The History Of History Part 14

She turned a bend and there it was, the Teufelsberg, before her, looming like a skysc.r.a.per. Right away she knew that she had never been here before, that her sense of deja vu, too, had fallen away. She had been expecting a hill sloping gradually out of the landscape, covered in trees. Instead, a soaring cliff of land rose before her. It was grand, it suggested the myths of icebergs floating in the night ocean.

Approaching the giant, she saw a zigzagging flight of stairs cut up the side of the vertical wall, and she was sure that her mission to climb out of Berlin was going to succeed, for already beginning to ascend the rough stairs she felt that in some essential way she was escaping, her heart casting off ballast.

She got to the top; she was panting. She had counted sixteen flights.

Up here the land spread around her in a vast plateau, as on the roof of a tower, and this, too, was right and good. As she often recited on her tours, the Teufelsberg, an artificial mountain made of the remains of four hundred thousand bombed-out Berliner buildings, was "the collected works of Adolf Hitler." Now the great ma.s.s clambered toward the skies.

And here, too, the rope ladders were swinging in the heavy wind, filling the air in their locust swarm. The nearest ladder she grabbed hold of and, indeed, the grey sky was much nearer to the ground than it was on Grunewaldstra.s.se.

She began to climb with an energy that amazed her. The ladder was not pinned to anything below, so it was a jaunty, difficult ascent, the rungs twisting and spinning. But the effort of bringing her feet onto them occupied and emptied out her mind. If she looked down, she was. .h.i.t by vertigo; if she looked to the side, she was distracted by the sight of Berlin laid out around her, and so she did neither.

Finally, she burst through the clouds. She had a sensation of pure happiness. The sun was bright and warm up here, the freezing early spring air somehow left behind. The smell of the open breeze embraced her, chilling the nostrils only slightly-tenderly. She turned her head up in exultation.

She was not fated to enjoy her happiness long. Just as quickly as the first, another whiff of air gusted toward her on the back of the other. A second scent, horrible and familiar. The smell of bird droppings. They were there, in the clouds. There must have been ten or eleven-nestled among billowing vapor-enormous birds of prey, as big as elephants, most of them a dark, silvery grey, cosied up like smoky jewels in the pillows of cold.

Without a second thought, in a steady panic, Margaret began to lower herself back down the rope ladder again. But this was a more difficult and slower operation than going up. Dangerous slowness, really. Before she could get very far, the bird that was nearest to her began to pick its way across the cloud landscape in a slow approach, its head thrusting forward in repet.i.tive jabs. As it came, it began to change. The head shrank, the shoulders narrowed, and the dark, grey-black feathers molted quickly to reveal black gabardine. Gleaming now in the bright, super-stratospheric sun, the grey-blond Marcel water-waves were fire to the eyes. It was the hawk-woman.

"Ah, Margaret!" it screeched, in a megaphone-loud, bird-like voice. "You remember me, don't you? I'm Magda! How delightful we should meet!" There was a whistling sound all around, and these p.r.o.nunciations, for all their volume, were almost lost to the wind. Margaret didn't say anything, but her foot, which was looking vainly for the rung beneath her, was making the sad-futile gesture of a blind inchworm at the edge of a leaf, casting feelers into nothing.

The woman had trapped her. Margaret had no choice: she gave a nod.

"Going down so soon?" screamed the figure. "But if you don't like it here, you could continue up!"

Margaret was prompted, then, to look up up the rope ladder, which, stunningly, did in fact continue into the ether. "What's up there?" Margaret asked doubtfully. the rope ladder, which, stunningly, did in fact continue into the ether. "What's up there?" Margaret asked doubtfully.

"Wouldn't you know it! All the people you have lost," was the gleeful response. Margaret stared up into the bright, endless blue, with the rope ladder tracing into it like a fis.h.i.+ng line. "Perhaps you would like to see the one you left behind, Margaret?"

Margaret thought about this. Perhaps she would like to see-but the screeching voice of her interlocutor interrupted her thoughts. "And also there," said the woman, "are all the people I I have lost." have lost."

