The History of History

PART II


ROPE





The fascination aroused by Hitler and his demands on the nation did not only have to do with sadism but also very much with masochism, with the appetite for submission, behind which stood an impulse toward the desecration of authority that was much farther from the surface of consciousness (one thinks of Luther’s tone on the topic of the Pope).

—MARGARETE AND ALEXANDER MITSCHERLICH

THE INABILITY TO MOURN





SIXTEEN • Redemption Beckoning


It all began on the way to the Schöneberg archive. Although Margaret had painted a portrait in oils of the Nazi propaganda minister’s wife, photographed it, uploaded it, and retouched it, made shining digital variations, and all of this was done in a spirit of finding beauty in the woman’s face, and although she had read Mein Kampf as though it were a Bhagavad Gita, writing out many of the dubiously sympathetic passages in a tight hand in her own notebook, in the end, she had still not quite been able to stretch her brain far enough.

And after the Meissner biography was revealed as a sham, a despondency settled over her. The hawk-woman at her window was oppressive—nothing, really, but an instrument of terror, and the terror breathed down her neck day and night, infecting her small pleasures. Nightly dinner had a vague smell of guano.

On that fateful evening when everything changed, Margaret was in fact still trying: she was intending to find Magda Goebbels’s birth certificate and prove to herself conclusively that the woman had been born out of wedlock—she was already ninety-five-percent certain—but this was the way it was with her, everything shifted, her mind’s promises to itself were never kept. And so she was setting out doggedly, heading for the Schöneberg archive.

Down the Grunewaldstrasse she went, west toward Rathaus Schöneberg and John-F.-Kennedy-Platz.

The sky was a shade of blue that appeared wet, like new paint, and everything in the city, the buildings too, seemed restless.

Already when Margaret turned onto Martin-Luther-Strasse, she saw something in the distance: not a single bird—no—today it was a large swarm. Thousands of birds, and at first, reflexively, she mistook them for a convention of the taloned sparrow hawks of the Magda kind, and with all her soul she wanted to turn back toward home. But only a moment later, before she could swing around, she saw that it was not birds of prey after all, but swallows. Of course, it was only swallows. It was that time of twilight when swallows dive, in the light-filled evening, in the sleep-filled sky, and thousands of them moved in a globe of motion, according to their own complex design, around the spire of the massive city hall at John-F.-Kennedy-Platz, which rose like a fist of flesh in the early dusk.

There was something strange about the birds. Even if they were not the hawks, there was something unsettling. It took Margaret a moment to identify what the irregularity was, but finally she realized: the birds were silent. These birds did not make a single cry. The effect was almost to make her feel as if she were bicycling in a muted digital rendering, or—another thought—as though the birds were in that phase of rage where speech becomes impossible.

Margaret stopped her bicycle on the wide square and watched. The edges of their swarm were camouflaged by the late shadows, and she could not see how far into the distance their numbers spread. In silence, they made slow circles, sweeps, and caesuras, their shapes so dark, they seemed to leave trails of smoke behind them.

And then, almost imperceptibly, there was a change. They began to spiral downward. They were circling toward the open square and the surrounding canyons and depressed rooftops; they were beginning to alight on the ground. And as they did, their black forms broadened and stretched. Each bird was elastic, each bird was lengthening. Each bird grew a face. Each bird stretched into a long, thick, humanoid shadow.

The masses of black shapes, the birds in human shadow form, they moved down out of the sky, floating like dry leaves into the streets, quickly gaining detail: men and women, old and young, all of them withered and tarnished silvery like daguerreotypes. Their garments reeked of mothballs—woolen, worn and ash-smeared. A watch chain on the body of an old man; two grey, moon-shaped faces—sisters—moving at a loping pace arm in arm, their hair curled into small circles ridging their brow; elsewhere a thin baby; a flirtatious pair of platform sandals on the small feet of an adolescent girl. Deeper and deeper into the throngs of shadows Margaret went, rustling with them across the square.

Here they were, Margaret thought. So they had not evacuated. So this kind of ghost was in Berlin too. For a moment, she felt the flushest sort of excitement it is possible to feel. They were coming for her.

