The History of History

NINE • The Whale Ducks


A bird of prey traces a certain kind of line in the sky because it need not flap its wings, and every time Margaret glanced out the window, so this line came into her peripheral vision.

On Saturday afternoon, Margaret opened one of the windows and put her head out. She looked up into the sky. It was a blue sky, shocked out of all clouds, making the slow sound of an airplane. After a squinting perusal, she concluded there were no birds; her peripheral vision must have been mistaken. She drew back and began to pull the window closed. One final glance at the shuddering flesh of the buildings, however, an almost admiring glance at their vivacity, and she saw something move on the balcony of the building catty-corner.

Something flashed in her eyes. She squinted, and saw: the grey-feathered, hunchbacked woman in black gabardine, standing at attention. Not only that: the hawk-woman held a pair of binoculars, and her long eyes were trained on Margaret’s windows. Her perch was one of those ornamental balconies from the 1890s, the kind that are convex from the house, so the woman, with her hair molded in its immaculate water waves and the lenses of her voyeur’s binoculars glinting in the light, caught the full gift of the sun, and the reflection from her telescope eyes blinked into Margaret’s apartment like Morse code signals.

Quickly, Margaret closed the window and drew the curtains. It was the middle of the day, but she climbed into bed.

Under the covers, she whispered to herself violently. She muttered, tossing this way and that. She told herself in a grave voice to pull herself together. She told herself in a grave voice that she was sane, but a fool. She told herself to buck up, to strike down her gullibility. She closed her eyes.

She tried to sleep but then came that old jangling vision she had had once before—of the curving, oval staircase with its red runner. It rose from deep in her skull, bearing its blunt weapon, and pressed against her eyes. She could smell the flaxen runner, taste the chalk of disappointment; she could touch the shadowed walls, flinch at the cold.

She slept, but when she woke up, she was not refreshed. And her heart beat again, and never had it beat faster. She thought of that feathered woman in gabardine, a feathered woman who she believed was a figment of her imagination and yet who made her stomach dive and flip.

If she could not return to the doctor right away, she decided, she would have to talk to someone else.

But Margaret didn’t know anyone. She had managed that—she really had.

She decided to ride her bicycle over to Akazienstrasse and buy a guidebook to European birds.

When she got home from the bookstore she parted the curtain a crack to see if the bird was still there. Indeed. Present and alert. When the nasty beast saw the curtain move, it flew right at her window in full bird form and landed on the wide outer sill. It cocked a topaz eye at her, Margaret the helpless zoo animal, the bird gawking.

Margaret reached for the book. She compared several pictures. The bird had long tail feathers with banded stripes and yellow eyes; this bird must be an enormous version of the Sperber, the sparrow hawk—Accipiter nisus.

The Sperber, according to the book, was “a bird of prey with long, pointed talons that nourishes itself on smaller birds. These it hunts with lightning-quick loops and dives, knowing how to rip them out of the air in mid-flight with its beak.”

At this description, a sharp and bracing sort of panic took hold of the room, and Margaret had to shut her eyes.


That evening, as she sat over her books, the memory of a friend crossed her mind. Or perhaps he should be called an acquaintance; in any case, she remembered someone. It was a certain Benjamin, a fellow expatriate, a music critic, with whom she had once spent a good deal of time. She had never known him well, but she had liked him; he let her sit in his kitchen for hours with a newspaper while he went about his other business, entertaining women in the living room and making loud international calls to magazine editors. He claimed having a silent and strange woman in the house put everyone on edge, and he was eccentric enough to like the idea of putting his guests on edge. As for Margaret, she was permitted to eat his canned bratwurst and sauerkraut, and so for her part she had never complained.

It was not until ten in the evening that she finally made up her mind to go to him. It had been years since she last saw him, she did not even have his telephone number any longer. Late at night, too, there was a risk he would not be at home—he had been in the habit, she recalled, of spending every night at some hidden club or other. She would have to take her chances.

She traveled half an hour on the U2 line, all the way up to Prenzlauer Berg. She went through a concrete courtyard to a rear building where Benjamin’s dark apartment house decayed. All this, she remembered well. She rang the bell, and praise be—her heart skipped a beat with gladness—Benjamin himself came to the door.

He was a portly man, almost forty. He had the air of a ringmaster or a butcher, his cheeks a deep pink, his muttonchop whiskers thick and black. His eyes were white like hard-boiled eggs, the irises friendly and burlesque. Now he narrowed these eyes at the young woman in his doorway.

