by a body in crisis: the brain and the skeletal muscles.
“This research, then, was central in demonstrating that a woman living in the shadow of massive fears becomes infertile, and that menstruation has a strongly psychosomatic mechanism,” the doctor said, her voice ringing out. “No one had known that before,” she added plaintively, almost begging.
Margaret’s own face turned a deep red, up through her cheeks and under her eyes. She could feel it. She was hot. “Why are you telling me this?”
“My child. We did excellent work. We made an important contribution. Today, however, I dare not tell anyone about these studies. They would say what we did was unethical. Today it is so easy not to see that regardless of whether or not we had been there, broadening the circle of medical understanding, these women would have died anyway. That’s what has always comforted me. That’s what comforted me even then. These women were shielded from the doctor, because they were already dead.”
Margaret’s face seemed to creak, so stiff was it. “When I first came here,” Margaret said, “you tried to give me a medical exam although you were blind—”
“I know this must seem repugnant to you, but at the time it appeared a great good. To make something fine and enduring out of senseless death—”
Margaret stood up. The doctor must have heard Margaret’s chair as it scraped away the shine of the wooden floor, because her face rearranged itself into an expression of panic, and even Margaret was surprised. “Wait!” the doctor cried, her voice cracking. She was unexpectedly earnest. “Wait, don’t you see! Margaret, you are too quick to judge! Nazism—listen to me—it signified then, and it will always signify, whether you want it to or not, much more and much less than what it has come to casually mean—which is death, and only death! But listen, my pet, it was an inversion of death. It spiritualized everything in its vicinity. God was bankrupt, it was the only alternative some of us thought we had. And it was not the Nazis who bankrupted God, no, that was done already long before. Even now the world is convulsing! And the Nazis offered one asylum.” The doctor’s hands, as she lifted them in the air, had the most powerful tremor. Her voice rang out, “Do we not yearn to be dissolved into a higher good? ‘Your god lies shattered in the dust and serpents dwell among his ruins and now you love even the serpents for his sake.’ Have you heard that, Margaret? Joining the Nazis was loving the serpents, yes, but for the sake of what did we love them?”
Margaret stood. “You are a witch,” she said. Her stomach jumped straight up into her throat, and the nurse-receptionist popped her head in the door to see what was the matter. The doctor, hearing the door opening, thought Margaret was on her way out, and she became more agitated still. She began to feel her way around the desk with both hands.
“It’s a higher history! Margaret! Do we not yearn to belong to this higher, more scientific world, you and I? In which mistakes are not failures of God, nor failures of mine nor of yours, but instead of nations running without consciousness on a wheel of fire! Would you not like your life to become art? You have said as much to me before!” The doctor was almost crying.
Margaret, in anticipation of the doctor’s physical touch, began to panic. “I’m leaving,” Margaret whispered, as loud as she could.
“Do not leave!” the doctor yelled. “Wait! There is something to be said for dynamism, for courage, for self-sacrifice, for the cult of beauty! Listen!”
“I’m leaving now,” Margaret said again.
“But wait! I am not trying to convince you of anything. These are not my views. I was only playing devil’s advocate. I too have repented! Listen! Don’t you want to know where I got my name? I told you, Arabscheilis is not my family name, nor my husband’s. Comrade! My girl, Margaret darling, comrade,” the doctor cried out, “just take a look at this, will you look at this?” And with amazing speed she moved back around and opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out a mimeographed sheet, which she shoved toward Margaret. “You told me once that you go up there for your job. You’ll have sympathy for this, my dear. You’ll know it when you see it.”
The paper was yellowed, and the words had been typed,