She reached in front of her. She took an arm in her hand and looked down to see it. It was encased in plaid wool. She pulled on the sleeve and turned her eyes toward the place where a face should be, her vision patched around on all sides, and saw as though through the wrong end of a telescope, the grey face of a young man, not fully mature, with wavy black locks.

The boy looked away from her in the direction of the spire of the town hall. He pointed to the clock. Then he too looked up at it with a steady gaze. Margaret turned her head. The hands and notched numbers of the clock rushed toward her eyes in a blur of movement. Whether the graphology had physically come free, or whether she had simply lost the ability to tell time, she could not say. The boy, for his part, shook her hand from his sleeve and walked backward into the throng, where he was lost from sight.


Margaret got back on her bicycle and pedaled furiously. She arrived at the archive. The fluorescent lights of the entryway were heavy on her face, and she stood for a moment to catch her breath. She closed her eyes.

There it was. Margaret saw the woman in the dress walking up the oval staircase. Margaret saw her from a blue distance, and then the fist of a thing crashing through the skylight, coming down from the roof above. And it fell, fluttering like ash, through the central shaft of the stair’s helix down to the mosaic on the basement floor. Her inner eye’s lens darted down now toward the fallen thing and she could see it, she could see what it was: it was a bird. It was just a bird. Light and small, it should not have broken the glass. Why did the bird break the glass?


Margaret went into the visitors’ reading carrels. The archivist looked up at her. Margaret was flustered, unkempt, her lips and cheeks were glowing with a distinct pulse of their own.

The archivist quickly disabused her of the idea that she would be granted permission to see Magda Goebbels’s birth certificate. It was against data protection laws. But Margaret noticed that the sound of the name, Magda Goebbels, after she had spoken it, was hefty and cumbersome in the room. Her eyes drifted away from the archivist to the windows; suddenly she was full of loathing. Margaret muttered something bitterly, about the archive making nothing, but nothing at all, available to the public, bureaucratically keeping everything, even very old and senseless things, under lock and key. At the end, she even mumbled a phrase that she knew was taking things too far—she said something about the archive “protecting the guilty.”

The archivist set her face. For a moment both she and Margaret were quiet. Finally the woman puffed her blouse out and pointed emphatically to the shelf. The museum, she said, with prim emphasis, recently made the collected Schöneberg police logs available to the public—everything up until and including 1966. Margaret was very welcome to look at that.

This was a shameless non sequitur.

But still, Margaret’s rage dissipated. She had other worries. The shadows she had seen outside, she felt they were pressing against the window glass, beginning to beg her for something. So now, embarrassed and clumsy, Margaret indeed hoisted down a police logbook; she chose the one from 1943.

At first, Margaret only pawed through it without reading it. She thought she would wait until the archivist was in the other room and then quickly leave. But, despite herself, Margaret became involved. She read through January 1943, and already, something of interest caught her eye. There was a letter of complaint from a middle-aged woman who had walked her cat on a leash in the Kleistpark. She was peacefully making a round in the late afternoon when a policeman set upon her and beat her with a stick, merely because cats were forbidden in the park. Was it possible, Margaret thought, for everyone in a society to be variously psychotic, all at the same time? She got out her notebook and pen. She copied the letter of complaint in its entirety into her notebook.

She moved into the records of February and March. These were mostly concerned with the police seizure of apartments recently “abandoned” by Jewish families. There were entries concerning the looting of Jewish homes, many reports of calls from neighbors complaining that the loot had not been equally divided. Also many entries concerning Jewish suicides. The suicides coincided with the mass deportations, the period when Berlin was undergoing its “cleansing” by Goebbels.

Then Margaret came to the log of Police Revier 173, and all of a sudden her breath, which had been even, stopped, and her heart, which had been loping, sped up to a trot. The first entry, on page 143, was this:

March 3, 1943, circa 9:00 p.m., the married couple Franz Strauss, born 11/5/06 in Gross-Strenz, and Regina Sara Strauss née Herzberg, born 11/20/09 in Schwedenhöhe, living in Berlin-Schöneberg, Salzburgerstr. 8, committed suicide by natural gas. They took their three children, Rahel Strauss born 7/5/32 in Berlin, Gerda Strauss born 2/27/39 in Berlin and Beate Strauss born 4/3/42 in Berlin, with them into death.



