The History of History Read online

  And the lake below continued to burn ever brighter, until abruptly it went black. At the same moment there was a flicker of movement, a neat parabola on the right edge of the frame, and the forest came back into focus and went still.

  For a few seconds the projector continued to tick, and the forest persisted—only a slight rustle of branch now and then; a lonely bird alighting on a twig. And then gracelessly, and yet still with a kind of charm, like a cat lifting its paws out of water, the boy moved out of the frame.

  The film ticked off.

  For a while, Margaret and the doctor sat still: Margaret in one of her trances, and the doctor asleep.

  The doctor finally woke herself with a snort. She said, as though time had not passed, “Treat your memories gently when they return, my dear.”

  Margaret did not reply. The doctor sat for a while longer.

  “Can I trust you will come back to the office?” she asked. “When your memories return, I mean? Your treatment isn’t finished, you know.” There was something much gentler about the doctor now.

  Margaret said she would come, but she spoke in a flat voice.

  “I’ll wager,” the doctor said, “that you believe you’ll never set foot in my office again. Perhaps you have judged me insane, or perhaps you are not as mentally disturbed as you pretend, and even now you are planning your escape to Brazil, or to some other country that has no extradition treaty with Germany.” She sat very still, drumming her fingers against the desk. She sighed. “In any case, I’m willing to take the risk.”

  She felt her way across the room to Margaret, and at last removed the speculum from Margaret’s unfortunate abdomen.

  At the prompt, Margaret rubbed her eyes and sprang off the table. She dressed and went as fast as she could back down to the courtyard and out into the street.

  On the way home, the buildings on the Grunewaldstrasse grew farther into the sky. Margaret’s heart pounded and her cheeks flushed. She felt mysteriously unwell. Not as though the doctor had any right to her insinuations, but as though Margaret had somehow been complicit in the accusation.

  Another strange thing: the film, for its part, was the very opposite of what the doctor had promised. It offered nothing in the way of pulchritude, pregnant or not. On the contrary. After the viewing, Margaret felt much worse than before. The gentle breathing terror was wending back to life.

  Poor Margaret! That evening, she went to the phone booth on Gleditschstrasse and looked in the Berlin telephone book, and then on the Internet. She found no Margaret Täubners listed in all of Germany, nor Margarethe Täubners, nor Margaretes, nor Margaritas nor Grits nor Gretchens nor Marguerites nor Maggies. She looked over the world, she looked in the U.S. telephone directories online. She tried various alternate spellings of Täubner. She found a record of a Margarethe who married a Taubner (without an ä) once in Missouri, but that woman had been dead more than fifty years now. She even did something she could not quite explain to herself. She looked for other Margaret Taubs. But Margaret Taub, too, was a lonely name.

  Why was it Margaret did not chalk the whole thing up to a misunderstanding? Why did she let the doctor trouble her? After all, Margaret was neither crazy nor imbecile. Surely, once in the safety of her own home, she could have shrugged the whole thing off.

  The answer is twofold. One, there was the rushing silence of the missing time, the time up until and including the night in the forest, which she could not remember. This effectively rendered her without alibi. The complete knowledge required in order for her to stand straight and declare herself a stranger to the doctor, once and for all—it was not there, she could not defend herself. She could not say for certain she had never been acquainted with this doctor, and she knew it.

  There was another problem, however, something far less concrete, and therefore more dangerous. It was a matter of an ineffable distortion in Margaret’s mental landscape. Just as a man of chronically injured pride believes a bank error in his favor to be a matter of celestial justice, Margaret’s anxiety framed her vision, and she was incapable of understanding the doctor’s interest as fully accidental.

  The result was this: after the doctor’s visit, Margaret no longer stood straight. She went about crookedly.

  On that very first night, she dreamt she was leading a walking tour, but all the city’s buildings were infected. It seemed there was a kind of mold. It was in the walls, even in the stone, and she did not know where the trouble lay. Was it in the atmosphere or was it in the soil, was it growing from within the city, or was it blowing in from the outside—a cancer or a virus?

