The History of History

TWENTY-EIGHT • Dreams During Illness


Listen, Margaret, listen. When it first started I began to say to Franz, lying beside him at night, “We’re pressed so! If we were made of carbon, we’d already be squeezed into diamonds”—making light of it, you see. And he would kiss my hand, call me “my diamond.” Now that it’s all over, here we are, it’s come to pass: We’ve flown up. We’ve come and gone. We’re diamonds of the night sky.

I came from Posen. I came from Posen to the big city. I came to my husband, we were married, we had a child, and when the government changed, I took refuge in a new church, the church that would save me but did not.

Where to start the story of how things went wrong? It began much earlier, but I’ll start in the summer of 1939, as that is when, for me at least, our death began seeping in.

Nineteen thirty-nine we got a canary for Rahel’s birthday. She was turning seven years old, old enough to care for the bird herself, we thought, a precocious little girl. Gerda had been born that winter, I was often tired, the baby didn’t sleep through the night. Rahel could use a little amusement at home. Many of her friends had left Germany already. She was at the school with the gentiles, but they knew she was of mixed birth, and did not play with her. She was a lonely, quiet child. Our apartment was often as silent as if we had never had any children.

We went to a place. You could buy birds there, on the corner of Fuggerstrasse and Motzstrasse, in a fine, stylish apartment house. The bird seller lived all the way at the top, under the roof, in a sort of garret with a winter garden built out of glass. Being on the corner and up under the roof, the place was struck with sunlight, and it was dreadfully hot, with large, blazing windows. It smelled wretched. A Jewish man by the name of Apfelbein who had been run out of business by the Nazis was trying to make a living in secret; he was thin. Officially he merely had a lot of birds that he cared for, and sometimes he gave them to his friends who wanted them as pets. If we made him a gift of some money in return, then no one had to be the wiser. In the old days before ’38 he had had a large pet shop on the Kurfürstendamm that even sold fancy-breed ponies in the courtyard behind.

We asked for Herr Apfelbein’s advice, but he did not speak to us in reply, he spoke to Rahel directly, told her about birds in a way she could understand. Rahel was a shy child. There weren’t many who could draw her into conversation, but he seemed to have a way with children, and soon she was speaking freely with him. He pointed out several birds in the row of cages, and she became excited. She was already quite overstimulated—it being her birthday. She liked two of the canaries. You could see why she chose them. They stood out—one was a vibrant yellow and the other a bright white. In the spirit of the occasion, her father and I told her she could choose whichever one she liked. She went back and forth between the two, talking to each bird in a soft, singsong voice, asking, “Would you like to come home with me, little bird?” She even went so far as to name them both—the white Sarto and the yellow Ferdinand. But she made no move to choose. After half an hour, we felt embarrassed—Gerda was starting to cry in my arms—and Herr Apfelbein began to look at us with interest to see what we would do.

We thought maybe, since the birds were not expensive (Herr Apfelbein was ready to give them to us for almost any price), we would buy both. Franz was still working at the time. Rahel smiled at the idea and looked at us triumphantly. I remember she had most of her milk teeth still, being a little behind for her age. But Herr Apfelbein shook his head.

“Don’t get two birds, young lady,” he said, addressing Rahel, “unless you have a lot of space for two cages. If you have both in one cage, one of the birds will die. Not right away, but after one year, maybe two years—one of them will die.”

We looked down at Rahel, who showed no reaction to this news. She stuck her finger through the bars at the white bird and cooed at it softly.

All of a sudden, with the strict, schoolmarmish air I knew meant she was happy, Rahel spoke. “Which one?”

“You mean which one dies?” he asked her.

Rahel caught her breath and looked at me, all at once panicked by shyness.

But the shopkeeper went on good-naturedly. “That’s a funny thing. You’d think it would be the smaller one that would die, wouldn’t you? But it’s not always the smaller one. Sometimes it’s the healthier, larger bird that dies, the one with the most beautiful song, and the funny-looking runt with the short legs that lives. It’s a simple thing only: the dominant bird lives.”

“The dominant bird lives,” Rahel repeated, breathing in and out. She was quiet for a while, and then just as suddenly as before, she spoke up. “How do you know which it is?”—this still shrilly, as if she were testing a pupil.

