The History Of History Part 2

She went on. "Let's begin, shall we? You seem to be highly lucid, I will a.s.sume for the time being that yours is a case of psychogenic amnesia. If it is organic, there is little I can do in any case, so let us a.s.sume it is psychogenic."

Margaret did not try to understand. She was thinking of other things.

"It happens there is a film I have right here in the office," the doctor went on. Her fingers were busy, and her voice caught for a moment in distraction. "If this film has the effect it occasionally has had on others, we might see-dramatic changes in you." The doctor fumbled with the projector. Finally it began to tick. It started and it stopped. Once it was responding without fail, the doctor turned it off again and sat facing Margaret. changes in you." The doctor fumbled with the projector. Finally it began to tick. It started and it stopped. Once it was responding without fail, the doctor turned it off again and sat facing Margaret.

She began to speak slowly, the stresses of her words falling like a clock's hands. "As you watch this film," she said, "here is what I would like you to consider, my girl," and the doctor's voice glided up, becoming ever more incantatory and commanding. "In its entire history," she said, "the Western world has produced nothing more meaningful than what you are about to see. Nothing has ever surpa.s.sed it for density of significance. Can you believe that?" the doctor asked, with real curiosity.

Margaret looked at the woman. "Not really," she said. The speculum was not painful, but the denatured steel in the bottom of her was worse than pain.

"A work of perfect meaning, that is, of perfect pregnancy," the doctor went on, "is the opposite of oblivion. It is the linking node between fantasy and reason, at which point all is remembered and correlated. If you imbibe an expression-whether it be symphony, poem, or skysc.r.a.per-whose creator has endowed it by intention or accident with perfect pregnancy, you will attain perfect consciousness."

"But-" Margaret began.

"Wait," the doctor said. "You will will understand. After experiencing a work of perfect pregnancy, or, otherwise put: an artwork of perfect meaningfulness, the mind will enjoy a season of pulchritude, finding the grace to read all metaphors as they ride in: the symbols hidden in the clouds, the a.n.a.logical proxies buried in the faces of dogs and clocks, the eyes and ears of subway trains will open, the slightest corner of a footprint will summarize the Avesta, the threading of an oak stump will tell whence came Jupiter, and every poor crescent fingernail will be a prophecy of the future history of the human earth. You will admit-this sort of miracle has the capacity to become the greatest therapeutic tool of all, my darling." understand. After experiencing a work of perfect pregnancy, or, otherwise put: an artwork of perfect meaningfulness, the mind will enjoy a season of pulchritude, finding the grace to read all metaphors as they ride in: the symbols hidden in the clouds, the a.n.a.logical proxies buried in the faces of dogs and clocks, the eyes and ears of subway trains will open, the slightest corner of a footprint will summarize the Avesta, the threading of an oak stump will tell whence came Jupiter, and every poor crescent fingernail will be a prophecy of the future history of the human earth. You will admit-this sort of miracle has the capacity to become the greatest therapeutic tool of all, my darling."

At this last term of endearment, the doctor turned away from Margaret toward the projector, and at that moment, Margaret did not think about perfect pregnancy or perfect meaningfulness or anything of the kind. She was struck by something else-it must have been latent all along, but she only recognized it now. She was sure: the doctor did not like her. Or she did not like, at least, the person she believed Margaret to be. She spoke to Margaret kindly and with many loving names, but only as a self-discipline and camouflage. There was a movement in her neck, a slide of the gullet as she spoke, that Margaret saw now to be the jerky pa.s.sage of pride being swallowed. Margaret considered again what the doctor had written in the letter: "You and I have not always seen eye to eye." All at once, the phrase seemed ominous. Coolness licked her; she was bathed in a new flush of sweat.

The film projector began to tick, and the doctor was now circling the perimeter of the room, running her hands against the walls to find each window in turn and pull the tall brown drapes closed, until she and Margaret sat in a chiaroscuro world. Margaret, from her vantage point on the examination table, where she was still coldly exposed, was compliant. She turned her attention to the wall across from the doctor's desk. A small black-and-white film began to play there, its light glowing yellow.

It is fair to say that Margaret both watched the film and went to sleep. She saw the film in the same sort of trance in which she gave tours of the city, where all that is perceived is blown up so large that it crowds out other elements of consciousness. The darkened room, the buzzing light of the projector, her sudden freedom from the obligation to speak-all came together and allowed her to swim away.

The little film was poor-quality 8mm, in black and white, at least fifty years old. The air in the room seemed to become thinner as it played.

The action began in the woods. From the top of what seemed to be a narrow rock outcropping, the camera looked down on a lake nestled in the forest. Trees sprang up around the lake like scaffolding. The water was inky, black, and cold.

Gradually, however, there came a dance of light on the water, and soon it burned. More and more, and then the surface of the lake was all ablaze, the fire so bright the woods around it went dark.

And then a black shape, a smudge like a thumbprint, formed in the center of the lake amidst the flames, a shadow rising at the crux of the water. It was a figure-a man-who was rising from the flames, and the way he rose was not with volition or muscular energy. He rose sideways like a doll on a string, jouncing along the slope.

But then he straightened, and when he did, he glided through the air, flew through it, amazingly!, and landed perfectly straight on his feet at the top of the cliff, next to the camera. And there he was, standing with wide stance, quivering and proud, leonine head held high.

