The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,96

peering idiotically at the uniformly grey pictures, which, from Margaret’s vantage point, looked like little grey fractals: each one randomly, differently the same. Margaret gave two loud, suggestive sighs. The woman looked up again.

“What is the trouble?”

“I told you last time,” Margaret said. “My own past isn’t coming. I’m drawn to the past before I was born.”

“What do you see in it?”

Margaret wondered whether the woman had forgotten everything she had told her. Dr. Arabscheilis spoke much more slowly than she had last time, soberly and detached, and it crossed Margaret’s mind that the woman might be addicted to some kind of prescription medication.

“I’m unable to find a place in it,” Margaret said, still making an effort. “Don’t you remember what I told you?”

“You have no place in the past,” the doctor said slowly and without lifting her head.

“But I do.”

“You do?” asked the doctor rather absentmindedly. Her face was hovering, a dragonfly of attention, over the pictures.

“Yes, I do.” Margaret thought of the night she had knelt before the yellow stripe and worshiped the Family Strauss. She took a breath. “I can do all my living through other people,” Margaret began. She stopped. The room was quiet. Margaret felt as though she were hoisted up, floating on the heat.

“What does it mean to you, to live through others?” asked the doctor. Again, without any special interest.

“Well,” Margaret said. There was a way in which the woman’s cool, slow detachment might be read as encouragement. Detachment prevented the woman from talking very much. Maybe she would listen this time, Margaret thought. She had been longing for the doctor to listen.

Margaret began to formulate what she had been thinking about as she was trying to fall asleep the night before. “Once there were people who suffered horribly,” she said. “They suffered so much that all other kinds of suffering must be inside that single suffering.”

“What?” the doctor asked.

“Comprehensive suffering,” Margaret said.

“What are you speaking of, my child?”

“Don’t you think there must be such a thing?”

“I have no opinion,” said the doctor.

“But isn’t there something—about innocence?” Margaret asked. As this last word came out of her mouth, she felt ridiculous, buffoonish even.

But she pressed on. She was focused on the graves of the Family Strauss, with their waxy pillow of black ivy and rash of scarlet dots. Margaret looked at the floor, noticing in the corner the movement of falling dust.

“But sometimes,” Margaret went on, “I think no matter how much I search for them and think of them, their innocence can’t be transferred to me. They are quiet. And also I wonder, is innocence even a trait of goodness?” Margaret looked at the doctor, waiting for the woman’s face to move. But the room was silent.

Then the doctor spoke all at once, and when she did, her harsh voice was decisive and unyielding. Margaret jumped. Dr. Arabscheilis spoke loudly, almost making of her acerbic idea an incantation, and it became apparent she had never been absent from the conversation at all.

“Listen, comrade. I’ll tell you something. Death has an aesthetic appeal, but there is no aesthetic appeal to death on a mass scale. All stories in this world are premised on the idea of character as arbiter of destiny. But these people you like to think about, they were killed regardless of their personality. So now you switch it around, you make destiny capable of arbitrating character. You want to make the victims purer by ex post facto decree, by virtue of their deaths alone.” The doctor hummed a little tune to herself and looked away, her head was swaying. “But there is no link between these people and what happened to them,” she said. “No link at all.” She hummed again. “You have become sanctimonious in your obsession, comrade.”

Margaret was upset. “No, it’s not like that,” she said. “Let me tell you something.” She rubbed the flannel wool over her knees in haste. “The thing is—there’s something else.” She spoke louder, trying to pull together her courage. “It’s not just the victims. The killers, too. They shadow me. She—” Margaret corrected herself, “They have been shadowing me for a long time, only I didn’t want to mention it. They come at me—and they’re disgusting, they’re desiccated hawks. But sometimes they seem intriguing anyway—like—like intelligent, righteous souls.” Margaret still couldn’t bear to name the name. “They want to carry me away with them. I can feel it. They want to carry me away with them, dress me in their clothes.” She