The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,76
the shabbiest of flea markets. The former tenants—their ghosts—would laugh at the shambles, and they would laugh at her, Margaret. Berlin had fallen; Berlin had been destroyed. If Lucifer had once been an angel, he had long since gone down. Was anyone or anything in this city a continuation of what it had been—either for good or evil? Was there any continuity at all?
Then she thought of the Family Strauss, the nobility of their decision, and the idea of nobility in general: its music, its architecture, its moral independence, and she asked herself with atrocious anxiety: Can I possibly follow them? Can I possibly be like them? Do I have the character?
Character or not, she would try. She could not stop herself from trying.
And if she could manage it, if she could manage to swim in their wake—Margaret lay her head back on the sofa and closed her eyes, her happiness swooping back in a rash of light. It came to her, chanted as though a triumphant rhyme, washing her with its purple, the lullaby of possibilities.
The swallows would speak. The clock would take back its numbers; the balconies would resume the cradling of their lost, cupped lives. The faces of the living would contort to mirror the faces of the dead, the written words would fly like homebound bees to the spoken. The secret meaning of the city would manifest itself, the house numbers alight from the clouds of the mind to fix themselves to the permanent book written underground. The numbers would correspond to the forgotten names, the shadows to the bodies, the palimpsest ache to the threaded ruins.
Hands were stretching out to Margaret, offering every fine thing, every decipherment. And her breath was full of oxygen.
Just before she went to sleep that night, she thought of the doctor’s forest film and its so-called “perfect pregnancy.” It wandered into her mind after a long absence. She asked herself then, very seriously, whether the prophecy had not been fulfilled. Everything will be revealed, she thought. And meaning—meaning was not going to be a stranger to her after all.
SEVENTEEN • An Expectation of Mirrors
The next day Margaret was soberer, but still, the first thing she did was think of the Strausses, and she acted immediately. She went to the apartment building where the family died. She knew the Salzburgerstrasse well: it had been nearby all along: a small, tree-lined street behind the town hall, beyond the cake-like Nordstern building.
She bicycled. Her body was still bruised, and in her joints, the fall of the night before was lurking. This might have brought her into a state of reflection: the pain as she felt it in Schöneberg’s dowdy day was so different than the pain as it had been in Schöneberg’s riddling night!
But she silenced all uncertainties. The voice of the child had been palpable, as shimmering as shimmering can be. It had filled her with an ecstasy larger than life. And so what was she to do? Once you’ve met something unimaginable you can never unmeet it again. It will never be disentwined from instinct.
And, all reasoning aside, whether she could justify it or not, she had known from the moment she woke that morning, under the rustling bedsheets, by her excitement and happiness and energy, that she was going to be riding high all day.
In fact, she fantasized for the greater part of the bicycle ride, hatching ideas of gifts she would bring to the Strausses’ memory and places she would go to find their traces.
She pedaled off west into Jewish Switzerland toward the Nordstern behemoth. She was excited, nervous. Never had she been so exuberant and frightened of rejection at once. Never had she been so preoccupied, and before she left home, she had not even noticed the absence of that incredible lurking bird who was usually outside her window.
Number 8, when she pulled up in front of it, turned out to be a rich building with blushing white skin. Its fleshy balconies squeezed the flanks of the building, like twin rolls of plumpness on a woman’s back, giving the place the simple, softhearted, motherly style of the Weimar era. All of it pleased Margaret.
Margaret waited, and after a while a man emerged from Number 8. Behind a tree, lost in fantasy, Margaret almost missed her chance. She dashed to the door and caught it at the last moment before it clicked shut. She moved into the foyer, her sensitivity to everything around her fantastically acute.