“You don’t know,” Herr Apfelbein replied. “That’s the thing. There’s not a dominant bird or any other kind of bird at the beginning. But then, when the moment is ripe, there’s a fight. And whichever bird wins the fight—he’s the one who becomes the dominant bird.”

Rahel paused, thinking about this painstakingly, I could see. In the end she asked, “And what about the second fight?”

“That’s precisely it: there’s never a second fight.”

“Why not?” the child asked.

“The bird who loses at the beginning thinks everything will be better for him if he lies low. Better he gets used to things how they are. Then he won’t involve himself in any more nasty situations, lose an eye, or tear a wing. In fact, the second bird knows that the dominant bird doesn’t really have a better life. They both can live well, you see. The new order is just an order like any other order. Each one has his place. An orderly birdland.”

“But if you say the second bird dies, I suppose he does get hurt,” said Rahel.

“Well, that’s true, young Fräulein, you have a point. But like I say, you’re not supposed to keep these birds in cages together. I’m referring to the ideal conditions in the wild that the birds were first used to; the conditions that taught them how to live.”

“But how will it die then? Will the other bird kill it?”

“No, no killings!” He raised his voice. “I’ll tell you. These birds are territorial. Do you know what that means? That means each bird needs his own living space.” Herr Apfelbein caught my eye.

“And he kills the other bird in his space!” Rahel said excitedly, with a certain gusto.

“No!” the man cried out, “I told you, no killings!”

“What then?”

“Well, it’s a slow process.” Herr Apfelbein became pensive. “The dominant bird feels like he has to oversee the other bird—not hurt him, you understand—just oversee him. Nudge him. Peck at him while he’s eating. The other bird can still eat, but probably not his fill. The dominant bird screeches at him, sings louder songs, and sings more songs, and sings more often. Not so bad really. But the other bird—he won’t be able to move about the way he wants, drink water when he wants. The strain on his nerves—that’s what will kill the other bird.”

“It’ll break his heart,” Rahel said sadly, quick to understand.

“That’s right, it’ll break his little bird heart.”

Rahel didn’t say anything more.

Franz, for his part, hadn’t been listening. He was carrying Gerda around the shop and was now at the end of his rope. And can I tell you? He insisted on buying both birds after all, thinking that Rahel would be pleased with him in the end, but also eager to get out of the bad-smelling shop. Herr Apfelbein caught my eye again. He shrugged.

As you may be able to guess, I was not insensitive to the allegory, and neither, I am certain, was Herr Apfelbein. I was even interested in having both birds, as a test. It stayed with me, in any case. It became a marker in my mind. There is nothing like fear to make one begin to see oneself mirrored in animal life.


The problem came with the woman upstairs, Frau Schivelbusch. She lived in the apartment on the top floor of the house, and back then we lived in the apartment beneath hers. She thought the canaries were too loud. And it was true, the canaries were unusually eager to sing, in competitive spirit with each other.

Frau Schivelbusch had been our friend for several years. Not the closest friend, but Frau Schivelbusch had an amiable face. Her eyes were wide-set and merry, her smile broad. She was a good woman. At first, the summer we got the canaries, everything was all right. She even let Rahel lead her to see the birds in the back bedroom shortly after we got them, while Rahel was still so excited. But then September came and the war began, and her son, Karl, who worked in the typewriter shop at Viktoria-Luise-Platz, signed up as a soldier right away. And while everything was going so well, Karl fell, in May of 1940 during the invasion of France. He got a posthumous Iron Cross, and she was proud; it was sent to her in a red velvet box, which she showed me, weeping. She added a lock of his hair to the box, that she had cut off while he slept when he was just a babe, and then she kept the whole thing open on the sideboard, in the dining room where she no longer entertained. The dead son had been her only child, and his father was a fallen hero of the Great War, so Frau Schivelbusch was left very much alone.

Even then it was still not so bad with the birds and Frau Schivelbusch. It really only got bad with the first air alarms, when we started having to go into the cellar together. Frau Schivelbusch had taken in a war orphan by then, a young boy of twelve. His parents had given him the Nordic name of Björn. Frau Schivelbusch must have felt pity for the child because his mother had been killed in the early bombings, before there were really any significant fatalities. So they had this in common—both their losses were early losses, out of synch with the nation, which was just then on the cusp of glory. Squeezed by the public’s happy delirium, they both had no choice but to shut up—I saw that distinctly, how their Nazi friends made them hide their tears.

