The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,82

the tram moved away from her. It was Margaret’s face.

Margaret got off the tram in Weissensee and turned into a side street. Her head was still dazed—she was empty and fresh as though she had slept.

Then she had luck: she spied a little flower shop on her way to the cemetery. One of the Vietnamese establishments that only has a couple of bouquets, the rest of the vases empty but for a few bundles of artificial flowers. Margaret found a little potted rosebush. It cost almost nothing. She felt so light; a happiness like sugar-water bubbled in her throat. The pink nubs were small and perfect enough to be mistaken for the flowers painted on china, and she convinced herself that the children of the Family Strauss would be pleased.

Out here in Weissensee, the apartment houses’ flesh was old, almost grey. These buildings were set far back from the street, and the gardens in front had high brick walls and arched iron gates. In some places the skin of the flesh seemed to have become dry and fallen away, and the red muscle beneath was exposed, what might have once been the redbrick of inner walls, and it was a ruinous beauty. Margaret made her way to the cemetery over the cobblestones, hurrying along with the potted rosebush. At the end of the road the buildings stopped, there was an open bramble. The blond, healthy skin of the cemetery’s entrance rose over the near horizon. Margaret could hear birds calling, water gurgling in the fountain of a hidden garden. The street was deserted. Margaret drew closer. She noticed the absence of the usual guard for Jewish institutions, and the place seemed enchanted.

She walked through the arch and into the cemetery.

First came the feeling of sudden darkness, not as when the sun is behind a cloud but rather as when it goes flat behind the discus of the moon, and the birds grow dull. The trees grew up higher than the eye could see, in a heavy halo. The impression was of islands of bone, as in a great blond-brown archipelago rising out of the sea. The aisles between these tumbledown graves crept away into the haze, around bends toward a missing horizon, and the darkness of shadowless moss seemed to grow seamlessly into the darkness of decrepit mausoleums.

Margaret moved uncertainly. She saw a sign: Field A. She followed the path, going by graves from the nineteenth century and then, just as soon, graves from only the year before. She curved with the high wall around the inside edge of the cemetery, circling.

At first she thought she was alone in the entire place, but when she passed Field C she heard a regular scraping sound. Shovels and plastic buckets were left askew on the ground. She looked down the long aisle. In the distance, two bright specks twinkled: old women. They were raking gravel.

She came up on Field D, and here the graves were not marked in Hebrew but in German. Margaret began to read the names on the gravestones. In the second row there were stones so tightly grasped by the roots of ivy that names could not be made out. She worried that one of these graves might be that of the Family Strauss and she would miss them.

She walked more slowly. Her only hope was that she would sense the graves if she did not see them. It was in that spirit that she focused on the complex pattern of the cobbles under her feet.

She passed into the fourth row, and there it began: gravestones very small and flat, on each nothing more than a lone family name and an endless repetition of the same years of death: 1943, 1944, 1945. Ivy drew back and exposed names: Stein, Schwarz, Moses, Rosenberg, Benjamin—and on and on, the suicides went.

Under a tall elm, toward the back wall of the cemetery, Margaret pushed back a creeper of heavy ivy. With no warning at all, there they were.

On one side lay Franz, in the middle a single grave with the names of the three little girls, Rahel, Gerda, and Beate, and on the other side Regina. All three short mounds were covered in ivy, puffed and waxy, like feather beds fluffed and tucked at the edges. As soon as Margaret rustled the ivy with her hands, she could see hundreds of red dots—the ivy was rich with bright, red berries.

At this sight, a quotation wove in her mind: They seemed like sleeping