"The people you have lost?" asked Margaret, dazed. "I'm going down." And again her feet began to jab at the air, looking for a rung down.

"Stay awhile," said the hawk-woman. "We can have a little chat."

"That's all right," said Margaret, and again focused on her footing.

The rope ladder, however, seemed to have shortened in the meantime. Below her it did not extend much more than four or five feet toward the earth, which was far, far away. Margaret's back p.r.i.c.kled with electricity, her skin cold. For a brief instant, she thought she would jump. a.s.suming this was a dream, she'd only have to suffer the suffusion with fear, and then she'd be awake. But she couldn't be sure. And if she was wrong? So she stayed.

"Ah, I see you've decided to have a little chat with me after all!" screeched the bird-woman. "We have so much in common, you and I. I've been meaning to make your acquaintance simply for ages."

And Margaret was warmed by this, despite herself. "Really?"

"Oh, yes!" the bird-woman said in a quieter, more human-like voice.

"Well-" Margaret paused. "That's nice."

"I think so too! What a lovely little setup you've got there in the Grunewaldstra.s.se. You and I are going to be the best of friends, I know it already."

Margaret would have shuddered at this, but she found that with the rope ladder gone and her imprisonment in the clouds, the woman's friendly overtures were more winning. She said, "You know, my ladder here, it's shorter than it was. I have no idea how to get down."

"Oh, don't worry about that for a second! I'll I'll take you!" take you!"

"You?"

"Gladly, my dear. Just hop on my back. I'll fly you." And with that, downy feathers began to sprout from the woman's face and hands, her clothes fell away to reveal the b.u.t.tressed chest of her bird-self. Her face extended and her nose lengthened and latched into a beak. She fluffed her wings tentatively, and they spread wider and wider, telescoping from some inner resource. The woman's wingspan was as broad as a city street. It seemed safe enough to ride on such a ma.s.sive bird. As the wings were folded in again, Margaret inclined herself toward the back of the predator, and put out her hand. But with a great screech, the bird hopped away from her and swooped up into the sky. The sparrow hawk flew so high she disappeared from view in the clouds. Margaret craned her neck. But then the bird was plummeting back down toward her, Stuka-fas.h.i.+on, and without even realizing what was happening, Margaret was scooped up onto her back and borne away, traveling at high speed.

They jetted across the mist, they broke through, they swooped and dove, and then they were back below cloud level in bracing Berlin. There was the city laid out below, like a veined b.u.t.terfly pinned down on the earth. The arteries, capillaries, bundles, clots, and junctures of the city streets interlocked and weaved. It all happened so quickly the eye couldn't keep abreast. Margaret got used to the overstimulation, but by then the hawk had begun to fly lower still. They flew east along the line of Stra.s.se des Siebzehnten Junis and coasted down toward the Brandenburg Gate.

Margaret looked for her favorite monuments. There was the dome of the cathedral, fluorescent in its green copper cloak. Then she looked beyond it, off toward Alexanderplatz, but there, something wasn't right. The TV tower was missing. Where had the TV tower gone?

"The TV tower-" Margaret cried. But she could hardly hear herself-the wind was rus.h.i.+ng by her ears.

The giant bird flew to the south now, veering away from Unter den Linden and turning along Charlottenstra.s.se, and as they moved even farther to the south, the high-rises at the base of Hallesches Tor were missing too. They moved into Kreuzberg; Margaret looked in vain for the Memorial Library. It was gone. She wished the bird would fly even lower so she could see what was on the site instead. But the bird was holding her alt.i.tude now. The tracks of the U1 were clearly visible from this height, although there was a portion that seemed to be dented. The ca.n.a.l ran under it. And yet, where were the housing projects that should have risen up over at Kottbusser Tor? The city seemed so grey.

