The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,88

and he said, “You know, you look very much like your mother when you smile,” and Margaret said, “You don’t know my mother,” and he said “Doch, once I met her. Before you were born, your father brought her back with him one summer,” and Margaret was surprised at this and shivered. She had not known her mother ever made such a trip; her mother had never mentioned it. But it made Margaret feel all the more of a pounding in her chest, that he was no stranger to her history. He had known both her parents in the time before she was born.

Later that day, the two of them still together although night had come—chapters of time fell by so quickly, it was extraordinary—first in the park and then later a friend of his joined them in a café: a short, bristle-haired man named Florian. Then in another café, then in a restaurant and then in a bar, Amadeus made money quickly appear and fly into the waiters’ hands before Margaret could move to pay for herself and like magic, a relationship of dependency sprang up between them. After the comment about her likeness, Amadeus never again mentioned her mother, nor, more strangely, did he ever again mention her father. It became—how can it be explained? It was not even as if he and Margaret had met by chance. At least that would have been mentioned. The reason for their meeting was left so unspoken that it was as if the circumstances had been some terrible crime.

Margaret misunderstood this. She took it to mean he was uncomfortable talking about her father’s troubles: most people did not know how to talk about mental illness, and Margaret was used to that. Also, she sensed Amadeus was the sort of man who could not address death and other stirring things—exile, separation, and betrayal. He was both too soft and too hard for it. When the heat is too high in the oven, the bread becomes stone-hard on the outside while still almost liquid in the middle, and later when she got to know him better, she found this intuition regarding his character had been correct, and so she left it alone. (To her later regret.)

That night already it began—the love affair in his freezing, coal-heated second apartment, where Margaret’s little envoy of the heart to a world free of advertisements found its perch, in those loose, cool, summery years after the end of Communism and before the beginning of true capital; a society breathing out at the end of state control but not yet fighting toward wealth, light-headed, perhaps slightly flaccid and all-embracing, a slacker student of the new, like Margaret herself.

In those early months, Margaret began spending the night with Amadeus regularly. She remembered in particular how very cold his place was, even in the spring, and how he still needed to feed coal into the oven, which he would often forget to do, so the corner room, with its high balcony over the silent street, at the far eastern end of Friedrichshain, gave off an odor of cold, and of unforgiving, oxblood-painted, dusty wooden floors. She remembered that his bookshelf held Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics by Bakhtin, and this book fascinated her. It was also in these months that she began to wear a perfume that smelled like freesia flowers, but ritualistically: she only wore it when she knew she was going to meet him. Then to lie in the coal-smelling room with the book, on the sheets which were cold to the touch but clean-smelling, over the mattress on the floor which was even colder against her bare feet, and lined with coal powder mixed with the smell of freesia, and he would speak to her of his other women, and she felt safe and coddled despite that, or maybe because of it—she thought to hear of his other women drew her into a society with them, and all of them were foreign and hidden and preserved outside of time, like flowers pressed into oil. It is terribly seductive to have a style in which to think of oneself.

Once, she remembered, he told her that his favorite novel was Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, and gave her his extra copy. She took it home to her much warmer, more modern apartment, and read it through in one afternoon and evening.

She remembered the night after she finished reading this book; it was very late and she was alone, the