the smell of it made her walk the house weak and bleary-eyed, without blood in her veins, not remembering to open the curtains in the morning or at any other time, afraid of all things light and springing, what could she do? The Nazi past was her encampment now, her nest, her burrow.
ELEVEN • Sachsenhausen
In mid-December, a cold fell over the city. Much to everyone’s surprise—for it was uncommon in this part of the country and at this time of year—Berlin fell under a thick layer of ice. Temperatures dropped to twenty below zero, and people, streets, trees, and buildings shriveled into muted silhouettes of themselves. It was so freezing that Margaret didn’t know whether her flesh city was still living; the buildings had frozen, had become one with the sandy ground, indistinguishable from stone.
On the coldest of these cold days, Margaret was assigned to give a tour of the concentration camp memorial of Sachsenhausen. Surprisingly, given the weather, eighteen people booked places for the excursion. In the regional express train shuttling north of the city to the little town of Oranienburg where Sachsenhausen spreads its sad cloud, Margaret looked out the window, her eyes slack over the dead plains around Berlin. The open expanses of winter fields were punctuated by bails of hay tightly wrapped in plastic. In the morning light, their frost-covered surfaces smoked like glass, dull with the secret of cold.
She thought of Magda, and then of Minnebie, whom she had pictured in her mind as looking something like herself. The collapse of Magda into Minnebie into Margaret was not an unpleasant sensation. The sense of camaraderie since the hawk-woman had come and Margaret had begun to read Mein Kampf was familiar to her: a sense of sure-footedness, of buttressing, of walking with a phalanx.
Whence did she know it? She racked her mind. She knew it from early childhood. To be dependent on others without resentment—what a sweet time.
She thought back on her earliest years. The time before her father became sick. She did not have very much of it. She remembered that he sometimes played “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind” on the harmonica, and then sang the refrain in a language that, in those years, she did not know. And once, she remembered, he had pulled the Great Dane up on its hind legs and danced with it. How she had laughed! The man who danced with a dog was the man she had loved. This was before he shut himself in his office and before they got rid of the dog.
So the feeling of walking with a phalanx, she decided, also had something to do with the sunshine of the psyche before it is hacked apart.
Around the train car wafted bits and pieces of the sort of conversation that always preceded a visit to the concentration camp memorial.
“Why did Hitler hate the Jews?”
“We’ll never know. Terrible.”
“One of them bullied him as a child maybe. You know, innocent kids’ stuff, but he took it the wrong way.”
“Do you think so?”
“Really, he was a weird man, wasn’t he.”
“What we’d call today a sociopath—”
“Like Pinochet.”
“Yes, like Pinochet.”
“But the Jews did have all the money, they never minded making a pretty penny off the Germans—”
“But I’ve heard that his own mother was Jewish—”
“Never mind that, I saw a documentary on BBC2 where you could see plain as day he was a homosexual.”
“Bah! He wasn’t any different than the rest of us. Anyone might do the same thing for power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Say what you will, he was a sort of genius.”
“The Germans were anti-Semites from the ground up, going back a thousand years,” said another voice. “No sense looking at Hitler out of context.”
The quick rattling off of chestnuts never ceased to amaze Margaret. It was several British, Australians, and Americans who sat in a group of eight seats facing one another from across the aisle, while a Norwegian couple of middle age sat farther off, outside of the anglophone gathering. A group of Argentine students sat farther away still.
Margaret herself sat with her back to the anglophone group, in a seat where she could hear them but not see them. She was seething with dislike for a particular English businessman. It was because he wore a trench coat—an inadequate coat, given the extreme cold. Margaret knew who would suffer, whose eyes would glaze over with dilettante misery. She knew it in advance. These people would be displeased with her tour no matter what