There might have been some question as to whether he recognized her. Before the night in the forest, Margaret knew, her features had been soft, as though one were seeing her through a grease-smeared lens. Now she had become sharp—the bones of her face had floated up to the surface, and her oversized men’s clothing too moved about her in harsh shapes. After a long glance, however, Benjamin’s eyes relaxed, and he opened the door.

“Margaret Taub,” he said. He was in his pajamas and a tattered smoking jacket, reeking of garlic.

“Benjamin.”

“Do you wish to visit me now, Margaret?”

“Yes, Benjamin.” She tried to take him in her arms, but he stiffened.

“It’s been a long time, Margaret.” He looked down the stairwell to see if anyone was with her. “After three years, all of a sudden Margaret Taub shows up.”

Margaret, excited, headed straight for her old spot in the kitchen. Benjamin followed. His eyes widened, the whites waxing larger. “You know what, Margaret? You’re in luck, I was about to eat a can of sauerkraut.”

“Oh, yes.” Margaret breathed a sigh of happiness, although she was speechless for lack of socialization. She sat down at the table in the kitchen and looked around her.

Just a moment before, standing in the hallway ringing his bell, she had had no image of his apartment; the door to his flat seemed as if it would open onto nothing at all, as though part of a stage set. But now inside, she discovered she knew the place in every detail, was sure that almost nothing had been moved since she was last here. The same dusty, poolside furniture in orange-and-white plastic was scattered here and there, the same album covers were thumbtacked to the walls featuring lounge lizard girls in blue lipstick; the electric organ; several lamps made out of coconuts; tall piles of CDs and LPs, white-and-green-striped wallpaper falling off the walls for the moisture. Benjamin took an open can of sauerkraut out of the refrigerator and brought it to the table.

“To be honest, Margaret, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Benjamin began.

“Neither did I,” Margaret replied aimlessly and at once.

“I won’t say I wasn’t fine with that.”

“Benjamin—” Margaret longed to touch him. But everything about the way he stood, about his rigid expression, suggested he did not trust her.

“Are you still living in Schöneberg?” he asked.

“Same place,” Margaret smiled up at him.

“That’s a surprise.”

“It’s not so easy to change,” Margaret said.

“No?” He raised his eyebrows in his burlesque grimace. “Well,” he said, in a falsetto. He brought two beers over to the table and sat down. “Margaret Taub,” he said, still in the falsetto, opening his beer. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Well,” she hesitated. She swept the dust off the unused end of the table. “I wanted to talk to you about something in particular.”

“Oh yeah? I wanted to talk to you about something in particular too,” he said.

Margaret sensed this was not good.

“Do you want to know if I ever went to Gau-Algesheim?” he asked.

“To where?”

“The dumb monkey, eh?”

“What?” Margaret looked at him.

“It was scummy of you, Margaret.”

“Benjamin—”

“Don’t try to Benjamin me. The answer is no. I didn’t go. You said you’d interpret for me, I was on the platform, the train came. No Margaret. No one came. Margaret cut out. Now the old man is dead.”

“The old man?”

“I guess you knew we had to go down there before the a*shole died. Now my father won’t ever get the house back.”

“Benjamin, Benjamin,” she said plaintively, trying to buy time. What was he talking about? “Benjamin,” she stuttered. “The thing is, I never leave Berlin. I haven’t gone outside the city limits in years.” She said it, and realized with a start that, except for Sachsenhausen, which was still part of the Berliner public transport network and so hardly an exception, it was true.

“Now I know that. I found out the hard way. You could have told me before I bought the tickets. Three hundred and seventy five euros each, nonrefundable. My father’s sure not coming over to Germany, I can tell you that. You were our chance.”

Margaret tried to mask her confusion. “But you always behave so badly, Benjamin,” she said. It was the only honest statement that occurred to her.

“They did not give me German citizenship for my charm, Margaret, they gave it to me because they killed half my family.”

“Okay,” Margaret said. “Okay.” She swallowed. Something jogged her. She remembered a time—waiting in line with Benjamin at the ticket office at Zoo Station. He was smoking a cigar; she was worried about the smoke, then an altercation with the station police. Of course, she must have been preparing to make a trip with him. A trip to the south, it seemed to her, fuzzily. Why hadn’t she made the trip?

“Do you still want to go?” she asked. “I’ll go,” she said. She wanted terribly to befriend him.

