The History Of History Part 6

It crosses the magistrate's mind that all along he had thought he was an angel, where in reality he must have been a devil.

The worst thing is that his wife, at the window, still seems unable to move or speak, and he senses there must be more. He waits.

"As you know, the..." the housekeeper goes on, stammering. "The war is lost."

"Yes," said the magistrate, "but perhaps...perhaps, not entirely lost-"

"No, truly lost," she cuts him off, "and the money, your money, even this house...I'll stay on until your health is better, sir, but then I'm afraid I'll have to leave. Wages are wages."

"Of course they are," says the magistrate, beginning to have trouble catching his breath.

"I'll try to keep this brief, sir, I don't want to be cruel." The housekeeper pauses, then speaks. "Jasper-you know he always got in such trouble-he tried to climb up through the big chimney, but he got stuck in the middle. Lonie was nearby and heard him crying. She herself was too large to climb into the chimney after him. She seems to have run for help, but the little children and the mistress and I were out picking blackberries in the valley, and blind and wounded as she was, she didn't find us in time."

"When the doctor told us Jasper was dead"-the magistrate's wife, Minnebie, whirls her face from the window; her voice is queer and unexpected-"I went to the upstairs lavatory to cry, at the top of the house, and there I found the eyes of Lonie were still in the washbasin-"

The magistrate thinks he will be sick. "Where are the babies? Where are my little ones?" he asks, with a terrible fear in his voice.

"Can you imagine my disgust?" his wife goes on. "I learned at that moment: we are an unlucky people we are an unlucky people. I do not wish to give my children to this defeated land, nor to this defeated house. I shall save my gifts for the victorious kingdom of heaven."

"Don't get abstract on me now. Where are the little ones?"

"Smallpox."

"What?"

"All three boys, one by one; after Jasper died. Within a week of one another."

The magistrate draws a long breath. He pulls the covers up further under his chin. His face glows like a moon rising from a green ocean.

There is a long silence in the room. In the performance for the whale ducks, the entire theater sits in silence for fourteen minutes. Then the music begins to rise, and the magistrate throws off the bedclothes.

"My wife," says the magistrate slowly. "Minnebie. Do you know? There is a way. We will bring back the children."

Minnebie looks at him in hatred.

The magistrate begins his beautiful aria.

"We will journey far away from here to the valley of oblivion," he sings. "Forget the defeat and all the lost children. We will forget and start again from the beginning. Do you know how much like a dream all this misfortune seems to me now? Imagine how much more like a dream it will be when the trees have lost their leaves and regained them. How much more like a dream when the earth has pa.s.sed into shadow again and again and the stars have grown colder and colder! When the birds have laid eggs until, with the generations taken together, they have laid more eggs than would cover the ocean floor?"

(At this, the whale ducks exchanged meaningful glances, touched to the quick-"It's our time, he's speaking of the time of the whale ducks!") The magistrate pauses. Minnebie says nothing, and a great silence again envelopes the stage. The magistrate seems to go just a little red in his white face, but only ever so slightly, so that, looking at him, it isn't clear whether it is blood rising with shame into the net of capillaries over his facial muscles or whether it is because he has raised his head from the pillow and taken a bit more of the rays from the vanis.h.i.+ng sun. (The whale ducks insist on only the best lighting for a production of Naragir Naragir.) "How much more like a dream will it be then!" he shouts into the darkness. "I'll tell you how much more! Much more like a dream. Dreams are lovely things. I am an old man, but still, even in what's left of my life, I have time. There is always time. And listen, my darling-we will be blessed with new money, made through new industriousness, and G.o.d will bless us with new children, different children will be born to us. And although you'd never believe it, having forgotten the ones that came before, the new ones will be better than what we've lost. The songs the first ones used to sing won't be sung, but other children can sing other songs, and the richness of their lives...will outdo any richness-" and the magistrate begins to cry.

Meanwhile, Minnebie's fury is gradually reaching the breaking point. "I have no children in me," she screams, "not now, nor ever again. The children I had are the children of the country that was shattered and I shall never forget-I shall never forget the shattering. Would you have me go on? Would you have me walk away from death as if it were less than life?" Minnebie says, and with that, in the way the story would have continued if the opera had not been interrupted on the night of Botuun's skeleton's debut, Minnebie kills herself; she uses the magistrate's own revolver from the commode next to his bed, and the bullet goes straight to her brain, for she puts the barrel against the roof of her mouth.

