The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,59

differences,” the doctor said. “The first is this: in the story, there is a multiplicity of things—the door opening, the doctor in her white coat, the doctor launching her weapon, the knife flying, the sound of the knife lodging in the corkboard, the cowering girl—I am merely assuming you cowered. Did you cower? Well, never mind. But in the experience, by contrast, there are only two things. There is confusion, and there is fear.”

Margaret shifted in her chair.

“And then there is the second difference,” the doctor went on. “Can you guess what it is?”

“No,” said Margaret.

“Really? Not a single guess?”

“No,” Margaret said. She was nauseous.

“Did you guess Dido and Aeneas, comrade? Dido and Aeneas is the correct answer. In the story, the sound of Dido’s aria flowing through the room changed the style and tone of everything. But in real life, the music made no difference.”

Margaret was silent, shielding her head.

“If you read some scrap of history,” the doctor said, “you are doing nothing but replaying your own life, only in heavy makeup. The world is pregnant with your own face, and it will never give birth to anything else. You know nothing but this life of yours, which is plain and pure emotion, stripped of all gratification of meaning—just a whimper in the dark. A story, by contrast, is a symphony blooming in the sunlight, trying to draw you away from chaos. Anyone who doesn’t know this has been nursing herself with lies plugged into her consciousness, as the symphonic sound track is plugged into the films in the dark of the movie theater, trying to make us believe that all experience carries an emotion familiar and long since invented, making a case for religion, trying to prove—foolishly, comrade, so foolishly!—that we all know the same beauty.”

Margaret held her head tightly in her hands, trying not to open her mouth and scream. Her mind was going black and white and black and white again, as if there were a strobe light pulsing the room.

She sat for a while so, but then with sudden brightness something suggested itself to her, and she lunged across the desk at the doctor. “That’s not true,” she broke out. “It’s not true about Dido and Aeneas. It’s not incidental at all. When I came into the room and the knife went by my head, Dido sang, ‘in my breast.’ And that’s all I remember about the knife now. Just those three words. And if I were to remember what happened later, I might think the knife went into my breast instead of the door!”

“Only because you’d already be remembering it, which is to say mythologizing it. It has nothing to do with the actual event.” The doctor was not necessarily reasonable, but she was quick.

Song lyrics—thinking of them, Margaret’s thoughts jerked over to the moment on the train on the way to Sachsenhausen, when she had remembered her father. The song he used to sing. “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind,” he had sung to her in German, a language she did not know as a child. He sang, and the German words sounded in the child’s ears like radio static. But sitting here now, she could remember it, she could remember his voice and his song, and to her mind now it was full of meaning. The German words could be dropped like coins into the new slots cut into her mind in the years since, and decoded by their very grooves. He had sung:

Du bist verrückt, mein Kind,—and now she knew it meant: You are crazy, my child,

du musst nach Berlin,—you must go to Berlin,

wo die Verrückten sind,—where the crazies are,

da gehörst du hin—that’s where you belong.

Du musst nach Plötzensee—you must go off to Plötzensee,

wo die Verrückten sind—where the crazies are,

am grünen Strand der Spree.—on the green banks of the Spree.

The meaning of the lines touched icy fingers to Margaret’s back.

She remembered more: he had sung it at a party. She was wild with delight, he was drunk. She was running in loops with the other children; he plucked her out of circulation, took her in his arms and held her up above his head, and she looked into his light eyes, which were small behind his glasses, and he sang to her.

However, the doctor was right in a certain way. Her memory was foreign to the experience of the child, who did not understand German, who did not know how to recognize drunkenness, who did not know her father would one day