The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,128

sky.

She felt clean—the tears still wet on her face were made of the salt and water of her body, a body that was—finally—not entirely bad, a body that was full of concern and full of care.

I love them, she thought, and she realized right away that she had loved the Family Strauss for a long time. She had never allowed herself the identification, but she now saw that it didn’t matter whether she was worthy of it, it was still there—this love that made her eyes again fill with tears.

The stew had burned in the meantime; it didn’t matter. Margaret was full of joy, full of recognition. And tonight she went so far as to think that perhaps she did not deserve to die.

PART III

TUNNEL

The addiction to a center, above all to the human center, usually ends in the four-hundred-year-old cell between witness and perpetrator. You sacrifice yourself again in the figure of a black reflector. And then they have you just where they wanted you. You are the center.

—SASCHA ANDERSON

TWENTY-NINE • Iron Waves

His eyes—blue, blue, the color of lake water, ringed with black lashes. His skin: brown and pink with dark moles.

She had told Amadeus she was expecting a child.

It was late spring of 2002, and they were sitting on a bench in an overgrown corner of the Volkspark that runs along Weinbergsweg, where the earth smells of worms and poison ivy and broken beer bottles. They had just had sex in the dark, on a bench. Margaret had not allowed him to get her drunk and Amadeus could never relax when a woman was not drunk, and he had dropped all semblance of courtship. Revelers were coming out of the bars on the hill and their voices were loud, but they couldn’t see Margaret and Amadeus through the thick of the bushes.

Amadeus suspected instantly that this was the thrust of a well-planned dagger. How could it have been accidental, when he had been so careful? At least, almost always he had been so careful. Maybe it was an accident. But he had seen the witch, the vixen, the succubus, with her hand covered in ejaculate, and he shuddered at where she put her fingers. He knew. He knew what this was, despite her play of guilelessness.

He offered her two thousand euros, an abortion, and a one-way ticket to New York City.

He was angry, this man who had never before wanted a lover to leave his neighborhood. It was not merely because Margaret was such a ruthless shrew in her destruction of his marriage. His marriage was brittle, and its existence, at this point, arbitrary. Nor was his anger because of her duplicity. What would have been the crucial point for most men, the thing that would have destroyed all hope of happiness—that she had tricked him into having a child—was not what most bothered Amadeus. He expected this kind of thing from women. No, what made him livid, turned him against her with the full force of his personality, was that she was trying to make out of their love affair a small human being.

Amadeus had never wanted a child, never under any circumstances, not with his wife, and not with anyone else.

There was a story one could tell, a story of a family, the mother’s birth in the Ukraine followed ten years later by the grandfather’s deportation to Siberia. One could tell of how the grandfather was never heard from again—or at least not until fifty-five years later when one found out he was remarried and living in Vladivostok. You could tell of how the grandmother, with three children at the time of her husband’s disappearance, made her way alone to Brandenburg overland on foot with the children in wartime, how she had turned hard, when she didn’t have enough to feed them. Of how since then she had not once been back to Volhynia, where she was born, where she bore her children, where her family had worked the land for five generations. Of how her oldest daughter married a certain Heinrich whose father was killed outside Leningrad; Heinrich, who fled from Königsberg to Leipzig in 1945, and never once went home. Of how at Amadeus’s birth, father and mother did not react to the child. One could tell of how Heinrich stopped looking Amadeus in the face when he was nine years old, the same age Heinrich was when his father was killed outside Leningrad. One could tell of how Heinrich hanged himself in the