Margaret froze. She did not think immediately that this entry would bring a revolution to her life, but one of her fingers, which had been winding a strand of hair, went still, and a long, breathless moment passed.

When she came to herself, it was as if she had stepped behind a curtain hitherto hiding the harshest lights in the world. Red spots glowed before her eyes; the lights coming in from the street contained parts of the spectrum that she had never seen before. She felt her chest begin to tighten, and a clever fever, a madness, a vast energy flickered in her.

She stood up. The energy made her nauseous. Standing bent over, she read the passage a second time. Her fingers, controlled from afar, brushed over the print of the logbook; she had a hallucination that the letters were made of loosely strewn sand; sand that could be swept away with reverent fingers. Something told her, whispered to her, that there would be pictures beneath.

She rubbed. She rubbed harder, feeling split into two persons—one who knew this was madness, and one who believed that there were pictures underneath the print. The second person would reveal them. She would expose them come what may.

Margaret was out of control. She felt a keening pity for what she had read, and also a terrible pain. At the same time, she was knocked hard by a sense of tyrannical exclusion. She pushed her chair back with a suffocated gesture. She gathered her books and threw them in her bag. At first she thought she would simply run, but then she looked at the police logbook lying there on the table and could not bear the thought of leaving it behind. She quickly searched for change, made a ten-cent Xerox copy, feeling all the while as though she would be sick.

Outside the archive, the headlamps and neon signs cast snakes of light over the Hauptstrasse, striking Margaret’s eyes with lasers menacingly futuristic.


The lay of the land here is very important in what happened next. Precisely: the old villa housing the archive was close up against the road. Behind the villa, a modern annex had been built, which held a small branch library. Farther still, behind the library, was a broad and sloping pasture of a city park, opening out toward the north. The park was reached by a wide and graveled path. It was this path that Margaret turned down now, her legs numb, meaning to cut home in the blessed darkness, for she was in a state of extreme light sensitivity now.

As she moved through the twilight, however, she came to the entrance of the branch library, squat under the sunset and, as she looked over at it, her head bounced in surprise—it seemed to be staring at her with a single glass eye. Above it, the last light of day was a wide yellow stripe on the far horizon. Without knowing why, Margaret pulled the handbrakes of her bicycle, and it skidded. Before she could think, she was lofted into the air.

The back tire’s brake had not been properly able to grip since the late summer, and when the front tire stopped so abruptly on the loose gravel of the path, the rear of the bike kept spinning and swung out.

Margaret’s limbs pumped the air. She tried to heave herself away from the bicycle and land on her feet, but her legs were numb and disobedient as in a dream, and her head was spinning. She went down sideways, falling heavily on her left shoulder and hip.


And then, an entirely marvelous thing happened. Everything began to tilt. Margaret looked into the night sky, and the stripe of yellow seemed to grow three-dimensionally above the low roof of the library. It blew up rhapsodically with color and warmth.

The pain in Margaret’s limbs and the emotion in her heart clasped, coming together like the teeth of a zipper. Margaret’s eyes would not move from that thick, warm stripe of yellow. Now it was beginning to billow like smoke, to represent something terrible and beautiful at once, and she stood up. The hurt in her body, the inflammation, ballooned—she was on fire, and she began to yaw toward the dimensionalizing yellow stripe. Three uncertain, swaying steps toward the giant color that was bleaching now, losing its heat—and Margaret felt convinced that before the yellow light disappeared, it would let her float into the center of it. She put her arms up high and wide—she felt her arms lengthening and strengthening around the entire earth. All the way around, her arms might reach, all the way to the hidden yellow sun. If only the night sky, that bleachworks, would not destroy the yellow king! And then as though possessed—she startled herself terribly—her lower jaw dropped open, and like water from a tipped bucket, sound came glistening out. Which is to say that she began to yell, and simultaneously she began an almost comical clenching and unclenching of her fingers—she was both surprised and amazed—the grasping had a frightened, unnatural quality to its rhythm, and she gave a series of high and imploring cries.