“Now you want to? Well—” He looked at the calendar on the wall next to them. It displayed June 2001; it too was covered in dust. “The bastard is dead now anyway,” he said. “There’s no point. We’d have to sue the state. The fun part would have been tearing it away from the anti-Semite.” He took a bite of sauerkraut. “What did you want to talk to me about, Margaret?”

Margaret drank her beer. The single bulb on the ceiling cast a light that fatigued the eyes. “Benjamin—” she began, but stopped.

The fact was that in this location—with the old, precariously tilting stacks of records around her, the smell of curry and mildew, Benjamin’s kind, impossibly familiar face—the events of the last weeks seemed remote. She wondered if she had really seen any hawk-woman. She wondered if she had not perhaps been inwardly exaggerating about the flesh, the transformation, the bird. Now, picturing everything in her mind, it all seemed unlikely.

But that had been the entire reason for coming—so that Benjamin could bring her back to reality. So Margaret spoke up. “Do you have any idea what I was doing, say, about two or three years ago?” she asked. “Any idea at all?”

“What? You want me to tell you about your own life?”

“Well—” she said, her face starting to itch, “there’s this time I can’t remember. I know it’s odd, but—that’s how it is.” Margaret caught her breath.

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“Well, back when we were friends, for example. After that, there’s a foggy time. It’s like when you think back on your childhood. Sometimes you can remember when you were six years old, but weirdly, not very much from when you were seven.”

Benjamin pulled on his mustache. “Okay,” he said.

Margaret leaned over the table and kissed his cheek, trying to solidify any goodwill he might have toward her. Benjamin put his hands on the table and licked his lips.

“You lived down in Schöneberg,” he said. “What about that guy? You were in love with the German guy, right? Not with me, that’s for sure.”

“A German?”

“You’ve got to remember that guy. Even I remember him.”

“Benjamin, I told you, I don’t remember anything.”

“What, not even the German? You were crazy about him.”

“Really?”

Benjamin looked at her and became still for a fraction of an instant. Then he began to chew the inside of his cheek. “Are you sure you’re okay, Margaret?”

“I think so,” she said, but her eyes stung. This seemed to mortify Benjamin, and he pulled on his whiskers.

“Well, all I can tell you is what I know, Margaret. The thing is, you were always secretive. You never introduced me. I thought you were embarrassed of him. I only saw the two of you once, on Weinbergsweg, and it was dark, and you didn’t see me. He was older, I remember that. And then after you didn’t show up to go to Gau-Algesheim, it was like you’d dropped off the face of the earth. You never called, your phone number went out of service. I figured you’d left Germany.”

“You were angry at me.” Margaret rubbed her face. So there had been a man. She looked at the beer in front of her, picked it up, and drank almost the entire thing down in one go, wincing. Her eyes began to water in earnest.

“True enough,” Benjamin said. “Let’s see. You always wore those little dresses back then, didn’t you. Not like now,” and he gestured at her oversized man’s trousers, whose cuffs had lately been dragging behind her in the sod, their hems unraveling, and the broadcloth shirt. “But okay. What happens when you try to remember?”

“I told you, Benny. There’s nothing. Nothing comes to mind at all.”

Benjamin poured her a shot of Unicum.

“I don’t want that,” Margaret said.

“Don’t drink it if you don’t want it.”

Margaret picked up the shot glass and drank it down. Then she began to laugh. “It’s all ridiculous!”

“It’s ridiculous all right.”

Margaret laughed on and on. Benjamin sat with his arms crossed, looking at her with an uncertain smile.

Finally she took a breath. “There’s one thing,” she said, swallowing. “I often see one thing. But it’s not a memory. It’s more of a picture. Maybe even more like a smell than a picture. I think I dreamt it or saw it on TV. It comes to me sometimes when I try.”

“That’s good, Margaret. That’s a clue. What is it?”

Margaret gave a last hysterical peal of laughter. The sound was shrill. “It’s a staircase in an apartment house,” she said, choking on saliva.

“Where?” Benjamin asked.

“I don’t know where. Nowhere I’ve ever been. But I can see it perfectly. The staircase curves in an oval spiral upward around an oval shaft in the middle. At the top there’s a skylight with wedged panes. I can see it all really well. The window is like a wheel with spokes. But oval-shaped, to match the shape of the stairwell. And because of the skylight, the stairwell is bright at the center and shadowy around the edges.”

“Okay,” Benjamin said.

“And the stairs are covered in red flaxen runners, the kind that smell like straw.”

