The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,95
and some dried blood on the back of her scalp, where the skin broke when she hit her head. She got up, went into the bathroom, and looked in the mirror.
She gazed into her face with hatred. The uniform had fit. It looked all too crisp, sharp—stunningly attractive.
The very next day she gave a tour, and when she was at Hitler’s bunker, again she saw the bodyguard, Arthur Prell, talking to young people on skateboards in the park adjacent.
TWENTY-TWO • A Taxonomy of Sins
With resolve, and a pounding desperation, Margaret returned to Dr. Gudrun Arabscheilis once again. She went through the muted ivy courtyard and proceeded upward with a firm, clacking step. She would do things differently this time. She would demand a fair hearing no matter what the woman tried on her. In her bag she carried her American passport and two other forms of identification.
But when she arrived at the office, nothing was as it had been before. Her ambitions began to flounder and distort. At first the change was subtle. The stairwell had a different smell.
Then as Margaret came in and walked past the coatrack, the place became more unfamiliar still. In the waiting room was an intense heat. Margaret instantly began to sweat in the dryness of it. The room was very dark, and the lights glowed yellow.
At the reception desk, the dour nurse, almost hidden behind an enormous jade plant, was asleep with her mouth open. The lights seemed to give off a vapor.
Through the hot ether, Margaret could hear a sound. A great whooshing, windy assibilation of hot air and beneath it a stuttering, mechanized clack-clack-clack. The sound of a running film projector. Margaret tiptoed down the long hallway. Opening the oak door of the examination room, she was buffeted backward by the heat, the air hot and dry as in a sauna. The curtains were drawn and the room made light-tight against the dusk. It was close and musty in the heat.
On the wall next to the door, a film was projected. Black and white; the forest scene, a boy in medieval garb with sword in hand rising out of the lake, with great scabs of light burning across it.
A sudden glimmer in the recesses of the darkness—two round Os—perhaps the lenses of the doctor’s bifocals. But Margaret felt as if she had trespassed, and she withdrew and closed the door behind her. She walked back down the hall and sat on a chair in the waiting room.
She closed her eyes. The heavy heat was richly soporific. Lulled by the whooshing clack of the film projector’s noise, Margaret fell asleep.
When she awoke, the receptionist was still breathing behind the counter with an even, whistling rhythm. Margaret went down the hall a second time. Now the examination chamber was brilliant with light, and Margaret stepped through the door. The old woman’s skin glowed with sweat, and an album of black-and-white photographs lay in front of her on the desk. Over it, she held an enormous magnifying glass, and her ruddy, hot face hovered close to the book.
“Ah, Margaret Täubner,” the doctor said. She did not look up. “Be so kind and give me a moment, will you?”
Margaret tried to say something acquiescent, but only grunted softly, the words sticking in her throat. She pulled at her collar. The doctor moved the magnifying glass toward the top of the oversized page, her massive head moving with it, eyes just a few centimeters from the glass. After three or four slow minutes, she spoke.
“What can I do for you, my dear?”
Margaret breathed out. “Help me.”
“With what?” The doctor elongated her vowels.
Margaret was unprepared for the question. She thought for a moment. “Well,” she said slowly, “help me—get rid of the past.”
It seemed like the sort of large-scale request to which the doctor might be able to respond.
But the doctor only went back to her photographs. She turned a page, peering again through her thick bifocals and the large magnifying glass. The room was silent.
Margaret had imagined, on her way over, that the scene would play very differently. She had seen herself stepping forward and speaking in a loud voice of her ever-increasing terror. Now she found herself cramped by the true. The cue of the room revivified the memory of her last visit, and the doctor’s eccentricity rose up against her. How could she have forgotten her mistreatment at the hands of this woman? She began to feel the old anger. She watched the bulbous-headed doctor