But Frau Schivelbusch changed after she took in the boy. She became a model of what was then called “good citizenship.” I saw the lonely widow carefully sewing a giant Nazi flag as big as a bedsheet, actually partially made from a bedsheet. And Frau Schivelbusch left off talking with us, and she cupped her hand on the side of Björn’s eyes as she and he walked past us in the stairwell, like blinders around the eyes of a horse. And so what could I do, I grabbed the girls’ hands and pulled them out of her path. But it was a betrayal; yes, it was a betrayal.


A year passed. The birds, Sarto and Ferdinand, sang uninterrupted, in a fight to the death. In July of 1941 I discovered I was to give birth again, and I was not glad. But what could I do? Franz was so unhappy in those days, and suddenly he was happy about my pregnancy, naïve, still convinced no one could harbor ill will toward an expectant mother. And Franz also, I think, still hoped we would be granted a son. Of course, Frau Schivelbusch did not congratulate me—by the time my condition was obvious, the ordinance against friendly relations with Jews had already passed, and she, with her eagle eye, made sure that the other women in the building followed it to the letter. That winter, Franz was not allowed to perform concerts or give lessons at the conservatory any longer, and his brother, sister, and father cut off contact with him, thinking that in this way they would encourage us to divorce, not destroy his promising career. Only his mother still spoke to us, and then by post. At this time, Franz was becoming sicker with the melancholia that had plagued him since 1935.

At around the same time, I saw that the white bird, Sarto, was flourishing, while the yellow bird, Ferdinand, was losing his gloss, looking smudged, the feathers of his breast spiky as if wet. By this time the shop at the top of the apartment house on the Motzstrasse had closed, and in any case Herr Apfelbein had disappeared.

So now I often said a prayer for the bird Ferdinand at the same time I was praying for my family.

When I was already quite large with the baby in January, the Nazis made an ordinance that Jews had to give up all clothing made of wool or fur—it was all the warm clothing I had. Franz and I discussed it and we decided that since I did not have to wear the yellow star, being privileged through my marriage, I should simply ignore this ordinance. That was really the best thing—just pretend as if I hadn’t heard about the rule.

But Frau Schivelbusch began to eye me, and I could see she was estimating my fur coat. It wasn’t long before she had given the tip to the Gestapo—I knew it was her by her eyes. They came banging on the door. Franz went to answer with Gerda in his arms. My little girl was two years old then.

When they left, they had my fur coat and all the wool sweaters with them. The sweaters I had knitted myself.

I became sick with influenza the next month, most surely because I was always so cold, rubbing my red hands together. My ears when I came home from work every night were pink like the flower they call the bleeding heart, as Franz said, always his way to see the beauty in things. Perhaps that was what caused his terrible melancholia.

During my illness I had a very high fever, my lungs were so full of fluid I couldn’t sleep, and my cough was painful like a blunt knife scraping my lungs.

In my sickbed I became more and more deeply removed from myself. My head was spinning, my soul was floating. After the days without sleep, I was somewhere far away. Thinking back on that time, I have memories, very vivid memories. For days on end, I left my body and went to some place of hallucination.

In my sickened state, my thoughts about my belly, now round with eight months of child, completely changed. I dreamt this roundness was a unit of earth burying me under the ground—the weight of it. As I lay sweating and feverish on my back, I dreamt I was already buried. Or, more precisely I should say: I dreamt my body was already buried. My soul, for its part, flew straight off. As it happened, straight into the Alps of Switzerland.

As a girl, my father used to take me with him when he went on business to Paris, and afterward we would travel to Switzerland to see an old friend of his, a certain Oswald in Basel. My father was a hobby botanist. He used to say that you didn’t know what it was to love a plant or flower until you had loved it in the pure sunlight and sweet clover scent of a mountainside in Switzerland, where the colors are brighter, and life a more virtuous adventure. Myself, I don’t remember the scent of clover so well as I remember the mountain reek of cow dung, fresh milk, and the cheese of Gruyère, but these memories of smells are happy ones.