“So it’s probably Berlin.”

“What?”

“Red flaxen runners are mostly a Berlin thing.”

“Oh,” Margaret said. She had not thought of this.

“What else?” Benjamin asked.

“At the bottom, there’s a girl, about my age, walking up the stairs.”

“Bingo, Margaret,” Benjamin said. “That must be you.”

“No, no. Not me at all. She’s wearing a bluish dress. I don’t have a blue dress.” Margaret felt herself sinking in—seeing in her mind the narrow blue stripes of the faded fabric, the brown plastic belt made to look like leather. She let out her breath. “The girl is looking up, and she can see there’s a man up at the top of the stairs. The man doesn’t see her. He’s leaning both arms on the banister way up there under the skylight, he’s smoking a cigarette, almost at the top of the house, maybe four or five stories up, pretty far away from her. She can see the smoke from his cigarette, it’s curling grey against the skylight, and even sometimes next to her, she notices ash fluttering down. She calls up to him, but he doesn’t call back. She’s walking up the stairs, holding on to the banister, and calling. But every time she puts her head over the edge and looks up into the white light in the shaft, he’s never any closer, and she gets blinded by the brightness. When she looks back down at the stairs, the ovals are burnt on her eyes. She can see the shape of the skylight on the stairs, black spots like silverfish.”

“Like silverfish?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, that’s good. I should be taking notes on all this.” Benjamin poured himself another shot of Unicum, and then one for Margaret. She drank it down. “What else?” he said.

“Actually, there is something else.” Margaret swallowed. “Maybe it’s a different dream. Sometimes I think it’s a different dream. Or maybe it’s later. It’s probably a different dream. But in any case, on the same stairs, while the girl is still climbing, something actually crashes through the skylight. It crashes a hole in the glass up there in the roof and it drops down. Down past the fifth- and fourth-floor landings, all the way down to the bottom. Once it’s down on the floor in the cellar, the girl knows something. Nothing will ever be the same. And the reason: she’s lost the fight.”

“What fight?”

“I don’t know. That’s just what’s going on. I don’t even know if it’s in her mind. Maybe it’s a narrator saying it in the background, or some music playing those lyrics.”

“Okay.”

“Well, anyway, the thing, whatever it is, it falls all the way down to the bottom floor, way down below, onto this blue-and-white-checkered floor down there. There’s a mosaic on the underground level, and it falls onto those tiles. But it doesn’t make a crashing sound. It lands silently. And the girl looks over the banister, looks down, and sees whatever it is, maybe something the size of a fist, a little red and grey on the blue-and-white tiles.”

All of this Margaret had remembered that very afternoon, while she was fretful in bed.

“You have no idea where this came from?” Benjamin asked.

Margaret considered. “I think I probably made it up.” Her eyes were closed, she felt like sleeping now. Benjamin spoke again, but his tone had changed.

“Margaret,” he said, “there’s someone I want you to meet.”

Margaret opened her eyes. There was a movement at the doorway. She roused herself to standing, feeling much more drunk than she had known. She held on to the chair for support. She peered. A young woman at the entrance to the kitchen. The newcomer was barefoot and wore only a T-shirt and underwear. Her hair was in disarray, her cheeks pink with sleep. And the funny and terrible thing was that Margaret was looking at herself. The woman had the same wide-set eyes, the same long bones, the same skin dotted with moles. Her legs had the same sparse hair, the same narrow kneecaps, her veins the same streaking presence through her freckles. Her hair was like Margaret’s, long and fine and curly.

“Hello,” Margaret said.

“Hello,” the woman said.

Looking at her, Margaret felt a change. Warm curtains closed around her eyes. Through the diaphanous fabric she could see alternating shadows, a correspondence between prisms. She heard a radio far away playing a tin melody she already knew.

There was something else, Margaret thought, something else she was meant to remember. What was it? Margaret put her hands over her eyes, and sat down at the table again.

The young woman went over to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water, and slammed the door. She left the kitchen.

Benjamin turned to Margaret and said with embarrassment that could still not mask his excitement. “What do you think of her?”

“She looks exactly like me,” Margaret said.

Benjamin looked at Margaret a long time. “Not really,” he finally said. “I found her at the King Kong Klub last night.”

“Is she German?”

“She’s Czech,” Benjamin said.

