The History of History

TWENTY • The Violence of Nostalgia


The mistake was made: the muscle of her mind had slackened, and all it took was an instant: the beast sidled in. The tent poles fell and the tent too, and there was nothing to block the coming animal.

Restless, uneasy, Margaret went walking in the next weeks. One night she went east, walked away, out of Schöneberg. She crossed the railway lines that form the border with Kreuzberg. She stood on the bridge over the emptiness between the districts. Alexanderplatz sparkled distantly over in the center of town, and under her, the railway cut grooves ever more deeply into the land, like water over centuries chafing deeper into a riverbed.

On the Kreuzberg side, the apartment buildings were tenement-like, covered in tattoos. On the Schöneberg side, there were gold rings on the chimney-fingers, but also much crumbling bone. Looking off toward town, Margaret felt a wayward love.

Down in the ravine where the train ran, a wan field opened up on the side. A dilapidated Biergarten, shut for the winter, rested darkly. A narrow stairway led down from the street above. Up on poles, dark lights were strung around the tables and benches, and the dead wires looked skeletal; light too is a kind of flesh. So here: a skeleton of the summertime.

Margaret was drawn to it. She climbed over a low gate, and went down into the empty Biergarten. She sat on a chair and drew her body together for warmth. She closed her eyes.

It was no coincidence, the Biergarten. She had known it from before, from her earliest days in Berlin, her first attempts at independent spring living: people with beer mugs in their hands shivering in outdoor cafés, crowding themselves into blotches of kingfisher sunlight in the prickling early spring air. Margaret tightened her eyes. It was the skeleton of the summer, and she was younger then. She remembered her first days.



Nineteen years old, a fresh arrival from the new world to the old, her eyes flashing. Her first day, she hoisted her suitcase off the baggage belt at Tegel, and already that same afternoon, an electric pulse in her fingers shocked anyone she touched, so great was her sense of possibility.

She was free, her father dead of cancer after years of frightening mental illness, a terrible quarrel with her mother behind her—and her bag hoisted from the belt and it was as simple as that: she was on her own. That first day in Berlin, her back arching, rising toward the sky, she was greeted by an old man in the subway station, a man she had never seen before, with the words, “Mein Liebling! Ich liebe dich!” and then kissed on the neck, on the platform with the train rushing by and the man gone before the train was. People seemed to sense intuitively that any overtures toward her would not only be welcomed but ratcheted up.

Margaret came to Berlin fleeing, but she also came to Berlin running straight into the arms of her dead father. Her father she had loved like some quintessential thing. He had been mentally ill, he had fought his cancer only weakly, but through all this, she had seen him as though he were cradled. Off in the haze, he was miniaturized but not diminished: he was a tiny, perfect figure so small as to be invisible, running back and forth in the palm of her hand.

Now she had come to Germany to study her father’s “soul,” as she called it. She was interested in everything he had been interested in. His paranoid mind shot like an arrow to the Stasi, to the CIA, to the KGB, to the postwar reconstructed Nazi party in South America, and so Margaret too was interested in these things. She did not put any stock in his paranoid fantasies, but her veneration for him coalesced with her estrangement such that his obsessions seemed dignified and only coincidentally wrongheaded. In fact, such organizations became, to Margaret, a form of evil nebulous and mythical, not terrible at all.

In any case, her first Sunday in Berlin, she was already trying to know him. She set off to meet an old friend of his, and she felt, in anticipation of this meeting, almost as if her father would come along with them, return from the dead out of old friendship. Her father had always spoken of this man with moist-eyed fondness: Amadeus Vilnius, Slavist.

The man on the phone, when Margaret heard his voice, did not disappoint, either: he sounded over the wires like pebbles brightly colored under water.

They agreed to meet in Friedrichshain. From there, they would walk to the Soviet Monument in Treptower Park. This destination, too, was chosen meaningfully: Margaret’s father had talked about it once. He spoke of it using both hands, his thickly lensed eyes and hoarse voice becoming emotional.

It was on the platform at Ostkreuz, then, that Margaret Taub first saw the man she would always want to see. Later, not a single thing about that first moment went lost. This was how it was: the station was nothing but a knot of criss-crossing platforms, and on that sunny, first-spring March day, the damp air was filled with coal dust left over from the winter. Crowds moved toward the ring trains on the overpass above and toward the East-West axis trains in the shadows below, and Amadeus got off the train in these shadows. At first, he too was in shadow. But as he drew closer to Margaret, he came into the light—she remembered it so well—and the world seemed to tilt into wonderful alignment. He was dressed like a student, in dust-covered black corduroy guild pants with two gold zippers, a coarse sailor shirt, androgynously shaggy hair, and a rosy face. Everything around him seemed to instantly become a part of him: on the whitewashed station walls, letters were stenciled—networks of exposed wires filigreed the sky, grids of windows gave a Bauhaus effect, and the world seemed to be smoking its grandfather’s pipe. The station felt as if it were held together with black electrical tape, and Margaret’s spirits rose like a baby’s hand toward the unfamiliar flame, automated beyond reason.

