The History of History

THIRTY-THREE • The U7


On the U7 line to Rudow, the trains are nearly empty. The unemployed, the weary, the angry, and the immigrants sit only sparsely. It was here, three days later on this subway line to nowhere, that Margaret rode, bound for the home of the aging Herr Prell.

The minutes on the train dragged like years. Hermannplatz went by, a yellow station. A woman got off the train with difficulty, using a walker. Margaret looked on, from under the brim of her slouch hat. She had pulled it very low over her eyes.

Why did no one help the woman? Margaret did not rise to help her either. She didn’t want to call attention to herself. She was reckless, careless, vengeful, but she knew she must remain inconspicuous.

Since the visit to the doctor, Margaret had become an accordion of ill humor, unfolding, wheezing with heavy, distempered sounds. Now, as the woman stumbled her way out of the train on her own, Margaret wondered darkly whether she would not be reborn after the death of Prell. It seemed doubtful, but then, she had nothing to lose.

Rathaus Neukölln came and went, the ceilings hung low and royal blue. The seconds dragged.

Karl-Marx-Strasse station drew close. The train halted and a man made ready to get off. Before he did, he emptied his pockets—they were full of shreds of paper—and the white and yellow bits fluttered to the floor. How could he throw his trash on the ground so flagrantly? If only she were a man, Margaret thought, she might challenge him physically. For a moment, she riffled through all the ideas of who she might be, if only she were someone else.

Neukölln station followed in its bright yellow tiles. It occurred to Margaret that there was no rebirth, no changing of character, only momentary evasions—and that was never enough.

Grenzallee trickled by. It was painted a stale green color like algae, and Margaret thought she could smell the algae. She was desperate, her head was hot, she could not go on as she had been going. As for the doctor: she wanted never again to think of her.

And then came Blaschkoallee, and it was horrible, the worst of all. On the wall was the graffiti: “The woman maintains the house and the mood of her man.” The station itself was grey, the lights painful to the eyes.


Margaret was in a mood of rage, then, by the time she arrived. She was worked into a lather. She rang the bell at Prell’s house. When he came to the door, he did not recognize her, but Margaret said she had come for a follow-up interview, and he smiled sheepishly, proudly. He let her in.

His house was stuffier than it had been before. It smelled powerfully of old age. On the wall in the hallway was a wooden crucifix. Right away, already then, in that very first twenty seconds, Margaret thought of her grandfather, who had made films, who had taken pride in the film of a boy’s death. When he came to stay with them in New York, he slept through the daytime. Her mother fixed up the back bedroom for him, and he, in the wide guest bed, kept the venetian blinds almost opaque, the sounds of ambulance sirens circling up to the twelfth floor. On the wall across from the bed, he hung an oak crucifix like Prell’s, with a Christ figure carved out of the same dark wood as the cross, spine bucking away from the vertical.

And the old man, he slept under an image of unbelievable suffering, breathing regularly.

Margaret had been small, skulking about. She had found his pictures of naked ladies in a metal box he kept in the closet. She found his reels of black celluloid tape.

Now Margaret looked at Prell’s crucifix.

The icon of the man collapses him into the instrument used for his torture, the means of his death becomes the symbol of his life; the sacrifice is snapped into the flesh. And then Margaret thought, in a wave of hopelessness, that crime was more powerful than tenderness, that death was more memorable than life. She felt a rage rising. She thought of this man who stood next to her now, as he had once stood goat-like outside a room while children were killed.


Prell invited her into the living room. She sat down by a little side table that was dressed in a white linen cloth. He bustled into the kitchen, came back to her, and stooped to serve tea from a pot.

But Margaret caught him by surprise. She raised her arms and took the old man’s face in her hands, her fingers becoming spider’s legs, squeezing vise-like. The loose skin on either side of his face doubled.

“How could you?” Margaret gasped at him, losing control of her voice.

Prell’s giant, horse-like body lurched back; his neck extended and Margaret, holding on to him, was jerked forward. She reared up from her chair. Prell tried to prevent the tray in his arms from falling, and this confounded his self-defense.

But soon the tray smashed to the ground. He fumbled and caught the cream pitcher, but the teapot broke on the ground and the hot water splashed over Margaret’s feet, scalding her ankles. It must have scalded Prell as well, for he cried out in pain and pulled away from Margaret’s iron grip forcefully. With one heavy arm, he swiped at her shoulder.

But Margaret held his face ever more tightly on either side with her thumbs and forefingers, and her ears rang. She pushed hard into his jowls and temples. Her fury surged to a peak, and for some reason, Prell finally went limp under her hands.

“How could you?” Margaret let out again.

“How could I what?” Prell breathed hard.

A sound came out of Margaret’s mouth. And then another. “How could you have lost faith?” she stammered at last.

“Let me go,” he said.

But she held his face longer, and the power was in her and had gone out of him, as a rabbit freezes at the end of its life. He was doubled over, cradling his cream pitcher.

But then at last he turned his face up, and Margaret looked into his eyes, eyes that darted and flicked about, the navy-blue orbs revolving, and she felt a ripping in her chest. She saw, buried far beneath the reflective sheen of his pupils, in the embers of the rods and cones there, the eyes of the infant she had lost.

The moment collapsed. Prell let go of the pitcher and punched at her stomach with his fist, and although he did not hit hard, her stomach made as though to burst in pain.

She released him. He lumbered heavily upstairs to the toilet, roaring threats of litigation. Margaret felt she was burning into black strips; she did not know what she had done, where to put her shame. She had read—it was Jung who had written—that the more evil is contemplated, the more it enters you, and she wondered under what circumstances she could ever learn how to live, she who had betrayed, or had been betrayed by, every hope and every idea and every icon of redemption, she whose very understanding of these things was in rubble.