The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,63

was waiting for her to rise up against him, but she—she didn’t know what she was doing at all. She looked at him.

When Margaret thought about the interview afterward, it was that moment, with Prell yelling, “That’s how it was!” which she would always remember as the point at which a blue sky went yellow-black. Because as far as Margaret was concerned, it was at that moment when it began to be not Prell who was on trial. Not Prell, but Margaret herself.

And Magda Goebbels, suddenly, was everywhere in the room. She was hovering against the walls and in the jars of potpourri; she was a black fume around the curtains and darkening the craft-fair paintings on the walls.

If Margaret were going to take a stand against Magda Goebbels, it must be right now.

Margaret stuttered, buying time. “Did you—?” she began, uncertainly.

Again, however, Prell did not wait to hear the rest. He cried out as though she had already accused him outright: “It wasn’t for me! I did as I was told.”

He was helping her along.

Margaret was quiet, her palms burning. Her muscles locked.

Prell gambled: “But sure, it was a shame.” Margaret sat with her head down.

Prell began again. “Next to the site of the bunker they’re putting up the big memorial for the Jews right now. Two thousand seven hundred concrete blocks—they’re allowed that. But I say, how would it be if over there around the corner by the bunker, we put in six blocks, just six? The children of Goebbels were murdered, killed, deliberately murdered. Couldn’t they be honored, the children? It won’t do them any good now, but at least we could honor them, put up a sign that says, ‘Here died six murdered children.’ Two thousand seven hundred blocks for the Jews, but six children can’t be honored?”

“What about the neo-Nazis who would make it into a shrine?” Margaret’s voice came out in a squeak. She began to dash lines on her notepad. She drew a lighthouse with a black stripe twisting around it.

Oh, if Margaret were going to grab the demon and pull it by the nose, it must be now.

“Ach, ‘neo-Nazi.’ No such thing,” said Prell. “What does neo-Nazi mean? New Nazi, right? There aren’t any. That’s just a buzzword. What you have are nationally conscious people, people who say, ‘my fatherland,’ right or wrong. ‘My fatherland,’ nothing more, am I right? You Americans say it, the Swiss say it, the Israelis say it—‘My country,’ they say. ‘And I’ll fight for it.’ The Israelis are nationalistic people, they defend their territory, they defend their people. They have as much right as anyone.”

He looked at Margaret over the tin of chocolates she had brought him. Then he tilted his head toward her conspiratorially.

“I’ve got an idea for what the memorial for the kids could look like. A sort of design. I do some of that on the side.”

Margaret’s face was red. She was breathing hard. She didn’t look at him.

“I’m thinking there would be six blocks and each one would be the height of the respective kid when it died. So one meter thirty, one meter ten, and so on. Pretty good, I think.”

Margaret started to cough. The air in the room was very dry.

Prell was on a roll. “You can’t talk about guilt, you know.” (But she had not.) “All these things they write about Hitler nowadays. If he had really done all the terrible things they say he did, how could he have been our Führer?”

Margaret coughed harder. Prell ignored her. “Let’s think about it. I’m telling you, one way or another, the war would have come, the war would have come ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, it didn’t take Hitler to make the war, the Jews now, they declared war on Germany in the 1920s, and then again at the end of the 1930s, The war right now in Iraq isn’t about Saddam Hussein, it’s about Israel! That Israel, it can’t exist on avocadoes and oranges, a nation lives from business, they have to have money, and the Americans always pay in, don’t they? This is just my opinion, but why did they occupy Iraq? Supposedly because of atomic bombs!” He laughed straight from the belly. “In my opinion Iraq is a wealthy oil region, and with this money they can support Israel; they can’t keep pumping in their own money forever. There’s something I’ll tell you about Israel …”

And on and on he talked. Margaret looked at the tin of chocolates she