disappear into a mental hospital, where he would make thinking of the time before he had gone away from home into an act of nostalgia.
The doctor seemed to regard Margaret very closely, but with her ears rather than her eyes—her head was cocked. “Writing history, reading history, my dear, a person will always try to stage a symphony in a cave where nothing but a whimper dwells,” she said, “but at the end of your life, perhaps even sooner, you’ll realize that there’s nothing to chronicle, nothing to remember, or even to know, that bears any relationship to experience at all. Eventually there will be no more pantomimes, only the acute attunement to the whimper.”
“But if there’s nothing to chronicle, then why do you care whether or not I remember?”
“Comrade! I am not opposed to the ideal—the ideal of the remembering human mind! I’m only opposed to false expansions of same. Meaning is private, puny, and constructed artificially. If you recognize that fact once and for all, the meaning you will eventually have no choice but to construct will be proportionate. That is to say, it will be very small. You will know it to be essentially provisional, even fraudulent!—and then, as a result, it will be powerless, and remembering all things unbearable will become bearable to you.”
“Will it?”
“Yes.”
“And is that good?”
“What?” asked the doctor.
“To remember unbearable things.”
“Of course it is,” said the doctor. “Truth is a worthy cause, even if it is wildly limited in scope. You’ll get but a penny from your copper mine.”
Margaret took a step toward the door. She saw that the doctor was not going to help her escape; on the contrary, the doctor was part of the nightmare. Margaret opened the door. One of the knives was still stuck in it.
“Comrade!” the doctor cried out when she heard the door opening. “You have to go nearer before you can get farther away from it! Ascribe significance to everything, but only personal significance!”
The cry of advice sounded in the room, the doctor’s voice had grown hoarse and exalted.
At home, Margaret again heard the first bars of “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind” playing in her mind—an earworm of the most insistent kind. It wasn’t long before she began to feel the song around her like flames, licking at her feet, polluting the air, and there was a terrible moment. Because of a sense of rising chaos, she thought the fire would shatter the panes of the glass globe that had been around her head for so long.
She went over to the bookshelf. In the inferno of the earworm’s heat, a book flew at her eyes. It was a book that was fat with letters from her mother, some opened and others not, all left so long untouched that it was blurred into something almost imperceptible.
She wanted to escape the song. The song suggested damning things about her free will. She longed to pin down the specifics of her mother’s modest handwriting. It seemed that in comforting herself thus, she would draw something monstrous out of the sky.
She pulled the book out of the shelf—it was a Russian novel called Moscow-Petushki, and all at once a wave of bad feeling came over her again. Tick-tock, this is the end. Her hands shook. The veins in them had risen. She tidied the letters.
You are crazy, my child. You belong in Berlin. Her father had sung that to her when she was only a girl. He had danced with Alphi, his beloved Great Dane.
She could not go on. She put the letters back into the book, and the book back onto the shelf, all the while staring at her hands. Another wave of bad feeling pushed her back, with a mighty shove to her solar plexus.
So she did not read the letters from her mother. And it shall be noted, much to the frustration of anyone who might be wishing to tether her tale to a rational mast, she also did not bother to look and see that one of the letters, written in a cribbed hand, contained all the lyrics of “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind.” It was postmarked August 2002—that is, it came from the period that Margaret herself was in the habit of designating as “lost time.”
THIRTEEN • Face Tattoos
There was a day in January that began in the yellow phone booth outside the supermarket on Gleditschstrasse. Margaret pulled open its heavy door. She needed a phone book.
She opened the city phone book in the sweaty