The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,132
are too small to be endured—the sheerest grains of sand, they fall through the cracks of any defense. She remembered the bracelet Amadeus had given her—she broke it on the sidewalk the same day; the smell between his shoulder and his neck. And her life split into two films, two films that had nothing to do with each other. She longed to let water flow over the newly remembered second film, ruin the celluloid. She was having dreams of chickens trapped in burning yards, dreams of houses built on sand washing into the sea, dreams of cruelty from strangers.
Until finally, one night, she had a dream that was worse than the chickens.
It was the worst thing of all. She had a dream of the Salzburgerstrasse—the Strauss family’s last home.
In the dream, it was raining outside. The foyer of Number 14 was hushed, and the foliage pressed against the glass from the mossy courtyard, leaves and branches thick as tongues, soaked in rain. Already everything was suffused with what was coming.
Outside, a few shrubberies and one or two puny saplings loomed lushly, deliriously so: a wall of pity-green flowers, drawing their tongues along the panes of glass in the aluminum wind.
Margaret went out to the courtyard, in search of the speaking pool, full of anticipation. She put her ear into the pool as she had done once before. All was murky. The goldfish were gone.
Beneath the water, only silence had its home. Margaret gave up at last. Her ear was cold. She went back inside, shaking droplets from her hair. She walked through the grey velvet interior to the mirror, to the place where she had first seen Regina.
The room smelled of dust. She went to the oval of the mirror and brought her eyes up.
The room was darker than it had been a moment before.
Margaret touched the frame and saw her fingers were shaking. She could hear a fluttering.
Oh, the shadow-woman appeared almost right away. Glowing, it moved in beside her, glowing, the woman in her faded hair and brittle, many-times-washed, starched lace collar. There was Regina, there she was, looking out at Margaret.
Regina was as Margaret remembered, only far more so. Her eyes were large and round and pooling and her glance was sweet and soft and reproachful. She was silent, and for a fraction of a second, Margaret felt herself begin to catapult on waves of the old ecstasy.
Almost right away however, the life inverted. First, it was the smell of mildew. Margaret saw something in the woman’s face. There was a glint of blood. A glint of blood in her cheeks—something grasping—hope or hatred or fear, Margaret could not tell, but it was the manifestation of a quickened heart.
Margaret spoke first. “I wanted to know about—our game of Hearts.” Her voice rasped in the silent room.
Regina looked to the side. She sighed. She looked around, but not at Margaret, and she flushed. Margaret repeated herself more desperately now. “Won’t you play?”
Regina sighed again, strangely, cryptically. She pulled at her hair, then she shrugged, and her eyes flashed in a way that spoke of some hidden passion. She looked at Margaret and seemed to muster her.
Margaret saw something bad in that look. In a rush, as if in a reflexive gesture of self-defense, Margaret brought her arms up toward those narrow shoulders beyond the glass, and her movement was two things at once: both meant to hold Regina back from her, but also the beginning of an embrace.
Before her fingertips could touch the glass, Regina spoke, and her voice shattered the room. “I was lying, Margaret. Ich habe gelogen.”
In the foyer a smell of tundra rose, and then a smell like sweet grasses beginning to rot at the end of summer. The smell of herd animals and manure, and then the smell of wet, overripe clover. The room began to change; the streetlights’ bulbs, aloft in their cast-iron, came on outside; the glass at the front of the foyer and also at the back pressed toward Margaret; the walls of green flowers floated nearer. Each cupping blossom began to spin, cups of water glinting in the light, and the water carried the scent of tundra, the scent of an old and tired buffalo lying dead or ready to die near the water, the scent of fish on sparkling northern riverbanks that are eaten and later shat out. Despite everything, I believe in the good of humanity, came a whisper.