The History of History

THIRTY-EIGHT • Arrival of the Valkyries


It was a lightning storm outside—the summer had come. The buzzer of the door went off. A clap of thunder fell like the knock of a hammer, the thunder clapped, the hammer fell, the door buzzed, and then there was another knock, and deep voices. It was the accent of Berlin that sent the alarm through Margaret, the deep and angry voice of Berlin at her door. Margaret sat on the floor in the bedroom and listened to the yelling. They were the police, they said, and they knew she was inside. The Hausmeister had told them. If the racing bicycle was in the courtyard, then Margaret was upstairs, and Margaret closed her eyes and thought of the summer nights in the outdoor theater with Amadeus. She felt the sepia tint of one Russian film they had seen. It hovered on the outside of her eyes. She opened them and looked out at the purple sky. The rains were coming. She did not resist, she went to the door and opened it but without releasing the chain at first, and through the crack, there were the police officers, a man and a woman in camouflage green were looming above her; they were enormous and blond, the woman, turned in profile on the landing and speaking into a radio, had long golden hair that fell in an elastic band to her waist, her thighs proud and broad. The man too stood on wide-set legs broad as Berliner chimneys. Margaret looked up into their eyes—the light in them glinted, like water winking and shuddering at the mossy bottom of a well. So the police were the Valkyries, she thought: the choosers of the slain. She opened the door to its widest. She lifted her wrists.

They ignored her wrists. She was wanted for questioning, they said, for questioning in connection with a disappearance. Margaret murmured, “Arabscheilis.” But it was not that. Someone in the apartment complex had given the tip, they said, had suggested she be charged with the abduction or possibly the murder of a child whose birth had been registered at Charité but had never been seen in any register after that; a child that, even now, the state was trying to find.

•

They were in the police car on the way to the station. They drove past Kleistpark. Margaret looked out the window and into the Königs-Kolonnaden. O colonnade! How beautiful it was. The colonnade, archway upon archway, was detailed, gentle, ordered, moderate. She looked down its length in one quick movement of her eyes and saw everything at once: how it was like doorway after doorway of a long hallway, down which she could move toward the one she had always waited for, whom she had always loved. The sky was purple and the rain was beginning to fall warm, as though from a dog’s tongue. She thought of rain, and of fabric drawn over a face. She felt something of the old radiance; she felt something of Regina Strauss.

In her mind, the day became bright and sunny; the birch trees strained down from above and touched the colonnade with silver fingers. Margaret closed her eyes.

Around her—she sat on the tweed seat of the police car—Berlin spread in every direction, and it was nothing but Berlin.

Would it tax the imagination to propose that Margaret was sane? In her mind the day was bright, and music from far away drifted under her ears. The arrest was a sign, a long-awaited sign, of an orderly universe. The apocalypse had come, and the apocalypse had gone. At the police station she would tell them everything: that she had not meant to hurt anyone; that she had not foreseen the consequences of what she had done, nor the consequences of how she had lived. But she would also admit that she had been a part of something hideous. She would say that she had gone far outside the fold and lived there for a long and looping stretch of time. The significance would be in the telling, in the return to the ranks—to the brave asylum—of those who tell, without distortion, stories of their shame.

Margaret rode in the police car, but she was also floating wraithlike down the stone colonnade in the Kleistpark. A passion spun upon her mood; her eyes jumped over and past the rigorous face of things known. She lay back her head and pushed her cheek against the glass of the car’s window. The green of the trees in the park beckoned, just before it disappeared from view—the overture of a new century.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Without the following people, this book would not have come to be.

Elizabeth Adams

Bill Clegg

Olle Björkman

Annie Bourneuf and Benjamin Lytal

James Kennaway

Mozhan Marnò

Lisa Rudebeck

Colleen Hattemer Holwerk

Claudia Herr

Charlie and Ellen Hattemer

Torben Philipp

Vadim Sobolevski

Nick and Serena Gay at Original Berlin Walks

Jordan Pavlin and Leslie Levine at Knopf

Lee Brackstone and Helen Francis at Faber

Therese Hattemer, Biff Maier, and my little brother, Ted Hattemer-Maier



There was a time when the writing of this book was quixotic. Completely unpracticed as a writer of fiction, I worked obsessively, becoming progressively more jobless, broke, and isolated. What amazes me is that there were friends and family who learned of what I was trying to do and did not become skeptical. Instead, they offered their financial and emotional help. Their belief in this project, during the years when there was nothing at all to suggest anything worthy would ever come of it, still makes my eyes swim. In particular, I would like to thank my great friend Elizabeth Adams, who never wavered in her faith and love. I’d like to thank that woman of letters Colleen Hattemer Holwerk for her staunch encouragement. I would like to thank Charlie and Ellen Hattemer for early help and my mother for her love and patience. And I would like to thank my first readers both for their insightful notes and also for their enthusiastic admonitions to continue: Mozhan Marnò, Claudia Herr, and James Kennaway.

Once it was a finished draft, this book was saved by Bill Clegg. He not only recognized its potential but also stayed by me through an arduous year of revisions before it sold. I am unsure what to say about Bill except that he is a leuchtender Stern—a shining star. He is agile, brilliant, and true: a blinding talent. No one could wish for a better advisor, reader, friend, or agent than Bill Clegg. I wish to thank you with all my heart, Bill.

Once the book sold, I fell into the hands of a wonderful group of people: the great Jordan Pavlin at Knopf, along with her marvelous assistant, Leslie Levine, who has been a guide and a friend as few know how to be; the razor-sharp Lee Brackstone and perceptive Helen Francis at Faber; and my dear Olivia de Dieuleveult at Flammarion. These people with their warm and varied intelligences brought the book to full maturity. I wish to thank them profusely as well.

Finally, I would like to thank Nick and Serena Gay at Original Berlin Walks for tolerating a sometimes very absentminded employee, for keeping me at that job which proved so interesting to me.





A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Ida Hattemer-Higgins was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. She studied German and Chinese literature in New York, then left the United States in 2001. In the time since, she has lived in Japan, India, and Sweden and for the past seven years has been a student of literature in Berlin, where she has also worked as a walking-tour guide and translator. She now divides her time between Berlin and Moscow. This is her first novel.