The History of History Read online

  “True enough,” Benjamin said. “Let’s see. You always wore those little dresses back then, didn’t you. Not like now,” and he gestured at her oversized man’s trousers, whose cuffs had lately been dragging behind her in the sod, their hems unraveling, and the broadcloth shirt. “But okay. What happens when you try to remember?”

  “I told you, Benny. There’s nothing. Nothing comes to mind at all.”

  Benjamin poured her a shot of Unicum.

  “I don’t want that,” Margaret said.

  “Don’t drink it if you don’t want it.”

  Margaret picked up the shot glass and drank it down. Then she began to laugh. “It’s all ridiculous!”

  “It’s ridiculous all right.”

  Margaret laughed on and on. Benjamin sat with his arms crossed, looking at her with an uncertain smile.

  Finally she took a breath. “There’s one thing,” she said, swallowing. “I often see one thing. But it’s not a memory. It’s more of a picture. Maybe even more like a smell than a picture. I think I dreamt it or saw it on TV. It comes to me sometimes when I try.”

  “That’s good, Margaret. That’s a clue. What is it?”

  Margaret gave a last hysterical peal of laughter. The sound was shrill. “It’s a staircase in an apartment house,” she said, choking on saliva.

  “Where?” Benjamin asked.

  “I don’t know where. Nowhere I’ve ever been. But I can see it perfectly. The staircase curves in an oval spiral upward around an oval shaft in the middle. At the top there’s a skylight with wedged panes. I can see it all really well. The window is like a wheel with spokes. But oval-shaped, to match the shape of the stairwell. And because of the skylight, the stairwell is bright at the center and shadowy around the edges.”

  “Okay,” Benjamin said.

  “And the stairs are covered in red flaxen runners, the kind that smell like straw.”

  “So it’s probably Berlin.”

  “What?”

  “Red flaxen runners are mostly a Berlin thing.”

  “Oh,” Margaret said. She had not thought of this.

  “What else?” Benjamin asked.

  “At the bottom, there’s a girl, about my age, walking up the stairs.”

  “Bingo, Margaret,” Benjamin said. “That must be you.”

  “No, no. Not me at all. She’s wearing a bluish dress. I don’t have a blue dress.” Margaret felt herself sinking in—seeing in her mind the narrow blue stripes of the faded fabric, the brown plastic belt made to look like leather. She let out her breath. “The girl is looking up, and she can see there’s a man up at the top of the stairs. The man doesn’t see her. He’s leaning both arms on the banister way up there under the skylight, he’s smoking a cigarette, almost at the top of the house, maybe four or five stories up, pretty far away from her. She can see the smoke from his cigarette, it’s curling grey against the skylight, and even sometimes next to her, she notices ash fluttering down. She calls up to him, but he doesn’t call back. She’s walking up the stairs, holding on to the banister, and calling. But every time she puts her head over the edge and looks up into the white light in the shaft, he’s never any closer, and she gets blinded by the brightness. When she looks back down at the stairs, the ovals are burnt on her eyes. She can see the shape of the skylight on the stairs, black spots like silverfish.”

  “Like silverfish?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, that’s good. I should be taking notes on all this.” Benjamin poured himself another shot of Unicum, and then one for Margaret. She drank it down. “What else?” he said.

  “Actually, there is something else.” Margaret swallowed. “Maybe it’s a different dream. Sometimes I think it’s a different dream. Or maybe it’s later. It’s probably a different dream. But in any case, on the same stairs, while the girl is still climbing, something actually crashes through the skylight. It crashes a hole in the glass up there in the roof and it drops down. Down past the fifth- and fourth-floor landings, all the way down to the bottom. Once it’s down on the floor in the cellar, the girl knows something. Nothing will ever be the same. And the reason: she’s lost the fight.”

