The History Of History Part 19

Ah, and Franz, poor Franz. Always one never to set foot in a grocer's shop for it was a woman's place and not a man's, who stayed clear of the kitchen, was uncomfortable with the sick-such a man was he. And now here he was, with his sleeves rolled up before the cold eyes of his neighbors, forced to deliver our child like a midwife, his heart beating, his eyes full of fear. I was so proud of him. I don't remember much of this, but after a time, in a fog of pain and sweat, I began to push the baby. What I do remember is that I was, in those last moments before her birth, happy at last to think that I would see this child. For months I had been willing her to stay inside me forever. She came out, and I cried. Franz washed the baby at my direction on the floor of the cellar, and then he put her to my breast. The child was yellow with jaundice, her skull cone-shaped from the squeezing. I put her face to my face and kissed her, and when the afterbirth came out, we improvised the cutting of the cord, neither of us knowing if we were right. We felt terribly uncertain. I thought my child would die.

In the next weeks, however, the baby thrived against all expectations. And although I never would have expected it, I too survived the birth. We named the baby Beate, a Catholic name, not wanting her to suffer as Rahel had.

To my relief Franz got a letter from the labor department soon after, and started having to go to Fromm in Kopenick. There was a factory there. It took him so long to travel, and he was not paid, we got only the ration cards. But now I felt at least some a.s.surance that he would not be on one of the lists. He spent all day in a room with two ma.s.sive ovens and a terrible heat, and from morning to night he had to shove a two-ton metal frame in and out of the oven, ruining his fine violinist's hands. Despite my protests, he shared his meat, fruit, and vegetable rations with me, as I only got Jewish rations, which did not include these things. The result was that he became increasingly thin. But otherwise, he said, how was I to nurse our child? I think it was now becoming clear to Franz that he and I would not survive the war. But he always thought our children would.

Shortly after little Beate's birth, the n.a.z.is pa.s.sed an ordinance that Jews could not have household pets, and this included dogs, cats, and canary birds. I was so tired now, I think it was because of that-I "forgot" this ordinance. Ferdinand and Sarto continued to sit in their cage in the living room, cared for with loving constancy by Rahel, who was growing up so quickly.

But Sarto was nothing if not a powerful singer, audible in those early spring months with a trill that blew like dark smoke out our windows. It wasn't long before I found a note under our front door from Frau Schivelbusch, saying in pinched phrases that it would be better for us if we were to "cease and desist to harbor beasts and fowl reserved for Aryans," as if we were keeping a zoo! I did not think I could stand another visit from the Gestapo, but I should not have busied my head. The Gestapo came anyway.

Let us simply say: they came and after they left both canaries were gone, the robust Sarto and the ailing Ferdinand. Rahel cried and cried.

What happened in the next days is interesting to me still. For a while an unaccustomed silence reigned. But! Then I began to hear birdsong again. And not only the song of Sarto, but also the song of Ferdinand. in the next days is interesting to me still. For a while an unaccustomed silence reigned. But! Then I began to hear birdsong again. And not only the song of Sarto, but also the song of Ferdinand.

I did not speak of this to anyone.

As I washed our ever-regenerating piles of dirty linen, I could hear it-I was still bleeding since the birth, the baby's diapers, little Gerda's wet nights-I listened to the singing birds. Sometimes it is so clear one is going crazy. I remember hearing the bird twitter when Franz told me of the first large deportations. I heard the birdsong while I listened to Rahel recite her square roots and European capitals. I heard the birdsong and I thought of my home in Posen, now burnt down in war. I heard the birdsong and thought about what could and could not be. With the sleeplessness of the baby and the ever-returning air-raid siren, waking up, shaking Rahel awake, carrying Gerda and little Bibi, as I called my Beate, downstairs with our always-ready suitcases of diapers and toys and blankets, nights spent in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and then the worry, always the worry. I hardly had any sleep, and it didn't surprise me that I should be in a world outside worlds, a funny, dizzy, drunken place, a place in which birds carried off by the Gestapo return to sing inside the walls, and in the stairwell, in hidden places in the courtyard, and in the garden.

The birdsong was so fragile, so difficult to hear. One day as I was was.h.i.+ng the dishes, Rahel said to me, "Mother, why is it I still hear Sarto and Ferdinand singing?" was so fragile, so difficult to hear. One day as I was was.h.i.+ng the dishes, Rahel said to me, "Mother, why is it I still hear Sarto and Ferdinand singing?"