But Margaret saw now where they were going. Up ahead was moribund Tempelhof Airport. Margaret had never had a chance to fly into this airport before-there were almost no flights through it these days, and Margaret's many pilgrimages to the n.a.z.i-era building had been only by bicycle, just to look around. So her spirits lifted a bit-she was finally going to see the place from above, just as she had long wanted.

The bird began to circle the gra.s.sy landing strip, coasting lower with every revolution. Margaret had the sensation of being sucked down a drain. Their speed increased, or maybe it was an illusion. The earth was so near. Finally they landed lightly on the gra.s.s of the airfield.

As soon as her feet hit the earth, Margaret began to run away from the hawk-woman without a word of thanks or goodbye. But she tripped and fell into the gra.s.s, and the hawk-woman caught up with her without trouble, in half-human, half-bird form. She came upon Margaret, who was still lying on the gra.s.s, and loomed over her.

"Margaret, honey," the bird said.

"What?"

"This has been lovely. But there is something fabulously important that I still need to talk to you about."

"What is it?" Margaret s.h.i.+vered.

"You don't have very much time."

"What?"

"You don't have much time until you have to come with me underground."

"Underground?"

"I hope you'll come at my invitation. We'd love to have you. But if you don't come on your own, I'll fetch you. I'll carry you there, Margaret."

"I don't understand."

"When it's time, I'll carry you."

Margaret turned at these words. She didn't pause. She ran toward the reception hall. It wasn't until she got to the building that she dared turn around again. The thick gra.s.s of the airfield was a-flutter, waving in the breeze that must have come up only now. There was no trace of the ma.s.sive bird. And there was no trace of the woman either.

But all was not mended. Turning back toward the terminal, she saw that the building was dark. Of course, the sun had burst through the clouds again, and maybe it was just a trick of the eye, the was.h.i.+ng-out effect of the brightness, but as Margaret got closer to the building, it still seemed dark, and half was encased in scaffolding. Even more strange, the scaffolding was made of wood. The sign Margaret had so often seen from the Ringbahn, the famous lettering that should have impressed the eye from the sky, Flughafen Tempelhof Flughafen Tempelhof, was also missing.

The place was deserted. The empty reception hall glowered at her, the windows dark. Margaret pulled back one section of a fence and entered. Shouldn't there have been more security? Inside, too, everything was wrong. Half of the ceiling she knew so well was missing, and there were nothing but piles of bricks and dusty drop cloths all around, without any airline check-in counters or the usual blue and red logos to be seen. As she walked through the long hall to the other side, her footsteps clattered loudly on the marble floor.

She came out the other end. She was under a mess of wooden scaffolding. Two construction workers walked the boards above her.

Margaret stood very still. The workers had not noticed her, and she was glad of it. An odd thing: they seemed to be old men, seventy if a day. Margaret positioned herself where she could see them but remain hidden. She watched. The men moved strangely. Their pants were belted high, and also unusual for German construction workers, they wore no bright colors. The accent of their Berlinerisch, as they yelled to each other, was somehow unfamiliar, overly stylized. The melody seemed rounder and jauntier than what Margaret knew.

She ducked on tiptoe back into the reception hall and walked back to the other end. Her heels clacked. Margaret tried to bend the sound away with a lithe ankle. It was better, she thought, to avoid running into those construction workers again. But she didn't know how to get out. Already she was tired of walking, and her fear was dragging heavily behind her.

She went into a stairwell in hopes of finding an exit from the upper floor, which by some vague recollection she thought was at street level on the other side. It was dark in the stairwell and smelled thickly of fresh plaster. She wound round and round, flight after flight. Finally she came to a landing that had a window to the outside. She dashed to it, overcome by claustrophobia. But the window only looked out on a dank, concrete courtyard. She heard shouts and looked down. A group of construction workers were on the paving stones below. Or were they construction workers? Again, there was something wrong. They were in clothing like pajamas; they spoke to one another, and even from this height, Margaret could hear that their language wasn't German. It sounded Slavic. Margaret's hair was standing up now, and she slumped down against the ground, her back to the wall. But in another instant she rose again and peeked through the window a second time, her fingers shaking as she heaved herself up on the sill. This time her gaze was focused, seeking. Off to the side, in the courtyard, was a truck, and it wasn't a model from Margaret's era. On top of the truck two men lounged, in black uniforms with machine guns slung over their shoulders. And then a thought crossed Margaret's mind: Organisation Todt Organisation Todt. Other than forced labor, Margaret had almost no a.s.sociations with Hitler's engineers, and so now she began to be hugely afraid.

