copy and packed it away. At first she thought he would not answer.
Finally he said: “That one is two hundred euros. This one here is two hundred fifty.”
Margaret was shocked. “That’s far too much.”
“Don’t buy it then.” He turned his back on her.
Margaret had Mein Kampf in an English translation at home, but the German edition looked nothing like it. What struck her was how carefully the book she held had been designed to look like a religious text. That would be Goebbels’s work. She noticed a tiny embossed gold swastika on the leather cover where a cross would usually be. Margaret had a Bible at home that felt just like this, the same weight and leather flop in the hands. The pages in both books were like onionskin, and the smell was also the same.
She was holding the book under her nose. And right then, to her surprise, just as Goebbels had meant her to, she saw Nazism as a religion. In a flash, she felt the scope of it, bigger than ever. It was a religion because it steeped everything in Germany in meaning. Fascism had made the world’s fluttering sights and frothy sounds, buoyant wares and technicolored sensations full of weight and pith and awesome death for those who could manage to live with its cruelty. Even now: here was Margaret herself, borne up on the tide and design of it, all her landmarks came out of it, her compass was calibrated to those lodestones. How could it not excite her? Margaret’s own identity, blank as it had become—her own sense of herself as redeemable—was dependent on it as on the devil; what a role it had to play, if you would let it!
Could she grow out of its soil? What could this moral system teach her, inversely, about how to live and how to discriminate?
Could she manage to reject its songs, its films? Yes, that easily.
But could she reject its ideas, its only slowly dying people, its correlations, its loose ends? What was one to do with the truckloads of lost meaning? The correlations sat now in a garbage dump. Margaret put the heavy book down, her cheeks flushed with shame. She wandered away, so deep in herself she could not see.
Maybe it was the intense of the blue sky over Holzmarktstrasse, or maybe she was tired from the nights of insomnia—but all at once she broke through a membrane and thought: I have nothing. None of these things once offered by fascism are things I have in my own life. Nothing means anything to me at all. How could it, without memory?
She walked a few steps farther. She realized with a kind of surprise that her own life had no meaning at all, and with this she was not saying that it had no larger meaning—although it did not—but rather that there were no small correspondences either. Buoyant, frothy, wispy little life.
She was drawn back toward the book. She took a few steps toward the table.
Margaret’s mother’s family had been loud, her father’s family silent. When things happened in her father’s family (she remembered her grandfather), they disappeared forever, whether they be double-jointedness or stock market gains, failed marriages or stillbirths, they remained unnoted and uncorrelated. By contrast, in her mother’s family, events and characteristics were repeated endlessly, told to laughs or made into a refrain, until everything you did or had done to you was part of the pounding myth, a link in the chain, part of history, part of television. Margaret had not been able to stand it, she had gone the way of her father’s family—in silence.
The city had turned to flesh. What if soon she had no choice but to decipher every sign, just as the doctor seemed to want?
Margaret spun around. The young man with the red face looked at her. She said, before she had even made up her mind, so that the words surprised even her: “I’ll take it.”
“You don’t have the cash,” the man said quietly. If he was surprised at her, he did not show it.
“Yes, I do.” It happened that Margaret was carrying her work wallet with her, the one with the money from selling tickets for her tours. She decided that she would borrow from this wallet. It would make her month very tight. When she handed him the cash, the man did not even look at her; he took the money and made it disappear like a magician pressing it into his palm.