I gave her the broadest smile-and looking down at her I wiped from my face soap bubbles that had floated up and stuck to my skin. I dropped to my knees and said, "My darling." And then we both stopped and stood very still and listened, and sure enough, in a moment we both realized that we could hear it distinctly outside of our mind's ear, with a sudden clarity of sensation.

And so, almost giddy with the feeling of not being crazy, I led Rahel down and out into the courtyard, and we stood at attention with our heads tilted up toward the house around us, which was in a U-shape, the two wings cradling the garden. Now it was clear enough that the sound was coming from our wing. And we both looked at each other and gave a sort of laugh because we thought the sound was coming from our own apartment. It was beautiful to see Rahel's face change with the perception. She looked up to our open kitchen window and looked back at me with her eyebrows raised. It was beautiful because I could see in her face that the world affected her the same as it did me. Even if she was only a child.

It sounded like the bird was in our flat but we knew the bird was not in our flat. We went back up the stairwell of our wing. We stood near the doors of the apartments as we went further up into the house. Finally we had pa.s.sed our own floor and had come to the top, and of course it was from behind the door of Frau Schivelbusch's apartment that the sound of canaries trickled.

So Frau Schivelbusch had the canaries.

It was very difficult to calm Rahel once we realized what had happened. The little girl was beside herself. She wanted to go up to Frau Schivelbusch at once and kick in her door. I reasoned with her, explaining that we were unlucky to live in these times, that we had to do our best to hold on to our dignity, and didn't she want to grow up to be a dignified lady? But even I was not convinced. I wondered if I was not destroying her.

As for me. There came a time when the choir I sang with at the cathedral protested my presence, even if I stood in the back, although my conversion to Catholicism was many years past. Father Loewe asked me to leave, and then, after that, I ask you, what more could I do to preserve my faith? What of my hope for the future?

There were some days during the months when I was planning our death when I didn't suffer at all. That's a funny thing: you domesticate fear. I only cried in antic.i.p.ation of the worst, but somehow during the worst itself, I only thought about this or that part of now. It was through a series of very soft, gradual changes that I became accustomed to a new trajectory for my life and the lives of my children. When I was young I had thought I would live with a family, a community, someday likely have grandchildren. Now I did not have these ambitions any longer. Instead I thought, Perhaps tomorrow I'll make a doll out of the red velvet of the sofa cus.h.i.+ons for Gerda. We don't need the sofa cus.h.i.+ons anymore. And these small things rather than the large things kept me in the habit of moving forward. And on some lighthearted days I even thought that the ambitions could be halved forevermore without a change in my moment-to-moment happiness, like the mathematical paradox of a man crossing half a room, and then half the remaining length, and so forth, and thus never reaching the other end of the room. The idea of a changed period of time for my life, once it was established, filled me with neither fear nor intense loathing-fear is rooted in uncertainty, and unlike Franz, I had no uncertainty.

I don't mean to say that's the way I look back on my life now from up here. In the nightmares I sometimes have while sleeping in eternity, I know horror, disgust, and hatred over what was done to us-and these feelings are truer because they see the tragedy in its entirety. It is with these feelings, too, that you should remember us.

But I will still insist that often in my daily life at the end, every change in our circ.u.mstances took on that muted quality that gently colors the life of any sane person, for good or ill. No matter how misshapen or how terrible true life becomes, it is always calmer, less emotionally vibrant than in those vivid dreams that prepared me for our death.

As for why we killed ourselves the way we did: we thought better to die like the canary than to die like the hunted. Every day is a good day to be born, every day is a good day to die.

From those years, what I remember most is our picture book, Du Mein Tirol Du Mein Tirol, with the photographs of the fresh alpine air, and the thickness of the gra.s.s on the mountainside. The sound of the waterfall, the smell of cow dung.

When Margaret woke, she was lying on the ground next to the goldfish pond at Salzburgerstra.s.se 8. The hair on her head was matted and wet.

She had been so deeply concentrated for so many hours, her body had gone lost. The fatigue, the limpness, that comes of such concentration broke over her. She sat up very slowly. Her face was ashen. She felt as though there was less oxygen in the air than there had been before, and her throat was full of lumps.

After she got home, she went around for a while as if nothing had happened. She was terribly hungry. She opened a can of kidney beans and another of peeled tomatoes and dropped them into a pot. The apartment around her smelled of old musty carpets; the smell reached her sharply. She chopped onions and fried them. She browned a fist of hamburger. She glanced under the toaster as she searched for the wooden spoon. She saw the crumbs there. She added the meat to the pot. Looking down into it, she felt a nausea.

