The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,133

then Regina began to tell a story. A different story. At first Margaret could not hear her; she had an auditory hallucination like a loud report. She thought: Everyone is full of danger, but this one person must not be changeable, this one person is my life. Regina’s white earlobes caught the light and Margaret could see little earrings on her lobes, what had once been pearls, although the globes of them had been crushed in some long-since-extinguished fury.

She had been enraged, Regina said. She had been panicked, eager, hopeless and blistering. She might have taken the children to her husband’s family in the country—yes, for a time, there had been that choice.

But when she still had the chance, she and her husband were quarreling. After her neighbors betrayed her, she could no longer make out the snowy peaks and icy brooks of the Alps—no, that had been a lie, and there was no thought of reading to the children. They had barely enough to eat. And he, her husband, was vile; his mother, too—she did not send them food packages though in the country she had more for one person than they had for five, and once even, several years before—it burned Regina’s mind, oh how it burned—she had flung one of Regina’s dishes to the ground for its pattern of roses, a pattern that did not match the dishes she had given them. The unmatched dish “injured her eyes,” the mother-in-law said. (“It was my dish,” Regina said. “It was my own dish.”)

Given the chance, Regina dragged her feet. She suggested first of all to her husband that perhaps she would not take the children to his mother’s after all. Just to see what he would say. And to her surprise he did not reply. He walked meekly to the park. Later that same day he came back. He said simply: I want a divorce. He said he would take the children with him.

That night, when she sat partially undressed—she was bathing the children in a tub it had taken her much labor to fill with hot water—Franz looked at a mole on her back and he remarked on it.

And in that instant she felt under his eyes like an old and ugly and dirtied woman and a flickering came before her and her head twisted. Regina’s mind threw itself against the bars of its cage with all its weight then. Outwardly she set her mouth and spoke to Franz all at once, in a strange voice she did not recognize, about how they would have coconut cakes after the war.

And her husband might have noticed her humiliation.

When the children were breathing evenly, after her husband was laid to bed on corduroy cushions by the kitchen window where he had exiled himself—his white face, his open mouth, the children too sweet for this world—the branches of the naked trees tapped at the frozen glass. Regina was frightened and grasping. She was stubborn and feverish and her other chest—where was her true chest, where was her true heart?—her other chest was plugged with the thirst for vengeance, not only against her husband but against this mad and ugly world. His eyes fluttered as he slept and his cheeks were deep rose. What happened as they died, here in this house, was something like the spinning claws of a cornered bear—if you take them with you, no one shall live.

So together, they died.

All the gentleness in Regina’s face was dissolved. As she spoke to Margaret now, all the broad wisdom was revoked.

It broke Margaret’s heart.

“I barely lied.” Regina breathed heavily. “I only lied about how I felt. About how I wish we had been. About the feeling within the family, about our psychic life. I did not lie about what happened. If you recall, I never claimed Franz took any part in it.”

Margaret struggled to clear her mind. In fact she made an effort to correlate the details of this story with the other one. She saw this was true, perhaps not exactly, but more or less—the main difference was indeed the feeling, the emotional shades.

“But,” said Margaret, her voice weak. She thought of how this new story might be taken apart; about how the variations, the fabrications, might continue in layer upon layer forever. “But can you tell me …” and now Margaret spoke haltingly, hoping to catch Regina out. “The gas was in the kitchen, you say?”

“I already told you. I didn’t move him. For weeks Franz had