  “What fight?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just what’s going on. I don’t even know if it’s in her mind. Maybe it’s a narrator saying it in the background, or some music playing those lyrics.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, anyway, the thing, whatever it is, it falls all the way down to the bottom floor, way down below, onto this blue-and-white-checkered floor down there. There’s a mosaic on the underground level, and it falls onto those tiles. But it doesn’t make a crashing sound. It lands silently. And the girl looks over the banister, looks down, and sees whatever it is, maybe something the size of a fist, a little red and grey on the blue-and-white tiles.”

  All of this Margaret had remembered that very afternoon, while she was fretful in bed.

  “You have no idea where this came from?” Benjamin asked.

  Margaret considered. “I think I probably made it up.” Her eyes were closed, she felt like sleeping now. Benjamin spoke again, but his tone had changed.

  “Margaret,” he said, “there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  Margaret opened her eyes. There was a movement at the doorway. She roused herself to standing, feeling much more drunk than she had known. She held on to the chair for support. She peered. A young woman at the entrance to the kitchen. The newcomer was barefoot and wore only a T-shirt and underwear. Her hair was in disarray, her cheeks pink with sleep. And the funny and terrible thing was that Margaret was looking at herself. The woman had the same wide-set eyes, the same long bones, the same skin dotted with moles. Her legs had the same sparse hair, the same narrow kneecaps, her veins the same streaking presence through her freckles. Her hair was like Margaret’s, long and fine and curly.

  “Hello,” Margaret said.

  “Hello,” the woman said.

  Looking at her, Margaret felt a change. Warm curtains closed around her eyes. Through the diaphanous fabric she could see alternating shadows, a correspondence between prisms. She heard a radio far away playing a tin melody she already knew.

  There was something else, Margaret thought, something else she was meant to remember. What was it? Margaret put her hands over her eyes, and sat down at the table again.

  The young woman went over to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water, and slammed the door. She left the kitchen.

  Benjamin turned to Margaret and said with embarrassment that could still not mask his excitement. “What do you think of her?”

  “She looks exactly like me,” Margaret said.

  Benjamin looked at Margaret a long time. “Not really,” he finally said. “I found her at the King Kong Klub last night.”

  “Is she German?”

  “She’s Czech,” Benjamin said.

  Margaret gave a cry and tried to get up to leave. She did not know what was coming, but again, as after meeting the doctor, she felt a creeping sensation of rot, as of having found by chance some terrible thing for which she was partly at fault. She stumbled and caught herself on the table, but in the process she knocked Benjamin’s beer onto the floor. He went to get a rag, she poured herself another glass of Unicum and drank it down.

  In the end she was so drunk he had to carry her into the bedroom. She felt like a sea creature with arms gushed on the currents. She fought back a little: she told him she did not want to stay; she told him sleepily that she would go home. Benjamin said not to worry. He said he and Lenka, as the girl was called, were going out anyway, the bed was free. He took her shoes off, covered her, and went out. Margaret heard him talking quietly to the young woman in the other room, and the plink-plank of her own voice. It was angry.

  Margaret slept.

  When she woke up it was still night and she did not know where she was. She was alone and she could smell that she was not in her own bed. She raised herself on her elbows, her heart beating. />
  Then she saw the Jägermeister Christmas lights.

  She could hear Benjamin clomping around hastily in the kitchen, his footsteps deliberate. Margaret decided he must be getting ready to leave. She listened for the girl, too, but did not hear a second pair of footsteps. Finally the door to the apartment sounded. It opened and closed with a bang. All was still.

  The room where Margaret lay was narrow. It dead-ended into a grotto balcony. The Jägermeister Christmas lights were wound around its balustrade.

  Margaret remembered this room from before. She had always thought it had a quality of fungus, or fungal nearness, as if it were in the shade of a giant mushroom.

  She couldn’t sleep. Why, she didn’t know—she had drunk enough. But her heart was pounding awfully. She closed her eyes and lay back into the pillow. By some dark trick of the imagination she thought she could hear a magpie out on the balcony, scratching at the cement floor.

