The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,97

scowled, her face, she could feel, was bright, and her eyes were swelling. “If I don’t do something, they’re going to come for me,” Margaret said, beginning to cough. The heat was rising in her face; the room had begun to twirl, and she grabbed onto her chair to keep from falling over.

The doctor was silent. She stared at Margaret. It was as though she thought the longer she trained her blind eyes on her, the better she would see her.

Margaret knew her own head was not right; she knew that today she was going to behave in ways suspect and irrational, but her fear was too strong now; she held on to the chair, racked by vertigo. She whispered—she did not want the nurse outside to hear—“I think I’m attracted to them.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, overloudly. “To whom? Of whom are we speaking?”

Margaret kept her head down, talking past the doctor, her cheeks hot. Even as her vertigo grew, her only hope was to reveal herself. She must reveal the workings of her mind even if it damned her straight to hell. “To the—to them. Sometimes when I read their memoirs and biographies, they seem normal, and often ingenious. I imagine them moved by an emotion like nobility.”

The doctor laughed.

Margaret startled.

“Comrade, we’d all like evil to be simple and obtuse, but it’s wieldy and intelligent.”

Margaret looked at the doctor for a moment, but she barely saw her. “There’s more,” she went on instead. “It’s almost as if I like them because they are killers. I read about them instead of the victims because it seems less painful. Just for having been killers I am hungry for them, and feel soothed by them. For that reason alone, I’m willing to follow them down any path they devise.”

The doctor remained silent, her blank eyes fixed now on a spot on the upper wall as if she were waiting for something.

Margaret’s voice became louder, ringing in the wide room. She was leaning forward over the doctor’s wide desk, supporting herself on her fists. “But I’m lying.” Her brow pulled together. “I think it’s something worse.” Her eyes were narrow. “I notice—” she stuttered. “I notice similarities. Similarities between myself and them. I think—they might be my own kind.”

The doctor laughed hoarsely. “Come, come,” she said. “Is this not a sort of hypochondria?”

Margaret’s face was puckered. She paused for a long moment, gathering herself together, and the clock in the room ticked louder than before. She thought: Because I am as passive as their women, and as zealous as their men. Then she wiped her head where the sweat had begun to bead, and she thought, And I am as zealous as their women and as passive as their men.

Fearing the worst, she took the German copy of Mein Kampf out of her backpack. Yes, she had brought that with her. She loathed herself. She began to read to the doctor in a loud, deep voice that had a brassy quality. She was terribly upset.

“The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this feeling is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially.”

“Do you know what it means to me,” Margaret said, “to have to live with those words having been written by that man? What am I supposed to do with it? How am I to go on living? To have been diagnosed by him—he was right! This is what I am!” Margaret spoke quickly, it might even be said: hysterically.

“Comrade. Calm yourself. It sounds like the boilerplate of any armchair political strategist. There’s nothing shocking in that. Surely you can find something more hard-hitting in that book of yours.”

“It’s not boilerplate to me!” Margaret shouted. And then she muttered more quietly: “And even if that’s true, wouldn’t it be significant if we discovered his strategies were just like everyone else’s?”

“Comrade.” The doctor knocked her knuckles on the desk impatiently. “There is something you’re hiding from me,” she spoke in no more than a whisper, “hiding from me very mean-spiritedly, as is your wont. You demonstrate a marked tendency to aggravate your illness. But we’ll leave that for the moment. I see clearly, now, why you lost