On the slate staircase leading up to the library’s blind eye, she threw herself down, in sudden and total capitulation.

But the new position did not put an end to it. With her eyes closed, the black letters in the police log, telling her of the Family Strauss, came swimming to Margaret. The letters gushed closer, lost some of their darkness, and soon melted into the shape of a strange man, it looked like a monk, a monk dressed in hay-colored robes. Margaret could see him. His hair was like transistors and his earlobes dangled pendulous. He too was falling down before the setting sun, and this was all at once vivid: the monk in his hay-colored robes and swinging earlobes, prostrated before a sun that was as red as an animal’s heart, beating and loping.

Here was Margaret in Berlin, where only the last, pale yellow stripe smarted against the bleachworks of the sky, and there was the monk in some world far away—he saw it all burn, he saw it all burn bright as a furnace fire.

And then Margaret knew.

The monk was an ancestor, a visitor come to her bearing tidings, a visitor sitting somewhere along a line that ended in—prostrations before this Family Strauss. They, they and only they—they had conquered the setting sun. They were the true conquerors of the disappearing light.

What had they done? Faced with deportation, the Family Strauss had chosen to kill themselves and their children rather than go through the hell served to them. They had chosen to die privately rather than in the chambers in Poland. These people killed themselves and their little daughters on the shoulders of God, to escape soul-destroying torture, the humiliation of death at the hands of dog-men. Nothing could be higher than that, nothing more elect.

Margaret was resolute and sure. She thought of them and believed. The Family Strauss in March 1943 was where innocence was active. Innocence had been in a coma, but now here it was, coming back to life. The idea of active and effective innocence was the bright light behind her eyes; it was the voluminous stripe spreading its cloud into her mind. This was the hidden, ever-disappearing goodness. This she had yearned for so long. This was the friar’s lantern.

Here is how I will go about it, she said to herself. Here is how I will save myself. People—for once, people—who acted cataclysmically in the service of love.

That was how Margaret saw it, and horsemen of joy came riding to her.

She closed her eyes tighter so as to better see, buried her face further into the gravel and pinched at her heaving flanks, trying to see more clearly. The monk slowly dissolved, and another image bore down in its place: already she could see a girl, it must be one of the Strauss children, the oldest girl, ten years old, almost eleven when she died, a child with a face like roses and sandpaper, her head surrounded by light. The girl was wearing yellow cloth, the same color as the almost disappeared sunlight, and she was coming closer. She was filling Margaret’s eyes and quenching her ears. The child spoke clearly. This is what she said.

On that day Mother made us come out for a walk in the park. We didn’t want to. Not even Father. We are hungry. We think only of sleep. Mother said we would like the snow. The storm was coming all day, and now it was here and the flakes were very large like moths against our cheeks. We went to the Stadtpark by the Rathaus. Mother says it looks like the Jardin du Luxembourg. Once she was there, in Paris. She says it is beautiful. Mother is beautiful. I walked behind with Gerda. Mother carried Beate and walked beside Father. Mother and Father argued about something and the snow was thick, I couldn’t hear what they said. Gerda was tired. I let her ride on my back. I became breathless. Up ahead, I saw the golden stag on its pedestal, surrounded by dark snow, bright like a moon in the afternoon that was much more like night. Mother and Father slowed down and I caught up and then I saw Father was crying. Father did not cry when he lost his position at the conservatory and he did not cry when he lost his job at the factory, and when he began to sleep all day or sit looking out the window after he had finished giving me my lessons, he did not cry. He taught me French and mathematics and he taught me the violin.

Mother is beautiful. She has a friend who gave us money when Jews weren’t allowed to work. We were hungry. Mother couldn’t buy food with the money without ration cards. She decided to use the money to make her hair blond so she would have an easier time finding a private position as a maid in a rich person’s house. In the beginning it looked hideous. Very orange. But she went back to the salon every ten days, and soon it was gold blond and yellow. Some people said she should have used the money differently, but Mother always said that now that Jews weren’t permitted to emigrate, the best way was camouflage.