Margaret gave a cry and tried to get up to leave. She did not know what was coming, but again, as after meeting the doctor, she felt a creeping sensation of rot, as of having found by chance some terrible thing for which she was partly at fault. She stumbled and caught herself on the table, but in the process she knocked Benjamin’s beer onto the floor. He went to get a rag, she poured herself another glass of Unicum and drank it down.

In the end she was so drunk he had to carry her into the bedroom. She felt like a sea creature with arms gushed on the currents. She fought back a little: she told him she did not want to stay; she told him sleepily that she would go home. Benjamin said not to worry. He said he and Lenka, as the girl was called, were going out anyway, the bed was free. He took her shoes off, covered her, and went out. Margaret heard him talking quietly to the young woman in the other room, and the plink-plank of her own voice. It was angry.

Margaret slept.


When she woke up it was still night and she did not know where she was. She was alone and she could smell that she was not in her own bed. She raised herself on her elbows, her heart beating.

Then she saw the Jägermeister Christmas lights.

She could hear Benjamin clomping around hastily in the kitchen, his footsteps deliberate. Margaret decided he must be getting ready to leave. She listened for the girl, too, but did not hear a second pair of footsteps. Finally the door to the apartment sounded. It opened and closed with a bang. All was still.

The room where Margaret lay was narrow. It dead-ended into a grotto balcony. The Jägermeister Christmas lights were wound around its balustrade.

Margaret remembered this room from before. She had always thought it had a quality of fungus, or fungal nearness, as if it were in the shade of a giant mushroom.

She couldn’t sleep. Why, she didn’t know—she had drunk enough. But her heart was pounding awfully. She closed her eyes and lay back into the pillow. By some dark trick of the imagination she thought she could hear a magpie out on the balcony, scratching at the cement floor.

She listened. She lay very still. She turned on a little lamp by the pillow. There was a book lying on the floor next to the bed. She picked it up. The title was Die Wal-Enten (The Whale Ducks). The author was one Olaf Therild, the book was in German, published in West Berlin, 1975. She opened it and began to read the first page. Right away, she found herself sliding in.

The Whale Ducks

Millennia to come, the world was overwhelmed by floods whose causes even then were in dispute. Berlin was buried at the bottom of a great sea. Above this sea over Berlin, only the tops of the tallest buildings still protruded from under the water.

A new animal reigned, a species that called itself the whale duck. The whale ducks were large, robust creatures. They fed on the old human buildings under the water. These had become soggy and nutritious during the centuries of inundation.

One of these whale ducks was one day vanquishing her hunger, diving down under the surface of the water to take bites out of architectural glories of the past, when she came up having unknowingly bitten off the top of a church steeple (the whale ducks were very large indeed), and developed a stomachache not long after. An operation was necessary. When the whale-duck surgeon looked inside, she found that while the steeple itself had been digested, there was something else, the entire skeleton of a human being in the stomach of the duck, and this was the source of the problem. The skeleton clutched a bottle of scent in one claw-like hand and in the other, a glass jar which at first appeared stuffed with cotton. Closer inspection revealed that the vial contained a sheaf of paper, rancid and pulpy and covered in the symbols once used for communication by the humans.

The skeletal remains met a fate not entirely atypical. It happened that the whale duck who had swallowed the skeleton, by the name of Botuun, was a great lover of the theater. She had mated in her youth, had been the wife of a great monster of a duck, so large in fact that he had not been long for this world. But she had been left a fortune (and some very large ducklings): meadowlands, swamps, and several factories that derived extracts from the swamp which were then used in making dye, in turn used to make paints.

Botuun saw to it that the skeleton became part of her own theater—her own house of shadows, as such it was known. Shadowing was a theatrical form, an entrenched part of the “ancient” culture of the ducks—a theater of the dead. The remains of dead things, usually skeletal, sometimes mummified, were painted in bright colors, and bits of putty were used to round the edges, so that the skeletons appeared as they would have in life. Or at least, as the ducks supposed they would have looked. Humans, for example, had been extinct for so long, and their records submerged and dissolving under water for so many eons, that no one knew exactly what they had looked like, what color their skin had been, or even whether they had had fur. It was possible to imagine that they had been green creatures, an adaptation designed to camouflage them against the green of grass and trees, as some archeologists held, or that they had been blackish like the bats of today, the only non-water mammal to have survived the floods (and often kept as pets by the whale ducks). In the traditional shadow theater, however, the views of archeologists were predated and later ignored—the impulses that had given rise to a theater of the dead were much older and more ingenuous than would allow for scientific influence. So the puttied skeletons were painted in many colors, exactly as the whale ducks in their earliest powwows had imagined that humans, the chief recipient of the ducks’ tireless fascination, might have appeared. They were given false hair, not only on their heads but protruding from points all down their spines. The hair was traditionally black or white, although villains were sometimes blazing green.

