The History of History (7 page)

Margaret turned her head upward then—upward and to the side in a faux-contemplative gesture. Stealing the moment, she twisted back to see finally what it was that was moving behind her. She couldn’t quite make it out. She wanted badly to turn around all the way, but the sound of her own voice dragged her on. “This building, the onetime Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, is today the Ministry of Health for the Federal Republic of Germany.”

Still breathing with the performer’s excitement, she gave in to her impulse and turned around all the way. She saw—more than the cancer, more than the lump of living construction—she saw a woman, moving at one of the second-floor windows of the ministry. The woman drew back gauzy curtains, her face electrically familiar, shining sharply in the illumination of Margaret’s upturned gaze. The smooth, blond, wig-like hair, carefully set in marcel waves, glistened over a beaked face, her prominent brow bone so low that her little black, unblinking eyes were in heavy shadow. The hair on her tiny skull, with its cultivation, and the beautifully tailored dress—black gabardine, high-waisted—almost managed to obscure the woman’s body; the woman was hunchbacked, but uniquely, peculiarly—inhumanly. The woman leaned out the window. There was a sense of dirty feathers, of sickening, phosphorescent droppings, a strong suggestion of violence, as if at any minute she might coast down from her window perch and fall on Margaret with the talons of an all-knowing, all-destroying intelligence. She smiled at Margaret with such a tight, familiar grin. Margaret drew back. The woman smiled again and nodded her head.

Margaret turned around toward the group, but her eyes dragged along the ground, and among her tourists there was an uncomfortable silence. They regarded her expectantly. Margaret stuttered, making
sounds as if she would begin to speak, but her mouth was dry. It was the Floridian who saved her.

“Who was the architect of this building? I guess you haven’t told us the most basic information.”

“Oh,” Margaret said quickly, pulling her eyes up, “an excellent question. The building may indeed appear to be in the archetypical Nazi style, so-called Nazi Monumentalism, which, in turn, would seem to imply the signature of none other than the famed technocrat himself, Albert Speer. But in fact this building is the work of Karl Reichle, an architect whose name is no longer remembered. Reichle’s architectural innovation was the subterranean garage with overhead lighting.” Margaret smiled, her head cocked. “The first of the modern kind.”

She glanced behind her again. Now the woman in gabardine was no longer in the window. Margaret smiled more brightly still.

Too soon. There was someone coming out the side entrance of the building near them, in sunny waved hair and heavy grey feathers, and a face Margaret now recognized without any doubt. In one hand this person carried a leather cosmetics case, in the other, an ax. She nodded at Margaret meaningfully.

Just a few meters away, the hawk-woman walked up to the flesh of the propaganda ministry, and putting the case down on the ground beside her, she raised the ax over her head and made a broad downward arc. She chopped. With its soft flesh, the building façade gave way instantly, the skin rolling back from the muscle beneath it like seawater contracting from the shore. Floods of blood gushed into the street. Some of the group was spattered with it. Tufts of muscle, ripped by the dull blade, budded into the perpendicular.

Margaret felt as if she’d been hit. Her mouth pulled into a closed-lipped, cheerful yet cheerless grin, and she could feel her eyes losing focus. She wheeled about and looked at the group of tourists. They looked back at her, the undazed souls, some chatting quietly, others taking snapshots. Margaret gazed at their blood-daubed traveling clothes. The man from Florida who had asked the question about the building’s architect even seemed satisfied. His arms were folded across his chest and his legs cast wide. Margaret rubbed her brow. She blushed. In her stomach, an ache spread quickly through her middle.

She led the group away. From a safe distance, her heart still speeding like a rabbit’s, Margaret turned back and caught a last glimpse
of the sensational wound on the side of the building. The hawk-woman, for her part, was gone. A quarried gouge of missing flesh was apparent, and the streets ran with blood as though water up from the sewers.

