The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,99

and the youth would appear to be rising out of the flaming depths. I myself was invited to come along on the trip,” the doctor said, with a little shake of her head, her lips drawn as though she tasted something sour. “I saw all of it.” She paused. She moved her tongue.

“The trouble, as it were, was in finding a suitable ‘actor’ to play the fire child. My brother felt it should be a boy of great physical beauty. Further complicating things, there were not many boys, when the day finally came, willing to walk backward into the fiery lake. My brother had only a few in mind who he felt had features fine enough to come into question, and of these, the first two bowed out.”

Margaret listened. The tips of her fingers grew cold.

“There was one boy in the group, a youth of sixteen, who was very beautiful and something of a maverick for those times. He let his hair grow long in black Indian waves, bucking every tenet of his milieu. He was unusually haunting of face and charming of spirit.

“Now it happened that about this boy, my brother had some special information. He knew that his father’s mother was Jewish and that his mother’s father’s mother was a Jewess as well, although up to this point the boy’s family had managed to keep it quiet. And taking this boy aside into a glade, on the day filming was meant to go forward, my brother told him—all in the spirit of realizing his creative vision, mind you—that if the boy didn’t volunteer for the stunt, my brother would have no choice but to tell the rest of the group about his mixed heritage.

“So the boy—he conformed.

“The tragedy, however, was that walking backward, and deliberately avoiding taking a strong jump away from the cliff, so as not to compromise the look of the thing when reversed, the young man, Albert was his name, did not manage to get far enough away from the edge. As he tumbled downward, because the cliff was not sheer, his neck snapped.”

The doctor got up from her desk and took several steps to the side of the room, away from Margaret.

“The story does not end there. After Albert’s death the fact of his partially Jewish roots came out, via an anonymous tip to the Gauleiter. Where the tip came from, we’ll never know, although I have my suspicions; I know my brother too well. In any case, the boy’s family quietly prevented an investigation into the incident, so as to prevent further misfortunes.

“As for my brother—the event never cast a shadow. He became ever more boisterous, more hail-fellow-well-met—more beloved than ever of his peers. Our villa on the Wannsee was the scene of picnics, barbeques, boat races. The basement den smelled of cigar smoke and the meaty sweat of boys. This was where my brother and his friends had their powwows. They played darts or table tennis.

“A year later, my brother volunteered for the Wehrmacht. He was sent first to Riga. I heard some stories about his life on the Eastern Front, or behind the front, as it happened—but let’s not make things complicated. The upshot is: after spending several years in Russian captivity, in due course he came home, one of the lucky survivors.

“Back in Germany, he did a bizarre thing. He made a sort of conversion. He had a strange and unexpected relationship with a bohemian, a floozy, a rabid socialist. No one could understand it. What did he want with the Marxist strumpet? Her skirts showed her hairy knees.

But I understood him. She was not so different from my brother. A theater director and “dance poet” she called herself. And in fact they quietly married, had a son together. Soon after, however, the radical woman insisted on moving to East Berlin, where she meant to be part of a new, socialist dawn. She took the child with her. My brother never spoke to her again.” The doctor focused her blind eyes on Margaret, with a slightly curling lip.

Margaret felt her fingers grow colder still.

“Well.” The doctor sighed, turning her head away. “My brother became a successful film director. In Munich. And although he never remarried, he gradually made a complete return to his old politics. He made a series of successful films through the nineteen-fifties, Heimat films, sentimental tripe, mostly, but he made a name for himself and was ultimately invited to Hollywood, where he had a measure of success