The magistrate rises from the bed and his expression travels from pain to stillness. With stony face he walks by the dying Minnebie. He never looks backward. He tears the gold coin out of his beard. He uses the money to travel to the capital, and there he haggles for a pack of cigarettes, some ladies' silk stockings, and a sausage. He trades these on the black market, and soon has enough business to live well, and, his integrity unbroken to the end, he lives out his days with a new young wife, and a second set of children. And also his blind daughter, Lonie. She cannot see, and in later years she chooses not to speak either.

However, the opera that night was to be interrupted and the story did not come to an end. It happened that Botuun's fine, donated skeleton was playing the role of Minnebie. The audience was much taken by the new puppet, and they watched in amazement as the delicate motions of the treasure put the other "actors" to shame. But an extraordinary thing happened. When the skeleton mimed the final words of the play, which happened to be set to music in a long and exquisite aria, with much repet.i.tion, the skeleton slowly began to turn to powder. The process was so slow at the beginning (although quickly accelerating) that none of the ducks was sure that the skeleton hadn't been disintegrating since the first act. By the time the song was ended, half the skeleton lay in dust on the floor of the stage, having fallen away from its crystal suspension strands. The other half of the skeleton, the top portion, widened its jaws and seemed to be laughing at the crowds of whale ducks, those curious, hungry birds with their long necks craned toward the extinct species' remains, watching them enact their grotesque failures to thrive. The skeleton that was turning to dust, with a twinkling eye, seemed to be asking how much longer she would be made to reenact her humiliation-when would she be released into nonexistence? The whale ducks craned their necks ever further forward, cooing and crying, waiting for catharsis as the infant awaits birth.

Margaret stopped reading. She let the book slide to the floor. Some of the parched and rustling pages of the book fell out-the spine was broken. She could still hear the magpie scratching at the ground out on the balcony. She thought: Minnebie! She didn't pay heed to the rest, she fell in love with the insane wife, Minnebie. There was more than a strand of n.o.bility in the madwoman's actions. Would not anyone have felt vindicated-refusing to forgive, refusing to forget, refusing to create in this turpentine world? How much finer than the old soul who clutches at the gold in his beard, grabbing at a life gone squalid. Then she heard a small voice coming from outside on the balcony. The voice was avian, squawking.

"Don't you want to know about the sheaf of paper?" it said. "The one the skeleton was clutching in the steeple, in the beginning. Do you want to know what was on it?"

Margaret raised her head in surprise. "Who's there?"

"The question is: don't you want to know?" the bird said. Margaret settled into the pillow, the Unic.u.m she had drunk taming her alarm. She considered. Now she remembered the pages referred to.

"But I thought the whale ducks were not able to read human script," she said. "They wouldn't know."

"But I know what was on it," said the voice.

"All right," said Margaret. "What then?"

"It only had two words written on it, but two words written over and over."

"Which two?"

"The two of her name.

"I see."

"Her name, because she did not want to be forgotten after her death."

"Ah," said Margaret. She thought of this and laid her head back. She breathed deeply. She slept and woke, and slept again. Then she woke herself with a start.

"Why did Minnebie want her name to be remembered, if she chose to die?"

It was as if the bird had been waiting for her to ask just this question. "The dead do not wish to be forgotten. It is only their suffering they wish to erase. 'Remember me, but ah, forget my fate.' That is the creed of the destroyed."

"I see."

"But why do you a.s.sume the skeleton was Minnebie's?" the bird asked.

And Margaret saw that she had made a mistake. "Whose was it then?"

"I can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"The skeleton was that of someone yet to die."

The magpie on the balcony laughed a screeching, birdy laugh. And then it scratched at the ground twice, rustled its wide wings, flapped frantically, and was gone.

Margaret drifted back into sleep. When she woke up the next morning, Benjamin was still out. Margaret found the story of the whale ducks fresh in her mind, even fresher than when she had read it.

She reached down beside the bed. She thought she would read the story again straight through from the start.

She searched, but she didn't find the book about the whale ducks.

And it was only after she could not find it that she thought how strange it was that Benjamin owned The Whale Ducks The Whale Ducks, a book in German, a language Benjamin did not speak or understand.

Margaret stayed in Benjamin's bed for most of the day. She was hung-over and ailing. In the kitchen she found that Benjamin had left her a note with his telephone number written on it in oversized digits, as if she were a child. She waited for him, but he never appeared. Finally she went home when the sun was going down. in Benjamin's bed for most of the day. She was hung-over and ailing. In the kitchen she found that Benjamin had left her a note with his telephone number written on it in oversized digits, as if she were a child. She waited for him, but he never appeared. Finally she went home when the sun was going down.

