The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,152

and taller out of their chrysanthemums, and the iron eagle on the Weidendammer Bridge rustled its wings; the Wall fell and fell eternally, the crowds surging through the carnival night; the small, broad body of Rosa Luxemburg landed in the canal with a platsch; and although Margaret could not see him, she could hear him: the Brazilian man who had come to Berlin just to see the Stadtpark where his mother once played under the golden stag as a girl—as he opened his mouth to sing tra-la-la.

Warm curtains closed and opened around her mind. Through the fabric Margaret could see alternating shadows, a correspondence between prisms.

She blinked. The sun was down. Now, only the dusty wooden floor of the belfry porch hissed underfoot in the dark.

But in that moment, a feeling of beauty took hold of Margaret—a feeling so rich it dwarfed death. The door in her mind opened and the narrow glimpse turned a magnet key in her eye; she felt light seeping out from the base of her skull. A heavy stone shifted, and the warm curtains billowed no more than by the breath of an insect, but exposed for a brief instant, in the heart of the city before her: a red jewel with a flame inside it, red at its core, arching corridors raying in every direction, toward every fine thing, every decipherment.

Margaret breathed and was flooded. When she would have to die, it would be remembering this.

The sleeve of amnesia holds a mystery—a shadow, an innuendo—that is a weaponry of beauty; it makes of the mind an arboretum, the inkling of lost and hidden things a wind shaking down all the tears left unshed, like fruit from a storm-rustled tree. For good or ill, whether it be necessary to outgrow it or not, the mystery inside the ever-inverting sleeve is an engine to power the task of living, or conversely, a form of deathlessness.

And a ghost, a ghost is the leftover resonance of a style of being, the intense and prolonged sympathetic vibration, in this world, of a life in the next. Once, caught in the sleeve of time, Margaret split herself in two and released a ghost of herself. The ghost went lost and wandering. But now here it was, coming home again.

THIRTY-SIX • Margaret

Margaret lay her head back. She could see.

In the early hours of an already darkening evening, she could see how a young woman had walked down the slope of a cobblestone street in Prenzlauer Berg.

The young woman was carrying a sleeping baby, the child that had emerged from her body in the most recent days. She carried it in a car seat they had given to her at the hospital—a donation for low-income single mothers. She was dressed in heavy clothing made for a man: an overcoat, a slouch hat, and wool trousers, although underneath, a pair of high-heeled boots. The autumn night was mild. Her long, fine hair was unbrushed and matted. Under her eyes, her transparent face was dark, and the child’s miniature face too had the papery lacing of acne some babies are born with. From both of them came an odor of sour milk, and from Margaret, sleeplessness. Nearing Number 60, from her vantage point on the other side of the street, she looked up at a set of two balconies belonging to the apartment on the fifth story, and she was crushed at the sight of unlit, lifeless windows. She crossed over and sat down on the stoop of the next house.

She would wait.

She glanced at the child in the carrier. She felt a blooming. There was a tug of pain on either side of her chest as her milk let down. The sensation was blocked out quickly by rebuke, however. She blinked, looked about, erased her mind, really a welcome alternative to despair, and closed her eyes. She tried not to fall asleep.

She sat for a half hour, until finally two boys emerged from Number 60, and she jumped up to catch the heavy door before it closed. She came into the stairwell. The thick oak banister was carved into a shining lion’s head at its curving base. The animal’s face was scowling and haughty. The stairs curved in an oval around a great shaft of light, lit from a multipaned skylight above. Margaret made her way up laboriously. She almost tripped on the red flaxen runner. Around and around she went.

She strained to keep the carrier from swinging into the railing although its