The History of History (8 page)

As she finished the copying, Margaret grabbed her head in her hand.

Margaret held the pictures up to the light and considered whether or not she could sketch what she saw on the page, but she felt nauseous.

Instead, she wrote,

A few moments later, Margaret was still on red alert. She recalled that once, she had read a letter Magda Goebbels wrote with her own hand. It was reproduced in its entirety in a book that she knew was very likely still somewhere in the flat. It quickly became shining and irresistible. She went to the shelf and began to page through several books. She couldn’t remember exactly where she had read it, that was the trouble. She went into the hall and knocked over two piles of books and rummaged.

The passage was nowhere to be found.

Back at the desk, she grabbed her forehead in her hand again. Her mind pulsed. All at once, like a word on the tip of the tongue bubbling up after sleep, she knew after all which book it was. She plunged her hand to the shelf and withdrew a dust-covered book:
The Death of Adolf Hitler
. She paged through it, and there indeed was the facsimile.

She could feel hives blooming on her neck. She was so excited—it was as if someone else’s body were moving under her head. Her heart beat, and it was hardly her own heart.

By the time Margaret finished, her hands were shaking and her eyes were wet; she thought they were bleeding, but it was only a few tears. Magda’s strange idea gripped her—this choosing of death over shame.

Margaret made herself ready and went to bed. For a long time she lay still under the covers. It was raining out and there came a tapping. The panes shook.

Margaret could not sleep. She began to read a second time, now
with heavier eyes. She read about Magda Goebbels’s high marks in
Gymnasium;
about the details of her relationship with the Zionist Arlosoroff; about Magda’s own efforts on behalf of the Zionist movement as a young woman. Regarding the Soviet inquest, she learned that Magda killed her children with the help of a doctor, that none of the children had struggled, except the oldest girl, who, according to the coroner’s report, had bruises on her body and so apparently had been held down. No one was sure exactly what the poison was, as the Russian coroner had not been able to ascertain, but it left the tips of the children’s fingers yellow. When Margaret read this, she was very quiet inside, her thoughts slowing and then stopping altogether, her head pulsing.

It was almost morning. Margaret got out of bed. She had a thick twist of energy in her chest.

She took a gesso board out of the closet. She flipped through the biography of Magda, to its glossy centerfold pictures. She propped the book up on the desk. Over the gesso board, her hands moved. She was surprised at herself, and frightened. Her fingers were of steel, and she applied so much pressure to the stick of charcoal that twice she broke it. Finally she drew with only a nub. She watched as Magda Goebbels’s face bloomed in black lines. Magda Goebbels’s face rose up, in the form of a glamour shot taken in Magda’s youth. It was a young face, from the time before she had given birth to any of her six children with Goebbels.

The image of the face held Margaret and mesmerized her. It had traces of all the later forms of ugliness that came to dominate—the low, heavy brow bone; the snideness of the lines between the wing of the nose and outer corner of the lip; the thin mouth; the priggish tilt of the forehead. And yet—and here is where Margaret dragged her charcoal back and forth, craving the curve: something, something in the young face was still bleeding, still searching for metaphysics, and Margaret carefully traced every softness and hardness. She felt her disgust stretching, becoming a concentration that was almost tenderness.

Later she took out oils. She brought in color. One corner of the face became so vivid, it seemed ready to move. Margaret, possessed by some devil, produced a large, cold face, with silver-blond, salon-waved hair—a face glaring out at her with civilized eyes and callousness. Margaret brought in the squeezed-out bits of light and dark, setting
the woman’s hair to gleaming, the shadows of her nostrils to deepening. And finally, Magda Goebbels stared out at Margaret Taub, pert and quizzical.

As dawn broke
, Margaret was in bed. The last thing she remembered before falling asleep was that she could feel the heat of a bird at the window, the slash of its wings against the glass—although it may have been nothing more than the rain grown violent.

T
he Grunewaldstrasse was an old West Berliner street, too far behind the front lines to have been rocked by the fall of the Wall or any other terror of the metropolis, so the street did not want for eyes, the kind of eyes that grow like lichen if a street knows no heavy winds.

Even an abbreviated inventory must include the eyes of the old lady from Armenia with bottle-black hair, who leaned permanently from the window of a half-height flat that was squeezed under the airy
belétage
at Number 89. She folded her arms across the cobwebbed ledge and watched, especially at night. Although it was not unheard of that a pedestrian’s eyes wandered up and met the old lady’s by accident, something about the way her eyelids squared with her brow seemed to suggest a lack of involvement: “have no fear” they seemed to say—“we will not tell a soul if we see you hot-wire a 1986 Mercedes.” Meanwhile, across the street, two glossy dogs were on standby behind the door at the Internet café. They had eyes as blue as forget-me-nots, with the same yellow center, and roused themselves for the man in a neon orange traffic cop’s uniform, who passed several times each day, bicycling up and down the Grunewaldstrasse without once touching the handlebars, yelling his head off. Everyone called him Loud Guy, or sometimes only The Loud One.