For a while after she got back to Schoneberg she sat very still in a chair at the kitchen table. She looked out the window, down into the courtyard as the last of the light disappeared over the orange roofs. She sat, and the silence of the apartment became thicker. "Remember me, but ah, forget my fate."

The story of the whale ducks wrapped tentacles around her mind. There were two models for how to behave if you were tried like Job. Two models, each one so evangelical that Margaret would have a hard time not making a decisive choice between the two. There was only one trouble: Margaret herself had never been tried like Job. Why did she a.s.sume that she had been, with hardly any hesitation? Why did she a.s.sume it as a matter of course, that it was for her, too, to make such a choice, between the way of Minnebie and the way of her stubborn husband, the magistrate?

At the edges of everything, there came a whitening, as if some gla.s.sy being had drawn a circle in dust around her feet, curbing her thoughts and her world to here and here, but never here here.

She was cooperating. If there was an invisible fence that had stunned her once, she only circled the perimeter now, avoiding the shock.

Now Margaret decided to act out. She went into the bedroom. She stood for a while. Then she began to take all of her clothing out of the wardrobe. She laid each piece on the bed, mustered it with her eyes. She fingered the seams; she checked the pockets. She methodically emptied two wooden trunks that sat on top of the wardrobe, also filled with old clothes, books, tennis rackets, and broken this and that, and there too, she looked at every item carefully. She was not looking for anything in particular, no, she was particularly looking for nothing. To prove to herself there was nothing to find-this was her purpose. Every box opened and found to be empty of significance was a little triumph, every half hour that pa.s.sed in which she saw nothing unsettling was a half hour closer to victory. She went to the desk and reorganized the drawers. She piled and repiled the stacks of books in the hallway, shaking each one to see what loose paper would fall out. She went through the closet: old shoes, a basketball, a Frisbee, screwdrivers of different sizes, an old bag of planting soil. She began to weary, but still, she went through the pantry; she looked at all the canned goods. It occurred to her to look in the bathroom, too. The night drew on; she searched. The dawn broke; she was losing energy.

Finally, about to take apart the commode in the bathroom, jiggling the drawer whose key she had lost but which could easily be broken into, she was stopped by a powerful itch at her temples. She rubbed and rubbed the sides of her face. She felt light-headed. The room rocked back and forth. She went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed.

There, as the itching sensation diminished, dreams began to fly behind her eyes. She saw herself as a child-holding fireflies in a mayonnaise jar with holes for oxygen punched in the tin lid. Another time, on a ferryboat with a wide paddle wheel hauling up the waters of a beef-fed river, and once too, sitting in a darkened theater touching the horsehair seat that lifted her toward the bright, warm beauty of the stage.

Oh, she had felt things, and smelled things, and lived things-all things that had a different feel, a different smell, a different organization, than this cold and forsaken life she was leading here.

The morning sun was burning brightly in the room. Margaret was still sitting on the bed, motionless. In the moments she had been there, her mind had wound around, considering every angle. And now- She had made a decision. She would fold.

She did not want to find out anything at all. Job was an innocent-an innocent trapped between G.o.d and the devil. But she, Margaret-she did not know how or why, but she was guilty.

She must fold. The stakes were too high. Uncertainty was preferable to certainty, and although the peace she would win would be a shallow one, she need not play the dangerous game.

Yes, she would fold her hand. Let the others go on playing without her. Now she wanted to be still.

Because whether or not she found evidence, it did not matter. She could smell it on herself and on the wind, in how her heart raced every day, how her mind craved an escape: she was guilty. The wind came in the open window. The smell of it was nothing but threat.

TEN * * The Concubine's Mind The Concubine's Mind

How to describe what happened next? The historical ones-Magda, but not only Magda-were rising around Margaret like ocean waters filling in cavities. They flowed according to the justifications already written in the land, deep where deep, curved where curved. Margaret's self-examination was finished now, and the era of the dead n.a.z.is had begun.

Yes, when Margaret awoke the next morning, she went to the window, and the hawk-woman was standing at attention on the balcony across the way, even larger now, hulking and frivolous. The lady pulled a compact out of her kit and made up her face under its heavy, brilliantine waves, her attention directed languidly at Margaret's three windows, and the sight burned Margaret's eyes and could not be fled.

