The History of History

FOURTEEN • Sweet Vitaly


The doctor was not Margaret’s ally, to Prell she had brought chocolates, and Magda Goebbels—who somehow for a moment she had borrowed to play for a finer spiritual division—was becoming a more threatening type of ghost by the day.

At the university, her worst fears regarding Magda Goebbels were catastrophically confirmed.

It happened at the Rostlaube: the central building of the Freie Universität, a metropolis of a structure. Previous to the change in Berlin, it had looked like a massive collection of junked cars piled into a glinting mountain. Stretched over acres, it was dissected by narrow hallways. All the hallways looked exactly alike; inside it quickly became labyrinthine in the modernist way: every path and room was exactly the same as every other, so there were no locations at all.

Since it had turned into human flesh, however, the building had taken on personality. It was pulsing—the most active building Margaret had yet seen since the change, and it seemed the great size of the structure made the difference. In contrast with other architecture, which tended to be only bodies abbreviated, one could make out, in this instance, what sort of identity the flesh carried. It was a giant redheaded adolescent boy—the roof sprouting with orangeish hair—a boy of enormous virility despite bad health. Where there had been rust on the old Rostlaube, today there was acne, and an atmosphere of melancholy strength and hope wrapped in mourning for the recently lost happiness of childhood—these were recognizable in the walls. This building, Margaret saw, was a node of power.

On her way to class, Margaret entered N street, with its bright orange carpeting and ramps zipping up to low balconies and rubber floors, bright with the white light of sky from the windows in the roof. Students were everywhere, students of the German kind: men and women no longer in their first youth. They were clustered in the smoking area, or marching along the low corridors, or sloping themselves up the ramps. They moved quickly and their faces were closed, so beautiful and unknowable they looked like goblins. They flowed with certainty—no, it was more than certainty: with style. They had so much style that they were alarming to Margaret, who thought—looking at them now as though she herself were an inert rubber doll in their midst—that the purpose of style was to release reference into its natural habitat, that good style had a jubilant, horrifying freedom to it, at once attractive and repellent, like a jungle cat liberated from a concrete zoo loping back toward the forest, returning to itself; style was as monolithic as character.

Margaret was afraid she would see the wizard of the students, the king of the Berliner panther style: Vitaly Velminski. Vitaly had been studying philosophy and history at the university for ten years. It was known that if Vitaly ever finished his Magister—he was a dawdler in the intellectual bath like everyone else—since he was both a brilliant mind and an adequate politician, he would become the heir to Meitler, Wolfgang Meitler, founder of Meitlerian metaphysics, center of a buzzing hive. Vitaly had achieved a closeness with all his professors, but with Meitler in particular, that was reflected in Vitaly’s ancient leather shoes, his dark three-piece suits, his cat-like eyes, his cutting, staccato voice that he barely raised above a whisper of precision when he spoke in class. There was excellent loose tobacco in his breast pocket along with rolling paper, and this he feinted into cigarettes when standing outside talking with one of his friends in intimate, casual tones.

For that was the point about Vitaly—he had many friends. He was a friend to anyone of any stylistic note; his human aesthetic was impeccable. He knew, and sometimes flung an arm around, the long-haired professor of philosophy who swept in on the wings of a great black cape and streaming green scarves; he was friends with the stiff man from the south, the one with curling, fleshy red lips and fiercely enunciated accent, whose trench coat was starchily belted and whose knowledge of Hegel seemed to be in his bones. Vitaly was friends with the icy and diminutive Frau Beitsch, who wore nothing but black lace and looked to weigh no more than ninety pounds, painting her skin white and her lips scarlet, but who had the broadest and deepest familiarity with Deleuze this side of the Rhine. Yes, Vitaly knew and inclined his tall head toward all of them. And yet he was also at ease with the run-of-the-mill boys of certainty, who were not noticeable, but who would still go far, because knowledge gave them no trouble—no trouble at all.