  She listened. She lay very still. She turned on a little lamp by the pillow. There was a book lying on the floor next to the bed. She picked it up. The title was Die Wal-Enten (The Whale Ducks). The author was one Olaf Therild, the book was in German, published in West Berlin, 1975. She opened it and began to read the first page. Right away, she found herself sliding in.

  The Whale Ducks

  Millennia to come, the world was overwhelmed by floods whose causes even then were in dispute. Berlin was buried at the bottom of a great sea. Above this sea over Berlin, only the tops of the tallest buildings still protruded from under the water.

  A new animal reigned, a species that called itself the whale duck. The whale ducks were large, robust creatures. They fed on the old human buildings under the water. These had become soggy and nutritious during the centuries of inundation.

  One of these whale ducks was one day vanquishing her hunger, diving down under the surface of the water to take bites out of architectural glories of the past, when she came up having unknowingly bitten off the top of a church steeple (the whale ducks were very large indeed), and developed a stomachache not long after. An operation was necessary. When the whale-duck surgeon looked inside, she found that while the steeple itself had been digested, there was something else, the entire skeleton of a human being in the stomach of the duck, and this was the source of the problem. The skeleton clutched a bottle of scent in one claw-like hand and in the other, a glass jar which at first appeared stuffed with cotton. Closer inspection revealed that the vial contained a sheaf of paper, rancid and pulpy and covered in the symbols once used for communication by the humans.

  The skeletal remains met a fate not entirely atypical. It happened that the whale duck who had swallowed the skeleton, by the name of Botuun, was a great lover of the theater. She had mated in her youth, had been the wife of a great monster of a duck, so large in fact that he had not been long for this world. But she had been left a fortune (and some very large ducklings): meadowlands, swamps, and several factories that derived extracts from the swamp which were then used in making dye, in turn used to make paints.

  Botuun saw to it that the skeleton became part of her own theater—her own house of shadows, as such it was known. Shadowing was a theatrical form, an entrenched part of the “ancient” culture of the ducks—a theater of the dead. The remains of dead things, usually skeletal, sometimes mummified, were painted in bright colors, and bits of putty were used to round the edges, so that the skeletons appeared as they would have in life. Or at least, as the ducks supposed they would have looked. Humans, for example, had been extinct for so long, and their records submerged and dissolving under water for so many eons, that no one knew exactly what they had looked like, what color their skin had been, or even whether they had had fur. It was possible to imagine that they had been green creatures, an adaptation designed to camouflage them against the green of grass and trees, as some archeologists held, or that they had been blackish like the bats of today, the only non-water mammal to have survived the floods (and often kept as pets by the whale ducks). In the traditional shadow theater, however, the views of archeologists were predated and later ignored—the impulses that had given rise to a theater of the dead were much older and more ingenuous than would allow for scientific influence. So the puttied skeletons were painted in many colors, exactly as the whale ducks in their earliest powwows had imagined that humans, the chief recipient of the ducks’ tireless fascination, might have appeared. They were given false hair, not only on their heads but protruding from points all down their spines. The hair was traditionally black or white, although villains were sometimes blazing green.

  Because the humans were tiny by the standards of the ducks, their remains were also easy to maneuver. In the shadow theater, the joints of the humans—every finger, every vertebra—were articulated by white threads that hung from the ceiling. The skeletons became something very similar to marionettes.

  The stories that the ducks made the humans tell were often tragedies of the distant humans’ lives, and usually in lyrical, exaggerated motion, projected into much larger sizes with light and magnifying lenses so that the audience would not be forced to strain its eyes. The ducks were wont to enjoy shadow theater while sitting in semi-darkness, under the influence of an herb that made them more susceptible to extremes of emotion.

  The ducks liked best that which was farthest away but which was capable of seeming the nearest.

