The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,134

been sleeping in the kitchen anyway, on a bed he made up for himself by the window. We did not get along. As for the children—they slept with me in the bedroom, but children are easy to carry without waking, once they sleep.”

“I see,” Margaret faltered. “What about the birds?” She shuddered. “Was that true?”

“That was true, every word,” Regina said. She smiled. The way her eyes moved, it seemed she was drugged—her pupils were unnaturally large. “With one difference. After they went to Frau Schivelbusch, I did something. I broke into her apartment when she was at church, and I killed them both—strong Sarto and weak Ferdinand. And Frau Schivelbusch—I would have killed her too.” Regina paused. “We were not weak,” she said. “We were not the kind of birds—who don’t give a second fight.”

Margaret cast her eyes down.

Something was happening inside her. Something that was directed not at Regina but at herself.

She felt the chills that accompany a fever. She wrapped her arms around her chest but still she was terribly cold. An involuntary refrain rose in her: Despite everything, I believe in the good of humanity. It was a cold, cold refrain. She thought—and now the coldness, the causticity of her thoughts grew further still—of Walter Benjamin, living just a few blocks from this apartment house, as he wrote: “Kitsch is nothing more than art that has absolute, one-hundred-percent, immediate use-value.” She shivered horribly. To herself, she said: My love has been greedy. My love has had use-value. Her face froze in shame. The Family Strauss—she had latched onto them and used them. She had made them into the perfect sacrifice, just as—her thoughts blackened, swirling in mud—a needy world used Anne Frank, that sweet and self-complete girl, as precisely the sacrifice it needed. To have sacrificed the best, Margaret thought—that was what was craved. Old man history never gets away without surrendering up his prize roses—his hostages of myth and time.

The doctor’s pronouncements had planted the seeds, and now they were pushing up. If we find a lamb, Margaret was telling herself spittingly, a suitable lamb, and look at it very hard, and agree as a people, as a civilization, that we have, during one long and terrible night of the soul, given up the finest thing to the devil—rendered up the dearest, most gracious, most openhearted thing to the devil, then all human rivalry will be dissolved at its acme; all guilt paid for in one stroke. The finest thing dissolved before it can be owned.

Margaret felt this horribly, and in her bitterness the entire thing struck her as defiled and unforgivable, as a crime of the living against the dead. And it was not even because this was why people being murdered now, in other parts of the world, are not rescued—because no one knows yet whether they are the kinds of victims that are needed: the pure, the innocent, and the humble, and so we will wait with our hands steepled, and let them go it alone, calling them up for service only after their throats are slit.

No, it was not even this that crushed her.

It was the symbolic itself. Abruptly, Margaret rebelled against—for she could not bear it any longer—innocence by proxy. She could not stand atonement through metaphor.

She looked back into the mirror at Regina standing next to her own reflected face.

“You lied to me,” she said.

“I could not have lied,” Regina said, and in a new, deeper voice, almost a growl: “I could not even speak.” Her words were slurred.

“You murdered your children,” Margaret said.

There was a hissing sound. Words rose as though sizzling in fat.

“I would have cut out their hearts.”

Margaret drew back. Shivers ran up and down her and up and down her sweat-drenched face. She wanted to flee—to flee for the rest of her life. It is impossible to describe how searingly Regina’s words burnt her mind.

Margaret raised her arm to shield her face, but she could see the woman was changing. She was darkening, broadening, and seemed covered in fat and fur. A pelt had grown on her. And more than anything now, it was the smell of grasses. A smell of grasses in the body of a fine and splendidly muscled animal. She was taller than Margaret now, far taller—she was filling out into the most dangerously mothering animal of all—she was a brown-black member of the ursine family, a rearing bear, with paws like hands, eyes like pinecones, and mouth sweet and dandy and