The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,7

that Margaret had decided to go along with the misunderstanding, and that was all well and good. But by this time, surely, the woman should have sniffed out her mistake. Margaret was not Margaret Täubner. This was plain as a pikestaff, even to a very old woman. “I remain interested in your fate,” the doctor had written, but now any imposter was welcomed greedily. And because Margaret did not know the meaning of the word the doctor had used, gymnophobia, she began to thrust on that term all her fantasies of what was going wrong. Gymnophobia—perhaps it was a fear of self-revelation. She even began to develop an image of this other Margaret T. in her mind. She would have very short hair, she decided, and a habit when she was sitting of holding her handbag on her lap, rather than letting it rest at her ankles.

Behind the screen, Margaret pulled off her trousers. She looked down at the floor and saw that the deep burgundy and intricate pattern of the Oriental carpet disguised years of grime. She was disgusted. She came out from behind the screen, nude from the waist down, and the doctor gestured toward the leather table with its swathe of white paper and stainless steel.

And now Margaret’s nakedness made her even more wretched; her misgivings ducked from her mind to her stomach.

The doctor hurtled to the table and began to adjust the stirrups to their full length. “Legs spread! Feet in!” she commanded. She turned around and went to the cabinets below the long counter, rooted about, searching for something with both hands. Margaret climbed up on the table. She watched the doctor more closely than ever.

The doctor returned and gripped Margaret’s knees to steady herself, sighing melancholically. She screwed the instrument tight. She seemed not to glance at the thing as she did so, her hands working automatically. “I know you’re uncomfortable, my dear, but practically,” she said in a low voice, “you’re very lucky.” Her golf-ball eyes seemed to mist over again and she gazed into some middle distance that was her eyes’ preferred resting point. Her hands went still, and she again gripped Margaret’s knees. “The speculum of the nineteenth century presented a challenge to the nervous system of much greater consequence than the one you are enduring. It had a system of mirrors and lenses, and the light source, my dear girl, was a lamp flame. These early specula burned a mixture of alcohol and turpentine, and I shudder at the thought of the burns that were occasionally the sad drawback to their use. Knowledge of the inner in exchange for the beauty of the outer, I’m afraid.”

“My goodness,” Margaret said.

“You might well say.” The doctor sighed, her head falling forward as though gone overripe. “Tell me,” she said, “have you become afraid of doctors in the meantime?”

Margaret looked at her. She twitched. “I’m uncomfortable with gynecologists,” she said, having come to the realization only at that moment.

The woman gave a wheeze of satisfaction. “And what might this discomfort be?” she asked sharply, shrugging off her rasping illness. “Young comrade, there are two categories of people who are afraid of visiting the doctor. Their fear may seem at first glance identical, but in fact has neither the same cause nor the same effect. In the first case, the individual never goes to see the doctor at all—he suffers from a generalized atelophobia—fear of imperfection, that is—which masks a dark and disastrous thanatophobia. He thinks if he ducks out of sight of his personal emissary of malignant mortality,” she chuckled, “he might possibly escape the reaper.

“The second type of fear is much more complex,” the doctor went on, “and because it lacerates in waves, rising and abating,” she drew up her hand in a trembling arc, “the sufferer sees the doctor on occasion and can even develop a hippocratophile’s hypochondria which brings him to the doctor regularly. It is not easy to categorize, but seems to be an unhappy conjoining of gymnophobia, algophobia, and myxophobia: the fears of nudity, pain, and slime respectively. May I call you comrade, my child? You’re a grown woman.”

Margaret nodded in surprise, pleased at least to learn the meaning of gymnophobia. The doctor went on, “Comrade, you were willing to see me today. Thus, I deduce your fear is of the latter kind.”

“But—” Margaret hesitated. She looked at the doctor again. She was still convinced that the woman would recognize her as not Frau Täubner at any moment.