Vitaly—there he was: she had spotted him a level above her, outside the doorway to Koerfer’s classroom, standing in conversation with a man who looked like a rabbinical student. Margaret felt hungry when she came into Vitaly’s orbit. But she felt this hunger as though she were also on morphine. The students, Vitaly included, seemed so distant from her that if she were ever to open her mouth and speak to them, they would disappear. And in point of fact, whenever someone in class asked Margaret if she had an extra pen, say—or if she had the time, or the handout—her voice always became so hoarse, her German so stilted, that it was assumed she was on an Erasmus exchange and did not know the language. Over time, Margaret thought, her aura had become clear even to the naïve, and they had left off trying to speak to her.

The class was on media and assassinations in Weimar Germany, and after they were all sitting down—Koerfer was a celebrity, so the “seminar” had over ninety people smashed into a room meant for no more than fifty—Koerfer began to talk about the Berliner pneumatic dispatch, the Rohrpost.

There was something nightmarish about this to Margaret.

Also making the hair stand up on the back of her neck was the presence of Vitaly. She and he were among the last students to enter the classroom, and so now, in the crunch, he was directly behind her, his body smelling of sea salt and hills. She could not see him, but every breath he took made her feel something.

“Does anyone know how it worked? So far as I understand a dual propellant system was used,” Koerfer was saying, warming them up with facts before the theory. “The projectiles containing the letters or cards to be transported were pulled in one direction by means of compressed air, then later the same projectile was brought back to its starting point with rarefied air, through suction.

“I’ll show you a map.” With magnets he put it up on the white board and began to point. “The Berliner system was radial. From the main telegraph office a series of tubes branched to the most important post offices throughout the city. At each of these offices the projectiles were then unpacked and sent on their way again to smaller offices, where they were again unpacked, the cards and letters sorted and carried to the homes of the recipients by telegram couriers. Thus if a letter needed to go from one end of the city to the other, it had first to be sent to the central office, and only from there would it travel on to the other side. The exceptions were the direct lines between the main telegraph office and the Reichstag and eventually the chancellery, and this is where the system became important to the press, who could and did, on certain occasions, tamper with the pneumatic lines. Journalists tunneled underground to dig out the receptacles and read the classified contents. Members of the press weren’t the only ones.”

Margaret began to imagine journalists tunneling underground like moles, their eyes bleary and dim. She rested her head. This bright, low-ceilinged room did not face out onto a courtyard as most of the others did, but instead onto the empty land beyond the Rostlaube, land that was filled with scotch pines. The pines crowded up against the windows. As the professor talked on, the pines brushed against the glass. The branches lashed, insistent. Margaret pushed the side of her face against the glass, as if to rest it there, and then she could almost feel the skeletal fingers, the whispering smoke of the pine needles against her face. She turned to look out. Deep in the tree closest to her, near the cloistered trunk, she saw, looming in the darkness, a great bird of prey with legs in pants of feathers. The bird did not have any traces of womanliness, and its talons were yellow and orange against the black tree. It cocked an eye at Margaret, a glint of topaz fire. Margaret looked directly at the bird, then turned and looked at Vitaly behind her, to see if he had seen.

Vitaly saw her looking at him and turned his face to the professor, crossing his long haunches. He did not look at her again.

Margaret turned back and there was the bird—she almost had assumed that just as suddenly it would be gone—but in the meantime it seemed to have gotten much larger, now maybe the size of a ten-year-old boy. Through the heavy shadows of the darkening pine needles, Margaret saw the flutter of falling feathers. The bird was losing its mantle. She saw the sheen of gabardine, and before long, Magda’s heavy-browed face was grinning at her, grinning and winking, her smile broad. Her teeth looked like old piano keys. Margaret turned her head away quickly and tried not to look out the window again, although she could not help but glance back once or twice, and always the bird was there.

After class, Margaret sat down on a bench outside the classroom to summon her strength. She looked the length of the long hallway. It gently sloped down.

She saw a girl come out of an adjoining corridor and turn south, away from Margaret. Margaret watched the young woman’s back. She thought she recognized it. It was Margaret’s own long body, with its awkward calves.

