The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,125

in the next days is interesting to me still. For a while an unaccustomed silence reigned. But! Then I began to hear birdsong again. And not only the song of Sarto, but also the song of Ferdinand.

I did not speak of this to anyone.

As I washed our ever-regenerating piles of dirty linen, I could hear it—I was still bleeding since the birth, the baby’s diapers, little Gerda’s wet nights—I listened to the singing birds. Sometimes it is so clear one is going crazy. I remember hearing the bird twitter when Franz told me of the first large deportations. I heard the birdsong while I listened to Rahel recite her square roots and European capitals. I heard the birdsong and I thought of my home in Posen, now burnt down in war. I heard the birdsong and thought about what could and could not be. With the sleeplessness of the baby and the ever-returning air-raid siren, waking up, shaking Rahel awake, carrying Gerda and little Bibi, as I called my Beate, downstairs with our always-ready suitcases of diapers and toys and blankets, nights spent in the basement, and then the worry, always the worry. I hardly had any sleep, and it didn’t surprise me that I should be in a world outside worlds, a funny, dizzy, drunken place, a place in which birds carried off by the Gestapo return to sing inside the walls, and in the stairwell, in hidden places in the courtyard, and in the garden.

The birdsong was so fragile, so difficult to hear. One day as I was washing the dishes, Rahel said to me, “Mother, why is it I still hear Sarto and Ferdinand singing?”

I gave her the broadest smile—and looking down at her I wiped from my face soap bubbles that had floated up and stuck to my skin. I dropped to my knees and said, “My darling.” And then we both stopped and stood very still and listened, and sure enough, in a moment we both realized that we could hear it distinctly outside of our mind’s ear, with a sudden clarity of sensation.

And so, almost giddy with the feeling of not being crazy, I led Rahel down and out into the courtyard, and we stood at attention with our heads tilted up toward the house around us, which was in a U-shape, the two wings cradling the garden. Now it was clear enough that the sound was coming from our wing. And we both looked at each other and gave a sort of laugh because we thought the sound was coming from our own apartment. It was beautiful to see Rahel’s face change with the perception. She looked up to our open kitchen window and looked back at me with her eyebrows raised. It was beautiful because I could see in her face that the world affected her the same as it did me. Even if she was only a child.

It sounded like the bird was in our flat but we knew the bird was not in our flat. We went back up the stairwell of our wing. We stood near the doors of the apartments as we went further up into the house. Finally we had passed our own floor and had come to the top, and of course it was from behind the door of Frau Schivelbusch’s apartment that the sound of canaries trickled.

So Frau Schivelbusch had the canaries.

It was very difficult to calm Rahel once we realized what had happened. The little girl was beside herself. She wanted to go up to Frau Schivelbusch at once and kick in her door. I reasoned with her, explaining that we were unlucky to live in these times, that we had to do our best to hold on to our dignity, and didn’t she want to grow up to be a dignified lady? But even I was not convinced. I wondered if I was not destroying her.

As for me. There came a time when the choir I sang with at the cathedral protested my presence, even if I stood in the back, although my conversion to Catholicism was many years past. Father Loewe asked me to leave, and then, after that, I ask you, what more could I do to preserve my faith? What of my hope for the future?

There were some days during the months when I was planning our death when I didn’t suffer at all. That’s a funny thing: you domesticate fear. I only cried in anticipation of the worst, but