The History Of History Part 8

But who would want to know about Himmler's incentive plan? About the stamps received for efficient labor-the point system-these points that could be traded for the use of a body. Who would like to hear about the young women from Ravensbruck held here in captivity as s.e.x slaves?

Yes, there were some who would. Some had come to learn the truth about the concentration camp. The picture it would have made, however, as far as Margaret was concerned, both for her tour and for her own sake, would be impossible, and that was the central point. What kind of unity would the tour have, what were the people to think? If concentration camp victims raped their fellow victims under the point system, what was that for a story? The women were given a lethal injection after a few months of "service" or whenever they showed signs of venereal disease, and the male prisoners who made use of them knew that.

How was Margaret to continue the tour? Instead of giving Margaret their pious, sympathetic glances, the customers would look about the camp c.o.c.keyed. She herself, formerly priestess, would become a rogue. The camp was a temple. Certain things were a desecration. The only thing that belonged here was piety.

She had learned early on: too many tales of horror and she began to think that her piety sounded propagandistic, like a tabloid television show. On the other hand, it clearly would not do to talk excessively of the camaraderie among the Communist inmates, the evenings of "Bella Ciao," and the radio hidden in the laundry that picked up the BBC; of the "kindness" of certain SS men who had shared whiskey with the prisoners, helped others escape. All in all, then, Margaret was also guilty of omitting "happy" stories, of how, for some, it had not been so bad at Sachsenhausen, because these, too, went against the grain.

And Margaret had noticed something: the ratio between the uplifting stories and dystopian stories became the basis for the customers' conclusions about the camp, later their conclusions about the concentration camp system in general, and finally the conclusions they reached (usually while on the train back to Berlin) about the Holocaust. Margaret had heard all of them. And because of this, she could not help but become manipulative.

Theoretically at least, she would have liked to give a realistic picture and leave it at that. But there was a problem: there was no realistic picture to return to. No one knew how it had really been. No one could ever know. Even the survivors who had lived to tell the tale did not entirely know how it had been; the experience was too large for that. There are magnitudes of suffering that cannot be held in the mind. So there was a camp, and there was a "tour," and one was bigger than the other and would always be bigger.

Often she imagined saying out loud what she so often thought.

You want to understand? But here's what there is to understand: there's nothing for knowing minds to glean. The more you learn about the camps, the less you know. The more you see this place, the farther away it is. The human social brain wasn't designed to understand the human social terror, and the more it tries, the more it dies. There are people who notice the unwillingness of this place to curve toward comprehension, and so they deny the camps ever existed. These are people who have no tolerance for guilt and especially no tolerance for the things that guilt demands. So instead they mistake the emptiness they find here for an absence of content. They are wrong; there is something here. There's more content here than in universities and museums and churches taken together, but you won't see any of it. All I can show you today is a mirage. This tour is a virtual tour.

But Margaret didn't say that. She would never say it. It wasn't in her. She was a social animal with a social brain, and she did not want to begin to try to communicate what little she knew of the deformity, the chemical structure of which would suffocate, slowly, the brain's chance at happiness-she knew it even from a distance-if it were ever ingested.

As they were on the way to the Jewish barracks the sun came out. Margaret struck up a conversation with the Norwegian couple. The man was a high school history teacher, he was older, and he taught about the concentration camps to the kids. That was why he was here. It also happened that his father's brother had been sent to Sachsenhausen. The uncle survived, but he came home to Trondheim without arms or legs. on the way to the Jewish barracks the sun came out. Margaret struck up a conversation with the Norwegian couple. The man was a high school history teacher, he was older, and he taught about the concentration camps to the kids. That was why he was here. It also happened that his father's brother had been sent to Sachsenhausen. The uncle survived, but he came home to Trondheim without arms or legs.

Margaret felt dizzy. The white sky seemed immortal. That's how she said it to herself: the sky was immortal. She glanced away from the man to the open field. Her eyes lost focus. She saw, on the other side, between two trees, a great basket swaying from enormous ropes strung high above from the top limbs. The basket, swinging, held a heap of appendages, a head with long grey, mouse-colored hair, a curled human being. Before she had time to blink, Margaret looked back at the Norwegian. When she glanced over again to the field, the basket swinging between the trees was gone. Reflexively, Margaret remembered a few lines-"the sibyl, in her basket swaying, tells the children: I want to die."

Now she looked back at the group, and they were looking at her inquisitively, for they had arrived outside the Jewish barracks. But when she glanced at the trees again, the sibyl was swaying there. It seemed the thing could blink into existence. Margaret's ears were ringing, her eyes aglow, and her throat stiff. The group looked at her, waiting.

