The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,17
ultimately jilted, was also a Jewish intellectual, like Magda’s Arlosoroff.” Margaret’s mouth was full of water at the thought, as if it were a sweet and pungent apple fermenting against her tongue. “Can you believe it?” she asked. Her audience said nothing, but appeared to follow her gossip carefully. It was especially well-tolerated by a short, apparently wealthy Brazilian businessman. His tall and beautiful wife, however, seemed to be coming undone from boredom, as were their two teenage daughters, who wore makeup so heavy it appeared intended for the stage.
Margaret gave a great laugh. She was trying to drive up interest. “What a fanatic Magda was! What a waste of herself, always donating herself to some cause—”
But at that moment Margaret happened to glance backward at the building behind her. She caught a glimpse of movement there.
“Magda, Magda,” she went on desperately, looking back at the group, trying hard to ignore the sensation of movement. “Magda was constant only in her fanaticism toward one cause or another. She married Goebbels in the end, telling her friend Leni Riefenstahl that her love for Hitler was much stronger than her love for the propaganda minister. Goebbels had a—what’s it called?” Margaret asked. She was distracted. The feeling continued. Something or someone was moving behind her. “What’s it called?” She was flustered; the hair on the back of her neck stood up. “You know, when one leg’s shorter than the other, and twisted?”
“A peg leg?” an American woman suggested.
“No, no.” Margaret was getting out of breath. “That’s not it.” She left off. “Anyway, he was, well, handicapped, and Magda told Leni that she was marrying Joseph even though she didn’t love him, in hopes of a closer union with her Führer—whom she wanted very much to marry, but whom she couldn’t have! Couldn’t have, you see, because Hitler’s great love was for his dead niece, you know, little what’s-her-name who shot herself in Hitler’s rooms down in Munich back in ’31, apparently a suicide in response to Hitler’s withdrawn love. Magda adopted the feminine duties of state within the Third Reich, however, always to be found at Hitler’s side on grand occasions, and yes, giving birth, too. What a tool, what a weapon it was! But why, does anyone have a guess, why was it all her babies turned out to be girls, all but one, and the little boy that did come was slow in the head? The award, you see, the state decoration, the Mutterkreuz, the Mother Cross, something like the Iron Cross, that Hitler and Goebbels, her own husband, thought up; its highest grade went to those women who had eight children, so she was continually pregnant through those years, giving birth to her six H-named children, Hitler’s loving hetaera—ha-ha!” Margaret laughed. “It was little Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide.
Margaret turned her head upward then—upward and to the side in a faux-contemplative gesture. Stealing the moment, she twisted back to see finally what it was that was moving behind her. She couldn’t quite make it out. She wanted badly to turn around all the way, but the sound of her own voice dragged her on. “This building, the onetime Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, is today the Ministry of Health for the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Still breathing with the performer’s excitement, she gave in to her impulse and turned around all the way. She saw—more than the cancer, more than the lump of living construction—she saw a woman, moving at one of the second-floor windows of the ministry. The woman drew back gauzy curtains, her face electrically familiar, shining sharply in the illumination of Margaret’s upturned gaze. The smooth, blond, wig-like hair, carefully set in marcel waves, glistened over a beaked face, her prominent brow bone so low that her little black, unblinking eyes were in heavy shadow. The hair on her tiny skull, with its cultivation, and the beautifully tailored dress—black gabardine, high-waisted—almost managed to obscure the woman’s body; the woman was hunchbacked, but uniquely, peculiarly—inhumanly. The woman leaned out the window. There was a sense of dirty feathers, of sickening, phosphorescent droppings, a strong suggestion of violence, as if at any minute she might coast down from her window perch and fall on Margaret with the talons of an all-knowing, all-destroying intelligence. She smiled at Margaret with such a tight, familiar grin. Margaret drew back. The woman smiled again and nodded her head.
Margaret turned around toward the group, but her eyes dragged along the ground,