom from the obligation to speak—all came together and allowed her to swim away.

The little film was poor-quality 8mm, in black and white, at least fifty years old. The air in the room seemed to become thinner as it played.

The action began in the woods. From the top of what seemed to be a narrow rock outcropping, the camera looked down on a lake nestled in the forest. Trees sprang up around the lake like scaffolding. The water was inky, black, and cold.

Gradually, however, there came a dance of light on the water, and soon it burned. More and more, and then the surface of the lake was all ablaze, the fire so bright the woods around it went dark.

And then a black shape, a smudge like a thumbprint, formed in the center of the lake amidst the flames, a shadow rising at the crux of the water. It was a figure—a man—who was rising from the flames, and the way he rose was not with volition or muscular energy. He rose sideways like a doll on a string, jouncing along the slope.

But then he straightened, and when he did, he glided through the air, flew through it, amazingly!, and landed perfectly straight on his feet at the top of the cliff, next to the camera. And there he was, standing with wide stance, quivering and proud, leonine head held high.

But the figure was more distinct now, and it was not a man. It was only a boy, fourteen or fifteen, in costume—a medieval huntsman. Long, waving black hair, and his broad, well-shaped forehead caught the light as he turned it to the side, a forehead that was square and flat and fine, a vein like an
M
pushing from it, and he had as much beauty in that moment as the young Gary Cooper coming toward the camera out of the Moroccan desert.

The boy took a sword from a sheath hung on a carnival belt slung
low around his narrow hips. He held the sword aloft, his face earnest, his arm extended and utterly convinced. Then, with a helpless, backward gesture, he brought it back down.

And the lake below continued to burn ever brighter, until abruptly it went black. At the same moment there was a flicker of movement, a neat parabola on the right edge of the frame, and the forest came back into focus and went still.

For a few seconds the projector continued to tick, and the forest persisted—only a slight rustle of branch now and then; a lonely bird alighting on a twig. And then gracelessly, and yet still with a kind of charm, like a cat lifting its paws out of water, the boy moved out of the frame.

The film ticked off.

For a while, Margaret and the doctor sat still: Margaret in one of her trances, and the doctor asleep.

The doctor finally woke herself with a snort. She said, as though time had not passed, “Treat your memories gently when they return, my dear.”

Margaret did not reply. The doctor sat for a while longer.

“Can I trust you will come back to the office?” she asked. “When your memories return, I mean? Your treatment isn’t finished, you know.” There was something much gentler about the doctor now.

Margaret said she would come, but she spoke in a flat voice.

“I’ll wager,” the doctor said, “that you believe you’ll never set foot in my office again. Perhaps you have judged me insane, or perhaps you are not as mentally disturbed as you pretend, and even now you are planning your escape to Brazil, or to some other country that has no extradition treaty with Germany.” She sat very still, drumming her fingers against the desk. She sighed. “In any case, I’m willing to take the risk.”

She felt her way across the room to Margaret, and at last removed the speculum from Margaret’s unfortunate abdomen.

At the prompt, Margaret rubbed her eyes and sprang off the table. She dressed and went as fast as she could back down to the courtyard and out into the street.

On the way home, the buildings on the Grunewaldstrasse grew farther into the sky. Margaret’s heart pounded and her cheeks flushed. She felt mysteriously unwell. Not as though the doctor had any right
to her insinuations, but as though Margaret had somehow been complicit in the accusation.

Another strange thing: the film, for its part, was the very opposite of what the doctor had promised. It offered nothing in the way of pulchritude, pregnant or not. On the contrary. After the viewing, Margaret felt much worse than before. The gentle breathing terror was wending back to life.

Poor Margaret!
That evening, she went to the phone booth on Gleditschstrasse and looked in the Berlin telephone book, and then on the Internet. She found no Margaret Täubners listed in all of Germany, nor Margarethe Täubners, nor Margaretes, nor Margaritas nor Grits nor Gretchens nor Marguerites nor Maggies. She looked over the world, she looked in the U.S. telephone directories online. She tried various alternate spellings of Täubner. She found a record of a Margarethe who married a Taubner (without an
ä
) once in Missouri, but that woman had been dead more than fifty years now. She even did something she could not quite explain to herself. She looked for other Margaret Taubs. But Margaret Taub, too, was a lonely name.

Why was it Margaret did not chalk the whole thing up to a misunderstanding? Why did she let the doctor trouble her? After all, Margaret was neither crazy nor imbecile. Surely, once in the safety of her own home, she could have shrugged the whole thing off.

The answer is twofold. One, there was the rushing silence of the missing time, the time up until and including the night in the forest, which she could not remember. This effectively rendered her without alibi. The complete knowledge required in order for her to stand straight and declare herself a stranger to the doctor, once and for all—it was not there, she could not defend herself. She could not say for certain she had never been acquainted with this doctor, and she knew it.

There was another problem, however, something far less concrete, and therefore more dangerous. It was a matter of an ineffable distortion in Margaret’s mental landscape. Just as a man of chronically injured pride believes a bank error in his favor to be a matter of celestial justice, Margaret’s anxiety framed her vision, and she was incapable of understanding the doctor’s interest as fully accidental.