She left the food simmering and went into the bedroom.

She searched through the t.i.tles on the bookshelf, Yes, there was a book called Du Mein Tirol Du Mein Tirol in her own shelf. It was part of a series of travel picture books from the 1930s. She had bought them at the flea market for pennies. She fingered the yellowed, fraying pages. in her own shelf. It was part of a series of travel picture books from the 1930s. She had bought them at the flea market for pennies. She fingered the yellowed, fraying pages.

What she had just heard in the Salzburgerstra.s.se, was it a communication from beyond the grave?

Or had she dreamt the whole thing herself?

She desperately wanted it to be a communication from beyond the grave.

She looked more closely at Du Mein Tirol Du Mein Tirol. For the first time, she noticed that on the frontispiece of the book, the name "Karla" was written in a script both childish and old-fas.h.i.+oned. She looked through all the books in the series and saw that Karla had signed her name in each one. The signature was a little different in each book, and in different colors of ink, as though Karla had written each signature at a different time. The variation seemed to breathe life into the name: a rag on a clothesline animated by a breeze, the variation of the script whispered "Karla."

Margaret put the books back into the shelf. She looked out the window. She sat down on the bed. She got up and thought through the story she had heard from the beginning to the end, from the canaries, to the birth, to the gra.s.s on the mountainside.

The window to her bedroom was open, and the white cotton curtains moved slowly, swaying to their own dirge. Something about the movement of the curtains made her think of her life with the hawk-woman, Magda Goebbels. A very slight shudder ran through her. Regina Strauss's voice-how could she be sure of the sound of it? Had it really been her? She could not help but recognize the presence in that story of a book she owned. It made the entire thing suspicious. Perhaps it had all been her own madness. Now, in her mind, the sound of the woman's voice was filled with a crackling, obstructing static. The static obstruction was Margaret's life.

And there had been more than one such trace.

But Margaret wanted it to be a real communication from beyond the grave. The desire rose in her, very hard and very strong, steam-rolling her consciousness. She put her head on the desk and strained to remember one last detail of the story, the detail that could not possibly be invented, the detail that would be both the proof and the borrowed rib.

Instead, all at once and without warning, she began to cry. She cried and cried. Margaret cried because she could not remember any such detail. She cried because their lives had been stolen then and forever. She cried for what had happened in her own night's yard, for the deprivation. She cried because their lives had been thrown away senselessly and they had no memory except this moribund memory she had lent to them herself.

She cried. She had water coming out her mouth and nose. The sobs began to rack her as though she were shaken by a foreign body-a three-hundred-pound angel come to beat her into submission. The effort of holding her body upright at the desk, her white fingers gripping the polished wood, took all her strength.

There was a vacancy like hunger in her chest-the desire to give herself to them by believing. Isn't that all that's left to give the dead? What a slight gift. But no, she thought, it's not slight. (This was a wail, heartbroken rage.) Anybody on the street-if you ask: Would you like to be remembered after you die?-the answer will always be yes. Immortality is desired more than food and air. It is not so terrible to a.s.sume no one wants to die. The Strausses should be real, she thought, and they should have a mind wrapped uncritically around them in an embrace, a mind that doesn't panic-so they won't have to scrounge or connive in l.u.s.t or anger-someone giving their lives the floating, crystalline perfection of angels riding on white horses above the waves of this worldly storm-someone to catch them in a net!, her heart screamed. I will catch them in a net, and even if the thing in the net is nothing but a cipher, the net will be real, and the net will be beautiful.

How she longed to hear the voice of Regina Strauss again, if only for a moment. This was her longing now. The voice was the meaning, the voice was the ghost.

Margaret recognized a ghost for what it was: a ghost is the resonance of a life. A ghost is the intense and prolonged sympathetic vibration for the dead in the world of the living. A ghost is something in which everyone can and must believe.

