The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,129
garage—one fine day—and Amadeus found him after school.
One could tell a story of an uninsulated family. One could say that Amadeus had no desire for children because non-disappearance of people and continuity of home were lacking in the family’s blood, and these are the things that make children welcome: home and non-disappearance of people.
One could ask what happens to people who never go back.
One could ask what becomes of the children of people who never went home. One could say the family had been in a lock-dance with the twin forces of death and not-coming-home for as long as anyone could remember, a dance whose steps were of the same pattern as Amadeus’s relationship with women—beckon and retreat, beckon and retreat. His was the life that doesn’t entirely want to live, the desire that never finds its ease, the thirst for a milk that you are poisoning even as you drink. That a family that never looks back creates a son like Amadeus—a man who looks back always, but on things painless and far away, insulates himself from knowing how close to the surface of the skin his blood runs.
Yes, one could say all of that, or one could drop the topic and say instead that Amadeus simply didn’t like children and never had.
And whatever story one chose to tell, the fact was that Amadeus desperately did not want whatever was growing inside Margaret’s young, non-European body.
She had caught him off guard.
When she told him about the pregnancy, Amadeus slapped her across the face. He was a little drunk.
When he hit her, Margaret looked as if she had swallowed a silver dollar; it was caught in her esophagus.
Then he offered her money. He might have wasted time doubting the child was his, but he knew about Margaret and her self-sacrificial gambits. She was too careful to accidentally get pregnant by the wrong man. He zipped up his pants and went home. He transferred the money into her account, and he made sure he never saw her again.
Margaret fell behind at the university. She stayed up late thinking of the baby and wondering what kind it would be.
She was still in love with Amadeus.
She was married to her body now. Part of him was in it. She should have thought of how to care for herself, but instead she was still staring at Amadeus in her mind, wondering when he would come back to her. For the life of her, she could not leave the city where he was.
At some point during the pregnancy, she received a letter from him. The letter told a story of her own mother and father. It was more than a lock-dance with death and not-coming-home, she thought then. It was more than a fear of children. He had never loved her, he had never even seen her. At least, this was how she understood it. Her world unlaced.
He wrote:
Dear Margaret,
I’m not willing to meet you. Do you hear? Don’t come by here like that.
I want you to listen to me. I’m going to tell you something that will make you flinch, but you deserve it. Maybe it will make you understand. You have forced me to the wall. It’s something to do with your mother and father.
In 1979, your parents spent the summer in West Berlin. Your father was doing research, and sometimes they came over to the East to see his mother. It must have been five or six times. When they did, I used to go and meet them. I’d wait outside of the checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse, cool my heels on the other side of the river, trying to be a bit discreet. (Even being seen with them—Westerners, and your father a dissident—it was a liability for me. That was back when I was trying to get into the Party.) So I waited on the Northern side, under the big old copper birch trees that stand on the chalk banks there. I could see the station, and the border patrol on the other side of the river through the leaves, and the S-Bahn trains would curve in from the West. I could make them out through the trees.
I’m just trying to paint a picture for you, so you understand.
I’d sit and smoke, and at some point they’d turn up. Out of the Tränenpalast they’d be coming, looking rumpled and triumphant. Sometimes they would have been waiting in line to get through and sometimes it would have taken quite a long time.