So in these days of sickness in February of 1942 I remember my soul floating into the Alps and coming to rest next to a waterfall on the mountainside, in heavy sunlight. I was weightless, carefree, as if all things in the dark world were very far away. I sat by the water, the sun warmed me just enough, and the rushing water exhaled a cool windiness that refreshed me, also just enough. The grass blazed green, the sky blazed blue, and the mountaintops stretched off and off into the far azure. I released my feet from my pinching winter shoes as if I had been bound in the leather for a hundred years, and my toes spread at last. I dangled my feet in the water, as I had as a girl. I breathed deeply, filled with the soaking joy that only a dream can bring.

After a while, on the bough of a fir tree standing just a few paces away from me, a canary of a bright yellow color alighted, like a dab of ochre paint.

“Ferdinand,” I said in surprise.

The bird cocked his head

“Ah, Ferdinand,” I said, my mood drawn down by this reminder of home.

The bird fluttered to the ground, and hopped onto one of the stones not far from me. He cocked his head at such a jaunty angle, and then he spoke to me.

“What is it you’re doing here?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you mean, birdie.”

“You die, lady. You leave your children who are living.”

I was very surprised at this suggestion that I was dead or dying. Up until that moment I had not really thought of it in those terms—I don’t know how to explain. It was true I had a strong sense that my body had been buried. And yet, I did not think of myself as dead. So I went over this news of my death. I tried to examine my emotions. I found to my surprise that I felt no unhappiness, only relief. And I knew I should feel both more and less than relief, and yet I couldn’t seem to gather the necessary passion.

And so I had a moment of revelation. I was extremely pleased at the discovery of the worst not having brought me any unhappiness or pain.

Realizing I was happy, I turned to Ferdinand and said, “You know, I don’t mind to die.”

“But you leave your children who are living,” the bird said.

It struck me that Ferdinand seemed to be suggesting I had some choice in the matter. Gracious me! I thought, if I’m dead, then the influenza has taken me. What can I do?

But then it occurred to me that perhaps I was not fully dead, and there was still some element of choice after all. Now this struck me with its heavy light. In the mountain sun, I was silent for a long time.

The odd part was that although I felt tender and loving—not cold at all—I still felt very removed from the idea that my life need last forever, even that my life need be, ideas that before I had always gripped with fervor. Instead I thought: Life is not enough. Life is not enough on its own. One must also have a goodness, a place, a time, a happiness. Really, not having these, it is not so bad to die.

And so I said to the bird, “To die is not such a bad thing.”

“But lady,” repeated the bird stubbornly, “you will leave everyone behind.”

With this third reminder, the bird’s words struck my heart. A heavy pain fell over me; I didn’t know if I would ever see my Rahel again, or my Gerda again, and a sudden ache in my breasts came for the baby I would never know. And how would the children get along without me? So I was split in two. On the one hand, I thought: I would like to be finished now with living. On the other: If only there were a way to bring the children with me.

And that is just what I said to Ferdinand.

He replied, “Go then, go and bring them all. Take them away, up into the mountains. Together, forget Schöneberg.”

I considered his suggestion, quite taken aback. “All come together?”

“Yes.”

“Won’t they condemn me?”

“No one will condemn you.”

I went over this. My mind quickly sketched out the edges of a plan. But still something held me back.

“I would do it,” I said, “but I’m afraid I would never be able to recognize the moment. What if we died too early, and I stole from my children days of life, or too late, and I took from them the possibility of a soft death? I would never forgive myself.”

To this the bird replied, “Just as every day is a good day to be born, so too, every day is a good day to die.”


And then it was as if the reel caught on fire. The scene vanished in a half second of hot whooshing. I opened my eyes, my fever broken and my hair slick with sweat. The sounds of Sarto’s twitters and songs seeped into my sick chamber from the adjoining room. Heavy curtains were drawn across the doorway. A dark light filtered through the blackout shades, meant for times of air raid, which Franz must have drawn so I could sleep. I didn’t remember. But my headache was gone. The air in the room was close and motionless, smelling of dust and sour sweat.

I told myself then: Regina, you will get back into the habit of living, in order to cultivate, with cheer and strength, the habit of death.


After my recovery from the illness, the dream I had of the Alps and the bird faded from my mind. I lost this idea that I would take my own life, bringing the children with me. I regarded the notion as a passing madness, an excess of illness’s despair, and it never crossed my mind that I would go through with such a plan. However, there was a change in me. Having once been introduced to the idea that it would not be so terrible to die, I was never again intimidated by the fear of death in quite the same way. I was like the tame bear who has discovered he is stronger than his master.