Unexpectedly, Margaret became angry-angry at their expectant eyes. When the Argentines began to whisper to one another, their sibilant sounds searing her ears, she thought she could feel they all hated her, hated her for not speaking; hated her silence. And all eyes were on her again, the eyes of the seekers, who had come to the camp for the exotic suffering. Looking back at the sibyl in the high basket, she thought she heard yet more whispering and saw a face whose eyes had been removed, who blamed her for her lies, for her tour-shaping. She rubbed her face, convinced of her idiocy, inadequacy, inability to navigate between her visions and poor pandering to the worst of the interested eyes around her.

She drew a breath. She would spare them nothing, she decided, nothing nothing.

"Jewish prisoners," she began, "were brought here late. They were always a minority at this camp, most others were Slavs and politicals. The arrival of the first permanent group was heralded at the end of August 1939, when all the air vents of blocks 37, 38, and 39-these you see before you-were sealed, and the same thing was done to the windows and the walls, so that no air or sound came out or in. These little barracks were emptied of bunks and tables, and then over a thousand Jewish men were sealed in; only with severe beatings allowed out to the toilets. Soon the rooms were running with moisture and human filth. Sometimes the SS guards came in and told the men to lie down and then ran back and forth over their bodies, apparently for the 'fun' of it. One morning a month later, after over a third of the men had died from asphyxiation and starvation, three were found lying outside the barracks. We know from the memoir of a prisoner who wrote about it later: one of the men's faces was completely destroyed. An eye hung out of his skull, resting on his cheek." Margaret blinked before she went on. "The Blockalteste Blockalteste reported that in the night the Jews suddenly all said they had to use the toilet at once, and then fell upon the capos and the SS, who 'defended' themselves. reported that in the night the Jews suddenly all said they had to use the toilet at once, and then fell upon the capos and the SS, who 'defended' themselves.

"The surviving men, however, told a different story. In the night, SS men arrived armed with legs of chairs, they said, and began to beat them, killing and injuring indiscriminately. In the confusion, some ran out of the barracks, and they were beaten to death."

Margaret stopped. She blinked again. The twelve closest huddled around, bodies rigid with attention. Margaret's tension disappeared all at once. She took a deep breath.

"Do you know which version of the story is true?" she asked.

They shook their heads. "No," came the replies. "No, which one?"

"Maybe there was a revolt of the Jewish prisoners against the SS," Margaret said. "That would be some kind of consolation, wouldn't it? To think of a revolt. Or maybe the prisoners were entirely innocent, that's possible too. That would be some kind of consolation in another way, wouldn't it?" Margaret's voice had grown raw.

"Which one is it?" she asked. A slight note of cruelty.

The problem was what to do with truth in matters of the spirit.

"No one knows," she finally said. "No one has any idea."

Margaret whirled and entered the Jewish barracks, breathing hard. The tourists had a struggle to keep up with her. Margaret had become reckless in her upset; her movements were quick and lurching. She told them they would have twenty minutes to look around on their own. The group spread apart.

Now, Margaret thought, she would have time to make a plan, to bring herself under control.

At one end of the barracks were the bunks, and the rusty, lidless toilets once used by the prisoners, at the other was a multimedia exhibit. The group trod quickly through the dormitory, that dirty old lumberyard, but soon headed back into the heated exhibition. The charred rooms in the front were even colder than the outdoors; they still smelled of cinders from the arson attack a decade before. Margaret stayed by herself, watching her breath puff out of her mouth. She leaned against one of the primitive bunk beds.

The floor creaked. The bunks creaked. Margaret closed her eyes. She heard-what did she hear?-a tiny scratching sound coming from the corner.

A second scratching sound began soon after the first, as though in canon, this time from a portion of the wall behind the bunks, a little distance away. One mouse in the wall, now two. And then a scratching, scuttling, tunneling-just under Margaret's feet.

Margaret caught a glimpse of red in her peripheral vision, and turned quickly-it was the English businessman returned. "Aha!" Margaret cried out. She was embarra.s.sed. "I was just noticing the mice in the walls."

"Mice? Of course, this place built like a cracker tin as it is, there would be no place for a mouse to make a home. No, no insulation here!" He laughed. "Now I have a book in my collection, maybe you would know it, The Death of Adolf Hitler The Death of Adolf Hitler, it's called, would you know of that one?"

"No, I'm afraid I don't."

