The History of History Read online

  Every year, the magistrate gives a small velvet bag containing two small rubies to each and every father who is willing to give his daughter the choice of marrying him—and in return the father must respect the girl’s choice, whatever it might be. The magistrate does not care whether they all laugh at him as a fool. He gives out the jewels nonetheless. In the first year, all the girls say no. In the second year, all the girls say no likewise, and so it goes. But finally, in the magistrate’s fifty-third year, a woman, a widow, thirty-two years of age, agrees to marry him. Her name is Minnebie, and she is very beautiful. Her first husband was cruel to her; no one knows how he died. She moves into the magistrate’s home with what appears to be relief, and, praise God, over the course of the next seventeen years, they have six children together and are very happy. And so it is that the Magistrate of Naragir is able to wake those fine mornings in his seventh decade, and greet his wife directing the servants preparing breakfast in the kitchen on the first floor of his mansion, or teaching the children (none of whom was malformed in the end) in the library on the second floor, singing in the conservatory on the third, or cultivating ferns and orchids in the glass winter garden at the top of the house. It is an unprecedented happiness he can hardly believe.

  But the years go on and war breaks out. The country of Lon is again fighting with the enemy to the north. It is a war of great pomp and saber-rattling. The magistrate, the good citizen, invests heavily, and right away sends his oldest son away to fight, and his daughter, by the name of Lonie, only sixteen, runs away to volunteer as a nurse at one of the army hospitals in the capital. What can he do? The magistrate does the only thing he can—he makes a profit off the new industries that spring up around the enlarged military.

  When the war has been going on for several years, it happens that the country begins to lose. The news coming over the radio is more and more chilling. Finally, distraught, the magistrate becomes sick; it’s the smallpox. It seems he will not be long for this world. Several tormented weeks.

  But finally his fever breaks, and among his doctors there is much rejoicing. The magistrate will live. With his new, clear eyes—and it is a wonder he did not go blind!—the magistrate asks that each of his children be led in to see him. He breathes and is flooded with the joy of returning health.

  But his children do not come in to see him. No, his children will never come in. It is his wife and the stout housekeeper who enter the room. Minnebie’s face is swollen almost beyond recognition.

  “What has happened?” the magistrate asks, sensing immediately that nothing is right.

  Minnebie turns her back. There’s something about her movements that has all the lost grace of an elephant. The stout housekeeper puts her arms across her wide chest. “I think it’s best if I do the talking, sir,” she says.

  “All right,” the magistrate says helplessly.

  “You see, sir, the enemy reached the capital.”

  “I see.”

  “In the battle for the city, your boy fell.”

  The magistrate does not speak. He closes his eyes.

  “At the time the young master was killed, the enemy had only just managed to surround the city, but it hadn’t fallen yet. He died valiantly in the effort to save it.” The housekeeper stands with her head bowed and her hands clasped behind her. For a moment she is silent. “I’m sorry, sir. He was a good boy.”

  “Yes, he was a good boy,” the magistrate manages to say.

  “Well, there’s more, sir. By chance there was Lonie working in the lazaret at the same time; she was at the sickbeds when they brought her brother in. He was alive for a few minutes still, but his body was trampled and his intestines spilled out like snakes. She said they moved as if they were living reptiles. The boy’s skull was smashed. After, they let her come home.

  “But she wasn’t well, sir. How shall I describe it? She complained of headaches. She said she couldn’t get the sight of her brother out of her eyes. She was awake at all hours, we couldn’t get her to stay in bed. She said she was looking for a place to hide. She was terribly sleep-deprived, and if you ask me, she began to hallucinate because of it. But no one asked me.” She glared at her mistress. Then she whipped around and went on. “We did our best with her, but you see, we found her one day in the morning, up in the top of the house, she had cut her eyes out of her head. Her eyes were out, sir, by her own hand.”

  “She cut them out herself?” asks the magistrate.