As I neared the end of my pregnancy, I reached a point of near perfect inner stillness. At night I read to Rahel and Gerda until they fell asleep. I looked out the window for long, empty minutes; I took aimless walks. I remember that I began to recognize patterns with greater alacrity than I had ever been able to before. Once we had rain followed by a cold snap. Afterward the trees were encased in sleeves of ice, so that the skeleton of wood glowed with an inner fire.

I saw Jewish friends and acquaintances infrequently now. Most were spending all day in faraway factories where they had been called to do forced labor. They rose before the sun and came home exhausted long after dark. I was released from this by my condition, but Franz expected a call from the Gestapo any day. He had managed to convince them, so far, that he was too ill and had too many influential friends, but this sham could only deceive so long. During the day he sat by the living room window.

I continued my work as a maid at the Tombanzens’. I should have worried over what would happen when I finally had to give birth and could no longer work there. But instead I told my baby, “Stay down below just as long as you can, little submarine of mine,” and I think I remember believing that if I communicated passionately enough, the baby might shrink back down in size, stay in hiding, in my body, forever. These sorts of thoughts also released me from the impatience that usually accompanies the end of pregnancy.


Strangely enough, through all this, Ferdinand the bird stayed alive. It was as Herr Apfelbein had said it would be, at least in part: the bird did not thrive and he ceased to sing. But perhaps thanks to Rahel, who took such care of the birds, little Ferdinand clung to life.

At night I read to the children stories of the mountains, of the oceans, of faraway cities. After little Gerda fell asleep, I told Rahel about the cafés and boulevards of Paris, about what I could remember of the silks the ladies wore there. My girls had never been to the sea, never been to the mountains. They had never been anywhere but the sandy plains of Berlin. I read to them about Wally of the Vultures in the Alps of Tyrol, and about Heidi of the Swiss Alps, and Winnetou on the American plains. I reminded Rahel of the time before the war she hardly remembered. I always fell asleep instantly as soon as Rahel’s eyes closed, so exhausted I was. But never did I consider letting go of these nightly readings, as they held my dreams gentle. Often Franz would come and sit in the chair by the bed where Rahel and Gerda and I lay together, facing away from us and looking out the window, but inclining his head to hear the story, and sometimes turning his face to meet my eyes. We exchanged a look of pride when Rahel asked one of her questions at once naïve and wonderfully precocious.

I got a letter from my sister, then still living in Schwedenhöhe, saying that she was to be resettled with her family further to the East. Then came no more letters.

One night at Eastertime I slept poorly and woke up to the air-raid siren. Again we would have to go down to the cellar. I noticed that the bedclothes around me were wet, and it wasn’t long before I realized I was in labor.

Our midwife from my last births was gone from Germany—she left already in 1939. Franz telephoned Dr. Epstein, but there was no answer—of course in the middle of an air-raid there was no answer; Franz rang up his sister, who hadn’t spoken to us in so long, again no answer. We went down into the cellar with the neighbors and for a while I tried to disguise my contractions, shutting my eyes. But it wasn’t long before it was impossible for me to hide my pain, and the contractions were closer together. Franz’s face became whiter and whiter.

We waited together for half an hour, and then another half hour. My contractions continued. But a little later I began to realize that the all-clear would not come before the baby. So I sent Franz upstairs again, to again try Dr. Epstein, but the switchboard operator told him something ghastly: the doctor was deceased. Franz called over to Sveta Grigorieva. She said: Didn’t you hear? Epstein took his own life with veronal.

Well, the gas in our building had been turned off, but unbeknownst to anyone, Franz went into the front cellar and turned it on again. Then he boiled my sewing scissors, and boiled more water and brought it back down in a washbasin with the scissors. He got newspaper for the floor. His face was so white. During my previous deliveries he had always waited in the parlor. Now he held my hand. I began to scream. The intensity of the pain was more than it had been during my other labors and I felt sure there was some sort of terrible complication. Still no one in the room moved. The neighbors were silent, their faces, as Franz told me later, white as snow. Frau Schivelbusch held Björn’s head against her chest, although the boy kept twisting backward to see.

