The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,149
gropes for the right word, she interrupts to say, in a diction far younger than her years, “Wait, oh my God, are you one of those wicked smart people? You look like one of those.”
But always with this type, soon the good feeling turns. It seems at first coincidental, but it is not: she has a husband. And although this viciously tennis-playing woman might speak irreverently of him to begin with, telling you something hilarious about, most likely, his penis, it invariably turns out she has a pedantic, mulish, pharisaical sense of submission to him. A prim and stiff-necked blackout in her sense of humor slams shut whenever there is discussion of his views. And if the marriage has gone sour, then the devotion will jump seats: to her political candidate, her pastor, maybe her thesis advisor. Whatever his title, tears will spring into her eyes when she speaks of “what he has done for me.”
Always he has done a great deal. Because for herself, such a woman has no hope. In her own mind, she is as helpless today as she was at her birth. She has pinned her shadow to the wall of him, like a side of ham hung up to dry in a smokehouse.
Yes, Margaret knew this kind very well, it is nothing at all, and the hawk-woman, as Margaret saw her now in a fine mist of bubblegum scent, no longer had the slightest riddle or sharpness or even spook to her venal, bawdy, sanctimonious grasp, and Margaret thought for a blistering instant: I am done with her.
Some things have no meaning at all. The bright flames crested the sardine cans and danced. Margaret looked at the hawk-woman up on her dais. But now, recognized, she was for a moment not frightening at all, and a new energy filled Margaret. The cloud of ink light puddled and pooled, erasing the edges of the woman’s moiré dress. She sat huddled on her throne, crestfallen and poor. Margaret stepped sideways and moved back toward the door. She looked at the chamber and the rout of gleaming, dripping candles, and the still, waxy being—half woman, half hawk; half dead, half alive; half wax, half stone.
Margaret heard a shuffling: a trembling of wings. And then the figure on the throne gave a whimpering sigh, and all at once she was made of stone. She froze into soapstone, and the lower half of her—it began to turn to powder and stream away like sand flowing through the waist of an hourglass.
Margaret’s heart lunged. She was released. She took three heavy steps backward, scraping hard on the stone floor of the cellar, and then she turned on her heels and ran. She ran, hard and fast.
Out of the chamber and down the long hallway she ran. And although the hawk-woman just a moment before had grown shabby and disintegrated, now the figure had a final gasp of power over Margaret’s mind. The hawk-woman might transform herself again and come flying at the back of her, ready to fall on her and take her down from behind, hold her pinned to the ground in her domain. Margaret ran hard; she did not know how to get out, but she took a turn to the west whenever she sensed there was such a turn to take, thinking that in this way she would eventually reach home, through the catacombs reach Schöneberg, although it occurred to her—something—oh so terrible, made her shake: the basement of the old Nazi post office had been built with a tunnel connecting it to Hitler’s New Chancellery and, from there, the tunnel went on and led to the bunker underneath Gertrud-Kolmar-Strasse where Hitler spent his last days and where he died with Eva Braun, with his dog, and with his dog’s puppies. Although now the chancellery, thank God, was destroyed by the Soviets, Margaret thought that without knowing it she could run the wrong way, run underneath Anhalter Station and finally find herself in the collapsed bunker, and there perhaps take a false step and trigger a terrible and complete collapse of the remains, and nothing—nothing could be more terrible than to be buried alive in Hitler’s bunker, suffocating in the old Nazi mess, and she, Magda Goebbels, the hawk-woman, with her manicured talons, would welcome Margaret into the shadow life.
Margaret went up and down short flights of rusted stairs, forced her way over loose rubble, peered into crannies, saw toilet bowls that had overflowed many decades ago.