The History of History

THIRTY-SIX • Margaret


Margaret lay her head back. She could see.


In the early hours of an already darkening evening, she could see how a young woman had walked down the slope of a cobblestone street in Prenzlauer Berg.

The young woman was carrying a sleeping baby, the child that had emerged from her body in the most recent days. She carried it in a car seat they had given to her at the hospital—a donation for low-income single mothers. She was dressed in heavy clothing made for a man: an overcoat, a slouch hat, and wool trousers, although underneath, a pair of high-heeled boots. The autumn night was mild. Her long, fine hair was unbrushed and matted. Under her eyes, her transparent face was dark, and the child’s miniature face too had the papery lacing of acne some babies are born with. From both of them came an odor of sour milk, and from Margaret, sleeplessness. Nearing Number 60, from her vantage point on the other side of the street, she looked up at a set of two balconies belonging to the apartment on the fifth story, and she was crushed at the sight of unlit, lifeless windows. She crossed over and sat down on the stoop of the next house.

She would wait.

She glanced at the child in the carrier. She felt a blooming. There was a tug of pain on either side of her chest as her milk let down. The sensation was blocked out quickly by rebuke, however. She blinked, looked about, erased her mind, really a welcome alternative to despair, and closed her eyes. She tried not to fall asleep.

She sat for a half hour, until finally two boys emerged from Number 60, and she jumped up to catch the heavy door before it closed. She came into the stairwell. The thick oak banister was carved into a shining lion’s head at its curving base. The animal’s face was scowling and haughty. The stairs curved in an oval around a great shaft of light, lit from a multipaned skylight above. Margaret made her way up laboriously. She almost tripped on the red flaxen runner. Around and around she went.

She strained to keep the carrier from swinging into the railing although its burden was so light—so weak were her arms. On the landing of the top floor she stopped before the apartment on the left side and put the baby down next to the door. She knew when to expect them home, for she had long since been in the habit of tracking Asja’s comings and goings—anonymously calling her university office, in order that she—Margaret—might call Amadeus only when his wife was not at home. It was Thursday. Asja would come home at eight o’clock on the dot, less than an hour from now, and Amadeus, if he was not out drinking with his friends, must come home soon as well. She reached into her coat pocket and took out a letter in an envelope. It was labeled “Amadeus.” She tucked it next to the miniature body.

Dear Amadeus,

Perhaps you never loved me because I am twenty-five years your junior. Or perhaps it is because I come from the “superficial” new world and you have devoted your life to the archives of the old. You are a reverse Humbert Humbert, who cannot love his devoted Lolita, you neurotic, with your fear of airplanes, men, and tree branches—or why can’t you love the recipient of your craven choice of passion? (I can almost hear you insist: for a Lolita I am old, overeducated, that my skin is always white. Not the gold of the new world.) You insist that we cannot be together because of your attachment to your wife. But I ask you, if you were so attached to her, how could you visit me like you did, how could you dominate both my time and heart? I suspect you of misogyny or misanthropy or both.

I have never had any trouble loving you, you have always been easy for me to forgive. But there is one thing I cannot forgive. Why did you slam the door when I most needed you?

When you receive this letter, you will have our child in your arms, your arms which I know can be the most tender and compassionate in the world. And should you balk at your task, you won’t find me. I am leaving Berlin and won’t come back. I’ve found a job abroad. My plane leaves before you can find me.

I do not want him. He only came into this world as a bid for your love and he and I failed in that regard so dramatically that now he only reminds me of what a fool I have been. I would be ashamed to offer myself to him as a mother.

Sincerely,

Margaret

P.S. He doesn’t have a name.

P.P.S. Please don’t show him this letter when he’s older.



Margaret took a last look at the sleeping child. She put a drugstore-bought bottle and packages of formula beside him, and then made her way down the stairs.

She crossed the city, returning to Schöneberg, where she began to clean her apartment, a place of grime and filth. Of course she did not have a plane to catch, that part of the letter was a fabrication, but some weeks before she had already had her telephone number changed. She put a new last name on the letterbox. Schmidt.


She held out for two and a half days. On Sunday morning she hurried back to Number 60 Winsstrasse as soon as the subways opened at 4:30 a.m.; she had not slept the night. She had to go through an empty lot in the Marienburgerstrasse and climb over a fence (excruciatingly painful for her stitches) to get into the back courtyard of Number 60, but when she got up the stairs and reached the landing of the top floor, she found the baby was still in the car seat next to the door. The little infant was lifeless. She raised it to her chest. A heartbreaking silence slumped around her. She rang the bell of the apartment, over and over again. Had no one ever come home?

She never found out whether her little baby had cried, if so, why no one had come, or whether the cause of death was something that crept up more quietly than dehydration. All that occurred to her was this: to take the body in the car seat on the S-Bahn with her across the city. She pulled the blankets up around it so no one would see. She borrowed a spade from a suburban garden. She buried the child in the still soft earth of the Grunewald forest. She buried her letter with the child. Around a tree, she latched a bungee cord, to mark the grave.

She had meant to go back home then, but sadness leached into her muscles and undid them, and she sat down against a tree. Her head fell forward.