  “Yes, that’s right,” says the housekeeper.

  The magistrate swallows.

  It crosses the magistrate’s mind that all along he had thought he was an angel, where in reality he must have been a devil.

  The worst thing is that his wife, at the window, still seems unable to move or speak, and he senses there must be more. He waits.

  “As you know, the …” the housekeeper goes on, stammering. “The war is lost.”

  “Yes,” said the magistrate, “but perhaps … perhaps, not entirely lost—”

  “No, truly lost,” she cuts him off, “and the money, your money, even this house … I’ll stay on until your health is better, sir, but then I’m afraid I’ll have to leave. Wages are wages.”

  “Of course they are,” says the magistrate, beginning to have trouble catching his breath.

  “I’ll try to keep this brief, sir, I don’t want to be cruel.” The housekeeper pauses, then speaks. “Jasper—you know he always got in such trouble—he tried to climb up through the big chimney, but he got stuck in the middle. Lonie was nearby and heard him crying. She herself was too large to climb into the chimney after him. She seems to have run for help, but the little children and the mistress and I were out picking blackberries in the valley, and blind and wounded as she was, she didn’t find us in time.”

  “When the doctor told us Jasper was dead”—the magistrate’s wife, Minnebie, whirls her face from the window; her voice is queer and unexpected—“I went to the upstairs lavatory to cry, at the top of the house, and there I found the eyes of Lonie were still in the washbasin—”

  The magistrate thinks he will be sick. “Where are the babies? Where are my little ones?” he asks, with a terrible fear in his voice.

  “Can you imagine my disgust?” his wife goes on. “I learned at that moment: we are an unlucky people. I do not wish to give my children to this defeated land, nor to this defeated house. I shall save my gifts for the victorious kingdom of heaven.”

  “Don’t get abstract on me now. Where are the little ones?”

  “Smallpox.”

  “What?”

  “All three boys, one by one; after Jasper died. Within a week of one another.”

  The magistrate draws a long breath. He pulls the covers up further under his chin. His face glows like a moon rising from a green ocean.

  There is a long silence in the room. In the performance for the whale ducks, the entire theater sits in silence for fourteen minutes. Then the music begins to rise, and the magistrate throws off the bedclothes.

  “My wife,” says the magistrate slowly. “Minnebie. Do you know? There is a way. We will bring back the children.”

  Minnebie looks at him in hatred.

  The magistrate begins his beautiful aria.

  “We will journey far away from here to the valley of oblivion,” he sings. “Forget the defeat and all the lost children. We will forget and start again from the beginning. Do you know how much like a dream all this misfortune seems to me now? Imagine how much more like a dream it will be when the trees have lost their leaves and regained them. How much more like a dream when the earth has passed into shadow again and again and the stars have grown colder and colder! When the birds have laid eggs until, with the generations taken together, they have laid more eggs than would cover the ocean floor?”

  (At this, the whale ducks exchanged meaningful glances, touched to the quick—“It’s our time, he’s speaking of the time of the whale ducks!”)

  The magistrate pauses. Minnebie says noth
ing, and a great silence again envelopes the stage. The magistrate seems to go just a little red in his white face, but only ever so slightly, so that, looking at him, it isn’t clear whether it is blood rising with shame into the net of capillaries over his facial muscles or whether it is because he has raised his head from the pillow and taken a bit more of the rays from the vanishing sun. (The whale ducks insist on only the best lighting for a production of Naragir.)

  “How much more like a dream will it be then!” he shouts into the darkness. “I’ll tell you how much more! Much more like a dream. Dreams are lovely things. I am an old man, but still, even in what’s left of my life, I have time. There is always time. And listen, my darling—we will be blessed with new money, made through new industriousness, and God will bless us with new children, different children will be born to us. And although you’d never believe it, having forgotten the ones that came before, the new ones will be better than what we’ve lost. The songs the first ones used to sing won’t be sung, but other children can sing other songs, and the richness of their lives … will outdo any richness—” and the magistrate begins to cry.