  The next day she again went to the computer. She clicked farther and farther back in her e-mail account, trying to reach the e-mails from two years before. She was swimming beyond the buoys marking the shallow sea. She found a few pieces of mail from her boss at the tour company dating from March 2003. She clicked backward. The dates jumped. The next set of e-mails was from August 2002. There was a six-month gap.

  She called her boss, a wonderfully correct Englishman, at home. At first he did not understand what she was asking. “Well, Margaret,” he finally said, “that was when you went traveling, wasn’t it?”

  “Was it?”

  “I can look it up in our finances.” He went from the phone and came back. “Yes,” he said. “We did not make any payments to your account from August 2002 to February 2003. I’m remembering now, you went traveling in the East. Something about Odessa, or Yalta, wasn’t it? You told us at the time.”

  “Right,” said Margaret hoarsely.

  “Is that why you called?”

  “I’m trying to straighten things out in my mind.”

  “Is everything all right?” He paused. “I see you are scheduled to give a tour already tomorrow morning. Shall we find you a replacement? You don’t sound well, Margaret.”

  “No, no,” Margaret said. She reflected. She thought she would try something craftier. “I hope I haven’t inconvenienced the company over the years with my—absences,” she said.

  “Absences?”

  “Back then, you know …” She let her voice trail off, hoping he would fill in.

  “Margaret, you’ve always been very reliable. We’ve appreciated that. Freelancers are not always of your kind.”

  “I see. I couldn’t recall whether I had …” She allowed her voice to trail off again, but her boss too was silent, and the moment became awkward. “Well thank you anyway.” She rang off.

  She had never taken a trip to Odessa or Yalta. She was sure of it.

  In the bookshelf she had thirty-seven chronological notebooks in which she copied passages from historical documents and kept records of her lectures and seminars. Again, she began sifting through the dates. Again, she found a hole. The period from August to February had left behind no notes.

  She sat back down in the chair. She thought of the time she had lost. The record stopped, the colors ceased, the numbers jumped and skidded and went dark. To think of the gap was to stick her tongue into the soft, itching place where a tooth has been lost. The effort to remember life experience is a strange kind of effort.

  And then, that night, as Margaret looked out her window and saw the rhythmic streetlamps getting smaller beat by beat an image did arise in her. It was so weak, so soft. A poorly sketched little dream. A woman in a blue dress came wavering before her imagination. Margaret closed her eyes. The woman was walking up a red staircase. She was climbing around an oval spiral that circled a central shaft. At the top of the stairwell was a skylight made of convex glass. The woman climbed up and up around the brilliantly curving banister, and as she did, the milky light from the central shaft played on her face.

  But Margaret could only feel the woman visually, she could not see her, and this sensation—of visual knowledge without vision—made her think it was not a memory at all, but something she had once seen in a film. Right away, she tried to think of something else, frightened by the triviality of it. In things one knows to be critically imp
ortant, triviality is a kind of horror.

  Later that night, the phone rang, and although Margaret did not manage to get it in time—when she spoke into the receiver there was no one on the other end—still, it jounced her down from the high wire. She stared into the mirror in the hallway by the telephone.

  She began to laugh: What a fool I’ve been, she said to herself. Of course she was not Margaret Täubner. Of course she did not know the strange doctor. She would not have forgotten such a huge and bulbous head! And she laughed and wondered at how the doctor had rattled her. She thought of the doctor’s office, which now seemed very far away: its mustiness, dark drapes, the shadows, the film projector hidden in the cupboard. It was absurd; it belonged to another dream, a missing country. It was not hers.

  FIVE • The Slur of Vision

  The next day, something occurred which might tax the reader’s imagination to believe, but no more than Margaret’s own faith in perception was stretched to the limit. But this thing that happened—it must be believed. Without belief, Margaret’s story will quickly blanch for us, and the reality—that the world morphed and contorted and slurred around still and unchanging Margaret as cataclysmically as the body grows and ages and dies around its antique polymer codes—this will be misunderstood as nothing more than a fable. That is also a kind of tragedy: crisis fixed and framed too early.

