The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,109

away from each other.” He gave her a pained and serious look.

“No, I’ll never come back,” Margaret said, her voice thick.

“You’re vicious. How you women torture me. And you Americans are the most terrible. You learn it from the oil barons. You’re warmongers.”

“Don’t talk to me.” Margaret said. Amadeus was quiet. Margaret spoke again: “I’ll leave you forever someday. And when I do, it will be terrible. Terrible things will happen.”

“But not now,” and he threw a half a breadstick into her hair, which was curly and could catch things, and then reached to get it, as if he were drawing it out of her ear. “There now, look at that, you’ve got breadsticks in your ears. Why do you store your breadsticks there?”

He winked at her and laughed uncertainly, catching her eye. At last, Margaret smiled.

On Amadeus’s birthday, he threw a party. He invited Margaret, typical of his munificence when it came to sharing his life with both his mistress and his wife.

The day of the party came and Margaret’s heart scratched at her throat from the early morning. There was something that had risen in her like an enchanted beanstalk overnight, with a great, muscular hydraulic push out from the ground. It was a burning jealousy. She thought of Amadeus’s wife, Asja—nowadays she knew a thing or two about her. The woman was also an academic. Her name had a von and her West German family had a large house on Lake Constance. Although Margaret sometimes thought she was as much in love with the idea of Asja as she was in love with the idea of Amadeus, she was not ready to cede him to her; she had been convinced for some time now that it was she, Margaret, that he loved, not his wife. So she planned her day carefully. First, she would go to the shops and buy herself a new dress—so that she would stun all who saw her. She repeated several times to herself, “She shall not look better than I.” Then, she would go and have a free makeover at the French department store where they were having a promotion, and then she would go up to Alexanderplatz and pick out a gift for Amadeus at the electronics store there, and finally she would stop by a bar and get herself a stiff drink to make the arrival easier.

This was the breed of desperation that flourished throughout the affair.

Margaret did go to the shops, but it took her a very long time to make up her mind about a dress, and she fell behind on time. In the end, she chose a white canvas one that grazed her self-consciously small waist, clutching close around her self-consciously well-shaped breasts. It closed with a red belt. She went home to change into it, and in the end had to race to Alexanderplatz, where once again the shopping took longer than expected. She ended up going down a side street to a junk shop, where she picked out an antique radio in a teak case. The radio was very heavy, and she worried that its grime would get on her white dress, so she carefully wrapped it in her trench coat, and became very cold as she lugged it uphill, north into Prenzlauer Berg. In those days the trip from Alexanderplatz into Prenzlauer Berg was still through unreconstructed factory buildings abandoned like silos, and walking up the empty streets, with their slopes and brown cobblestones, she was alone. She listened to the sound of swallows. She passed leafy residences and the brick water tower that rises into view from behind a gentle hill, and she realized that with the heavy radio in her arms, she could hardly go into a bar or rather, if she did, she would attract too much attention.

So instead, her stomach rising into a collection of hasty insects, she stopped just before she got to Amadeus’s fine apartment on the Winsstrasse at a Döner kiosk, where she bought a little flask of vodka from a smiling Turk. He watched her as she drank. Margaret felt very conscious of being a girl in a white form-hugging dress. She quickly finished almost the entire little bottle, right there on the street. When asked, she made up a story: she told the Turk that she was about to see her beloved whom she hadn’t seen in many years; she was frightened of what he would think of her after all the time passed. He

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