I trusted Mother. Mother promised she would never let them take away any of us like they had taken away Berthe and her mother. She didn’t care what anybody said and she fixed the collar of my coat so that I could wear it so the star didn’t show when I wanted, and we would go to the pictures or look at the fabric in a fancy store. Father always said that nothing bad would happen if we would just learn to follow the new rules, for God’s sake! It would blow over. But mother said, it’s too late for that now, Franz.

Two weeks before the day it snowed, Mother came home from the Tombanzens’. She said she didn’t have to go back the next day. They were kind to Mother, but now Mr. Tombanzen had to go off to war and they would have to do without help. Then Mother couldn’t find anyone to give her or Father any work.

Father cried in the park. When we got home, he was very tender to us. Mother was busy around the house, cleaning and putting things in order. She told us we would all sleep on the floor of the kitchen tonight, all together, and wouldn’t that be fun? At first we thought it was fun. Then after all the bedclothes were laid down on the floor, we felt strange. Mother closed the door of the kitchen. She used our extra pairs of underwear and some socks to plug the space at the bottom between the base of the door and the threshold and also around the edges of the window behind the blackout shade where it was loose. When Gerda saw her underwear were getting dirty in the window frame she began to cry, so baby Beate started crying too. Mother told us to hush and held us all three very tightly. Father turned his back and I saw his shoulders shaking. Mother said the bad people in the government would never find us. She said she was keeping us safe now, hush.



On the ground in front of the glass branch library, Margaret hid her head in her hands.

When she looked up, the sky was dark purple; the yellow stripe was gone, and the air around her was thick. People—she said to herself—people who acted cataclysmically in the service of love.

She took lunging steps even as she hobbled with pain, and made it over to her bicycle. She rode back toward the Grunewaldstrasse. With every downward shove of the pedal, each more stabbing than the one before, she came further into a sense of grand-scale homecoming.

Once in her apartment, she moved in a loop from living room to bedroom to hallway and back again.

The child who had spoken to her was with her. Rahel Strauss’s young voice lapped at her ears, sweet as milk.

With the voice playing, she saw the painting she had made of Magda Goebbels lying next to her bed. She laughed with a bitter contempt. It was inert, deactivated like a discarded toy. False prophets would no longer tempt her, she said to herself. Some people—at least once—had done something right. She had been blind to that. She had believed that every comprehensible human action was corrupt.

She looped around the apartment, careening. What was Magda Goebbels? What was the hawk-woman? She was nothing but a shadow! The insanity of the last weeks hit her in the chest.

She considered this apartment she had lived in for five years and saw it in every way reborn. The ceilings were very high here, the French doors opened between the rooms; each room flowed gently into the next: an apartment built at the end of the old century for graceful, romantic ways of living; you could hear Dvoák breathing through the floor plan. Margaret saw that it was possible to think of the lives that came and went in this apartment as expressions of a single spirit, her own life separated from the other lives that had passed in it only along a single axis, an axis of time, which she knew now, she knew for certain now, could be collapsed like a telescope.

She shook with the joy of the mercy-shown.

Only seconds later, however, she went into a mild panic. She smelled the dust and mildew in the apartment. She considered the floors, once sleek parquet, now covered in musty wall-to-wall carpet. The scent of the carpet’s peculiar dust filled the nose. A leering sort of sadness took hold of her for a moment. These rooms, built spacious, gracious, and light, had almost nothing in them to remind of the fine old days. The few pieces of furniture Margaret had were picked off the street or bought at the shabbiest of flea markets. The former tenants—their ghosts—would laugh at the shambles, and they would laugh at her, Margaret. Berlin had fallen; Berlin had been destroyed. If Lucifer had once been an angel, he had long since gone down. Was anyone or anything in this city a continuation of what it had been—either for good or evil? Was there any continuity at all?

Then she thought of the Family Strauss, the nobility of their decision, and the idea of nobility in general: its music, its architecture, its moral independence, and she asked herself with atrocious anxiety: Can I possibly follow them? Can I possibly be like them? Do I have the character?


