The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,50
garden, enclosed, still, and frost-covered, laden with ornaments; a sundial here and a gnome there. A small dog came and pressed its bugging eyes to a parlor’s picture window. When he began to bark machine-gun-like at them, everyone jumped, even though the sound was muffled through the glass. The trees on the street were old and much taller than the one-story houses, these houses both neat and run-down, in the East German way, the windows made into proscenia with plastic lace curtains.
A chorus of cries began to echo in the distance then. No one knew exactly what it was. The sound was horrible. The sounds became louder. As they neared one of the oldest trees, a tree whose roots had piled up the sidewalk, the cries were all around them, and Margaret and the customers looked up. A colony of crows was gathered in the frozen tree, branches spread in the skeleton of a canopy. Between them, the birds were fighting over the carcass of a large white bird. Some of the black birds had bloody beaks, and the snowy white bird’s feathers, as it was dismembered, became pinker. Margaret felt a drop of moisture on her face, and touched it. On her finger was a spot of blood, fallen from the tree above her. The group of tourists shuddered and skittered toward the camp hastily, like game pieces being slid into a box.
Inside the camp the coniferous trees were low, and the sky tilted in an arch. The natural world made way for an open dreamscape, a geometry of cryogenics. Sachsenhausen, built by the SS in the childish shape of an isosceles triangle, with long walls rushing off to pine and guard-tower vanishing points, was a pedagogical place, giving lessons in sharp draftsmanship. The few barracks still standing smelled of paint, mildew, and ammonia; they called to the visitor for inspection, these lone seashells on the beach of weeds. This day, at Sachsenhausen, the great open space was shining with melted snow that had, in the extreme cold, refrozen, giving the open tundra a glassy surface reflecting the blue of the broad sky. Just inside the walls, Margaret noticed that underneath the snow there were mouse tunnels. That is to say, the snow was several inches thick under the ice, and the mice had tunneled inside it. The mice traced vaporous lines under the ice.
The first stop was the roll-call square. Here, Margaret told the tourists, thousands of prisoners had assembled every morning and every evening. The coarse, sandy earth of the Brandenburg mark was stretched flat, stamped down ten thousand years ago by receding glaciers and sixty years ago by a cement wheel rolled about by prisoners. Today it was a shining mirror in its cloak of ice. The beech trees inside the camp were large, and their black branches stark in the cold. Margaret spoke of many things—margarine rations, suicide rates among the prisoners.
Jakob Zhugashvili walked into the electric fence around the perimeter of the camp just here, in order to end his life. Margaret’s head, as she spoke, seemed weighted. It dropped toward the ground. Looking at her feet, her eyes grew hotter despite the freezing cold, and her vision buzzed. All of a sudden, here at the camp, everything seemed dreadful. But why was her head so hot? Her eyes were itching. When she looked up, the sky was white.
She looked down again. Under her boots, a woman’s face glowed in the ice. The reflection of the skeleton trees flashed, and the woman down inside appeared bound; it was as though the trees had dug into her. The woman’s hair was chalk-like and her eyes dark.
Margaret reached under her coat and gripped the flesh of her stomach. She pinched hard. She could not afford to lose her sanity here, not while trying to give the tour. She must not. She looked up into the sky.
She led the group to the old infirmary buildings. The customers straggled along behind her in silence. The wind rose, and it sounded like ocean waves drawing back from the shore.
This tour had never been an easy one for Margaret. Early on, she had become accustomed to lying at several points along the way. Or, not lying exactly—omitting, underemphasizing, and sometimes overemphasizing. She was conscious that she did it, but that is not to say she did it deliberately. She had never planned the disinformation in advance. The “lies” had developed over time of their own accord. In each case, it