The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,126

somehow during the worst itself, I only thought about this or that part of now. It was through a series of very soft, gradual changes that I became accustomed to a new trajectory for my life and the lives of my children. When I was young I had thought I would live with a family, a community, someday likely have grandchildren. Now I did not have these ambitions any longer. Instead I thought, Perhaps tomorrow I’ll make a doll out of the red velvet of the sofa cushions for Gerda. We don’t need the sofa cushions anymore. And these small things rather than the large things kept me in the habit of moving forward. And on some lighthearted days I even thought that the ambitions could be halved forevermore without a change in my moment-to-moment happiness, like the mathematical paradox of a man crossing half a room, and then half the remaining length, and so forth, and thus never reaching the other end of the room. The idea of a changed period of time for my life, once it was established, filled me with neither fear nor intense loathing—fear is rooted in uncertainty, and unlike Franz, I had no uncertainty.

I don’t mean to say that’s the way I look back on my life now from up here. In the nightmares I sometimes have while sleeping in eternity, I know horror, disgust, and hatred over what was done to us—and these feelings are truer because they see the tragedy in its entirety. It is with these feelings, too, that you should remember us.

But I will still insist that often in my daily life at the end, every change in our circumstances took on that muted quality that gently colors the life of any sane person, for good or ill. No matter how misshapen or how terrible true life becomes, it is always calmer, less emotionally vibrant than in those vivid dreams that prepared me for our death.

As for why we killed ourselves the way we did: we thought better to die like the canary than to die like the hunted. Every day is a good day to be born, every day is a good day to die.

From those years, what I remember most is our picture book, Du Mein Tirol, with the photographs of the fresh alpine air, and the thickness of the grass on the mountainside. The sound of the waterfall, the smell of cow dung.

When Margaret woke, she was lying on the ground next to the goldfish pond at Salzburgerstrasse 8. The hair on her head was matted and wet.

She had been so deeply concentrated for so many hours, her body had gone lost. The fatigue, the limpness, that comes of such concentration broke over her. She sat up very slowly. Her face was ashen. She felt as though there was less oxygen in the air than there had been before, and her throat was full of lumps.

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After she got home, she went around for a while as if nothing had happened. She was terribly hungry. She opened a can of kidney beans and another of peeled tomatoes and dropped them into a pot. The apartment around her smelled of old musty carpets; the smell reached her sharply. She chopped onions and fried them. She browned a fist of hamburger. She glanced under the toaster as she searched for the wooden spoon. She saw the crumbs there. She added the meat to the pot. Looking down into it, she felt a nausea.

She left the food simmering and went into the bedroom.

She searched through the titles on the bookshelf, Yes, there was a book called Du Mein Tirol in her own shelf. It was part of a series of travel picture books from the 1930s. She had bought them at the flea market for pennies. She fingered the yellowed, fraying pages.

What she had just heard in the Salzburgerstrasse, was it a communication from beyond the grave?

Or had she dreamt the whole thing herself?

She desperately wanted it to be a communication from beyond the grave.

She looked more closely at Du Mein Tirol. For the first time, she noticed that on the frontispiece of the book, the name “Karla” was written in a script both childish and old-fashioned. She looked through all the books in the series and saw that Karla had signed her name in each one. The signature was a little different in each book, and in different colors of ink, as though Karla had written each signature at a