counter.
Amadeus, I’m not playing things as coolly as I would like. I can’t tell anyone here about that part of it. It’s nonsensical, but sometimes I do things to provoke Christoph deliberately, things I know will set off his paranoia. There was one occasion, for example, when I took Margaret and left for a vacation in Wyoming without telling him. It was only to avoid having to go through weeks of his accusations beforehand. But when I came back, he started looking at me with a sly, mistrustful gaze. You know that gaze of his—he had a similar suspicious expression before he ever got sick, through those thick glasses of his. Later, I read his legal pad (I always read them, or have them translated, just to keep track of his thoughts, but that too, he notices. In fact he thinks it’s CIA surveillance).
He wrote: “They have made a new Sarah, almost a perfect facsimile. But the moles on the upper arms of the new Sarah are misplaced, and their constellation bears witness to the truth.”
Then there is also the fact that I’ve been snapping at Margaret, saying cruel things.
But the worst thing, the single worst thing, is that while he was in the hospital I got rid of his dog, his beloved dog. I told him Alphi was dead. Don’t you see, Amadeus, with the girl, and now with Christoph’s father staying in the back room sometimes when he’s not in California (that has really made Christoph worse, I think. How he hates his father!) I just couldn’t handle the dog as well. But maybe it was also a matter of vengeance.
We both miss you, Amadeus! If only you could come to us. Are you still thinking of coming? I hope you will think of it.
Yours,
Sarah
PART II
ROPE
The fascination aroused by Hitler and his demands on the nation did not only have to do with sadism but also very much with masochism, with the appetite for submission, behind which stood an impulse toward the desecration of authority that was much farther from the surface of consciousness (one thinks of Luther’s tone on the topic of the Pope).
—MARGARETE AND ALEXANDER MITSCHERLICH
THE INABILITY TO MOURN
SIXTEEN • Redemption Beckoning
It all began on the way to the Schöneberg archive. Although Margaret had painted a portrait in oils of the Nazi propaganda minister’s wife, photographed it, uploaded it, and retouched it, made shining digital variations, and all of this was done in a spirit of finding beauty in the woman’s face, and although she had read Mein Kampf as though it were a Bhagavad Gita, writing out many of the dubiously sympathetic passages in a tight hand in her own notebook, in the end, she had still not quite been able to stretch her brain far enough.
And after the Meissner biography was revealed as a sham, a despondency settled over her. The hawk-woman at her window was oppressive—nothing, really, but an instrument of terror, and the terror breathed down her neck day and night, infecting her small pleasures. Nightly dinner had a vague smell of guano.
On that fateful evening when everything changed, Margaret was in fact still trying: she was intending to find Magda Goebbels’s birth certificate and prove to herself conclusively that the woman had been born out of wedlock—she was already ninety-five-percent certain—but this was the way it was with her, everything shifted, her mind’s promises to itself were never kept. And so she was setting out doggedly, heading for the Schöneberg archive.
Down the Grunewaldstrasse she went, west toward Rathaus Schöneberg and John-F.-Kennedy-Platz.
The sky was a shade of blue that appeared wet, like new paint, and everything in the city, the buildings too, seemed restless.
Already when Margaret turned onto Martin-Luther-Strasse, she saw something in the distance: not a single bird—no—today it was a large swarm. Thousands of birds, and at first, reflexively, she mistook them for a convention of the taloned sparrow hawks of the Magda kind, and with all her soul she wanted to turn back toward home. But only a moment later, before she could swing around, she saw that it was not birds of prey after all, but swallows. Of course, it was only swallows. It was that time of twilight when swallows dive, in the light-filled evening, in the sleep-filled sky, and thousands of them moved in a globe of motion, according to their own complex design, around the spire of the massive city hall at John-F.-Kennedy-Platz, which rose like a fist of flesh in the early dusk.
There was