  Meanwhile, Minnebie’s fury is gradually reaching the breaking point. “I have no children in me,” she screams, “not now, nor ever again. The children I had are the children of the country that was shattered and I shall never forget—I shall never forget the shattering. Would you have me go on? Would you have me walk away from death as if it were less than life?” Minnebie says, and with that, in the way the story would have continued if the opera had not been interrupted on the night of Botuun’s skeleton’s debut, Minnebie kills herself; she uses the magistrate’s own revolver from the commode next to his bed, and the bullet goes straight to her brain, for she puts the barrel against the roof of her mouth.

  The magistrate rises from the bed and his expression travels from pain to stillness. With stony face he walks by the dying Minnebie. He never looks backward. He tears the gold coin out of his beard. He uses the money to travel to the capital, and there he haggles for a pack of cigarettes, some ladies’ silk stockings, and a sausage. He trades these on the black market, and soon has enough business to live well, and, his integrity unbroken to the end, he lives out his days with a new young wife, and a second set of children. And also his blind daughter, Lonie. She cannot see, and in later years she chooses not to speak either.

  However, the opera that night was to be interrupted and the story did not come to an end. It happened that Botuun’s fine, donated skeleton was playing the role of Minnebie. The audience was much taken by the new puppet, and they watched in amazement as the delicate motions of the treasure put the other “actors” to shame. But an extraordinary thing happened. When the skeleton mimed the final words of the play, which happened to be set to music in a long and exquisite aria, with much repetition, the skeleton slowly began to turn to powder. The process was so slow at the beginning (although quickly accelerating) that none of the ducks was sure that the skeleton hadn’t been disintegrating since the first act. By the time the song was ended, half the skeleton lay in dust on the floor of the stage, having fallen away from its crystal suspension strands. The other half of the skeleton, the top portion, widened its jaws and seemed to be laughing at the crowds of whale ducks, those curious, hungry birds with their long necks craned toward the extinct species’ remains, watching them enact their grotesque failures to thrive. The skeleton that was turning to dust, with a twinkling eye, seemed to be asking how much longer she would be made to reenact her humiliation—when would she be released into nonexistence? The whale ducks craned their necks ever further forward, cooing and crying, waiting for catharsis as the infant awaits birth.

  Margaret stopped reading. She let the book slide to the floor. Some of the parched and rustling pages of the book fell out—the spine was broken. She could still hear the magpie scratching at the ground out on the balcony. She thought: Minnebie! She didn’t pay heed to the rest, she fell in love with the insane wife, Minnebie. There was more than a strand of nobility in the madwoman’s actions. Would not anyone have felt vindicated—refusing to forgive, refusing to forget, refusing to create in this turpentine world? How much finer than the old soul who clutches at the gold in his beard, grabbing at a life gone squalid. Then she heard a small voice coming from outside on the balcony. The voice was avian, squawking.

  “Don’t you want to know about the sheaf of paper?” it said. “The one the skeleton was clutching in the steeple, in the beginning. Do you want to know what was on it?”

  Margaret raised her head in surprise. “Who’s there?”

  “The question is: don’t you want to know?” the bird said. Margaret settled into the pillow, the Unicum she had drunk taming her alarm. She considered. Now she remembered the pages referred to.

  “But I thought the whale ducks were not able to read human script,” she said. “They wouldn’t know.”

  “But I know what was on it,” said the voice.

  “All right,” said Margaret. “What then?”

  “It only had two words written on it, but two words written over and over.”

  “Which two?”

  “The two of her name.

  “I see.”

  “Her name, because she did not want to be forgotten after her death.”

  “Ah,” said Margaret. She thought of this and laid her head back. She breathed deeply. She slept and woke, and slept again. Then she woke herself with a start.

  “Why did Minnebie want her name to be remembered, if she chose to die?”