  Specifically, then, it was the city of Berlin. It rolled into a new phase all on its own, while everyone slept except the taxi drivers loose on the sun-smeared boulevards. By eight o’clock, it was already done.

  The city transformed into flesh. When Margaret awoke, there was no stucco or timber any longer, only human flesh and bone. Pygmalion’s Galatea as Berolina, though the name of the lover who craved the city and wished her living flesh, no one knew.

  Emerging from Number 88, Margaret turned her head up to the sky, and there before her eyes were the city apartment houses, all of them made flesh. And how severely the sun cut through the windows! What an effect of blush and glow, the sun purpling through the skin webbing, as through diaphanous alabaster in late afternoon church windows. The external walls of the buildings swelled and contracted, so heavy with life that the skin stretching over the façades seemed to veil a giant fetus or a set of opulent organs: hushed, lush, and enormous. Or was it not a single set of organs, but many millions of individual, quivering muscles?

  There on the sidewalk, Margaret gave a cry of the most injured surprise. She put her hand out to touch the wall of Number 88 and found the house soft, like a woman’s cheek.

  There was a spectacular quiet. All the natural sounds: the rumble of trucks, crosswalks clicking for the blind, had gone mute. Instead, out of the silence rose a sound like distant thunder: wide, echoing sighs, breeding themselves up from over the crest of the horizon in the west, symphonic as fireworks going off on every New Year’s street corner, but soft enough to be nothing but the shivering anguish of six-story houses. The city was softening; it was pulped; it was breathing.

  Margaret touched the building a second time, sure even now that the change would undo itself. But at the stroke, the contrary: the shuddering of the flesh rushed to the core of her; all her emotions flashed into a loop with the dreaming sleep of the building—flesh of her flesh, body of her body, and she drew her hand away in reflexive pain.

  Margaret looked off down the street, her eyes unsteady. This street, the Grunewaldstrasse, was a commercial paradeway, assembled during the hustle and razzmatazz of the 1890s; for years now, nothing but an old dog waiting to die. The shops once grand sold junk furniture, chop suey, and lottery tickets. Pigeons nestled undisturbed on the decayed moldings.

  Margaret looked hard westward, down the ray of the street, toward what had once been called Jewish Switzerland, and there she could see the spires, high roofs, and art-nouveau windows glinting and winking: the architecture of lost wealth. The endless view was wonderful—it had a trick of simultaneously revealing and concealing the splendor of times lost, a hologram somewhere between a vision and a memory.

  Just then she was startled by a sound very close to her. It was Okhan from the Döner bistro, emerging from Number 89 to tend his little restaurant. He began heaving rusty café tables onto the sidewalk for the day’s customers. Margaret breathed hard, waiting for him to lift his head. But Okhan, when he finally did look up, gave only a distracted nod. He appeared convinced he would catch the last of the sun revelers, putting out first tables, then chairs, then plastic flowers, although it was so late in the season. A wind blew dead leaves into spirals, and even with the crush of sun, there was a chill now and again washing across town, leaving goose bumps on the walls of flesh.

  Yes, the wind blew, and the buildings exhaled. Margaret looked back into her own apartment house through the carriage entryway and saw Erich, the Hausmeister, delivering in-house mail to the tenants under the arch. He too was going about his business as if nothing were awry.

  Margaret began then, with a quiver of uneasiness, to suspect she was alone. The city had changed, but only for her.

  She strapped her bike lock onto the rear rack of the bike with a bungee cord; she blinked back loneliness, and a feeling—what was it?—a feeling of having been betrayed.

  She was scheduled to give a tour, a three-hour walking tour of Third Reich sites. What made her head feel strange and heavy was this: if the city center were made of flesh as here, then she would have to look at the horrific transformation all through the tour. And even if it were not real, still, it was real to her—how would she behave as if she did not see it?

  She mounted her racing bike. She had never missed a tour, and she would not now.