Just then, Margaret felt her light blocked and looked up to see Vitaly Velminski standing before her. He leaned in. Her heart stopped. She waited. But his eyes were not on her. His eyes were on the department’s course listings for the coming semester, inside a glass box above her head. Vitaly leaned in further. Margaret’s excitement boiled to the point that it was no longer pleasurable, it was only painful, the proximity. The pleasure itself was the pain.

After Vitaly moved away, Margaret wanted to slam her fist into the glass box on the wall. She wanted to break her head against it. She wanted to shatter the glass, and shatter her porcelain self into bits. She hated her invisibility and muteness, she hated the attraction, the stimulation. She would flay and beat and destroy the vestiges of desire. She hated Vitaly for attracting her, and she hated him.


At the library, things only got worse. She was not insane, she told herself, but the frequent bouts of madness were beginning to add up.

When she found the Meissner biography of Magda Goebbels, the one with quotes from Ello Quandt which had made Magda Goebbels appear so sympathetic, Margaret read only three pages before she broke the spine of the book in a rage. She pushed it off the table and onto the floor. She stood up, almost unable to see.

For she had seen enough. The book was a slavering hagiography, Meissner was a sycophant. She had been led by a golden hoop in her nose straight over a precipice. Again and again, there were descriptions of Magda, a woman “of breeding and distinction,” “pretty, angelic-looking even, with her pale, gold, silken hair, milk-white complexion and sparkling blue eyes, graceful, dainty and slim,” worst of all, as de facto justification for her involvement with Nazis: “mistress of the feminine virtue of adjusting to different mentalities.”

Margaret remembered what she had read about Magda’s several affairs, the ones she had had to distract herself from Goebbels’s womanizing: many were with men who worked in the Propaganda Ministry with Goebbels himself, and wouldn’t it not be the most unlikely thing, if the man who decided to write a biography of the dead woman were one of her former lovers?

The most obvious lie in the book was this: Magda Goebbels, who in other biographies was said to have been born to a ladies’ maid out of wedlock, was here described as having been “the offspring of a happy marriage.”

Margaret was betrayed. The quotations in which she had put so much hope, which had rendered Magda cognizant and remorseful and mercilessly executive in her attempts to avenge herself against herself, not simpering, not silly—these were being discredited and crumbling into piles of fakery before her eyes. So Magda had been nothing but a fanatic, nothing but a deranged patriot when she killed her children, and all ideas that she had been a lone Nazi tribunal, turning the principles of inheritance of evil inward on the family of evil itself, were nothing but fantasies. Margaret had been singled out, chosen for tailing by a rapacious falcon, a lunatic, a fanatic, a spy.

The moment fell over her; the burst of a honey bubble. The collapsing that began at Sachsenhausen accelerated in a rush.

It was the plainly cheap and inauthentic quality of the available paths into Magda Goebbels’s mind. The situation could not be a matter of chance. The way Margaret saw it now, the smoke-and-mirrors, mirage-like quality of access to such minds must be intrinsic to the very stuff of such minds. A cephalopod builds its multichambered shell according to the nacreous laws of its species, and so too, this flickering figure of Magda Goebbels, without hardly meaning to, vanished inside layers of narrative artifice—whether by the euphuistic friends she kept, the rhetoric-heavy letters she wrote, the genre-distorted portraits she commissioned, the bombastic films and men she adored—all emanations from her personality which built rightness and naturalism, in layer upon layer, for things that were beyond right or nature. Margaret had thought she would read Mein Kampf and enter into communion with Magda Goebbels, but now she saw that without having even planned it for herself, Magda Goebbels would remain an icon on the outside, unreal on the inside, forever and ever.

The characteristic of storytelling that had first become manifest when Margaret was at the doctor’s—that the meaning generated through it was not only one great falsifier but the great falsifying agent at the disposal of the human mind—Margaret saw as the lurking bogey. Stories themselves were the hell that threatened to swallow her up whenever she came into contact with meaning, and meaning was the hell that threatened to swallow her up whenever she heard any story.

Margaret trembled. She left the university in haste.