"A pity really; fascinating book. Hitler had a phobia of cats, it outlines that in detail. And the book also has some interesting words to say about Stalin. The man was in love in love with Hitler. He used Hitler's bones-the ones that Zhukov brought back to Moscow-to make combs for his hair, for his moustache, you know. High style, if you ask me." He gave Margaret a wink. Then quickly he let out a guffaw. with Hitler. He used Hitler's bones-the ones that Zhukov brought back to Moscow-to make combs for his hair, for his moustache, you know. High style, if you ask me." He gave Margaret a wink. Then quickly he let out a guffaw.

"Really?"

"I've always been interested in history. One of my chief interests, I would say."

Margaret smiled, colored. Without any warning, she darted for the door. She left the man so abruptly he didn't have time to follow her.

Margaret looked up and down the camp. The man from Norway was outside, smoking a cigarette some distance away. Margaret pretended not to see him. Whether or not Hitler liked cats was the topic in her mind. She had never heard he didn't. But it made sense to her that he would not. She decided it must be true.

She wandered farther, this thought of cats dangling, distracting, even as she felt a long rope in her head begin to tighten, everything tightening and filling, becoming denser, a feeling of her large body flipping up into her tight, claustrophobic brain like a gymnast on the parallel bars folding into the above.

She focused her eyes with difficulty. Between the trees in the distance was the sibyl swaying in her basket. Her long, dying hair flowed down below her curled body. As Margaret came nearer she could hear the whisper of the sibyl.

Margaret backed away from the trees. But another sound, the rus.h.i.+ng sound of scratching, tunneling, running, miniature nails began again below Margaret, only now out here on the great plain.

She walked toward the old laundry building. She saw a forlorn entrance to a tunnel by the door.

A second great, fanning group of barracks had once stood out here on the field. These were all gone now. Margaret could see shadows of movement under the ice-covered snow. Mouse tunnels, invisible when empty, became dark when the mice ran through them, their bodies like smoke.

By the camp prison compound and over at the gallows, the tunnels in the ground were running with darkness. A kaleidoscope of movement began to trickle into her eyes from every direction.

A vast network of mouse tunnels-legions of beasts running just beneath the surface of the sandy, ice-covered, tumbledown, slipshod ruin of a camp. The network was vast, oh, but not nearly vast enough, for each tunnel branched, and then branched again, exponentially expanding into an enormous city of scamperers, yes-but then, just as at the edge of the world, or the edge of life itself-every tunnel dead-ended at the demarcation line of the triangle that was the universe and the humiliation: the tunnels did not run outside the camp. The work of the mice-the suspected rats, the parasitical beasts-their work was dirty, abject, senseless-and the mice, they were filled with motivation as they ferried sc.r.a.ps here, carried a message there. They ran hither and thither full of a.s.surance of reward. Their scampering was wonderfully glittering, the scuttling speed through the tunnels reminded one of vacuum tubes, the mice drawn rocket-like by the sucking emptiness beyond the end walls.

Margaret tried to calm herself. It was the burden of secrets that was making her crazy, she thought. To have all the pictures playing simultaneously in her head, but trying to follow one single string of speech-it would drive anyone mad.

When she got home to the Grunewaldstra.s.se, the hawk-woman was waiting for her on the balcony above her apartment, standing in the cold, still and gla.s.sy-eyed like a piece of taxidermy. Margaret was afraid, more than she had been before. to the Grunewaldstra.s.se, the hawk-woman was waiting for her on the balcony above her apartment, standing in the cold, still and gla.s.sy-eyed like a piece of taxidermy. Margaret was afraid, more than she had been before.

And she thought, then, that the alliance was crumbling.

She shut all the curtains and covered herself in the bed. There was no way to visit a place like Sachsenhausen and try to be a n.a.z.i at the same time.

It can hardly be a coincidence that later that very night, unable to sleep despite her exhaustion, Margaret found another quotation from Ello Quandt.

In March of 1942, Ello said that Magda complained to her of what Joseph told her. "It's horrifying, all the things he tells me. I can't bear it anymore. You can't imagine the terrible things he burdens me with, and there's no one to whom I can open my heart."

And what immediately followed stopped Margaret short. It seemed that not long after she complained to Ello, the right side of Magda's face became paralyzed. This was verifiable, and not exclusively based on Ello's testimony. Trigeminal neuralgia, said the doctors. Margaret looked up the diagnosis in the encyclopedia. "The condition can bring about a paralysis of the facial muscles, and stabbing, mind-numbing, electric-shock-like pain from just a finger's glance to the cheek. Believed to be the most severe type of pain known to human beings..." And then in May of 1943, a full year later, after Goebbels declared total war and the Wannsee decision went into effect, Magda was operated on, but the operation was unsuccessful: the right side of her face remained paralyzed, the muscles gone slack. Her beauty was gone. Her friends said she looked unwell, her enemies said she looked like a corpse.