  The skeleton that had been discovered in Botuun’s venerable stomach was a narrow, dainty piece, and gloriously, blindingly intact. There was a symmetry to its godly rib cage, a swoop of the cheekbones, a set of teeth that gleamed with pearly winks of light. It was clear from the moment it was removed from Botuun by the surgeon that it would one day be a celebrated shadow piece, perhaps famous throughout the nation of the whale ducks. After her convalescence, Botuun saw to it that the skeleton was taken to the workshop of a master shadowist, and made into an object of great beauty, and with pride she turned the skeleton over to her theater.

  The first piece that the new skeleton was made to perform was an old standby, an opera, The Magistrate of Naragir. All the whale ducks were familiar with the story.

  In the country of Lon, the tale begins in a time of relative peace. The intermittent wars with the enemy country to the north are in abeyance. The eponymous magistrate begins not as any kind of magistrate at all, but as the ninth of thirteen impoverished children—a family so poor they live in a clay cave they have hollowed out of the side of a cliff. To add insult to the situation, the young man who would become magistrate, by the name of Hans, is born with a deformity: his arms are short and twisted: his hands join directly with his elbows. At his birth his mother weeps; she believes he will be useless as a laborer. He will starve or live off the charity of relations for the rest of his life.

  But the boy grows, and slowly he proves himself: he is good-hearted. He is loving to his sisters and brothers. He is constant, reliable. But above all, he is tenacious: he has an extraordinarily tenacious temperament. He is so stubborn that we see him as a youth of thirteen or fourteen, working tirelessly for only his dinner as a hireling at one of the farms in the valley. He has been leading a bull, when a wasp bites it in the rump! And the boy refuses to let go of the tether around the neck of the bull, even as the animal bounds through a rocky field. Two of his sisters shout and scream at him to let go of the rope. They think he will die; they scream in fear. But he holds on to the rope with his left hand and his teeth, and his sisters will always remember the gleam in his face as he is pulled by the bull—his eyes rolled up into his head, only the white showing. And then his eyes shut, and his face is red, and the blood is everywhere. Hans breaks two ribs and his left ankle, and for the rest of his life he will bear scars on his face and chest where large pieces of skin were scraped away.

  Not long after this incident, young Hans, still hardly more than a boy, sees that his only chance in life is to work with his mind. He ties his few belongings in a kerchief on the end of a stick, bids his family goodbye,
and begins the several days’ journey by foot to the capital.

  Many years pass. Through sheer determination and constancy, he manages to work his way into the civil service and eventually rises high. He becomes talented at placing bets on the market. The first gold coin he earns, he bids a barber plait it into the coarse hair of his beard, and the gold stays there. The weight of it tugs at the tender skin of his face every minute of every day, as if it would pull the hair out at the roots, reminding him of his early toil.

  In time he is appointed magistrate to the provincial town of Naragir. The peasants there, a cantankerous people, outraged to learn they have been appointed a magistrate who is both a cripple and from their own class, decide to drive him out of town. Before his arrival, they take apart the manse that is reserved for the magistrate, and carry it onto swampland, brick by brick, where they rebuild it. When the magistrate alights from his carriage, the new home smells of rotten eggs and is already sinking into the ground. The magistrate, however, doesn’t make a complaint to the capital. He never says a word. Instead, he sets about taking apart the house again on his own. He carries the bricks on his back, load by load, and then every floorboard, every glass window he carries to a new spot far from the reeking swamp, to a high overlook—a spot even more well-chosen than the original location of the manse.

  Time passes. He plays the markets in the capital. His coffers are enriched further. He manages to earn the aloof respect of the townspeople.

  The one and only reward that eludes his grasp, finally, is a wife. The people of this country are a superstitious people who feel sure that the good and hardworking man will pass on his deformity to any issue he might have, and his scarred body and his gaze as intense as an iron tong do nothing to increase his appeal. The magistrate suffers many long years of loneliness and self-hatred, but he does not think to look far away for a wife. He is stubborn, and knows he will win the people only with a wife from among them. So he continues to labor and widen his influence, proving himself a faithful and wise friend to all comers.