The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,121

heard about the rule.

But Frau Schivelbusch began to eye me, and I could see she was estimating my fur coat. It wasn’t long before she had given the tip to the Gestapo—I knew it was her by her eyes. They came banging on the door. Franz went to answer with Gerda in his arms. My little girl was two years old then.

When they left, they had my fur coat and all the wool sweaters with them. The sweaters I had knitted myself.

I became sick with influenza the next month, most surely because I was always so cold, rubbing my red hands together. My ears when I came home from work every night were pink like the flower they call the bleeding heart, as Franz said, always his way to see the beauty in things. Perhaps that was what caused his terrible melancholia.

During my illness I had a very high fever, my lungs were so full of fluid I couldn’t sleep, and my cough was painful like a blunt knife scraping my lungs.

In my sickbed I became more and more deeply removed from myself. My head was spinning, my soul was floating. After the days without sleep, I was somewhere far away. Thinking back on that time, I have memories, very vivid memories. For days on end, I left my body and went to some place of hallucination.

In my sickened state, my thoughts about my belly, now round with eight months of child, completely changed. I dreamt this roundness was a unit of earth burying me under the ground—the weight of it. As I lay sweating and feverish on my back, I dreamt I was already buried. Or, more precisely I should say: I dreamt my body was already buried. My soul, for its part, flew straight off. As it happened, straight into the Alps of Switzerland.

As a girl, my father used to take me with him when he went on business to Paris, and afterward we would travel to Switzerland to see an old friend of his, a certain Oswald in Basel. My father was a hobby botanist. He used to say that you didn’t know what it was to love a plant or flower until you had loved it in the pure sunlight and sweet clover scent of a mountainside in Switzerland, where the colors are brighter, and life a more virtuous adventure. Myself, I don’t remember the scent of clover so well as I remember the mountain reek of cow dung, fresh milk, and the cheese of Gruyère, but these memories of smells are happy ones.

So in these days of sickness in February of 1942 I remember my soul floating into the Alps and coming to rest next to a waterfall on the mountainside, in heavy sunlight. I was weightless, carefree, as if all things in the dark world were very far away. I sat by the water, the sun warmed me just enough, and the rushing water exhaled a cool windiness that refreshed me, also just enough. The grass blazed green, the sky blazed blue, and the mountaintops stretched off and off into the far azure. I released my feet from my pinching winter shoes as if I had been bound in the leather for a hundred years, and my toes spread at last. I dangled my feet in the water, as I had as a girl. I breathed deeply, filled with the soaking joy that only a dream can bring.

After a while, on the bough of a fir tree standing just a few paces away from me, a canary of a bright yellow color alighted, like a dab of ochre paint.

“Ferdinand,” I said in surprise.

The bird cocked his head

“Ah, Ferdinand,” I said, my mood drawn down by this reminder of home.

The bird fluttered to the ground, and hopped onto one of the stones not far from me. He cocked his head at such a jaunty angle, and then he spoke to me.

“What is it you’re doing here?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you mean, birdie.”

“You die, lady. You leave your children who are living.”

I was very surprised at this suggestion that I was dead or dying. Up until that moment I had not really thought of it in those terms—I don’t know how to explain. It was true I had a strong sense that my body had been buried. And yet, I did not think of myself as dead. So I went over this news of my death. I tried to examine my emotions. I found