Ah, and Franz, poor Franz. Always one never to set foot in a grocer’s shop for it was a woman’s place and not a man’s, who stayed clear of the kitchen, was uncomfortable with the sick—such a man was he. And now here he was, with his sleeves rolled up before the cold eyes of his neighbors, forced to deliver our child like a midwife, his heart beating, his eyes full of fear. I was so proud of him. I don’t remember much of this, but after a time, in a fog of pain and sweat, I began to push the baby. What I do remember is that I was, in those last moments before her birth, happy at last to think that I would see this child. For months I had been willing her to stay inside me forever. She came out, and I cried. Franz washed the baby at my direction on the floor of the cellar, and then he put her to my breast. The child was yellow with jaundice, her skull cone-shaped from the squeezing. I put her face to my face and kissed her, and when the afterbirth came out, we improvised the cutting of the cord, neither of us knowing if we were right. We felt terribly uncertain. I thought my child would die.

In the next weeks, however, the baby thrived against all expectations. And although I never would have expected it, I too survived the birth. We named the baby Beate, a Catholic name, not wanting her to suffer as Rahel had.

To my relief Franz got a letter from the labor department soon after, and started having to go to Fromm in Köpenick. There was a factory there. It took him so long to travel, and he was not paid, we got only the ration cards. But now I felt at least some assurance that he would not be on one of the lists. He spent all day in a room with two massive ovens and a terrible heat, and from morning to night he had to shove a two-ton metal frame in and out of the oven, ruining his fine violinist’s hands. Despite my protests, he shared his meat, fruit, and vegetable rations with me, as I only got Jewish rations, which did not include these things. The result was that he became increasingly thin. But otherwise, he said, how was I to nurse our child? I think it was now becoming clear to Franz that he and I would not survive the war. But he always thought our children would.

Shortly after little Beate’s birth, the Nazis passed an ordinance that Jews could not have household pets, and this included dogs, cats, and canary birds. I was so tired now, I think it was because of that—I “forgot” this ordinance. Ferdinand and Sarto continued to sit in their cage in the living room, cared for with loving constancy by Rahel, who was growing up so quickly.

But Sarto was nothing if not a powerful singer, audible in those early spring months with a trill that blew like dark smoke out our windows. It wasn’t long before I found a note under our front door from Frau Schivelbusch, saying in pinched phrases that it would be better for us if we were to “cease and desist to harbor beasts and fowl reserved for Aryans,” as if we were keeping a zoo! I did not think I could stand another visit from the Gestapo, but I should not have busied my head. The Gestapo came anyway.

Let us simply say: they came and after they left both canaries were gone, the robust Sarto and the ailing Ferdinand. Rahel cried and cried.


What happened in the next days is interesting to me still. For a while an unaccustomed silence reigned. But! Then I began to hear birdsong again. And not only the song of Sarto, but also the song of Ferdinand.

I did not speak of this to anyone.

As I washed our ever-regenerating piles of dirty linen, I could hear it—I was still bleeding since the birth, the baby’s diapers, little Gerda’s wet nights—I listened to the singing birds. Sometimes it is so clear one is going crazy. I remember hearing the bird twitter when Franz told me of the first large deportations. I heard the birdsong while I listened to Rahel recite her square roots and European capitals. I heard the birdsong and I thought of my home in Posen, now burnt down in war. I heard the birdsong and thought about what could and could not be. With the sleeplessness of the baby and the ever-returning air-raid siren, waking up, shaking Rahel awake, carrying Gerda and little Bibi, as I called my Beate, downstairs with our always-ready suitcases of diapers and toys and blankets, nights spent in the basement, and then the worry, always the worry. I hardly had any sleep, and it didn’t surprise me that I should be in a world outside worlds, a funny, dizzy, drunken place, a place in which birds carried off by the Gestapo return to sing inside the walls, and in the stairwell, in hidden places in the courtyard, and in the garden.


The birdsong was so fragile, so difficult to hear. One day as I was washing the dishes, Rahel said to me, “Mother, why is it I still hear Sarto and Ferdinand singing?”

I gave her the broadest smile—and looking down at her I wiped from my face soap bubbles that had floated up and stuck to my skin. I dropped to my knees and said, “My darling.” And then we both stopped and stood very still and listened, and sure enough, in a moment we both realized that we could hear it distinctly outside of our mind’s ear, with a sudden clarity of sensation.