The workers were from the East. And if they were slaves from the East, then that would explain the condition of the airport-unfinished.

The men in black uniforms frightened her more than the German construction workers. So back down the stairs she went, all the way through the reception hall and main building, and outside to the wooden scaffolding again. Without giving herself time to become afraid, she clacked her heels loudly so the two elderly construction workers, still up on their scaffolding, would be sure to hear her. From the wide drive where the taxi stand should have been, she yelled up at them. "Hallo? Excuse me!"

The construction workers looked down at her in astonishment. There was a long silence. Finally, one of them, the one with the beard, said to her, "What are you you doing here?" doing here?"

"I hit my head," Margaret said.

The man looked at his companion. His companion shrugged. He turned back to Margaret. "We don't like the girls from the BDM."

"What?"

"Oh-" He left off. "I was just poking fun," he called out, smiling sheepishly. And his companion gave him a look of despair. Margaret considered-BDM, those were the Hitler girls. The Hitler Youth girls. Feeling so frightened now that she thought she would pa.s.s out, she looked down at her feet. She looked down at her shoes. But she was not wearing her her shoes. Nor shoes. Nor her her pants. Nor pants. Nor her her s.h.i.+rt. Instead, a dark blue skirt, a white blouse, and a black neckerchief, and over everything, a short jacket with four patch pockets. s.h.i.+rt. Instead, a dark blue skirt, a white blouse, and a black neckerchief, and over everything, a short jacket with four patch pockets.

Very afraid now, she called up to the two men on the scaffolding, making up a lie: "I've been hit on the head. Can you tell me please, I know it's odd, but what year is it?"

"Why, little ninny (Dummerchen) (Dummerchen)! It's 1942."

And Margaret looked at herself, in her patriotic uniform. She thought, So it's true about me, and she felt so much hurt that when the black started rising she did nothing to stop it. She only felt a bit of the fall; the last thing she remembered was the smacking of the back of her skull against the concrete.

Margaret woke up, she knew not how much later, back in her bed on the Grunewaldstra.s.se. She was no longer wearing the BDM uniform. But she had a pounding headache and some dried blood on the back of her scalp, where the skin broke when she hit her head. She got up, went into the bathroom, and looked in the mirror.

She gazed into her face with hatred. The uniform had fit. It looked all too crisp, sharp-stunningly attractive.

The very next day she gave a tour, and when she was at Hitler's bunker, again she saw the bodyguard, Arthur Prell, talking to young people on skateboards in the park adjacent.

TWENTY-TWO

A Taxonomy of Sins A Taxonomy of Sins

With resolve, and a pounding desperation, Margaret returned to Dr. Gudrun Arabscheilis once again. She went through the muted ivy courtyard and proceeded upward with a firm, clacking step. She would do things differently this time. She would demand a fair hearing no matter what the woman tried on her. In her bag she carried her American pa.s.sport and two other forms of identification.

But when she arrived at the office, nothing was as it had been before. Her ambitions began to flounder and distort. At first the change was subtle. The stairwell had a different smell.

Then as Margaret came in and walked past the coatrack, the place became more unfamiliar still. In the waiting room was an intense heat. Margaret instantly began to sweat in the dryness of it. The room was very dark, and the lights glowed yellow.

At the reception desk, the dour nurse, almost hidden behind an enormous jade plant, was asleep with her mouth open. The lights seemed to give off a vapor.