Margaret drank a gla.s.s of water. She breathed in and out. She looked at the blue gla.s.s in her hand. There were many tiny air bubbles caught in the gla.s.s. The water, too, was full of points of light. The movement of water from the blue gla.s.s to the muddy pink flesh of Margaret's throat occurred to her as something significant and great, and in a wave of happiness, she ate some thick bread with pieces of carrot in it; she cut up a tomato and ate that too, and then she drank more water. Her head was clearing at the pace of a tide, at the pace of the sun moving across the sky. a gla.s.s of water. She breathed in and out. She looked at the blue gla.s.s in her hand. There were many tiny air bubbles caught in the gla.s.s. The water, too, was full of points of light. The movement of water from the blue gla.s.s to the muddy pink flesh of Margaret's throat occurred to her as something significant and great, and in a wave of happiness, she ate some thick bread with pieces of carrot in it; she cut up a tomato and ate that too, and then she drank more water. Her head was clearing at the pace of a tide, at the pace of the sun moving across the sky.

She felt clean-the tears still wet on her face were made of the salt and water of her body, a body that was-finally-not entirely bad, a body that was full of concern and full of care.

I love them, she thought, and she realized right away that she had loved the Family Strauss for a long time. She had never allowed herself the identification, but she now saw that it didn't matter whether she was worthy of it, it was still there-this love that made her eyes again fill with tears.

The stew had burned in the meantime; it didn't matter. Margaret was full of joy, full of recognition. And tonight she went so far as to think that perhaps she did not deserve to die.

PART III.

TUNNEL.

The addiction to a center, above all to the human center, usually ends in the four-hundred-year-old cell between witness and perpetrator. You sacrifice yourself again in the figure of a black reflector. And then they have you just where they wanted you. You are the center.

-SASCHA ANDERSON

TWENTY-NINE

Iron Waves

His eyes-blue, blue, the color of lake water, ringed with black lashes. His skin: brown and pink with dark moles.

She had told Amadeus she was expecting a child. Amadeus she was expecting a child.

It was late spring of 2002, and they were sitting on a bench in an overgrown corner of the Volkspark that runs along Weinbergsweg, where the earth smells of worms and poison ivy and broken beer bottles. They had just had s.e.x in the dark, on a bench. Margaret had not allowed him to get her drunk and Amadeus could never relax when a woman was not drunk, and he had dropped all semblance of courts.h.i.+p. Revelers were coming out of the bars on the hill and their voices were loud, but they couldn't see Margaret and Amadeus through the thick of the bushes.

Amadeus suspected instantly that this was the thrust of a well-planned dagger. How could it have been accidental, when he had been so careful? At least, almost always he had been so careful. Maybe Maybe it was an accident. But he had seen the witch, the vixen, the succubus, with her hand covered in e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e, and he shuddered at where she put her fingers. He knew. He knew what this was, despite her play of guilelessness. it was an accident. But he had seen the witch, the vixen, the succubus, with her hand covered in e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e, and he shuddered at where she put her fingers. He knew. He knew what this was, despite her play of guilelessness.

He offered her two thousand euros, an abortion, and a one-way ticket to New York City.

He was angry, this man who had never before wanted a lover to leave his neighborhood. It was not merely because Margaret was such a ruthless shrew in her destruction of his marriage. His marriage was brittle, and its existence, at this point, arbitrary. Nor was his anger because of her duplicity. What would have been the crucial point for most men, the thing that would have destroyed all hope of happiness-that she had tricked him into having a child-was not what most bothered Amadeus. He expected this kind of thing from women. No, what made him livid, turned him against her with the full force of his personality, was that she was trying to make out of their love affair a small human being.

Amadeus had never never wanted a child, never under any circ.u.mstances, not with his wife, and not with anyone else. wanted a child, never under any circ.u.mstances, not with his wife, and not with anyone else.

There was a story one could tell, a story of a family, the mother's birth in the Ukraine followed ten years later by the grandfather's deportation to Siberia. One could tell of how the grandfather was never heard from again-or at least not until fifty-five years later when one found out he was remarried and living in Vladivostok. You could tell of how the grandmother, with three children at the time of her husband's disappearance, made her way alone to Brandenburg overland on foot with the children in wartime, how she had turned hard, when she didn't have enough to feed them. Of how since then she had not once been back to Volhynia, where she was born, where she bore her children, where her family had worked the land for five generations. Of how her oldest daughter married a certain Heinrich whose father was killed outside Leningrad; Heinrich, who fled from Konigsberg to Leipzig in 1945, and never once went home. Of how at Amadeus's birth, father and mother did not react to the child. One could tell of how Heinrich stopped looking Amadeus in the face when he was nine years old, the same age Heinrich was when his father was killed outside Leningrad. One could tell of how Heinrich hanged himself in the garage-one fine day-and Amadeus found him after school.