Margaret steered the group southward at a clip. They went to the looming air ministry of Hermann Göring—the elephant to the mice-like buildings around it. In its fleshly state, it exuded the stink of obesity: sweat trapped in fold upon fold. Margaret hurried by without stopping; the customers followed. Later they went by the sites of the SS and the Gestapo. These reassured, as no human dwellings were left to remember or incarnate. The trace remains of the foundations of the buildings appeared to Margaret not of flesh but of bone, and discoursing on them was easier.

They neared the Anhalter Bahnhof to look at the ruins of the once-palatial train station, and on this longer walk, Margaret had time to reflect. She saw that she could not possibly go on giving the tour. She was wrapped in a nightmare. The hawk-woman and the strange smell had made of Berlin a changeling desert, and in this desert she was ailed by the inverse of claustrophobia; she was trapped in a space so large, so endless, so ever-broadening, that it was without nook or shelter; she was trapped in a cloudless sky.

But she still had an hour to fill.

It occurred to her that if the buildings’ transformation had something to do with her own mind, perhaps she could outmaneuver this mind. Couldn’t she escape the hallucinations if she left the path of the scripted tour? She reasoned she might easily go somewhere she had never been, thus to a place upon which she would be incapable of overlaying imaginative visions. In fact, breathlessly, she realized that not far away was just such a place. A 1937 post office stood empty and abandoned on Möckernstrasse, and she had read about it often—she could easily improvise a tour-like commentary.

Margaret hummed to herself to keep her mind at rest. She led the tourists a bit farther down wide Stresemannstrasse than she had ever been before, and turned into Möckernstrasse. One side of this street was empty. Bombs had knocked out all the old buildings, one winter day.

In the distance, Margaret caught sight of the abandoned post office; the L-shaped building reared up on the corner. The building was bony, shuttered and prehistoric, as if the street were the hall of a forgotten and half-empty museum, and the building was the skeleton of a
Pleistocene beast in a shadowed corner, dusty and massive. Its façade was punched out in looming vertical lines—ribs of massive bones.

No, Margaret saw, leaving the route of the tour, she had not escaped. This building too was a carcass; the smell was enough to throw you down—a mass of bone drawn over with flesh decaying; blackened and bruised, rigid and retracted, a mutilated corpse.

The main entrance on the corner loomed. The opaque glass doors were shattered and covered in graffiti. Looking closely, Margaret could see a tattoo in the rotted flesh—a globe traversed by a banner emblazoned with the word
Post
—that had been partially eaten away. She turned her back to the building and faced the group. “This was once a post office,” she began unevenly.

The group drew up around. They seemed to sense her uncertainty. Margaret went on in a more brassy tone. “The entire district of Northern Kreuzberg was flattened in a single daytime raid on February 3, 1945. The raid was meant to decommission the train station. It also killed three thousand people. Almost everything was destroyed; only one building in fifteen survived. This building had the most miraculous of escapes: it wasn’t hit, but the land in the crook of its L-shape was. If you look through the window here, clear through to the other side of the building, you’ll see a bomb crater filled with water; it’s as big as a lake.” The tourists craned and peeked, but the windows were opaque as though the smoke of a long-ago fire had left them murky, and there were mutters of dissatisfaction. Margaret beckoned, and they followed her down the road to the far end of one of the arms of the L. On the opposite side of the street there was a mess of heavy trees on the bombed-out land, with a jungle depth to its green—the crush of foliage cast a shadow like a stain.

Here, on this side, beyond the end of the post office, wasteland stretched farther, partitioned off with falling-down sections of barbed-wire fencing. The Queen Anne’s lace sprouted unhindered; nothing had happened here for years. Through the metal grill, the back of the building could be seen. It was an unadorned pink lump of rotting flesh.

And just as Margaret had promised, a bomb crater filled with water, a great pond, sat in the crook of the L, like a welt of saliva before receding gums.

“What does this building have to do with Nazis?” It was the man from Florida.

