The History of History

THIRTY-FOUR • Reconciliation with Vitaly


The morning that followed was very still. Margaret gave a tour. All the while, she quivered. She reached and touched the hands of the customers who came along, and they felt the beseeching tremor in her fingers. They looked Margaret in the face and saw the enormous question there. She was reading their features with her eyebrows peaked like gables, as if she wanted to know the hour and minute they were born. When she had a moment to herself, she tried to soothe her uncertain heart. She thought: I did not kill him yesterday, and I will not kill him today.


In the afternoon, she went to the university.

I will not kill him, she told herself. Not now, and not tomorrow. In a heat of feeling, she spoke with devil-may-care directness to Vitaly Velminski, protégé of Meitler. She managed to convince the smooth and pretty young man, with whom she was not even acquainted, to take a coffee with her in the cafeteria, under the wide modern skylights, under the reaching, new-green trees.

They spoke of humanism. They spoke of capitalism. These were the wires that were fashionably live at the time.

At some point it was a question of whether a free-market society is more attracted to sacrificial lambs than a socialist one. Margaret’s idea, which she outlined to Vitaly chokingly, with embarrassed excitement, was this: Older societies, she said, are still religious and altruism is ritualized, and socialist societies redistribute the burden of excess riches through taxation! But other societies, neither religious nor socialist, have hardly any idea what to do with the sleeping guilt that laces the fringes of wealth-amassing hearts, and so the more a little child, a perfect lamb, will be needed for the nailing, for the rendering up to the pedophiles—for the various slaughters, and the people will vaunt their communal obsession with the sacrifices, and find absolution there.

Vitaly, his usual cool and unflappable self, inclined his head in response. He mentioned many interesting names, thinkers who had combed the beach of such a theme for all its many shells.

Margaret spoke hotly, her eyes ablaze, looking often into Vitaly’s seagreen gaze. After several hours had passed—more coffee fetched, professors evaluated, eviscerated, and even a long period spent in heavy-breathed silence—Vitaly, in his tweed suit, his penny-green oxford shirt, misinterpreted Margaret’s intensity. He opened the palm of his hand. He touched the side of her face.

Margaret flinched sharply.


There might have been a time, very long ago, when, at such a touch, Margaret would have dropped her eyes so that her long lashes spread fanlike over her upper facial bones. She would have made herself into a picture.

There might have been a time more recently, when her flinch, so disengaged, would have extended into a reflexive uppercut to his jaw.

Today, however, she only put out two quavering fingers and slid them under his reliable chin. She turned his face some sixty degrees to the side. She did not know exactly what she was after. She thirsted to see his face from a previously unseen angle, in a previously unseen light, according to a previously unconsidered code of ethics. It was hers, the power of description. She would do the telling.

She looked a long time, and Vitaly laughed a little at first, but then regarded her and went still. Margaret breathed in and out.

Soon after, she stood up and left the cafeteria.


When Margaret was gone, Vitaly sat for a little while longer on his own. A radicalized person, he thought she was. There was a woman, he told himself, who had gone through some kind of education.


Under the fir trees outside the Rostlaube, on the pebbled path between the cafeteria and the U-Bahn station, Margaret came upon a woman with a narrow white scarf pushing a pram.

In the pram, a large, fat, sleeping baby lay on its back with its face to the side. The baby had gone sheet-white, as some children go white during sleep. Its translucent eyebrows were raised, pockmark of a mouth closed. Because it was inert, it seemed to Margaret both less living and also younger than it likely was, for even more than size, it is animation that betrays age.

It was terrible for Margaret to see. For a moment there was a knife turning in her heart, like the pitting of a cherry.

However, as Margaret drew abreast of mother and child, light rain began to fall. Margaret was later amazed at the serendipity of it, for if it had not rained at just that instant, she might have missed the essential gesture. The woman in the white scarf leaned over the pram and drew the flannel of the infant’s blanket over its face, so the rain would not wake it.

In that movement, the fabric’s edge drew a line across the small white face, and Margaret felt the world spin, and a sensation of radiance.


When she had first begun to remember, when she first knew that her old life was beginning to return, she began to think in vague and later less vague terms that she could not bear it. She could not forgive herself, and if she also would not be allowed to drench herself in forgetting, then she could not go on, and a wild and decisive kind of self-annihilation was the only choice.

But today she developed a thought—it had the following heart to it, although it was wordless: Even if you cannot forgive yourself, and by some poor luck you cannot forgive anyone else either, and there is no vengeance to be had in this baneful world that is slowly suffocating on its own past, there might still be a paradox of goodness.

In the movement of the woman’s hand, the line of flannel rising, Margaret’s head revolved, and it was an ugly thing that the gesture brought her to remember, but still, the radiance of the coming completeness stole her breath away.