  She rode down the Grunewaldstrasse eastward. The Universität der Künste was covered with a light down of hair. The BVG headquarters, a Nazi-era curving giant of a building, had flesh with skin so dry that she recoiled as the wind sprinkled her with dandruff. She curved sparrow-like through the almost empty streets to the S-Bahn station.

  At the station, her mind cleared. It was a whiff of sweat suspended in the air—the oily, purring, homely smell of bodies—that led Margaret to connect the change in Berlin to the visit to Dr. Arabscheilis. The sense of some inevitable kinship pressed itself on her. The doctor had shown her a film of “perfect pregnancy,” and in passing had mentioned the possibility of inanimate things awakening—“the eyes and ears of subway trains will open,” and now, as Margaret gazed around her, she felt with a perspiration of intuition that there could not but be a connection. Something had been tampered with, some crucial mechanism’s fine joists thrown out of alignment, and every possible horror was now a latent possibility. She whispered to herself: There is more madness in me than I knew.

  Arriving on Wilhelmstrasse to give the tour of Berlin’s Third Reich sites, Margaret found the city center too presented as node after node of humanoid giants, just as it had in Schöneberg.

  In the east, in the distance, the spires of majestic Gendarmenmarkt, usually with their twin, gold-plated domes, were today breasts crowned with pinkish-brown nipples—as though a woman lay with her back spread over the kilometers of city space, hair streaming into the morning traffic. The recessed balconies of the apartment houses running up and down Wilhelmstrasse appeared moist and pink-shadowed, mouths, ear canals, nostrils, less sightly orifices as well, all quaking with secrets. The bricks of flesh and the stucco walls of flesh, crowned first by gutters, then by shingles, and finally by chimneys of flesh—brown-, rose-, and parchment-colored, some glowing with health, the older buildings covered in the wrinkled and loose skin of age—rose up into the heavens.

  Here in town, Margaret also spotted carcasses—buildings already dead and rotting, or even older ones that were nothing but skeletal remains.

  She was late. The customers were already congregated at the meeting point on the corner of Mohrenstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse, in shorts and white cross-trainers, all with sunglasses. British, Brazilian, American, Australian, and Finnish, and an Icelander in the ba
ck, dressed in black, peering reed-like out of pessimistic eyes.

  And now already Margaret was changing her mind. With the city laid out before her and the suspicious eyes of the people in front of her, how could she believe it was the doctor and her film of perfect pregnancy that had caused the change? What was more believable—the trace memory of the blind doctor of yesterday with her fantastic claims, or the buildings quaking and echoing with breath under Margaret’s very touch? Faced with the testimony of her senses, it was a very thin filament of rationalism that suggested it could all be traceable to Margaret’s mind rather than to the soil and beams of the city itself.

  She looked at the tourists, her customers. Didn’t they mind the smell? Of course they did not, she muttered into her own ear. It was only she who minded.

  But in the end, Margaret had to stop breathing through her nose. She could not stand to take in the scent of life flowing out of the architecture around her.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she began the tour. Selling tickets was a trial. Twice she dropped change on the ground, even dropping the same change more than once from a certain sweaty palm. Straightening up, she saw that an elderly gentleman from Florida had lost faith in her already, just for that.

  She rushed forward with the tour, gradually coming into the safety of her usual recitation.

  It will be better to set down exactly what she said, for these seemingly vacant recitations concerning the city of Berlin later became the weed—or perhaps it was the flower—that matured to greatness and suppressed other forms of life.

  “Although these streets of 1980s Communist blocks,” she began, “dreadful in their uniformity, and the seventies-era Czech Embassy here at my right”—Margaret gestured at what today appeared to be a muscular flesh lump—“might suggest that we have gone far afield of our topic, in fact we are standing where once the heart of the Nazi government pulsed. Bombings and Communist-era refurbishments have delivered this place from the accusations of the eye, but I’m sure you still feel its desolate rhythm. Over there, where today you see a Chinese restaurant, its life seeping away for lack of patronage, once stood Hitler’s mortal monument to immortal glory: the new Reich Chancellery.”