Margaret was looking at the hawk-woman through a single rotated slat of the venetian blind. She kept the blinds closed all day and checked after the monster only surrept.i.tiously. The woman perched with a live mouse in her beak sometimes, and in those cases her face was all bird, her head c.o.c.king jerkily around, and around, and around, until she seemed to be looking at Margaret from behind. Sometimes she winked at Margaret conspiratorially.

And then, as the days went by, Margaret did not always close the blinds. As she fell asleep, she began to be not frightened but preoccupied-with the question of whether she would find the hawk-woman at her perch on the following morning. She began to develop methods of prediction, ideas halfway between superst.i.tion and science: when it rained and the street was empty, the bird was likely to be in attendance (but not always). When it was sunny and the street was full of traffic, the bird was likely missing (but not always).

And then Margaret found herself not afraid-not at all. Instead, when the hawk-woman was not there, she longed for her. She came home in the afternoon and if she did not find the enormous bird preening her feathers on the terra-cotta balcony cattycorner right away, she ran back to the window again and again, to see if the bird had finally come.

She did not like it. She did not like that she was broken in. She said to herself that only a corrupt person could become a friend to a vision at the window of the deceased Magda Goebbels.

Yes. This was patently so.

But for the life of her, she could not arrest her fascination.

And so, seeking to justify herself, she began to study the life of the woman with great seriousness. She was looking to find something. Margaret wanted to find an element in Magda Goebbels's biography that would make the hawk-woman's presence outside the window proud and fine, not shameful, not wrong.

And who knows why, but it did not take her very long. Only a few days into her focused studies, Margaret made a crucial discovery regarding Magda Goebbels.

Margaret read what the woman allegedly said to a friend a few months before she killed her children.

For me there are only two possibilities: if we win the war, then Joseph will be so high and mighty that I, an aging, used-up woman, will be finished. And if we lose the war, then my life will be at an end anyway.

Margaret jerked her head up from the book.

The Magda Goebbels of this quote was not the woman who so bombastically wrote to her son in North Africa. This was someone else. This was someone in an advanced stage of self-loathing. Margaret was sitting at the desk, but the book before her seemed suddenly lashed to the room around it, a beetle caught in an invisible web. And later, Magda Goebbels wrote to the same friend: Don't forget, Ello, what has gone on! Do you still recall...I told you about it hysterically back then...how the Fuhrer in Cafe Anast in Munich, when he saw the little Jewish boy, said he would prefer to flatten him into the floor like a bug? Do you remember that? I couldn't believe it, I took it as nothing but provocative talk. But much later he really did it. Unspeakably cruel things have happened, done by a system that I too have represented. So much vengefulness has been collected in the world...I can do nothing else, I have to take the children with me, I must! Only my Harald will be left behind. He is not Goebbels's son, and luckily he is in English captivity.

Margaret glanced sharply around the room, almost blus.h.i.+ng, embarra.s.sed at the enormity of it. She stood up and began to pace.

But she was too moved to walk. She took hold of her woolen trousers lying on the floor whose hems had come undone. She backed into the Biedermeier sofa. Straw b.u.t.ted out of its red velvet where the cus.h.i.+on had ripped, but she sat down hard. She grabbed the s...o...b..x of thread and needles from beneath it. Her mind was clacking at high speed.

If Magda knew what the n.a.z.i government was guilty of-it would mean everything.

Magda Goebbels wrote to her son stationed in North Africa that it was because her children with Goebbels were too good for the later world that they must die. But to her friend, she said it was because they were too soiled for it.

Margaret's eyes narrowed onto the sewing before her. She felt something hardening in her throat.

She threaded her needle. Perhaps in a good and just world, children are not murdered for their parents' crimes.

Margaret plunged the needle into the wool that was stiff, stiff as sycamore bark, where the hems had dragged in slush and dried. Perhaps in a good and just world, children do not die as payment.

Perhaps so, Margaret thought, but it is not n.a.z.i justice. The n.a.z.is saw humans as carrying political guilt in their blood, with their birth, before their naming. This was the very axiom of the n.a.z.i crime.

Here is what Margaret knew. At Joseph Goebbels's incitement, ninety percent of Jewish children-Jews under the age of twelve-who were alive in Europe in 1938 were dead in 1945. Ninety percent of the Jewish children of Europe were tortured to death. These tortured and murdered children will never have children, and these children will never have children. With every generation, there will be a new wave of the unborn.

