The History of History

TWENTY-TWO • A Taxonomy of Sins


With resolve, and a pounding desperation, Margaret returned to Dr. Gudrun Arabscheilis once again. She went through the muted ivy courtyard and proceeded upward with a firm, clacking step. She would do things differently this time. She would demand a fair hearing no matter what the woman tried on her. In her bag she carried her American passport and two other forms of identification.

But when she arrived at the office, nothing was as it had been before. Her ambitions began to flounder and distort. At first the change was subtle. The stairwell had a different smell.

Then as Margaret came in and walked past the coatrack, the place became more unfamiliar still. In the waiting room was an intense heat. Margaret instantly began to sweat in the dryness of it. The room was very dark, and the lights glowed yellow.

At the reception desk, the dour nurse, almost hidden behind an enormous jade plant, was asleep with her mouth open. The lights seemed to give off a vapor.

Through the hot ether, Margaret could hear a sound. A great whooshing, windy assibilation of hot air and beneath it a stuttering, mechanized clack-clack-clack. The sound of a running film projector. Margaret tiptoed down the long hallway. Opening the oak door of the examination room, she was buffeted backward by the heat, the air hot and dry as in a sauna. The curtains were drawn and the room made light-tight against the dusk. It was close and musty in the heat.

On the wall next to the door, a film was projected. Black and white; the forest scene, a boy in medieval garb with sword in hand rising out of the lake, with great scabs of light burning across it.

A sudden glimmer in the recesses of the darkness—two round Os—perhaps the lenses of the doctor’s bifocals. But Margaret felt as if she had trespassed, and she withdrew and closed the door behind her. She walked back down the hall and sat on a chair in the waiting room.

She closed her eyes. The heavy heat was richly soporific. Lulled by the whooshing clack of the film projector’s noise, Margaret fell asleep.

When she awoke, the receptionist was still breathing behind the counter with an even, whistling rhythm. Margaret went down the hall a second time. Now the examination chamber was brilliant with light, and Margaret stepped through the door. The old woman’s skin glowed with sweat, and an album of black-and-white photographs lay in front of her on the desk. Over it, she held an enormous magnifying glass, and her ruddy, hot face hovered close to the book.

“Ah, Margaret Täubner,” the doctor said. She did not look up. “Be so kind and give me a moment, will you?”

Margaret tried to say something acquiescent, but only grunted softly, the words sticking in her throat. She pulled at her collar. The doctor moved the magnifying glass toward the top of the oversized page, her massive head moving with it, eyes just a few centimeters from the glass. After three or four slow minutes, she spoke.

“What can I do for you, my dear?”

Margaret breathed out. “Help me.”

“With what?” The doctor elongated her vowels.

Margaret was unprepared for the question. She thought for a moment. “Well,” she said slowly, “help me—get rid of the past.”

It seemed like the sort of large-scale request to which the doctor might be able to respond.

But the doctor only went back to her photographs. She turned a page, peering again through her thick bifocals and the large magnifying glass. The room was silent.

Margaret had imagined, on her way over, that the scene would play very differently. She had seen herself stepping forward and speaking in a loud voice of her ever-increasing terror. Now she found herself cramped by the true. The cue of the room revivified the memory of her last visit, and the doctor’s eccentricity rose up against her. How could she have forgotten her mistreatment at the hands of this woman? She began to feel the old anger. She watched the bulbous-headed doctor peering idiotically at the uniformly grey pictures, which, from Margaret’s vantage point, looked like little grey fractals: each one randomly, differently the same. Margaret gave two loud, suggestive sighs. The woman looked up again.

“What is the trouble?”

“I told you last time,” Margaret said. “My own past isn’t coming. I’m drawn to the past before I was born.”

“What do you see in it?”

Margaret wondered whether the woman had forgotten everything she had told her. Dr. Arabscheilis spoke much more slowly than she had last time, soberly and detached, and it crossed Margaret’s mind that the woman might be addicted to some kind of prescription medication.

