in general, and finally the conclusions they reached (usually while on the train back to Berlin) about the Holocaust. Margaret had heard all of them. And because of this, she could not help but become manipulative.
Theoretically at least, she would have liked to give a realistic picture and leave it at that. But there was a problem: there was no realistic picture to return to. No one knew how it had really been. No one could ever know. Even the survivors who had lived to tell the tale did not entirely know how it had been; the experience was too large for that. There are magnitudes of suffering that cannot be held in the mind. So there was a camp, and there was a “tour,” and one was bigger than the other and would always be bigger.
Often she imagined saying out loud what she so often thought.
You want to understand? But here’s what there is to understand: there’s nothing for knowing minds to glean. The more you learn about the camps, the less you know. The more you see this place, the farther away it is. The human social brain wasn’t designed to understand the human social terror, and the more it tries, the more it dies. There are people who notice the unwillingness of this place to curve toward comprehension, and so they deny the camps ever existed. These are people who have no tolerance for guilt and especially no tolerance for the things that guilt demands. So instead they mistake the emptiness they find here for an absence of content. They are wrong; there is something here. There’s more content here than in universities and museums and churches taken together, but you won’t see any of it. All I can show you today is a mirage. This tour is a virtual tour.
But Margaret didn’t say that. She would never say it. It wasn’t in her. She was a social animal with a social brain, and she did not want to begin to try to communicate what little she knew of the deformity, the chemical structure of which would suffocate, slowly, the brain’s chance at happiness—she knew it even from a distance—if it were ever ingested.
As they were on the way to the Jewish barracks the sun came out. Margaret struck up a conversation with the Norwegian couple. The man was a high school history teacher, he was older, and he taught about the concentration camps to the kids. That was why he was here. It also happened that his father’s brother had been sent to Sachsenhausen. The uncle survived, but he came home to Trondheim without arms or legs.
Margaret felt dizzy. The white sky seemed immortal. That’s how she said it to herself: the sky was immortal. She glanced away from the man to the open field. Her eyes lost focus. She saw, on the other side, between two trees, a great basket swaying from enormous ropes strung high above from the top limbs. The basket, swinging, held a heap of appendages, a head with long grey, mouse-colored hair, a curled human being. Before she had time to blink, Margaret looked back at the Norwegian. When she glanced over again to the field, the basket swinging between the trees was gone. Reflexively, Margaret remembered a few lines—“the sibyl, in her basket swaying, tells the children: I want to die.”
Now she looked back at the group, and they were looking at her inquisitively, for they had arrived outside the Jewish barracks. But when she glanced at the trees again, the sibyl was swaying there. It seemed the thing could blink into existence. Margaret’s ears were ringing, her eyes aglow, and her throat stiff. The group looked at her, waiting.
Unexpectedly, Margaret became angry—angry at their expectant eyes. When the Argentines began to whisper to one another, their sibilant sounds searing her ears, she thought she could feel they all hated her, hated her for not speaking; hated her silence. And all eyes were on her again, the eyes of the seekers, who had come to the camp for the exotic suffering. Looking back at the sibyl in the high basket, she thought she heard yet more whispering and saw a face whose eyes had been removed, who blamed her for her lies, for her tour-shaping. She rubbed her face, convinced of her idiocy, inadequacy, inability to navigate between her visions and poor pandering to the worst of the interested eyes around her.
She drew a breath. She would spare them nothing,