Because the humans were tiny by the standards of the ducks, their remains were also easy to maneuver. In the shadow theater, the joints of the humans—every finger, every vertebra—were articulated by white threads that hung from the ceiling. The skeletons became something very similar to marionettes.

The stories that the ducks made the humans tell were often tragedies of the distant humans’ lives, and usually in lyrical, exaggerated motion, projected into much larger sizes with light and magnifying lenses so that the audience would not be forced to strain its eyes. The ducks were wont to enjoy shadow theater while sitting in semi-darkness, under the influence of an herb that made them more susceptible to extremes of emotion.

The ducks liked best that which was farthest away but which was capable of seeming the nearest.

The skeleton that had been discovered in Botuun’s venerable stomach was a narrow, dainty piece, and gloriously, blindingly intact. There was a symmetry to its godly rib cage, a swoop of the cheekbones, a set of teeth that gleamed with pearly winks of light. It was clear from the moment it was removed from Botuun by the surgeon that it would one day be a celebrated shadow piece, perhaps famous throughout the nation of the whale ducks. After her convalescence, Botuun saw to it that the skeleton was taken to the workshop of a master shadowist, and made into an object of great beauty, and with pride she turned the skeleton over to her theater.

The first piece that the new skeleton was made to perform was an old standby, an opera, The Magistrate of Naragir. All the whale ducks were familiar with the story.

In the country of Lon, the tale begins in a time of relative peace. The intermittent wars with the enemy country to the north are in abeyance. The eponymous magistrate begins not as any kind of magistrate at all, but as the ninth of thirteen impoverished children—a family so poor they live in a clay cave they have hollowed out of the side of a cliff. To add insult to the situation, the young man who would become magistrate, by the name of Hans, is born with a deformity: his arms are short and twisted: his hands join directly with his elbows. At his birth his mother weeps; she believes he will be useless as a laborer. He will starve or live off the charity of relations for the rest of his life.

But the boy grows, and slowly he proves himself: he is good-hearted. He is loving to his sisters and brothers. He is constant, reliable. But above all, he is tenacious: he has an extraordinarily tenacious temperament. He is so stubborn that we see him as a youth of thirteen or fourteen, working tirelessly for only his dinner as a hireling at one of the farms in the valley. He has been leading a bull, when a wasp bites it in the rump! And the boy refuses to let go of the tether around the neck of the bull, even as the animal bounds through a rocky field. Two of his sisters shout and scream at him to let go of the rope. They think he will die; they scream in fear. But he holds on to the rope with his left hand and his teeth, and his sisters will always remember the gleam in his face as he is pulled by the bull—his eyes rolled up into his head, only the white showing. And then his eyes shut, and his face is red, and the blood is everywhere. Hans breaks two ribs and his left ankle, and for the rest of his life he will bear scars on his face and chest where large pieces of skin were scraped away.

Not long after this incident, young Hans, still hardly more than a boy, sees that his only chance in life is to work with his mind. He ties his few belongings in a kerchief on the end of a stick, bids his family goodbye, and begins the several days’ journey by foot to the capital.

Many years pass. Through sheer determination and constancy, he manages to work his way into the civil service and eventually rises high. He becomes talented at placing bets on the market. The first gold coin he earns, he bids a barber plait it into the coarse hair of his beard, and the gold stays there. The weight of it tugs at the tender skin of his face every minute of every day, as if it would pull the hair out at the roots, reminding him of his early toil.

In time he is appointed magistrate to the provincial town of Naragir. The peasants there, a cantankerous people, outraged to learn they have been appointed a magistrate who is both a cripple and from their own class, decide to drive him out of town. Before his arrival, they take apart the manse that is reserved for the magistrate, and carry it onto swampland, brick by brick, where they rebuild it. When the magistrate alights from his carriage, the new home smells of rotten eggs and is already sinking into the ground. The magistrate, however, doesn’t make a complaint to the capital. He never says a word. Instead, he sets about taking apart the house again on his own. He carries the bricks on his back, load by load, and then every floorboard, every glass window he carries to a new spot far from the reeking swamp, to a high overlook—a spot even more well-chosen than the original location of the manse.