“I’m unable to find a place in it,” Margaret said, still making an effort. “Don’t you remember what I told you?”

“You have no place in the past,” the doctor said slowly and without lifting her head.

“But I do.”

“You do?” asked the doctor rather absentmindedly. Her face was hovering, a dragonfly of attention, over the pictures.

“Yes, I do.” Margaret thought of the night she had knelt before the yellow stripe and worshiped the Family Strauss. She took a breath. “I can do all my living through other people,” Margaret began. She stopped. The room was quiet. Margaret felt as though she were hoisted up, floating on the heat.

“What does it mean to you, to live through others?” asked the doctor. Again, without any special interest.

“Well,” Margaret said. There was a way in which the woman’s cool, slow detachment might be read as encouragement. Detachment prevented the woman from talking very much. Maybe she would listen this time, Margaret thought. She had been longing for the doctor to listen.

Margaret began to formulate what she had been thinking about as she was trying to fall asleep the night before. “Once there were people who suffered horribly,” she said. “They suffered so much that all other kinds of suffering must be inside that single suffering.”

“What?” the doctor asked.

“Comprehensive suffering,” Margaret said.

“What are you speaking of, my child?”

“Don’t you think there must be such a thing?”

“I have no opinion,” said the doctor.

“But isn’t there something—about innocence?” Margaret asked. As this last word came out of her mouth, she felt ridiculous, buffoonish even.

But she pressed on. She was focused on the graves of the Family Strauss, with their waxy pillow of black ivy and rash of scarlet dots. Margaret looked at the floor, noticing in the corner the movement of falling dust.

“But sometimes,” Margaret went on, “I think no matter how much I search for them and think of them, their innocence can’t be transferred to me. They are quiet. And also I wonder, is innocence even a trait of goodness?” Margaret looked at the doctor, waiting for the woman’s face to move. But the room was silent.

Then the doctor spoke all at once, and when she did, her harsh voice was decisive and unyielding. Margaret jumped. Dr. Arabscheilis spoke loudly, almost making of her acerbic idea an incantation, and it became apparent she had never been absent from the conversation at all.

“Listen, comrade. I’ll tell you something. Death has an aesthetic appeal, but there is no aesthetic appeal to death on a mass scale. All stories in this world are premised on the idea of character as arbiter of destiny. But these people you like to think about, they were killed regardless of their personality. So now you switch it around, you make destiny capable of arbitrating character. You want to make the victims purer by ex post facto decree, by virtue of their deaths alone.” The doctor hummed a little tune to herself and looked away, her head was swaying. “But there is no link between these people and what happened to them,” she said. “No link at all.” She hummed again. “You have become sanctimonious in your obsession, comrade.”

Margaret was upset. “No, it’s not like that,” she said. “Let me tell you something.” She rubbed the flannel wool over her knees in haste. “The thing is—there’s something else.” She spoke louder, trying to pull together her courage. “It’s not just the victims. The killers, too. They shadow me. She—” Margaret corrected herself, “They have been shadowing me for a long time, only I didn’t want to mention it. They come at me—and they’re disgusting, they’re desiccated hawks. But sometimes they seem intriguing anyway—like—like intelligent, righteous souls.” Margaret still couldn’t bear to name the name. “They want to carry me away with them. I can feel it. They want to carry me away with them, dress me in their clothes.” She scowled, her face, she could feel, was bright, and her eyes were swelling. “If I don’t do something, they’re going to come for me,” Margaret said, beginning to cough. The heat was rising in her face; the room had begun to twirl, and she grabbed onto her chair to keep from falling over.

The doctor was silent. She stared at Margaret. It was as though she thought the longer she trained her blind eyes on her, the better she would see her.

Margaret knew her own head was not right; she knew that today she was going to behave in ways suspect and irrational, but her fear was too strong now; she held on to the chair, racked by vertigo. She whispered—she did not want the nurse outside to hear—“I think I’m attracted to them.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, overloudly. “To whom? Of whom are we speaking?”