One could tell a story of an uninsulated family. One could say that Amadeus had no desire for children because non-disappearance of people and continuity of home were lacking in the family's blood, and these are the things that make children welcome: home and non-disappearance of people.

One could ask what happens to people who never go back.

One could ask what becomes of the children of people who never went home. One could say the family had been in a lock-dance with the twin forces of death and not-coming-home for as long as anyone could remember, a dance whose steps were of the same pattern as Amadeus's relations.h.i.+p with women-beckon and retreat, beckon and retreat. His was the life that doesn't entirely want to live, the desire that never finds its ease, the thirst for a milk that you are poisoning even as you drink. That a family that never looks back creates a son like Amadeus-a man who looks back always, but on things painless and far away, insulates himself from knowing how close to the surface of the skin his blood runs.

Yes, one could say all of that, or one could drop the topic and say instead that Amadeus simply didn't like children and never had.

And whatever story one chose to tell, the fact was that Amadeus desperately did not want whatever was growing inside Margaret's young, non-European body.

She had caught him off guard.

When she told him about the pregnancy, Amadeus slapped her across the face. He was a little drunk.

When he hit her, Margaret looked as if she had swallowed a silver dollar; it was caught in her esophagus.

Then he offered her money. He might have wasted time doubting the child was his, but he knew about Margaret and her self-sacrificial gambits. She was too careful to accidentally get pregnant by the wrong man. He zipped up his pants and went home. He transferred the money into her account, and he made sure he never saw her again.

Margaret fell behind at the university. She stayed up late thinking of the baby and wondering what kind it would be. at the university. She stayed up late thinking of the baby and wondering what kind it would be.

She was still in love with Amadeus.

She was married to her body now. Part of him was in it. She should have thought of how to care for herself, but instead she was still staring at Amadeus in her mind, wondering when he would come back to her. For the life of her, she could not leave the city where he was.

At some point during the pregnancy, she received a letter from him. The letter told a story of her own mother and father. It was more than a lock-dance with death and not-coming-home, she thought then. It was more than a fear of children. He had never loved her, he had never even seen her. At least, this was how she understood it. Her world unlaced.