  It was as if the bird had been waiting for her to ask just this question. “The dead do not wish to be forgotten. It is only their suffering they wish to erase. ‘Remember me, but ah, forget my fate.’ That is the creed of the destroyed.”

  “I see.”

  “But why do you assume the skeleton was Minnebie’s?” the bird asked.

  And Margaret saw that she had made a mistake. “Whose was it then?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “The skeleton was that of someone yet to die.”

  The magpie on the balcony laughed a screeching, birdy laugh. And then it scratched at the ground twice, rustled its wide wings, flapped frantically, and was gone.

  Margaret drifted back into sleep. When she woke up the next morning, Benjamin was still out. Margaret found the story of the whale ducks fresh in her mind, even fresher than when she had read it.

  She reached down beside the bed. She thought she would read the story again straight through from the start.

  She searched, but she didn’t find the book about the whale ducks.

  And it was only after she could not find it that she thought how strange it was that Benjamin owned The Whale Ducks, a book in German, a language Benjamin did not speak or understand.

  Margaret stayed in Benjamin’s bed for most of the day. She was hung-over and ailing. In the kitchen she found that Benjamin had left her a note with his telephone number written on it in oversized digits, as if she were a child. She waited for him, but he never appeared. Finally she went home when the sun was going down.

  For a while after she got back to Schöneberg she sat very still in a chair at the kitchen table. She looked out the window, down into the courtyard as the last of the light disappeared over the orange roofs. She sat, and the silence of the apartment became thicker. “Remember me, but ah, forget my fate.”

  The story of the whale ducks wrapped tentacles around her mind. There were two models for how to behave if you were tried like Job. Two models, each one so evangelical that Margaret would have a hard time not making a decisive choice between the two. There was only one trouble: Margaret herself had never been tried like Job. Why did she assume that she had been, with hardly any hesitation? Why did she assume it as a matter of course, that it was for her, too, to make such a choice, between the way of Minnebie and the way of her stubborn husband, the magistrate?

  At the edges of everything, there came a whitening, as
if some glassy being had drawn a circle in dust around her feet, curbing her thoughts and her world to here and here, but never here.

  She was cooperating. If there was an invisible fence that had stunned her once, she only circled the perimeter now, avoiding the shock.

  Now Margaret decided to act out. She went into the bedroom. She stood for a while. Then she began to take all of her clothing out of the wardrobe. She laid each piece on the bed, mustered it with her eyes. She fingered the seams; she checked the pockets. She methodically emptied two wooden trunks that sat on top of the wardrobe, also filled with old clothes, books, tennis rackets, and broken this and that, and there too, she looked at every item carefully. She was not looking for anything in particular, no, she was particularly looking for nothing. To prove to herself there was nothing to find—this was her purpose. Every box opened and found to be empty of significance was a little triumph, every half hour that passed in which she saw nothing unsettling was a half hour closer to victory. She went to the desk and reorganized the drawers. She piled and repiled the stacks of books in the hallway, shaking each one to see what loose paper would fall out. She went through the closet: old shoes, a basketball, a Frisbee, screwdrivers of different sizes, an old bag of planting soil. She began to weary, but still, she went through the pantry; she looked at all the canned goods. It occurred to her to look in the bathroom, too. The night drew on; she searched. The dawn broke; she was losing energy.

  Finally, about to take apart the commode in the bathroom, jiggling the drawer whose key she had lost but which could easily be broken into, she was stopped by a powerful itch at her temples. She rubbed and rubbed the sides of her face. She felt light-headed. The room rocked back and forth. She went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed.

  There, as the itching sensation diminished, dreams began to fly behind her eyes. She saw herself as a child—holding fireflies in a mayonnaise jar with holes for oxygen punched in the tin lid. Another time, on a ferryboat with a wide paddle wheel hauling up the waters of a beef-fed river, and once too, sitting in a darkened theater touching the horsehair seat that lifted her toward the bright, warm beauty of the stage.