The result was this: after the doctor’s visit, Margaret no longer stood straight. She went about crookedly.

On that very first night, she dreamt she was leading a walking tour, but all the city’s buildings were infected. It seemed there was a kind of mold. It was in the walls, even in the stone, and she did not know where the trouble lay. Was it in the atmosphere or was it in the soil, was it growing from within the city, or was it blowing in from the outside—a cancer or a virus?

The next day
she again went to the computer. She clicked farther and farther back in her e-mail account, trying to reach the e-mails from two years before. She was swimming beyond the buoys marking the shallow sea. She found a few pieces of mail from her boss at the tour company dating from March 2003. She clicked backward. The dates jumped. The next set of e-mails was from August 2002. There was a six-month gap.

She called her boss, a wonderfully correct Englishman, at home. At first he did not understand what she was asking. “Well, Margaret,” he finally said, “that was when you went traveling, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?”

“I can look it up in our finances.” He went from the phone and came back. “Yes,” he said. “We did not make any payments to your account from August 2002 to February 2003. I’m remembering now, you went traveling in the East. Something about Odessa, or Yalta, wasn’t it? You told us at the time.”

“Right,” said Margaret hoarsely.

“Is that why you called?”

“I’m trying to straighten things out in my mind.”

“Is everything all right?” He paused. “I see you are scheduled to give a tour already tomorrow morning. Shall we find you a replacement? You don’t sound well, Margaret.”

“No, no,” Margaret said. She reflected. She thought she would try something craftier. “I hope I haven’t inconvenienced the company over the years with my—absences,” she said.

“Absences?”

“Back then, you know …” She let her voice trail off, hoping he would fill in.

“Margaret, you’ve always been very reliable. We’ve appreciated that. Freelancers are not always of your kind.”

“I see. I couldn’t recall whether I had …” She allowed her voice to trail off again, but her boss too was silent, and the moment became awkward. “Well thank you anyway.” She rang off.

She had never taken a trip to Odessa or Yalta. She was sure of it.

In the bookshelf she had thirty-seven chronological notebooks in which she copied passages from historical documents and kept records of her lectures and seminars. Again, she began sifting through the dates. Again, she found a hole. The period from August to February had left behind no notes.

She sat back down in the chair. She thought of the time she had lost. The record stopped, the colors ceased, the numbers jumped and skidded and went dark. To think of the gap was to stick her tongue into the soft, itching place where a tooth has been lost. The effort to remember life experience is a strange kind of effort.

And then, that night, as Margaret looked out her window and saw the rhythmic streetlamps getting smaller beat by beat an image did arise in her. It was so weak, so soft. A poorly sketched little dream. A woman in a blue dress came wavering before her imagination. Margaret closed her eyes. The woman was walking up a red staircase. She was climbing around an oval spiral that circled a central shaft. At the top of the stairwell was a skylight made of convex glass. The woman climbed up and up around the brilliantly curving banister, and as she did, the milky light from the central shaft played on her face.

But Margaret could only feel the woman visually, she could not see her, and this sensation—of visual knowledge without vision—made her think it was not a memory at all, but something she had once seen in a film. Right away, she tried to think of something else, frightened by the triviality of it. In things one knows to be critically important, triviality is a kind of horror.

Later that night, the phone rang, and although Margaret did not manage to get it in time—when she spoke into the receiver there was no one on the other end—still, it jounced her down from the high wire. She stared into the mirror in the hallway by the telephone.

She began to laugh: What a fool I’ve been, she said to herself. Of course she was not Margaret Täubner. Of course she did not know the
strange doctor. She would not have forgotten such a huge and bulbous head! And she laughed and wondered at how the doctor had rattled her. She thought of the doctor’s office, which now seemed very far away: its mustiness, dark drapes, the shadows, the film projector hidden in the cupboard. It was absurd; it belonged to another dream, a missing country. It was not hers.

T
he next day, something occurred which might tax the reader’s imagination to believe, but no more than Margaret’s own faith in perception was stretched to the limit. But this thing that happened—it
must
be believed. Without belief, Margaret’s story will quickly blanch for us, and the reality—that the world morphed and contorted and slurred around still and unchanging Margaret as cataclysmically as the body grows and ages and dies around its antique polymer codes—this will be misunderstood as nothing more than a fable. That is also a kind of tragedy: crisis fixed and framed too early.

Specifically, then, it was the city of Berlin. It rolled into a new phase all on its own, while everyone slept except the taxi drivers loose on the sun-smeared boulevards. By eight o’clock, it was already done.

The city transformed into flesh. When Margaret awoke, there was no stucco or timber any longer, only human flesh and bone. Pygmalion’s Galatea as Berolina, though the name of the lover who craved the city and wished her living flesh, no one knew.

Emerging from Number 88, Margaret turned her head up to the sky, and there before her eyes were the city apartment houses, all of them made flesh. And how severely the sun cut through the windows! What an effect of blush and glow, the sun purpling through the skin webbing, as through diaphanous alabaster in late afternoon church windows. The external walls of the buildings swelled and contracted, so heavy with life that the skin stretching over the façades seemed to veil a giant fetus or a set of opulent organs: hushed, lush, and enormous. Or was it not a single set of organs, but many millions of individual, quivering muscles?