He wrote:Dear Margaret,I'm not willing to meet you. Do you hear? Don't come by here like that.I want you to listen to me. I'm going to tell you something that will make you flinch, but you deserve it. Maybe it will make you understand. You have forced me to the wall. It's something to do with your mother and father.In 1979, your parents spent the summer in West Berlin. Your father was doing research, and sometimes they came over to the East to see his mother. It must have been five or six times. When they did, I used to go and meet them. I'd wait outside of the checkpoint at Friedrichstra.s.se, cool my heels on the other side of the river, trying to be a bit discreet. (Even being seen with them-Westerners, and your father a dissident-it was a liability for me. That was back when I was trying to get into the Party.) So I waited on the Northern side, under the big old copper birch trees that stand on the chalk banks there. I could see the station, and the border patrol on the other side of the river through the leaves, and the S-Bahn trains would curve in from the West. I could make them out through the trees.I'm just trying to paint a picture for you, so you understand.I'd sit and smoke, and at some point they'd turn up. Out of the Tranenpalast they'd be coming, looking rumpled and triumphant. Sometimes they would have been waiting in line to get through and sometimes it would have taken quite a long time.Their clothes always looked so nice to me though, that's something I'll tell you. You could peg Western clothes from at least half a kilometer away. What a fine duet they were, your mom and dad! Sarah always with high color in her cheeks, and Christoph next to her was just as tall and skeletal and morose as ever, but a fine-looking man, distinguished, a bit of the medieval knight about him. And me, I'd feel silly-that summer we had nothing but rainy weather and I'd have wet hair, water dripping from the leaves of this d.a.m.n tree I'd sit under, and my gla.s.ses would fog up as soon as we went inside. (G.o.d I love contact lenses! No more of that sort of thing now.)Anyway, they'd come up to me, smiling, I'd get up from my bench. First I'd put out my cigarette, then I'd shake Christoph's hand. Christoph was like a brother to me, I loved him, but that summer it wasn't very good. I could tell from the first time they came over that it wasn't going to be any good. He didn't even feel like a friend-there was just a ringing sound in my ears when I tried to talk to him.Well, but I'm exaggerating. We had a good time. He'd been gone for seven years, mind you, and seven years is a long time. That was the bulk of the problem. We were only nineteen when he got out, the lucky b.a.s.t.a.r.d, traded out after his imprisonment. The Stasi used to make those sorts of trades. I guess you must know this. I can't say I ever found out how he ended up in New Jersey, though, or why he went to Princeton like that. Can't say I cared very much, although now he's dead and I wish I knew.Oh, but who cares. It's Wurst Wurst to me now. Better to forget. to me now. Better to forget.The thing is, we were both studying Russian history, and that commonality, if you will, was pleasant at the time. By the time we'd get into my car (my dad's actually), we'd be filling up the silences by, you know, jos.h.i.+ng each other about Karamzin, making jokes about Lermontov. Your father fancied himself a great hero of his time. We both sort of thought of ourselves that way. I'd say something like: "You should have stayed here, Christoph, if you wanted to study Russians. We have plenty here." He'd nod his head and frown in a serious way, wouldn't show any recognition that my t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es were on the chopping block. He didn't seem to take any of it in. This was the summer after the Wolf Biermann affair, and I wasn't doing so well.I will say this: maybe we didn't pay enough attention to Sarah. Sometimes I think that was why things turned out the way they did. Women will go at your throat if you don't give them attention. The thing was, she didn't study Russian, and so she couldn't catch the jokes. There was no help for it. Come to think of it, her German was a floperoo as well.You know what else? I think Christoph was embarra.s.sed by your mother, of all things. What a pretty woman she was! And so young. I remember in particular that she always wore these gold-rimmed earrings. There is a certain kind of man who's embarra.s.sed by having a pretty wife. Your father was that kind. These earrings, anyway, they had cameos of Lola Montez in them. Your father had given them to her. I really liked them on her.I don't care what Christoph thought-as far as I was concerned, your mother was fantastic. No, she was more than fantastic. She was Christoph's prize. What he got for breaking free. Here I was, doing stinking work, slogging through theories of materialism I didn't believe in one wit, making compromises with the university administration, and there was even this man from the Stasi whom they were making me have these meetings with from time to time; I was giving him some info here and there. I was trying hard to get into the Party, as I mentioned, although I never did get in, d.a.m.n them. Ha-ha. It's all so funny in retrospect. And maybe it was these ridiculous meetings with your parents that got in my way. I don't know. I'm not going to read my file. To tell the truth, Margaret, I was more cynical when I was twenty-five than at any time afterward. The wound was freshest. I already mentioned Biermann. I took the whole thing very hard.And you know what-the fact that your mother was Jewish, or her mother was Jewish, or whatever it was-that was really something. The love of a Jewish woman! A d.a.m.n interesting thing for a German man of my generation. A Jewish woman-never touched, never tampered with, family intact-there's only one way to look at it: it's a sort of exoneration from the inheritance. I mean, that's how personally we took things. And with fathers like ours, well especially Christoph's-why not personally? Oh, that Venus of a mother of yours, that Sarah, was the light flooding into the backseat of the Trabi after the rain. I was shy with women back then, but I kept glancing over my shoulder at her, and she would smile at me, although G.o.d, I admit it, Christoph and I were both kind of snubbing her; what can you do, she didn't know German, and she didn't know Russian. was really something. The love of a Jewish woman! A d.a.m.n interesting thing for a German man of my generation. A Jewish woman-never touched, never tampered with, family intact-there's only one way to look at it: it's a sort of exoneration from the inheritance. I mean, that's how personally we took things. And with fathers like ours, well especially Christoph's-why not personally? Oh, that Venus of a mother of yours, that Sarah, was the light flooding into the backseat of the Trabi after the rain. I was shy with women back then, but I kept glancing over my shoulder at her, and she would smile at me, although G.o.d, I admit it, Christoph and I were both kind of snubbing her; what can you do, she didn't know German, and she didn't know Russian.Christoph, to h.e.l.l with him, he'd reach into his bag and pull out such riches-poststructuralists, deconstructionists, all these big names. Books I could have sold a kidney and not managed to rustle up for myself in the GDR, not at that time. And then we'd be at a stoplight and he'd do that thing of his-he'd turn his face away but put out his hand, and he'd be pus.h.i.+ng deutsche marks at me. It was great, he was a grand soul, but there was this part of me that wanted to bash his head in. How the deuce did he get the upper hand? When we were in school, I was the one with friends. My grades were even better. So how did he have the power of the gift? Who appointed him?Oh, your mother was lovely. The thing about me is: I've never been entirely indifferent to the wives of my friends. There's something delicious about them. Women I find on my own can't possibly be as alluring. You might say there is no cathexis there.I'm talking in circles around the hot broth. Here's what you need to know: for a few weeks that summer, while Christoph was busy with his big, important research at the Stabi, I waited outside the checkpoint at Friedrichstra.s.se for your mother alone. I drove her in my father's car to the apartment in Friedrichshain. Part of me would pretend she wasn't Christoph's wife. I never quite understood her English, for example. Man, she could talk to let the sow out! But at the same time, secretly, I liked her precisely because she was no stranger at all; she was like a sister to me, she was the wife of my brother-friend, Christoph (which, to be entirely honest, is part of why I got started with you too.)As for your mother-I don't know why she did it. She said something once-about Christoph. Since the wedding night, apparently, he had been lying in bed with his back to her. Wouldn't even turn around. He said he was tired. Christoph was not thriving in New Jersey, for obscure reasons, but maybe precisely because so obscure, all-powerful. That's my sense at least. Later she told me that Christoph was in love with me me, things like that. I don't know. Better let sleeping dogs lie. Let dead dogs lie. Ha-ha.What this means for you, Margaret, I can't say. I realize I should never have gotten involved with you. What's done is done, and there are some pretty ticklish issues here, although-no-I am not your father, not unless your mother carried you for fifteen months. But still, I hope you'll stay away from me, and from my wife, for that matter, and handle the matter of the pregnancy as you know you must.Friendly greetings, Amadeus