Time passes. He plays the markets in the capital. His coffers are enriched further. He manages to earn the aloof respect of the townspeople.

The one and only reward that eludes his grasp, finally, is a wife. The people of this country are a superstitious people who feel sure that the good and hardworking man will pass on his deformity to any issue he might have, and his scarred body and his gaze as intense as an iron tong do nothing to increase his appeal. The magistrate suffers many long years of loneliness and self-hatred, but he does not think to look far away for a wife. He is stubborn, and knows he will win the people only with a wife from among them. So he continues to labor and widen his influence, proving himself a faithful and wise friend to all comers.

Every year, the magistrate gives a small velvet bag containing two small rubies to each and every father who is willing to give his daughter the choice of marrying him—and in return the father must respect the girl’s choice, whatever it might be. The magistrate does not care whether they all laugh at him as a fool. He gives out the jewels nonetheless. In the first year, all the girls say no. In the second year, all the girls say no likewise, and so it goes. But finally, in the magistrate’s fifty-third year, a woman, a widow, thirty-two years of age, agrees to marry him. Her name is Minnebie, and she is very beautiful. Her first husband was cruel to her; no one knows how he died. She moves into the magistrate’s home with what appears to be relief, and, praise God, over the course of the next seventeen years, they have six children together and are very happy. And so it is that the Magistrate of Naragir is able to wake those fine mornings in his seventh decade, and greet his wife directing the servants preparing breakfast in the kitchen on the first floor of his mansion, or teaching the children (none of whom was malformed in the end) in the library on the second floor, singing in the conservatory on the third, or cultivating ferns and orchids in the glass winter garden at the top of the house. It is an unprecedented happiness he can hardly believe.

But the years go on and war breaks out. The country of Lon is again fighting with the enemy to the north. It is a war of great pomp and saber-rattling. The magistrate, the good citizen, invests heavily, and right away sends his oldest son away to fight, and his daughter, by the name of Lonie, only sixteen, runs away to volunteer as a nurse at one of the army hospitals in the capital. What can he do? The magistrate does the only thing he can—he makes a profit off the new industries that spring up around the enlarged military.

When the war has been going on for several years, it happens that the country begins to lose. The news coming over the radio is more and more chilling. Finally, distraught, the magistrate becomes sick; it’s the smallpox. It seems he will not be long for this world. Several tormented weeks.

But finally his fever breaks, and among his doctors there is much rejoicing. The magistrate will live. With his new, clear eyes—and it is a wonder he did not go blind!—the magistrate asks that each of his children be led in to see him. He breathes and is flooded with the joy of returning health.

But his children do not come in to see him. No, his children will never come in. It is his wife and the stout housekeeper who enter the room. Minnebie’s face is swollen almost beyond recognition.

“What has happened?” the magistrate asks, sensing immediately that nothing is right.

Minnebie turns her back. There’s something about her movements that has all the lost grace of an elephant. The stout housekeeper puts her arms across her wide chest. “I think it’s best if I do the talking, sir,” she says.

“All right,” the magistrate says helplessly.

“You see, sir, the enemy reached the capital.”

“I see.”

“In the battle for the city, your boy fell.”

The magistrate does not speak. He closes his eyes.

“At the time the young master was killed, the enemy had only just managed to surround the city, but it hadn’t fallen yet. He died valiantly in the effort to save it.” The housekeeper stands with her head bowed and her hands clasped behind her. For a moment she is silent. “I’m sorry, sir. He was a good boy.”

“Yes, he was a good boy,” the magistrate manages to say.

“Well, there’s more, sir. By chance there was Lonie working in the lazaret at the same time; she was at the sickbeds when they brought her brother in. He was alive for a few minutes still, but his body was trampled and his intestines spilled out like snakes. She said they moved as if they were living reptiles. The boy’s skull was smashed. After, they let her come home.

“But she wasn’t well, sir. How shall I describe it? She complained of headaches. She said she couldn’t get the sight of her brother out of her eyes. She was awake at all hours, we couldn’t get her to stay in bed. She said she was looking for a place to hide. She was terribly sleep-deprived, and if you ask me, she began to hallucinate because of it. But no one asked me.” She glared at her mistress. Then she whipped around and went on. “We did our best with her, but you see, we found her one day in the morning, up in the top of the house, she had cut her eyes out of her head. Her eyes were out, sir, by her own hand.”

“She cut them out herself?” asks the magistrate.

“Yes, that’s right,” says the housekeeper.

The magistrate swallows.