But the figure was more distinct now, and it was not a man. It was only a boy, fourteen or fifteen, in costume-a medieval huntsman. Long, waving black hair, and his broad, well-shaped forehead caught the light as he turned it to the side, a forehead that was square and flat and fine, a vein like an M M pus.h.i.+ng from it, and he had as much beauty in that moment as the young Gary Cooper coming toward the camera out of the Moroccan desert. pus.h.i.+ng from it, and he had as much beauty in that moment as the young Gary Cooper coming toward the camera out of the Moroccan desert.

The boy took a sword from a sheath hung on a carnival belt slung low around his narrow hips. He held the sword aloft, his face earnest, his arm extended and utterly convinced. Then, with a helpless, backward gesture, he brought it back down.

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 pa.s.sed, "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 Grunewaldstra.s.se 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 Gleditschstra.s.se and looked in the Berlin telephone book, and then on the Internet. She found no Margaret Taubners listed in all of Germany, nor Margarethe Taubners, 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 Taubner. She found a record of a Margarethe who married a Taubner (without an That evening, she went to the phone booth on Gleditschstra.s.se and looked in the Berlin telephone book, and then on the Internet. She found no Margaret Taubners listed in all of Germany, nor Margarethe Taubners, 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 Taubner. She found a record of a Margarethe who married a Taubner (without an a a) 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 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 hoa.r.s.ely.

"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 pa.s.sages from historical doc.u.ments 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 gla.s.s. 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 important, 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 Taubner. 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 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 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. 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 facades 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 s.h.i.+vering 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 Grunewaldstra.s.se, was a commercial paradeway, a.s.sembled 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 Doner bistro, emerging from Number 89 to tend his little restaurant. He began heaving rusty cafe 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 was.h.i.+ng across town, leaving goose b.u.mps 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 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 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 Grunewaldstra.s.se eastward. The Universitat der Kunste was covered with a light down of hair. The BVG headquarters, a n.a.z.i-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 kins.h.i.+p pressed itself on her. The doctor had shown her a film of "perfect pregnancy," and in pa.s.sing 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 There is more madness in me than I knew.

Arriving on Wilhelmstra.s.se 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 Schoneberg. 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 Schoneberg.

In the east, in the distance, the spires of majestic Gendarmenmarkt, usually with their twin, gold-plated domes, were today b.r.e.a.s.t.s crowned with pinkish-brown nipples-as though a woman lay with her back spread over the kilometers of city s.p.a.ce, hair streaming into the morning traffic. The recessed balconies of the apartment houses running up and down Wilhelmstra.s.se appeared moist and pink-shadowed, mouths, ear ca.n.a.ls, 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 s.h.i.+ngles, 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 carca.s.ses-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 Mohrenstra.s.se and Wilhelmstra.s.se, in shorts and white cross-trainers, all with sungla.s.ses. British, Brazilian, American, Australian, and Finnish, and an Icelander in the back, 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 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 Emba.s.sy 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 n.a.z.i 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."

No one in the group showed any reaction to this announcement. Everyone's eyes were hidden behind sungla.s.ses, and the sungla.s.ses held steady. Margaret reddened. She turned and hurried to the next stop of note-the Propaganda Ministry of Joseph Goebbels. The flesh of this ministry shuddered slightly when Margaret arrived, as if its sleep had become restive. She scanned the faces of the group again as they came abreast of her, but still they were placid and remote.

"In the Berlin of the n.a.z.i era, the street we're standing on was nonexistent," she said. "On this site stood a baroque palace, made over in the cla.s.sical style in the 1820s, and commandeered by the n.a.z.is in 1933 after Hitler's election. The young Dr. Joseph Goebbels, vicious, club-footed, and intelligent, was at the helm of this new 'Ministry of People's Enlightenment and Propaganda.' Dr. Goebbels expanded the role of propaganda to the point where nothing in the nation breathed entirely free of it. The ministry building, by 1935, had mushroomed, a steroid-fed monster, with addition after addition spreading cancer-like over the central city. The original palace was ultimately destroyed by an incendiary bomb, but these n.a.z.i-era additions live on," Margaret rattled off by rote.

The Floridian stepped forward, his hand pressed into the air.

"Yes?" Margaret said. She stopped breathing. She knew what was coming-she had ignored the transformation at her own peril.

But no. All he said was: "What sort of a 'doctor' was this Dr. Goebbels?"

"Ah!" Margaret cried. "Goebbels received his doctorate in literature in 1921. He even wrote a novel. Extremely long, ranting, autobiographical. Never published."

"He killed his children, didn't he, Goebbels?"

"No, that was Goring," said his wife scornfully.

"Marian, G.o.d d.a.m.n it, it was Goebbels."

"You're ahead of me," Margaret said, relief swelling her. "Yes, the short answer is-yes, it was Goebbels, the propaganda minister, who killed his children at the end, together with his wife, Magda."

"What kind of a lady was she?" asked a young Scotsman.

"Oh," said Margaret, blus.h.i.+ng at the question. "Oh. Goebbels's wife." And then all at once Margaret felt the sweet old trance returning, just as if the city had not transformed. "She was-" Margaret paused, her eyes light, "a highly intelligent woman. She was an only child, the apple of her Jewish stepfather's eye. As a young woman, before she met Goebbels, she was first devoted to Buddhism, then to Zionism. She married a wealthy industrialist at the tender age of nineteen, one of the Quandts-do you know them? A family that still controls Germany. Unhappy and drowning, headstrong, she became the zealous lover of the Zionist leader Vitaly Arlosoroff, does anyone know of him?"