The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,35

He took her shoes off, covered her, and went out. Margaret heard him talking quietly to the young woman in the other room, and the plink-plank of her own voice. It was angry.

Margaret slept.

When she woke up it was still night and she did not know where she was. She was alone and she could smell that she was not in her own bed. She raised herself on her elbows, her heart beating.

Then she saw the Jägermeister Christmas lights.

She could hear Benjamin clomping around hastily in the kitchen, his footsteps deliberate. Margaret decided he must be getting ready to leave. She listened for the girl, too, but did not hear a second pair of footsteps. Finally the door to the apartment sounded. It opened and closed with a bang. All was still.

The room where Margaret lay was narrow. It dead-ended into a grotto balcony. The Jägermeister Christmas lights were wound around its balustrade.

Margaret remembered this room from before. She had always thought it had a quality of fungus, or fungal nearness, as if it were in the shade of a giant mushroom.

She couldn’t sleep. Why, she didn’t know—she had drunk enough. But her heart was pounding awfully. She closed her eyes and lay back into the pillow. By some dark trick of the imagination she thought she could hear a magpie out on the balcony, scratching at the cement floor.

She listened. She lay very still. She turned on a little lamp by the pillow. There was a book lying on the floor next to the bed. She picked it up. The title was Die Wal-Enten (The Whale Ducks). The author was one Olaf Therild, the book was in German, published in West Berlin, 1975. She opened it and began to read the first page. Right away, she found herself sliding in.

The Whale Ducks

Millennia to come, the world was overwhelmed by floods whose causes even then were in dispute. Berlin was buried at the bottom of a great sea. Above this sea over Berlin, only the tops of the tallest buildings still protruded from under the water.

A new animal reigned, a species that called itself the whale duck. The whale ducks were large, robust creatures. They fed on the old human buildings under the water. These had become soggy and nutritious during the centuries of inundation.

One of these whale ducks was one day vanquishing her hunger, diving down under the surface of the water to take bites out of architectural glories of the past, when she came up having unknowingly bitten off the top of a church steeple (the whale ducks were very large indeed), and developed a stomachache not long after. An operation was necessary. When the whale-duck surgeon looked inside, she found that while the steeple itself had been digested, there was something else, the entire skeleton of a human being in the stomach of the duck, and this was the source of the problem. The skeleton clutched a bottle of scent in one claw-like hand and in the other, a glass jar which at first appeared stuffed with cotton. Closer inspection revealed that the vial contained a sheaf of paper, rancid and pulpy and covered in the symbols once used for communication by the humans.

The skeletal remains met a fate not entirely atypical. It happened that the whale duck who had swallowed the skeleton, by the name of Botuun, was a great lover of the theater. She had mated in her youth, had been the wife of a great monster of a duck, so large in fact that he had not been long for this world. But she had been left a fortune (and some very large ducklings): meadowlands, swamps, and several factories that derived extracts from the swamp which were then used in making dye, in turn used to make paints.

Botuun saw to it that the skeleton became part of her own theater—her own house of shadows, as such it was known. Shadowing was a theatrical form, an entrenched part of the “ancient” culture of the ducks—a theater of the dead. The remains of dead things, usually skeletal, sometimes mummified, were painted in bright colors, and bits of putty were used to round the edges, so that the skeletons appeared as they would have in life. Or at least, as the ducks supposed they would have looked. Humans, for example, had been extinct for so long, and their records submerged and dissolving under water for so many eons, that no one knew exactly what they had looked