Margaret kept her head down, talking past the doctor, her cheeks hot. Even as her vertigo grew, her only hope was to reveal herself. She must reveal the workings of her mind even if it damned her straight to hell. “To the—to them. Sometimes when I read their memoirs and biographies, they seem normal, and often ingenious. I imagine them moved by an emotion like nobility.”

The doctor laughed.

Margaret startled.

“Comrade, we’d all like evil to be simple and obtuse, but it’s wieldy and intelligent.”

Margaret looked at the doctor for a moment, but she barely saw her. “There’s more,” she went on instead. “It’s almost as if I like them because they are killers. I read about them instead of the victims because it seems less painful. Just for having been killers I am hungry for them, and feel soothed by them. For that reason alone, I’m willing to follow them down any path they devise.”

The doctor remained silent, her blank eyes fixed now on a spot on the upper wall as if she were waiting for something.

Margaret’s voice became louder, ringing in the wide room. She was leaning forward over the doctor’s wide desk, supporting herself on her fists. “But I’m lying.” Her brow pulled together. “I think it’s something worse.” Her eyes were narrow. “I notice—” she stuttered. “I notice similarities. Similarities between myself and them. I think—they might be my own kind.”

The doctor laughed hoarsely. “Come, come,” she said. “Is this not a sort of hypochondria?”

Margaret’s face was puckered. She paused for a long moment, gathering herself together, and the clock in the room ticked louder than before. She thought: Because I am as passive as their women, and as zealous as their men. Then she wiped her head where the sweat had begun to bead, and she thought, And I am as zealous as their women and as passive as their men.

Fearing the worst, she took the German copy of Mein Kampf out of her backpack. Yes, she had brought that with her. She loathed herself. She began to read to the doctor in a loud, deep voice that had a brassy quality. She was terribly upset.

“The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this feeling is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially.”

“Do you know what it means to me,” Margaret said, “to have to live with those words having been written by that man? What am I supposed to do with it? How am I to go on living? To have been diagnosed by him—he was right! This is what I am!” Margaret spoke quickly, it might even be said: hysterically.

“Comrade. Calm yourself. It sounds like the boilerplate of any armchair political strategist. There’s nothing shocking in that. Surely you can find something more hard-hitting in that book of yours.”

“It’s not boilerplate to me!” Margaret shouted. And then she muttered more quietly: “And even if that’s true, wouldn’t it be significant if we discovered his strategies were just like everyone else’s?”

“Comrade.” The doctor knocked her knuckles on the desk impatiently. “There is something you’re hiding from me,” she spoke in no more than a whisper, “hiding from me very mean-spiritedly, as is your wont. You demonstrate a marked tendency to aggravate your illness. But we’ll leave that for the moment. I see clearly, now, why you lost your memory.”

Margaret glanced up at her.

The doctor went on: “It is because you have no system of ethics.”

“I’m not sure I follow.” Margaret’s vertigo redoubled.

“You, my pet, are having an identity crisis that has become moral despair. It is impossible for the human animal to remember his or her own life without cleaving a line, a line of some kind, however capriciously zigzag, lazy, narcissistic, arrogant or, on the other hand, self-blaming and unforgiving, between right and wrong, credit and blame. Why? Because this is what makes it possible to distinguish between nostalgia and regret. The border between the two is of pivotal importance in the formation of continuous memory. Eventually, all of us will stop thinking back, if we don’t know with what attitude of the soul to do so.”

The doctor sat back in her chair and paused, and when she spoke again it was in a louder voice. “There are pure paths that will lead you away from your troubles if you have the—the talent to find them. You must handle the historical idea, and also your own memory of life, like a delicate pancake you are trying not to rip.”

Margaret looked at the doctor.

“I’ll tell you a story,” the doctor said, “and then I’m afraid you must go.” The old woman with her giant head sank further into the chair. She appeared to be interested in other things this night.

“All right,” said Margaret glumly.