Not long after she picked him out in the crowd (he told her on the phone what he would wear) she waved at him. Amadeus saw her do it. And already then, something strange occurred. He saw her wave, and he recognized her, but he looked away.

As he came closer to her, too, there was something overcharged. The first thing Margaret thought was: What beautiful eyes he has. And the thought was perhaps too simple and pure for their relationship. A single note had been sounded bell-like and left to vibrate a long time on its own.

She moved her mouth and said hello; he nodded and inclined his head away from her. Yes, it was an awkwardness too much for strangers. She filled the silence—babbled about coming to Berlin to study history, and Amadeus laughed quickly, made a derisive comment about the field attracting “the morbid pedants of the world,” although she knew he was himself a history professor and he must know that she knew it, and the second thing she thought about him was, How diffident he is, and how sour, but it did not stop her from following his face with her attention, her body frightfully still.

From Ostkreuz they walked together to Treptower Park. And in some subterranean part of her she began to feel, walking next to him, as though she were attractive and delightful to men. Who knows from what source such feelings well up in some company but not in others.

On that Sunday, the entire population of the Eastern city seemed to have rejoiced at its freedom from the cave of the indoors and taken to the park along the river. They passed Biergartens where the old ones in their polyester were dancing to oompah-pah, small children went by on tricycles at astonishing speed, almost knocking down the lumbering flâneurs in their paths, the ducks were back, and when they stopped, Amadeus festively bought two Currywurst from a stall, claiming Currywurst a great delicacy, and even too, whatever it was between them disappeared for a moment; we should not overstate the initial attraction. A few minutes long, Margaret looked at him and briefly thought him ridiculous; he seemed foreign in a foolish, foppish way.

But finally they came to the Soviet War Memorial, the object of their wanderings, and it was here, beneath the Russian soldier–ogre with German babe in arms, so large that directly beneath it you could not even see it, that everything went irrevocably awry. Specifically, Margaret asked Amadeus to explain the names and platforms of the German political parties, and while he spoke, he looked once into her eyes. It took him a long time to explain, and their eyes met several more times after that as well. Margaret’s entire chest began to expand, and a sense of unbelievable suspense and fear and almost painfully sharp anticipation overtook her. It is only illicit love that causes such gargantuan arousal, and that is a great misfortune.

By the time they were climbing through the bushes and over a fence to get into an abandoned amusement park, Amadeus, a bit out of breath but eager to appear fit, had begun to incandesce toward her, with a bright firefly gleam of attention. Breathlessly he declared that she was “very well read,” although later he would insinuate that she was just good at fluffing.

And then once as she climbed over a barbed-wire fence partially caved in—they were trying to get back out again—she smiled particularly broadly over at him and he said, “You know, you look very much like your mother when you smile,” and Margaret said, “You don’t know my mother,” and he said “Doch, once I met her. Before you were born, your father brought her back with him one summer,” and Margaret was surprised at this and shivered. She had not known her mother ever made such a trip; her mother had never mentioned it. But it made Margaret feel all the more of a pounding in her chest, that he was no stranger to her history. He had known both her parents in the time before she was born.

Later that day, the two of them still together although night had come—chapters of time fell by so quickly, it was extraordinary—first in the park and then later a friend of his joined them in a café: a short, bristle-haired man named Florian. Then in another café, then in a restaurant and then in a bar, Amadeus made money quickly appear and fly into the waiters’ hands before Margaret could move to pay for herself and like magic, a relationship of dependency sprang up between them. After the comment about her likeness, Amadeus never again mentioned her mother, nor, more strangely, did he ever again mention her father. It became—how can it be explained? It was not even as if he and Margaret had met by chance. At least that would have been mentioned. The reason for their meeting was left so unspoken that it was as if the circumstances had been some terrible crime.