Character or not, she would try. She could not stop herself from trying.


And if she could manage it, if she could manage to swim in their wake—Margaret lay her head back on the sofa and closed her eyes, her happiness swooping back in a rash of light. It came to her, chanted as though a triumphant rhyme, washing her with its purple, the lullaby of possibilities.

The swallows would speak. The clock would take back its numbers; the balconies would resume the cradling of their lost, cupped lives. The faces of the living would contort to mirror the faces of the dead, the written words would fly like homebound bees to the spoken. The secret meaning of the city would manifest itself, the house numbers alight from the clouds of the mind to fix themselves to the permanent book written underground. The numbers would correspond to the forgotten names, the shadows to the bodies, the palimpsest ache to the threaded ruins.

Hands were stretching out to Margaret, offering every fine thing, every decipherment. And her breath was full of oxygen.


Just before she went to sleep that night, she thought of the doctor’s forest film and its so-called “perfect pregnancy.” It wandered into her mind after a long absence. She asked herself then, very seriously, whether the prophecy had not been fulfilled. Everything will be revealed, she thought. And meaning—meaning was not going to be a stranger to her after all.





SEVENTEEN • An Expectation of Mirrors


The next day Margaret was soberer, but still, the first thing she did was think of the Strausses, and she acted immediately. She went to the apartment building where the family died. She knew the Salzburgerstrasse well: it had been nearby all along: a small, tree-lined street behind the town hall, beyond the cake-like Nordstern building.

She bicycled. Her body was still bruised, and in her joints, the fall of the night before was lurking. This might have brought her into a state of reflection: the pain as she felt it in Schöneberg’s dowdy day was so different than the pain as it had been in Schöneberg’s riddling night!

But she silenced all uncertainties. The voice of the child had been palpable, as shimmering as shimmering can be. It had filled her with an ecstasy larger than life. And so what was she to do? Once you’ve met something unimaginable you can never unmeet it again. It will never be disentwined from instinct.

And, all reasoning aside, whether she could justify it or not, she had known from the moment she woke that morning, under the rustling bedsheets, by her excitement and happiness and energy, that she was going to be riding high all day.

In fact, she fantasized for the greater part of the bicycle ride, hatching ideas of gifts she would bring to the Strausses’ memory and places she would go to find their traces.

She pedaled off west into Jewish Switzerland toward the Nordstern behemoth. She was excited, nervous. Never had she been so exuberant and frightened of rejection at once. Never had she been so preoccupied, and before she left home, she had not even noticed the absence of that incredible lurking bird who was usually outside her window.


Number 8, when she pulled up in front of it, turned out to be a rich building with blushing white skin. Its fleshy balconies squeezed the flanks of the building, like twin rolls of plumpness on a woman’s back, giving the place the simple, softhearted, motherly style of the Weimar era. All of it pleased Margaret.

Margaret waited, and after a while a man emerged from Number 8. Behind a tree, lost in fantasy, Margaret almost missed her chance. She dashed to the door and caught it at the last moment before it clicked shut. She moved into the foyer, her sensitivity to everything around her fantastically acute.

Inside, it was quiet, as the homes of the wealthy are always quiet, with thick, grey carpets over blue tiles. It’s just as I imagined it, she thought, just precisely as I imagined it.

The walls were decorated with elaborate plaster moldings. Muscled young heroes carrying horns of plenty curled themselves around mirrors. Margaret looked into the first one. She saw herself reflected in the milky glass in a miracle of integration. She felt flattered to be included.

She could hardly move, she was so pleased. And she noticed an extraordinary effect. The mirror changed her face. She was the same in every detail, but the sum total of the details was an expression her face had never carried before, and perhaps never would. An expression of serenity. Margaret’s face staring into its own eyes from across the mirror had a gentility and an equanimity to it, like a woman in a Vermeer, both as if she had no passions and as if she could go on living, softly and in the same way, forever. Margaret tilted her head to the side, considering this new, soft person. Maybe this face was caused by the light in the foyer. It was light soft and filtered; it was light like grey velvet.