Margaret lay in bed for a long time. The minutes pa.s.sed slowly, and she could not stop her galloping mind.

Shortly after three in the morning, despite exhaustion, Margaret was awake. A light came into the bedroom from the courtyard. The room was quiet and the light was sharp. Margaret could hear the bang of the trash lid and the thud-whisper of falling papers-someone had turned on the timed lights and was unloading newspapers. Then footsteps moved away. All went quiet. in the morning, despite exhaustion, Margaret was awake. A light came into the bedroom from the courtyard. The room was quiet and the light was sharp. Margaret could hear the bang of the trash lid and the thud-whisper of falling papers-someone had turned on the timed lights and was unloading newspapers. Then footsteps moved away. All went quiet.

Without warning a flicker came. Margaret jerked up. A shadow was on the wall, on the right side of the room. At first Margaret thought it was the hawk-woman-maybe she had come nearer, outside the window. Margaret's heart began to pound. But soon she saw that the shadow was not the shadow of a bird.

It was the shadow of a pair of hands, dexterous and sinister. The hands were moving: they made figures-a duck and a dog. Then one changed, now it was a dog and a stork. Bowing and twittering, miming, putting on a show in the path of the light, a restless pair of hands unable to sleep. The shapes of the animals were vivid and animal-like-adept at the pageant, while at the same time remaining human fingers, as if human flesh could mirror any creation under the sun. Margaret huddled under the covers, watching the movement of the hands on the wall. Her fear froze her for a moment, and then suddenly it was gone. In each thing, she thought, all things are to be found, and this is innocence-the world bundled into the head of a pin, in the fist of a hand, in the brain of a human, in the sun and in its microcosmic imitation of the universe; all patterns existing potentially in all other patterns, the world full of the energy of things it does not yet know, in its insides and in how it projects itself to the out. Design flows into design, every thing perceives and mirrors every other thing, and becomes more like it.

And then Margaret thought of Magda Goebbels, and of how that woman had been still while patterns moved and changed around her. Magda Goebbels could never be called innocent, no matter what she might have said to Ello Quandt. No matter what she might have said.

After sleeping, Margaret thought, she would have likely forgotten this, as she so often forgot the illumination that came to her during the night.

She heaved herself up from the bed and went to her desk. She thought she would write down what she had learned about innocence.

But instead of beginning to write, she was still and unmoving, and then her hands began to wander on their own, and she found herself opening a book and looking again at the Russian mortuary pictures of Magda's children at Plotzensee. She looked at their waxen faces. Their nightgowns were white, their faces were still. Margaret pushed her fingers against her head. She thought: Magda Goebbels drank it in. Magda Goebbels knew everything and absorbed it and became stiller and stiller.

Margaret touched her own face. The skin of her forehead felt scaly, unanimated.

Woe to the unthinking, woe to the empty-headed, woe to the unremembering, she thought. For they are the static, the blanketed, the uniformed, the shrouded, the dead in spirit.

TWELVE * * The History of History The History of History

Margaret went back to the doctor. Three days after Sachsenhausen, and there were still dark circles under her eyes. She was dizzy from lack of sleep. That hanging, grey-headed sibyl: she had not been able to pull away from it, nor from the scampering mice.

The small green door in the ivy was unlocked, and before long Margaret was sitting by the tall plastic plant in the waiting room, her body taut and ready. She had a handkerchief in her hands; she wound it around her fingers.

After a while, the doctor's voice warbled from down the hallway. "Margaret Taubner."

Margaret rose and walked down the length of the flat. As she neared the doctor's door, music flowed loud from inside the chamber, a stereo playing at high volume-harpsichord, violin, cello, and soprano.

Somehow-and mark well, it was merely by chance-Margaret had an impulse to open only one panel of the French doors. She turned her shoulders and slipped into the room, and she caught a glimpse of the old woman behind her desk, upright, her giant head wobbling on her narrow neck. The music blared: something seventeenth-century, pure, operatic, without vibrato. What was it? Margaret thought she knew the melody. Yes, it was Dido and Aeneas Dido and Aeneas.

Just at the moment of recognition, a very quick and confusing series of stimuli bore down on her. The music reached a height of emotion-the words "in my breast" were sung, full of pain. A dim, silver light pa.s.sed at high speed across her left shoulder by her ear, from fore to aft, and the air was displaced; a flicker of a breeze puffed her hair. In a fraction of an instant, there was the sound of a thunk thunk at the French doors behind her, loud enough to be heard over the ballooning music, followed by a vibrating at the French doors behind her, loud enough to be heard over the ballooning music, followed by a vibrating tw.a.n.g tw.a.n.g. She spun around in the direction of the shuddering.