Margaret misunderstood this. She took it to mean he was uncomfortable talking about her father’s troubles: most people did not know how to talk about mental illness, and Margaret was used to that. Also, she sensed Amadeus was the sort of man who could not address death and other stirring things—exile, separation, and betrayal. He was both too soft and too hard for it. When the heat is too high in the oven, the bread becomes stone-hard on the outside while still almost liquid in the middle, and later when she got to know him better, she found this intuition regarding his character had been correct, and so she left it alone. (To her later regret.)

That night already it began—the love affair in his freezing, coal-heated second apartment, where Margaret’s little envoy of the heart to a world free of advertisements found its perch, in those loose, cool, summery years after the end of Communism and before the beginning of true capital; a society breathing out at the end of state control but not yet fighting toward wealth, light-headed, perhaps slightly flaccid and all-embracing, a slacker student of the new, like Margaret herself.



In those early months, Margaret began spending the night with Amadeus regularly. She remembered in particular how very cold his place was, even in the spring, and how he still needed to feed coal into the oven, which he would often forget to do, so the corner room, with its high balcony over the silent street, at the far eastern end of Friedrichshain, gave off an odor of cold, and of unforgiving, oxblood-painted, dusty wooden floors. She remembered that his bookshelf held Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics by Bakhtin, and this book fascinated her. It was also in these months that she began to wear a perfume that smelled like freesia flowers, but ritualistically: she only wore it when she knew she was going to meet him. Then to lie in the coal-smelling room with the book, on the sheets which were cold to the touch but clean-smelling, over the mattress on the floor which was even colder against her bare feet, and lined with coal powder mixed with the smell of freesia, and he would speak to her of his other women, and she felt safe and coddled despite that, or maybe because of it—she thought to hear of his other women drew her into a society with them, and all of them were foreign and hidden and preserved outside of time, like flowers pressed into oil. It is terribly seductive to have a style in which to think of oneself.

Once, she remembered, he told her that his favorite novel was Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, and gave her his extra copy. She took it home to her much warmer, more modern apartment, and read it through in one afternoon and evening.

She remembered the night after she finished reading this book; it was very late and she was alone, the light glowing yellow around her like a sickness. A horrible sensation of fear and misgiving crushed her, a certain knowledge that in choosing this man she had chosen wrongly; that any man who loved such a book, where a cavalier draws all his romance and exultation from the bittersweet moment when he leaves his beloved behind, could only be rotten at his soft core—what she knew from her boarding school days Mary McCarthy would have called a “dangerous neurotic.”

But what did it mean? What was the ailment? She thought that night for a long time about Amadeus. She thought about his tendency to love her more, chase her with greater consistency and desire when she was running away from him. She had wanted to give it a name, to know whether she herself was at fault for having dived into the shallows of a heart such as his.

But at the same time, even after that night—and mark, she never completely forgot the realization of that night—her love for him only grew. That was the contradiction. The love became a world unto itself. It was both the liability and the fallback plan; her undoing but also her reward for bearing up under the undoing, the forest of pain, but also her comfort as she wandered lost in that forest. The itch of it, the painful itch of the love that would not cease; the inability to think of anything else when inside such a circle of longing and incomplete satisfaction and longing again—none of it was capable of coming to an end.


Margaret opened her eyes in the closed-up Biergarten, now returned to herself. Several types of pain snaked through her at once. The day in Treptower Park wavered, the tail of it at least, before her eyes, and then fled. In its place, her eyes filled with a blackness the color of pressure. She was on a folding chair in the cold night air, in the defunct Biergarten by the railway tracks.

Slow on her feet, she walked back to Schöneberg, her mind gone black and old.

She thought: I was wrong to remember. To remember is wrong. Memories—true or not, enactments of any kind, attempts at experience inside the head, playacting with neurons hidden behind the bones of the skull, are the enemy of life. It was the doctor who first taught her that.


On the Hauptstrasse, a 148 bus passed by her in the night, and she looked into its aquarium lights as it passed. In the back of it, she saw a girl sitting in a black overcoat over a sailor-striped shirt. She and the girl had the same wide-set eyes, the same long bones, the same skin dotted with moles. The passenger’s veins had the same streaking presence behind the freckles. Margaret saw with absolute clarity and certainty this time: it was Margaret, another Margaret, it was no one but Margaret herself. She was riding up toward Prenzlauer Berg to visit her lover, the older man, the friend of her father’s. She was still traveling up there! And the bus passed by and the young woman was gone, but Margaret was left on the street shivering and shaken.

Curtains closed around Margaret’s eyes, there on the pavement. Through the diaphanous fabric she could see the alternating shadows, the correspondence between prisms. She heard a radio far away in a high window, playing a tin melody she thought she already knew.

There was something else, Margaret thought, something else she was meant to remember.