And then Margaret noticed another effect. The foyer was slightly trapezoidal, and the mirrors were not positioned directly across from one another but at a slight angle, so that not only could Margaret see herself, she could also see herself reflected in copy after copy, extending far into the wall. In each copy she became more haloed by the soft light, more filtered and obscure. As she looked back into the wall at herself, so far away, the mirror corridor curved, and the tiny Margarets eventually went lost from sight. Margaret brushed her hand against her face. The dozens of Margarets in the hothouse of the glass did likewise and the synchrony of it blasted like an orchestra.

Margaret went out the back entrance of the foyer and into the courtyard garden beyond. The sun came through from above and the place was rich with pine. There were juniper, ferns, and rhododendron. She looked up at the side-wings and thought that the Family Strauss must have lived here in the back. They could never have held on to one of the fine apartments in the front all the way through 1943.

In the foliage, she saw a little brick path that led through the bushes. She followed it to a man-made pond, where a little jet of a fountain bubbled and arced in the sunlight. But the sun didn’t reach all the way into the pool, and she looked down into the dark waters. The pond was swimming with goldfish, each about the size of a finger, some of a red-orange color, and others orange and white like bridal kimonos. Margaret stood over it, moving her lips.

She went inside again. She went back to the mirror, wishing to look again at that passionless, unpained face.

She gazed.

Something behind her head moved in the mirror. A quick, dark shadow. It passed once, twice. She whirled around. Was it the shadow of a tilting bird? Maybe a starling had flown in from the courtyard. But the room was so still. Margaret’s heart beat. In the mirror, she saw the shadow pass again. The skin of her back went tight with goose bumps. She stood very still, her heart at a gallop. “I won’t move, and then it will go.” She stared straight ahead into the mirror. Her face was framed in the oval—it had turned white, and beneath her sleepless eyes, the crescents darkened.

Then all at once, stepping in from the side, a silent figure came. A woman stood next to her in the mirror. Margaret spun around. But no, there was no one in the room. The woman was only in the mirror. The apparition had a soft, round, worried face, dark eyes, and tired blond hair. She was wearing a dark wool dress with a slightly yellowed, white lace collar.

The woman—Margaret felt sure of it—was Regina Strauss. She stood in the mirror portrait very near Margaret, close next to her, good as a mother or a friend. She opened her mouth, and although no sound came from her pale lips, Margaret could see from the way she held her mouth that she was speaking.

The woman was saying a great deal. With her head held steady, she was telling Margaret a long story, holding her face expressionless, but Margaret was no lip-reader and could not make out the words. Although there was a sisterly warmth in the proximity of their bodies standing side by side in the mirror, there was also a sort of coldness—their faces opposed and their eyes meeting across the mirror.

At first, Margaret tried hard. She smiled back at her. She smiled and nodded, encouraging the apparition to speak, trying to follow her lips and divine what it was the woman was telling. But the words she was repeating over and over did not grow clearer.

Margaret strained hard, but she could not make them out.

After a while, Margaret began to feel chilled.


She spent the latter half of the day at the public pool. In the echoing hall, she swam up and down until she was hypnotized and could not think. On the way back home, she looked up at the sky.

She would later call it a spiritual aftershock. She looked up; she saw a complex grid in the sky. A grid of quasicrystals on the ceiling of the world, like the ceiling of the shrine of Darb-i-Imam, only deeper, only ghostlier, etched into the filling night. And at first Margaret was full of fear. She looked up into the quasicrystal heavens and was frightened that there was a pattern, there was a design governing behavior on earth. Past and present, a repeating pattern always circular, knowing no progress that does not loop back again. The heavens were a bureaucracy, cycle-bound, administering life on earth—playing fast and loose with Margaret’s red lips and tearing heart. And her head went weak.


That night, Margaret slept badly. She woke up several times, wondering when morning would come. Each time, she was afraid of returning to her dreams. At around six o’clock, just as dawn was breaking, she opened her eyes with Regina’s lips before her, and now, with a certainty so heavy, she felt as if she were being forced through the bed, she could finally hear the words that Regina had repeated in the mirror: the words that had been moving on her lips—retten Sie uns. Save us.