Margaret grabbed the wire lattice of the fence with both hands, peering through to the back entrance of the building. The door of the back entrance to the post office was missing. The empty hole was alluring to Margaret, like the entrance to a cave: a windy, unprotected void, unbelievably dark. Why did it appear as if wind were blowing from it? A memory came to Margaret of a cave she had once visited in South Dakota as a girl. In that place, there is a vast underground cave, with many miles of subterranean tunnels, but on the surface of the earth, almost no trace: only one tiny hole, no bigger than a rabbit’s burrow. Margaret stared at the dark entrance to the building, where the weeds outside were bobbing, laden with air, bowing and swaying in the artificial wind. Margaret was quiet.

“What does this have to do with anything?”

That was the Floridian again.

“In the basement of this post office was the central bureau of the Berliner pneumatic dispatch,” Margaret said. “Before the war, there was a total of three thousand kilometers of vacuum tunnels connecting every post office in Berlin. A dispatch could be sent through the vacuum tubes from Ruhleben in the south to Hiddensee in the north in twelve minutes.”

“Does it still work?”

Margaret made a descending whistle: a bomb falling. “Almost everything was destroyed,” she said. “But the bureau was connected by a tunnel to the New Reich Chancellery and the Führer’s bunker. If Hitler had made an escape at the end of the war instead of killing himself, as some people believe he did, then he would have come here, to the basement of this post office.”

The tourists nodded, and Margaret turned away sharply. She began to lead the group back toward Potsdamer Platz.

She did not turn around and speak to them the entire way. When they got to the S-Bahn station, she told them simply the tour was over. Some of them muttered within earshot that it had been a disappointment of a tour. No one tipped her.

Later that same day
, Margaret went back to Schwäbische Strasse. She went into the courtyard. When she got to the little door in the back leading up to the doctor’s office, there was a note pinned to it. “The
practice of Dr. Gudrun Arabscheilis will be closed for the holiday, from 11-11-04 to 11-20-04.”

Today was only the eleventh. And then Margaret thought of something else. There was no holiday to speak of. She ripped the note off the door. And now that she considered, what sort of practice could the old woman possibly have, blind as she was?

T
he next day it rained. Margaret did not set foot outside. Several times, however, she went to her window and looked down the Grunewaldstrasse, and each time there were the buildings, softly puckered, pink and tan and breathing under the raindrops. She threw open the window as the sun went down; she looked for the cool shadow. The chill, wet, autumn air blew into the apartment. Winter was coming. Some of the younger buildings had become pinker with edges chapped; older buildings—that was the majority—looked red in harsher tones, as if they were bursting into flame. The vague, soft scent of flesh, stronger than the smell of coal dust, had already become easily recognizable.

Yesterday was repeating in a flashing loop in her mind. It was drawing her into a repetitive circle. Instead of swaddling her memory in sleep and slipping it away as was her custom, Margaret was sifting through the day before with both hands.

The hawk-woman with the ax. Margaret knew very well who the woman was. It was Magda Goebbels. Magda Goebbels—Joseph’s wife.

That evening, she began to read a biography of Magda Goebbels. She had read this particular biography once before, but she was reading it now with new eyes.

And it was that evening as well that she had the first of what she would later call an
episode
.

It began about thirty pages into the book. She had a sensation as if a bright light had been switched on, or as though she were drunk on red wine and a searchlight were coming in through the window. And whereas she usually read with systematic attention, tonight her interest was untamed and frantic, full of desire, like the need to scratch an itch that has already been scratched to blood. She was making some unsteady attempts at note-taking as she read, but again and again she stood up from her chair, went out of the room, brought herself back,
and just as soon was ready to run out of the room again. There came a horrible pleasure, a pleasure that was laced with a kind of shame—her heart was overflowing. Even her handwriting changed: it was crabbed, controlled only by its extreme miniaturization and intense pressure of the pen. She came to a description of Magda Goebbels’s corpse when the Russians found it after her suicide, and the thing struck her so—she felt the need to copy the entire passage into her notebook. Each time she tried, however, the gremlin of her gaze went wild: she mangled sentences, unable to concentrate for the time it took to move her eyes from book to notebook. But still she would not, indeed could not, leave off and let well enough alone, and so five times—each time more desperately than the time before—she began to copy the following.