The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,127

different time. The variation seemed to breathe life into the name: a rag on a clothesline animated by a breeze, the variation of the script whispered “Karla.”

Margaret put the books back into the shelf. She looked out the window. She sat down on the bed. She got up and thought through the story she had heard from the beginning to the end, from the canaries, to the birth, to the grass on the mountainside.

The window to her bedroom was open, and the white cotton curtains moved slowly, swaying to their own dirge. Something about the movement of the curtains made her think of her life with the hawk-woman, Magda Goebbels. A very slight shudder ran through her. Regina Strauss’s voice—how could she be sure of the sound of it? Had it really been her? She could not help but recognize the presence in that story of a book she owned. It made the entire thing suspicious. Perhaps it had all been her own madness. Now, in her mind, the sound of the woman’s voice was filled with a crackling, obstructing static. The static obstruction was Margaret’s life.

And there had been more than one such trace.

But Margaret wanted it to be a real communication from beyond the grave. The desire rose in her, very hard and very strong, steam-rolling her consciousness. She put her head on the desk and strained to remember one last detail of the story, the detail that could not possibly be invented, the detail that would be both the proof and the borrowed rib.

Instead, all at once and without warning, she began to cry. She cried and cried. Margaret cried because she could not remember any such detail. She cried because their lives had been stolen then and forever. She cried for what had happened in her own night’s yard, for the deprivation. She cried because their lives had been thrown away senselessly and they had no memory except this moribund memory she had lent to them herself.

She cried. She had water coming out her mouth and nose. The sobs began to rack her as though she were shaken by a foreign body—a three-hundred-pound angel come to beat her into submission. The effort of holding her body upright at the desk, her white fingers gripping the polished wood, took all her strength.

There was a vacancy like hunger in her chest—the desire to give herself to them by believing. Isn’t that all that’s left to give the dead? What a slight gift. But no, she thought, it’s not slight. (This was a wail, heartbroken rage.) Anybody on the street—if you ask: Would you like to be remembered after you die?—the answer will always be yes. Immortality is desired more than food and air. It is not so terrible to assume no one wants to die. The Strausses should be real, she thought, and they should have a mind wrapped uncritically around them in an embrace, a mind that doesn’t panic—so they won’t have to scrounge or connive in lust or anger—someone giving their lives the floating, crystalline perfection of angels riding on white horses above the waves of this worldly storm—someone to catch them in a net!, her heart screamed. I will catch them in a net, and even if the thing in the net is nothing but a cipher, the net will be real, and the net will be beautiful.

How she longed to hear the voice of Regina Strauss again, if only for a moment. This was her longing now. The voice was the meaning, the voice was the ghost.

Margaret recognized a ghost for what it was: a ghost is the resonance of a life. A ghost is the intense and prolonged sympathetic vibration for the dead in the world of the living. A ghost is something in which everyone can and must believe.

Margaret drank a glass of water. She breathed in and out. She looked at the blue glass in her hand. There were many tiny air bubbles caught in the glass. The water, too, was full of points of light. The movement of water from the blue glass to the muddy pink flesh of Margaret’s throat occurred to her as something significant and great, and in a wave of happiness, she ate some thick bread with pieces of carrot in it; she cut up a tomato and ate that too, and then she drank more water. Her head was clearing at the pace of a tide, at the pace of the sun moving across the