Through the hot ether, Margaret could hear a sound. A great whoos.h.i.+ng, windy a.s.sibilation of hot air and beneath it a stuttering, mechanized clack-clack-clack. The sound of a running film projector. Margaret tiptoed down the long hallway. Opening the oak door of the examination room, she was buffeted backward by the heat, the air hot and dry as in a sauna. The curtains were drawn and the room made light-tight against the dusk. It was close and musty in the heat.

On the wall next to the door, a film was projected. Black and white; the forest scene, a boy in medieval garb with sword in hand rising out of the lake, with great scabs of light burning across it.

A sudden glimmer in the recesses of the darkness-two round O Os-perhaps the lenses of the doctor's bifocals. But Margaret felt as if she had trespa.s.sed, and she withdrew and closed the door behind her. She walked back down the hall and sat on a chair in the waiting room.

She closed her eyes. The heavy heat was richly soporific. Lulled by the whoos.h.i.+ng clack of the film projector's noise, Margaret fell asleep.

When she awoke, the receptionist was still breathing behind the counter with an even, whistling rhythm. Margaret went down the hall a second time. Now the examination chamber was brilliant with light, and Margaret stepped through the door. The old woman's skin glowed with sweat, and an alb.u.m of black-and-white photographs lay in front of her on the desk. Over it, she held an enormous magnifying gla.s.s, and her ruddy, hot face hovered close to the book.

"Ah, Margaret Taubner, Taubner," the doctor said. She did not look up. "Be so kind and give me a moment, will you?"

Margaret tried to say something acquiescent, but only grunted softly, the words sticking in her throat. She pulled at her collar. The doctor moved the magnifying gla.s.s toward the top of the oversized page, her ma.s.sive head moving with it, eyes just a few centimeters from the gla.s.s. After three or four slow minutes, she spoke.

"What can I do for you, my dear?"

Margaret breathed out. "Help me."

"With what?" The doctor elongated her vowels.

Margaret was unprepared for the question. She thought for a moment. "Well," she said slowly, "help me-get rid of the past."

It seemed like the sort of large-scale request to which the doctor might be able to respond.

But the doctor only went back to her photographs. She turned a page, peering again through her thick bifocals and the large magnifying gla.s.s. The room was silent.

Margaret had imagined, on her way over, that the scene would play very differently. She had seen herself stepping forward and speaking in a loud voice of her ever-increasing terror. Now she found herself cramped by the true. The cue of the room revivified the memory of her last visit, and the doctor's eccentricity rose up against her. How could she have forgotten her mistreatment at the hands of this woman? She began to feel the old anger. She watched the bulbous-headed doctor peering idiotically at the uniformly grey pictures, which, from Margaret's vantage point, looked like little grey fractals: each one randomly, differently the same. Margaret gave two loud, suggestive sighs. The woman looked up again.

"What is the trouble?"

"I told you last time," Margaret said. "My own past isn't coming. I'm drawn to the past before I was born."

"What do you see in it?"

Margaret wondered whether the woman had forgotten everything she had told her. Dr. Arabscheilis spoke much more slowly than she had last time, soberly and detached, and it crossed Margaret's mind that the woman might be addicted to some kind of prescription medication.

"I'm unable to find a place in it," Margaret said, still making an effort. "Don't you remember what I told you?"

"You have no place in the past," the doctor said slowly and without lifting her head.

"But I do."

"You do?" asked the doctor rather absentmindedly. Her face was hovering, a dragonfly of attention, over the pictures.

"Yes, I do." Margaret thought of the night she had knelt before the yellow stripe and wors.h.i.+ped the Family Strauss. She took a breath. "I can do all my living through other people," Margaret began. She stopped. The room was quiet. Margaret felt as though she were hoisted up, floating on the heat.

"What does it mean to you, to live through others?" asked the doctor. Again, without any special interest.

"Well," Margaret said. There was a way in which the woman's cool, slow detachment might be read as encouragement. Detachment prevented the woman from talking very much. Maybe she would listen this time, Margaret thought. She had been longing for the doctor to listen.