The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,148

break was taken, he played on the harmonica the song “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind!” [You Are Crazy, My Child].

He used to play that song to me, Margaret. That’s how I got singing it to you, before I knew any of this. Before I had done “research.” Anyway, this is why your mom and I changed the last name. That asswipe can rot in hell, and I won’t hear his screams. Otherwise, with my special hearing, you know I hear very well. Sometimes I hear the real pine needles in the forest, and the pins and needles as they go into my old dad’s sides. I always hear him screaming down there. Even the devil feels the heat of the fires they’ve got down there, and when it’s your own dad especially, you can hear him scratching and clawing and just trying to get out of the lakes of fires they’ve got down there. But I won’t hear the screams, I haven’t heard them since we changed the name. It was a simple thing. When you were four years old, I guess you were too little to notice, a few days after your birthday, we did it. Just from Täubner to Taub, but doesn’t it fit? We became the Taub family. (You know what Taub means, right? Deaf.) I know it’s hard for you to understand. I thought I was helping you if I didn’t explain. If I didn’t tell Maggie what kind of an old Opa she had, she wouldn’t hear the screams like her dad did. Little Maggie, you were a good girl. We used to have another name but maybe you can accept that and love the new one as I do. Your mom is the one who told me to tell you. She said you were old enough now. Don’t give your mom any trouble, okay?

Well, nice talking to you …

Good luck with your life,

Love you …

Your Dad

P.S. Any misspelled words are stickly (see, I typed strickly …) typos. And grammatical styling is for purposes of camouflage.

Margaret remembered her father’s letter. The hawk-woman on her throne was still murmuring and hissing. The woman made sentences, spinning the chubby glass cylinder around in her emerald fingers like a baton, laughing raucously, although Margaret could barely hear her for the pain.

Margaret closed her eyes. Fear and pain both know how to paralyze. Still and hard, the body careens to a stop; the rabbit’s heart slows its pound. When Margaret opened her eyes again, the white ink of the light in the room pooled around Magda Goebbels on her throne, her mouth flickering. She prattled on, and still that raucous little laugh was tinkling out of her. The light rose up, and her avian eyes were gemstones sitting in wax.

All at once, she leaned in. Margaret’s breath stopped; she felt the hawk-woman nearing. Fear paralyzed her, but she was paralyzed too by what she had remembered—of her father, the spinning cyclone, and her grandfather, the harmonica-player, and of herself—she had carried a little child, and she could not bear it, she could not bear it.

The sensation of the hawk-woman coming closer burnt Margaret’s skin. She had a sense of grand-scale entrapment.

And now shall be told of something else. Now shall be told of how Margaret’s eyes were plucked entirely away from memories of her own kin and flesh, for the sake of the hawk-woman.

It began when the monster spoke a single sentence, a sentence that caused the collapse of an essential support beam. At first, Margaret was sure she had misheard it.

It sounded like the woman said: “Look at you, Margaret—you’re so thin,” in a tone of vain and humbug envy.

Margaret looked up at her. She looked at Magda Goebbels through a veil of despair, but, still, something in this phrase was too familiar.

Magda Goebbels’s antiquated pianola style had thrown Margaret off the scent. But abruptly, Margaret thought she knew her kind.

It was a kind Margaret had run into many times. Always Margaret had associated it with chewing gum, flatulence jokes, and America.

You meet her in every cafeteria, in every extended family, and beside every swimming pool. The woman is jazzy, and probably she’s rich. She makes a show of asking you about your sex life when she first meets you. She pulls you onto her lipstick team further by insinuating half-truths sotto voce about women of mutual acquaintance. Before she knows you, she says, “You and I have more in common than blood relatives, babe,” and if Margaret