The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,18

and among her tourists there was an uncomfortable silence. They regarded her expectantly. Margaret stuttered, making sounds as if she would begin to speak, but her mouth was dry. It was the Floridian who saved her.

“Who was the architect of this building? I guess you haven’t told us the most basic information.”

“Oh,” Margaret said quickly, pulling her eyes up, “an excellent question. The building may indeed appear to be in the archetypical Nazi style, so-called Nazi Monumentalism, which, in turn, would seem to imply the signature of none other than the famed technocrat himself, Albert Speer. But in fact this building is the work of Karl Reichle, an architect whose name is no longer remembered. Reichle’s architectural innovation was the subterranean garage with overhead lighting.” Margaret smiled, her head cocked. “The first of the modern kind.”

She glanced behind her again. Now the woman in gabardine was no longer in the window. Margaret smiled more brightly still.

Too soon. There was someone coming out the side entrance of the building near them, in sunny waved hair and heavy grey feathers, and a face Margaret now recognized without any doubt. In one hand this person carried a leather cosmetics case, in the other, an ax. She nodded at Margaret meaningfully.

Just a few meters away, the hawk-woman walked up to the flesh of the propaganda ministry, and putting the case down on the ground beside her, she raised the ax over her head and made a broad downward arc. She chopped. With its soft flesh, the building façade gave way instantly, the skin rolling back from the muscle beneath it like seawater contracting from the shore. Floods of blood gushed into the street. Some of the group was spattered with it. Tufts of muscle, ripped by the dull blade, budded into the perpendicular.

Margaret felt as if she’d been hit. Her mouth pulled into a closed-lipped, cheerful yet cheerless grin, and she could feel her eyes losing focus. She wheeled about and looked at the group of tourists. They looked back at her, the undazed souls, some chatting quietly, others taking snapshots. Margaret gazed at their blood-daubed traveling clothes. The man from Florida who had asked the question about the building’s architect even seemed satisfied. His arms were folded across his chest and his legs cast wide. Margaret rubbed her brow. She blushed. In her stomach, an ache spread quickly through her middle.

She led the group away. From a safe distance, her heart still speeding like a rabbit’s, Margaret turned back and caught a last glimpse of the sensational wound on the side of the building. The hawk-woman, for her part, was gone. A quarried gouge of missing flesh was apparent, and the streets ran with blood as though water up from the sewers.

Margaret steered the group southward at a clip. They went to the looming air ministry of Hermann Göring—the elephant to the mice-like buildings around it. In its fleshly state, it exuded the stink of obesity: sweat trapped in fold upon fold. Margaret hurried by without stopping; the customers followed. Later they went by the sites of the SS and the Gestapo. These reassured, as no human dwellings were left to remember or incarnate. The trace remains of the foundations of the buildings appeared to Margaret not of flesh but of bone, and discoursing on them was easier.

They neared the Anhalter Bahnhof to look at the ruins of the once-palatial train station, and on this longer walk, Margaret had time to reflect. She saw that she could not possibly go on giving the tour. She was wrapped in a nightmare. The hawk-woman and the strange smell had made of Berlin a changeling desert, and in this desert she was ailed by the inverse of claustrophobia; she was trapped in a space so large, so endless, so ever-broadening, that it was without nook or shelter; she was trapped in a cloudless sky.

But she still had an hour to fill.

It occurred to her that if the buildings’ transformation had something to do with her own mind, perhaps she could outmaneuver this mind. Couldn’t she escape the hallucinations if she left the path of the scripted tour? She reasoned she might easily go somewhere she had never been, thus to a place upon which she would be incapable of overlaying imaginative visions. In fact, breathlessly, she realized that not far away was just such a place. A 1937 post office stood empty and abandoned on Möckernstrasse, and she had read about it often—she could easily improvise