The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,75

coat so that I could wear it so the star didn’t show when I wanted, and we would go to the pictures or look at the fabric in a fancy store. Father always said that nothing bad would happen if we would just learn to follow the new rules, for God’s sake! It would blow over. But mother said, it’s too late for that now, Franz.

Two weeks before the day it snowed, Mother came home from the Tombanzens’. She said she didn’t have to go back the next day. They were kind to Mother, but now Mr. Tombanzen had to go off to war and they would have to do without help. Then Mother couldn’t find anyone to give her or Father any work.

Father cried in the park. When we got home, he was very tender to us. Mother was busy around the house, cleaning and putting things in order. She told us we would all sleep on the floor of the kitchen tonight, all together, and wouldn’t that be fun? At first we thought it was fun. Then after all the bedclothes were laid down on the floor, we felt strange. Mother closed the door of the kitchen. She used our extra pairs of underwear and some socks to plug the space at the bottom between the base of the door and the threshold and also around the edges of the window behind the blackout shade where it was loose. When Gerda saw her underwear were getting dirty in the window frame she began to cry, so baby Beate started crying too. Mother told us to hush and held us all three very tightly. Father turned his back and I saw his shoulders shaking. Mother said the bad people in the government would never find us. She said she was keeping us safe now, hush.

On the ground in front of the glass branch library, Margaret hid her head in her hands.

When she looked up, the sky was dark purple; the yellow stripe was gone, and the air around her was thick. People—she said to herself—people who acted cataclysmically in the service of love.

She took lunging steps even as she hobbled with pain, and made it over to her bicycle. She rode back toward the Grunewaldstrasse. With every downward shove of the pedal, each more stabbing than the one before, she came further into a sense of grand-scale homecoming.

Once in her apartment, she moved in a loop from living room to bedroom to hallway and back again.

The child who had spoken to her was with her. Rahel Strauss’s young voice lapped at her ears, sweet as milk.

With the voice playing, she saw the painting she had made of Magda Goebbels lying next to her bed. She laughed with a bitter contempt. It was inert, deactivated like a discarded toy. False prophets would no longer tempt her, she said to herself. Some people—at least once—had done something right. She had been blind to that. She had believed that every comprehensible human action was corrupt.

She looped around the apartment, careening. What was Magda Goebbels? What was the hawk-woman? She was nothing but a shadow! The insanity of the last weeks hit her in the chest.

She considered this apartment she had lived in for five years and saw it in every way reborn. The ceilings were very high here, the French doors opened between the rooms; each room flowed gently into the next: an apartment built at the end of the old century for graceful, romantic ways of living; you could hear Dvoák breathing through the floor plan. Margaret saw that it was possible to think of the lives that came and went in this apartment as expressions of a single spirit, her own life separated from the other lives that had passed in it only along a single axis, an axis of time, which she knew now, she knew for certain now, could be collapsed like a telescope.

She shook with the joy of the mercy-shown.

Only seconds later, however, she went into a mild panic. She smelled the dust and mildew in the apartment. She considered the floors, once sleek parquet, now covered in musty wall-to-wall carpet. The scent of the carpet’s peculiar dust filled the nose. A leering sort of sadness took hold of her for a moment. These rooms, built spacious, gracious, and light, had almost nothing in them to remind of the fine old days. The few pieces of furniture Margaret had were picked off the street or bought at