Margaret began to st.i.tch, her throat stricken, her eyes shaking, pus.h.i.+ng the needle in and out guttingly.

And the world after the war-it left the children of n.a.z.is alone. Only last week, she had read a firsthand account in Niklas Frank's memoir. Oh, he went on and on with the following bitter cheer.

There really were advantages to growing up in the Federal Republic [of Germany] as the son of a major n.a.z.i war criminal. [The] help was especially beneficial when it came to hitchhiking.... From the moment somebody stopped to pick me up, my path to success was a.s.sured. All I had to say after a couple of kilometers was, "Do you happen to realize that I am the son of the Minister of the Reich without Portfolio and Governor General of Poland, executed at Nuremburg as a major war criminal?"...It wasn't long before the driver indulged himself in glorious reminiscence (omitting all mention of his somewhat lesser crimes); for as a soldier, either on the march to the East or on the way back, he had crossed through [Poland]. Then came the inevitable moment I would be waiting for, the moment when his emotions would be touched, when he lamented the unjust sentence that ended [my father's] life, and said it was so obvious that I, skinny little fellow, was now so bereft and impoverished, and when you think how the English had bombed Dresden, and that he himself had seen how two SS men had dragged a wounded American GI out of the line of fire at Monte Ca.s.sino and taken him to a German doctor, and that really the Jews were to blame for what happened to them because it was true that everything had been in the hands of the Jews, and just take a look at this marvelous autobahn we're driving on, my friend-may I call you that? In memory of your father?-the Fuhrer built this autobahn, and now I have to get some gas and you're going to get a fine lunch on me. Only one person..., only one solitary postwar German automobile driver in all those years of hitchhiking (it was in 1953, near Osnabruck), turned onto the shoulder of the highway and without saying a single word, in silent disdain, let me out of the car. The memory of that still makes my ears burn. I wonder if he is still alive. Democrats usually die so young.

The very opposite of Magda's fears! (Margaret took out a thimble, her finger already bleeding with rage and frustration.) n.a.z.i children lived on, under the impression that it was democrats who died young. And young Frank's experience was paralleled in the lives of the Bormann children; in the life of the medical technician, Edda Goring, in the life of the architect whose name is Albert Speer Jr., who even now, Margaret knew, was in the process of designing a stadium for the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Even the daughter of Heinrich Himmler-she, too, was smuggled, effortlessly snuggled, into everyday life. The actual retribution against the n.a.z.is' children, the penalty that would have been meted out to Goebbels's offspring had their mother and father not murdered them, was a pair of shamed ears once a decade or so, and this was a.s.suming they ever developed a sense of shame, which was not a given by any means. Margaret's st.i.tches picked up the exterior fabric. Her eyes rattled.

If the second version of Magda's motivation were to be believed, then Magda was the only n.a.z.i parent, indeed, the only tribunal in the world, to understand and confirm the n.a.z.i crime-as a n.a.z.i, for she was the only one to inflict upon her own family the n.a.z.i penalty: death for the crime of evil-in-the-blood.

And now Margaret already knew what she thought. She threw down the heavy wool. She stood up. Magda was right Magda was right.

It was right the Goebbels children died. Margaret wanted it by any means at all. She wanted it-not for the sake of vengeance, she told herself, her footsteps watery as she walked back toward the bedroom. She wanted it for the sake of equity. For the sake of the generations who will be born one day empty of all of us: who will have, from their ancestors, all genes and no memory.

If Magda knew what the n.a.z.i government was guilty of-it would mean everything. The monster loose on the streets of Berlin would no longer be a symbol of fanatical evil, but a symbol of fanatical shame.

On the mattress on the floor of the bedroom, Margaret sat down. All she had to do was verify that Ello Quandt was a reliable source. It didn't matter whether Magda's action was out of fear or out of repentance; all that mattered was that she knew knew. Margaret only needed to verify that Magda killed her children thinking of the evil that ran in their bloodline, and Margaret would change the categorization of Magda's crime for good. She would call the crime consistent. And consistency, after all, feels exactly like justice.

The verification was going to be difficult. According to the notes in the end pages of the Anja Klabunde biography, Ello's testimony came not from an interview with Ello Quandt herself, but from another, earlier, biography of Magda Goebbels. This earlier biography was written by a contemporary of Joseph Goebbels who worked at the Propaganda Ministry, a certain Hans-Otto Meissner. When Margaret searched the Internet, she found the Meissner biography was available in France, America, and the UK, but not in Germany.