A small knife quivered in the wood-the panel of the French door that Margaret had left closed-in a target made of cork attached at eye level, a red- and yellow-striped bull's-eye. There were two other small steak knives also standing in the target perpendicular. At the sight of the knives, Margaret cried out. She ducked her head in a belated reflex. There was a sense of the room coming apart, as if it had been thrown, the entire box, into black s.p.a.ce. The doctor, for her part, held her head rigidly, facing the door. Margaret yelled to the doctor, "Did you just throw a knife?"

"What?"

The music blared painfully beautiful harmonics, shaking the room in a tumbling stretto. And then Margaret could make out the words remember remember, and fate fate plummeting over each other in polyphony. plummeting over each other in polyphony.

"Did you throw a knife at the door?" Margaret yelled.

"Comrade! I'm going to have to turn down the music. I can't hear you." The doctor trailed her hand against the wall, leading herself to the stereo in the cupboard, where she finally managed to turn off the CD.

In the silence that followed, the rogue knife, long since home in its target, still quivered like a tuning fork. The doctor's rasping breath marked the time.

"I turned on the music when I heard you were here because I thought you'd help me with the lyrics. I can't make out what's being said. You're a native speaker of English."

"Yes," Margaret said, breathing heavily. "I suppose I can."

"All the music is in English these days. In exchange, now that I'm your mentor, I would help you with the Wagner librettos."

"I don't need any help with the Wagner librettos," Margaret said.

"Oh." There was a quiet. "The part I'm wondering about is in the beginning of Dido's lament. It sounds as though she's saying"-and here the doctor spoke in an English so heavily accented Margaret almost did not recognize it as English-"'May my ahms create no trouble in thy breast.'"

"'May my arms arms,'" Margaret corrected. "Is that what you said?"

"Yes. Ahms."

"But that doesn't make any sense."

"I know," the doctor agreed. "What are ahms?"

"Arrrrrms," Margaret said, emphasizing the American r r. And then in German: "Arme."

"Oh!" the doctor said with excitement. "Comrade, you're very clever."

"But still it doesn't make sense," Margaret said. "'May my arms create no trouble in thy breast'?" The doctor was now busily scanning the CD. She played the section of track again, and Margaret listened. "May my wrongs wrongs create no trouble in thy breast," Margaret said, when she realized what it was. create no trouble in thy breast," Margaret said, when she realized what it was.

"You're lovely, my dear. Very efficient." The doctor sat down.

But Margaret remained standing, still trembling like the knife. "Did you throw a knife at the door just now?" she asked.

The room around her was dusty and lush. The only light was from the windows, which, with their thick curtains on either side, and their inner blinds of parchment muslin, let through only a dusky light. Margaret noticed that now, in contrast with last time, there was a potted orange tree with lush foliage taking up much of the free s.p.a.ce to the left of the examination table, growing halfway to the ceiling. Its leaves seemed to rustle now and then.

"I was practicing my aim," said the doctor.

"I thought you were blind."

"Yes, my dear, blind as a badger, which is to say, not entirely blind, but mostly. My dear child, I have to have regular practice sessions for myself: challenges, obstacle courses, tests, and self-maintenance drills. I'm keeping myself sensitive to the world. For example, the knife throwing. I put up the target; I feel its location very carefully with my fingertips. Then I back away from it, counting the steps and feeling the floor with my toetips as I go. Finally, I install myself behind the desk, and wham! wham! I always. .h.i.t it. I can hear the blade entering the cork. A wonderful sound!" I always. .h.i.t it. I can hear the blade entering the cork. A wonderful sound!"

Margaret looked back at the French doors. It was true that there were three knives in the target now, but she also saw around it, on both sides of the door, many gashes in the wood, most of them in the vicinity of the bull's-eye-but not all. Margaret's stomach turned. Funny, she had not noticed this on her last visit.

"So, comrade," the doctor began, her voice becoming more rasping, "have you remembered? Are you ready to talk?"

"No," said Margaret, irritated, despite her best hopes for the visit. The business with the knife, the lyrics-the doctor was rattling her in record time.

"Really? Nothing at all?" asked the doctor.

"That's precisely what I wanted to talk to you about. That's why I'm here."

"About what?"

"The treatment is not what you said it would be," said Margaret. "Not at all."