And so, almost giddy with the feeling of not being crazy, I led Rahel down and out into the courtyard, and we stood at attention with our heads tilted up toward the house around us, which was in a U-shape, the two wings cradling the garden. Now it was clear enough that the sound was coming from our wing. And we both looked at each other and gave a sort of laugh because we thought the sound was coming from our own apartment. It was beautiful to see Rahel’s face change with the perception. She looked up to our open kitchen window and looked back at me with her eyebrows raised. It was beautiful because I could see in her face that the world affected her the same as it did me. Even if she was only a child.

It sounded like the bird was in our flat but we knew the bird was not in our flat. We went back up the stairwell of our wing. We stood near the doors of the apartments as we went further up into the house. Finally we had passed our own floor and had come to the top, and of course it was from behind the door of Frau Schivelbusch’s apartment that the sound of canaries trickled.

So Frau Schivelbusch had the canaries.

It was very difficult to calm Rahel once we realized what had happened. The little girl was beside herself. She wanted to go up to Frau Schivelbusch at once and kick in her door. I reasoned with her, explaining that we were unlucky to live in these times, that we had to do our best to hold on to our dignity, and didn’t she want to grow up to be a dignified lady? But even I was not convinced. I wondered if I was not destroying her.

As for me. There came a time when the choir I sang with at the cathedral protested my presence, even if I stood in the back, although my conversion to Catholicism was many years past. Father Loewe asked me to leave, and then, after that, I ask you, what more could I do to preserve my faith? What of my hope for the future?


There were some days during the months when I was planning our death when I didn’t suffer at all. That’s a funny thing: you domesticate fear. I only cried in anticipation of the worst, but somehow during the worst itself, I only thought about this or that part of now. It was through a series of very soft, gradual changes that I became accustomed to a new trajectory for my life and the lives of my children. When I was young I had thought I would live with a family, a community, someday likely have grandchildren. Now I did not have these ambitions any longer. Instead I thought, Perhaps tomorrow I’ll make a doll out of the red velvet of the sofa cushions for Gerda. We don’t need the sofa cushions anymore. And these small things rather than the large things kept me in the habit of moving forward. And on some lighthearted days I even thought that the ambitions could be halved forevermore without a change in my moment-to-moment happiness, like the mathematical paradox of a man crossing half a room, and then half the remaining length, and so forth, and thus never reaching the other end of the room. The idea of a changed period of time for my life, once it was established, filled me with neither fear nor intense loathing—fear is rooted in uncertainty, and unlike Franz, I had no uncertainty.

I don’t mean to say that’s the way I look back on my life now from up here. In the nightmares I sometimes have while sleeping in eternity, I know horror, disgust, and hatred over what was done to us—and these feelings are truer because they see the tragedy in its entirety. It is with these feelings, too, that you should remember us.

But I will still insist that often in my daily life at the end, every change in our circumstances took on that muted quality that gently colors the life of any sane person, for good or ill. No matter how misshapen or how terrible true life becomes, it is always calmer, less emotionally vibrant than in those vivid dreams that prepared me for our death.

As for why we killed ourselves the way we did: we thought better to die like the canary than to die like the hunted. Every day is a good day to be born, every day is a good day to die.

From those years, what I remember most is our picture book, Du Mein Tirol, with the photographs of the fresh alpine air, and the thickness of the grass on the mountainside. The sound of the waterfall, the smell of cow dung.


When Margaret woke, she was lying on the ground next to the goldfish pond at Salzburgerstrasse 8. The hair on her head was matted and wet.

She had been so deeply concentrated for so many hours, her body had gone lost. The fatigue, the limpness, that comes of such concentration broke over her. She sat up very slowly. Her face was ashen. She felt as though there was less oxygen in the air than there had been before, and her throat was full of lumps.

•

After she got home, she went around for a while as if nothing had happened. She was terribly hungry. She opened a can of kidney beans and another of peeled tomatoes and dropped them into a pot. The apartment around her smelled of old musty carpets; the smell reached her sharply. She chopped onions and fried them. She browned a fist of hamburger. She glanced under the toaster as she searched for the wooden spoon. She saw the crumbs there. She added the meat to the pot. Looking down into it, she felt a nausea.

She left the food simmering and went into the bedroom.

She searched through the titles on the bookshelf, Yes, there was a book called Du Mein Tirol in her own shelf. It was part of a series of travel picture books from the 1930s. She had bought them at the flea market for pennies. She fingered the yellowed, fraying pages.