THIRTY

The Return of the Tundra

There was a time that followed Margaret's communion with Regina Strauss. It was a time in which she knew only two things: One, she had once loved a man named Amadeus. Two, the redemption she felt in loving the Family Strauss was a relief.

She continued to give tours under flowering spring trees, and at first it was a warm time. Then, as if riding the waves of her love for the Strausses, memories began to come at an accelerated rate. Margaret remembered short, bright films, dreams from the missing time.

Vodka, subway rides, waking in strange beds, doctors' appointments, clothing she had once owned, and vodka again.

She began to sink deeper; she began to remember the sorts of things that are too small to be endured-the sheerest grains of sand, they fall through the cracks of any defense. She remembered the bracelet Amadeus had given her-she broke it on the sidewalk the same day; the smell between his shoulder and his neck. And her life split into two films, two films that had nothing to do with each other. She longed to let water flow over the newly remembered second film, ruin the celluloid. She was having dreams of chickens trapped in burning yards, dreams of houses built on sand was.h.i.+ng into the sea, dreams of cruelty from strangers.

Until finally, one night, she had a dream that was worse than the chickens.

It was the worst thing of all. She had a dream of the Salzburgerstra.s.se-the Strauss family's last home.

In the dream, it was raining outside. The foyer of Number 14 was hushed, and the foliage pressed against the gla.s.s from the mossy courtyard, leaves and branches thick as tongues, soaked in rain. Already everything was suffused with what was coming.

Outside, a few shrubberies and one or two puny saplings loomed lushly, deliriously so: a wall of pity-green flowers, drawing their tongues along the panes of gla.s.s in the aluminum wind.

Margaret went out to the courtyard, in search of the speaking pool, full of antic.i.p.ation. She put her ear into the pool as she had done once before. All was murky. The goldfish were gone.

Beneath the water, only silence had its home. Margaret gave up at last. Her ear was cold. She went back inside, shaking droplets from her hair. She walked through the grey velvet interior to the mirror, to the place where she had first seen Regina.

The room smelled of dust. She went to the oval of the mirror and brought her eyes up.

The room was darker than it had been a moment before.

Margaret touched the frame and saw her fingers were shaking. She could hear a fluttering.

Oh, the shadow-woman appeared almost right away. Glowing, it moved in beside her, glowing, the woman in her faded hair and brittle, many-times-washed, starched lace collar. There was Regina, there she was, looking out at Margaret.

Regina was as Margaret remembered, only far more so. Her eyes were large and round and pooling and her glance was sweet and soft and reproachful. She was silent, and for a fraction of a second, Margaret felt herself begin to catapult on waves of the old ecstasy.

Almost right away however, the life inverted. First, it was the smell of mildew. Margaret saw something in the woman's face. There was a glint of blood. A glint of blood in her cheeks-something grasping-hope or hatred or fear, Margaret could not tell, but it was the manifestation of a quickened heart.