The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,12

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

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