So if Erich, the
Hausmeister
at Number 88, where Margaret Taub lived, was watching everyone and everything, who could blame him? He told himself it was a defensive stance—he lived in a neighborhood of ghouls.

Erich was the hero of his own story. In the courtyard of Margaret’s building he lived, in a little ivy-covered house. He was unusually fleshless, his skull easily visible through the skin of his face, and already the night when Margaret returned from the Grunewald Forest, he had seen her while she was heaving clumps of clothing into the trash. And he had observed her long before that as well.

Erich was old. He seemed stern but in fact he was kindly; he was
blindingly efficient, and he was knowledgeable about all matters literal and very few matters figurative. He was one of those men who think simply but are politically resolute, much like the plain-spoken Georg Elser, the carpenter who built cabinets and clocks, kept his own counsel, and in 1938 almost managed to assassinate Hitler singlehandedly.

Erich was an
Autonomer
, an old one—he had been part of the ’68 generation before there was a ’68 generation to be a part of, one of those West Berliner anti-warriors who use the informal
du
to one and all, even to plumbers and bank tellers, and the plumbers and bank tellers almost fall to the floor with a heart attack at the audacity if they are new to the quarter and he hasn’t broken them in yet, although around here, almost everyone was broken in long ago.

Now it happens that Erich’s story must be told as well, for through no fault of his own (almost no fault of his own, that is), he was destined to betray Margaret Taub.

The very same morning the city turned to flesh, Erich was wearing his black leather pants and matching vest, busying himself eagerly, delivering mail from the co-op management to the tenants. This was a practice he had thought up himself, officially so that the management could save the cost of postage, but he was also (although he would deny it if accused) using the opportunity to peek at the contents of each letter box—no real reason and it was certainly not mean-spirited, but he was interested. To see who had letters from the tax office, who had letters from collection agencies, and by Jove, if he saw a letter from abroad, perhaps from a lover! These were his great pleasures. Erich, who as a young man had been an anarchist, was, in his old age, something he would never have expected. His anarchism had taken a turn for the officious, his native kindness had twisted into rodent-like curiosity.

After the letters, he would check the trash. Here too, he had been active: Erich had introduced a new system of trash sorting which would save the building co-op forty euros each month. It meant the recycling was far stricter than in other living communities. A relatively low rate of compliance concerned him. Certain tenants insisted on throwing trash into improper receptacles, and thus he found himself required to sort through the trash thoroughly every week, reorganizing, rescuing treasures here and there. Today he pulled various letters and even a couple of books out of the slimy heat of the decomposing
biodegradables, also a glass jar full of pickles! The letters, at least—he could easily see the names of the addressees. He would have a look at them, and then take the matter up with those individuals later.

He heard the main door to the apartment house open. Sunlight broke through from the carriage entryway. He poked forth his head. Ah, it was the American. He rustled through the trash again, watching her out of the corner of his eye.

The foreign girl was a difficult case. She always seemed to be sunken, her eyelids heavy. Erich had theories on this. In the past he had played with the idea that she slept fifteen hours a night. He knew when she came in (as he knew when everyone came in) and he knew when she went out (he could see these things from his garden house in the courtyard), and he also had a good view of when her lights were on and when they were off. Unless she was reading with a flashlight, there was no way around it: the girl slept extremely long hours. This was one of the benedictions of the winter for Erich, when the sun in Berlin rises so late and sets so early—he had an unusually profound insight into the sleeping habits of the building’s tenants.

Still, he considered the possibility that the American, this Margaret, had found some way to fool him. It seemed like her, somehow. Maybe she was awake in some invisible corner of the flat. He had had certain outrageous experiences with her in the past that would support this. On one occasion when her lights were
on
, Erich went and rang her bell in order to discuss with her the new basement allotments, and she did not come to the door. Even after repeated ringing of the bell. He went back downstairs and looked up at her windows again and saw the lights were certainly on and a shadow was moving behind the curtains. He went up and rang the bell more forcefully. Still, she did not come to the door. He watched from his house in the courtyard as her bathroom window went from open to shut, and he fumed. Erich would not have minded helping the girl, back at the beginning. She was not unsympathetic. But she had been so morose toward the community for several years now, he had lost his goodwill.