What she had just heard in the Salzburgerstrasse, was it a communication from beyond the grave?

Or had she dreamt the whole thing herself?

She desperately wanted it to be a communication from beyond the grave.

She looked more closely at Du Mein Tirol. For the first time, she noticed that on the frontispiece of the book, the name “Karla” was written in a script both childish and old-fashioned. She looked through all the books in the series and saw that Karla had signed her name in each one. The signature was a little different in each book, and in different colors of ink, as though Karla had written each signature at a different time. The variation seemed to breathe life into the name: a rag on a clothesline animated by a breeze, the variation of the script whispered “Karla.”

Margaret put the books back into the shelf. She looked out the window. She sat down on the bed. She got up and thought through the story she had heard from the beginning to the end, from the canaries, to the birth, to the grass on the mountainside.

The window to her bedroom was open, and the white cotton curtains moved slowly, swaying to their own dirge. Something about the movement of the curtains made her think of her life with the hawk-woman, Magda Goebbels. A very slight shudder ran through her. Regina Strauss’s voice—how could she be sure of the sound of it? Had it really been her? She could not help but recognize the presence in that story of a book she owned. It made the entire thing suspicious. Perhaps it had all been her own madness. Now, in her mind, the sound of the woman’s voice was filled with a crackling, obstructing static. The static obstruction was Margaret’s life.

And there had been more than one such trace.

But Margaret wanted it to be a real communication from beyond the grave. The desire rose in her, very hard and very strong, steam-rolling her consciousness. She put her head on the desk and strained to remember one last detail of the story, the detail that could not possibly be invented, the detail that would be both the proof and the borrowed rib.

Instead, all at once and without warning, she began to cry. She cried and cried. Margaret cried because she could not remember any such detail. She cried because their lives had been stolen then and forever. She cried for what had happened in her own night’s yard, for the deprivation. She cried because their lives had been thrown away senselessly and they had no memory except this moribund memory she had lent to them herself.

She cried. She had water coming out her mouth and nose. The sobs began to rack her as though she were shaken by a foreign body—a three-hundred-pound angel come to beat her into submission. The effort of holding her body upright at the desk, her white fingers gripping the polished wood, took all her strength.

There was a vacancy like hunger in her chest—the desire to give herself to them by believing. Isn’t that all that’s left to give the dead? What a slight gift. But no, she thought, it’s not slight. (This was a wail, heartbroken rage.) Anybody on the street—if you ask: Would you like to be remembered after you die?—the answer will always be yes. Immortality is desired more than food and air. It is not so terrible to assume no one wants to die. The Strausses should be real, she thought, and they should have a mind wrapped uncritically around them in an embrace, a mind that doesn’t panic—so they won’t have to scrounge or connive in lust or anger—someone giving their lives the floating, crystalline perfection of angels riding on white horses above the waves of this worldly storm—someone to catch them in a net!, her heart screamed. I will catch them in a net, and even if the thing in the net is nothing but a cipher, the net will be real, and the net will be beautiful.

How she longed to hear the voice of Regina Strauss again, if only for a moment. This was her longing now. The voice was the meaning, the voice was the ghost.

Margaret recognized a ghost for what it was: a ghost is the resonance of a life. A ghost is the intense and prolonged sympathetic vibration for the dead in the world of the living. A ghost is something in which everyone can and must believe.


Margaret drank a glass of water. She breathed in and out. She looked at the blue glass in her hand. There were many tiny air bubbles caught in the glass. The water, too, was full of points of light. The movement of water from the blue glass to the muddy pink flesh of Margaret’s throat occurred to her as something significant and great, and in a wave of happiness, she ate some thick bread with pieces of carrot in it; she cut up a tomato and ate that too, and then she drank more water. Her head was clearing at the pace of a tide, at the pace of the sun moving across the sky.

She felt clean—the tears still wet on her face were made of the salt and water of her body, a body that was—finally—not entirely bad, a body that was full of concern and full of care.

I love them, she thought, and she realized right away that she had loved the Family Strauss for a long time. She had never allowed herself the identification, but she now saw that it didn’t matter whether she was worthy of it, it was still there—this love that made her eyes again fill with tears.

The stew had burned in the meantime; it didn’t matter. Margaret was full of joy, full of recognition. And tonight she went so far as to think that perhaps she did not deserve to die.