It crosses the magistrate’s mind that all along he had thought he was an angel, where in reality he must have been a devil.

The worst thing is that his wife, at the window, still seems unable to move or speak, and he senses there must be more. He waits.

“As you know, the …” the housekeeper goes on, stammering. “The war is lost.”

“Yes,” said the magistrate, “but perhaps … perhaps, not entirely lost—”

“No, truly lost,” she cuts him off, “and the money, your money, even this house … I’ll stay on until your health is better, sir, but then I’m afraid I’ll have to leave. Wages are wages.”

“Of course they are,” says the magistrate, beginning to have trouble catching his breath.

“I’ll try to keep this brief, sir, I don’t want to be cruel.” The housekeeper pauses, then speaks. “Jasper—you know he always got in such trouble—he tried to climb up through the big chimney, but he got stuck in the middle. Lonie was nearby and heard him crying. She herself was too large to climb into the chimney after him. She seems to have run for help, but the little children and the mistress and I were out picking blackberries in the valley, and blind and wounded as she was, she didn’t find us in time.”

“When the doctor told us Jasper was dead”—the magistrate’s wife, Minnebie, whirls her face from the window; her voice is queer and unexpected—“I went to the upstairs lavatory to cry, at the top of the house, and there I found the eyes of Lonie were still in the washbasin—”

The magistrate thinks he will be sick. “Where are the babies? Where are my little ones?” he asks, with a terrible fear in his voice.

“Can you imagine my disgust?” his wife goes on. “I learned at that moment: we are an unlucky people. I do not wish to give my children to this defeated land, nor to this defeated house. I shall save my gifts for the victorious kingdom of heaven.”

“Don’t get abstract on me now. Where are the little ones?”

“Smallpox.”

“What?”

“All three boys, one by one; after Jasper died. Within a week of one another.”

The magistrate draws a long breath. He pulls the covers up further under his chin. His face glows like a moon rising from a green ocean.

There is a long silence in the room. In the performance for the whale ducks, the entire theater sits in silence for fourteen minutes. Then the music begins to rise, and the magistrate throws off the bedclothes.

“My wife,” says the magistrate slowly. “Minnebie. Do you know? There is a way. We will bring back the children.”

Minnebie looks at him in hatred.

The magistrate begins his beautiful aria.

“We will journey far away from here to the valley of oblivion,” he sings. “Forget the defeat and all the lost children. We will forget and start again from the beginning. Do you know how much like a dream all this misfortune seems to me now? Imagine how much more like a dream it will be when the trees have lost their leaves and regained them. How much more like a dream when the earth has passed into shadow again and again and the stars have grown colder and colder! When the birds have laid eggs until, with the generations taken together, they have laid more eggs than would cover the ocean floor?”

(At this, the whale ducks exchanged meaningful glances, touched to the quick—“It’s our time, he’s speaking of the time of the whale ducks!”)

The magistrate pauses. Minnebie says nothing, and a great silence again envelopes the stage. The magistrate seems to go just a little red in his white face, but only ever so slightly, so that, looking at him, it isn’t clear whether it is blood rising with shame into the net of capillaries over his facial muscles or whether it is because he has raised his head from the pillow and taken a bit more of the rays from the vanishing sun. (The whale ducks insist on only the best lighting for a production of Naragir.)

“How much more like a dream will it be then!” he shouts into the darkness. “I’ll tell you how much more! Much more like a dream. Dreams are lovely things. I am an old man, but still, even in what’s left of my life, I have time. There is always time. And listen, my darling—we will be blessed with new money, made through new industriousness, and God will bless us with new children, different children will be born to us. And although you’d never believe it, having forgotten the ones that came before, the new ones will be better than what we’ve lost. The songs the first ones used to sing won’t be sung, but other children can sing other songs, and the richness of their lives … will outdo any richness—” and the magistrate begins to cry.

Meanwhile, Minnebie’s fury is gradually reaching the breaking point. “I have no children in me,” she screams, “not now, nor ever again. The children I had are the children of the country that was shattered and I shall never forget—I shall never forget the shattering. Would you have me go on? Would you have me walk away from death as if it were less than life?” Minnebie says, and with that, in the way the story would have continued if the opera had not been interrupted on the night of Botuun’s skeleton’s debut, Minnebie kills herself; she uses the magistrate’s own revolver from the commode next to his bed, and the bullet goes straight to her brain, for she puts the barrel against the roof of her mouth.

The magistrate rises from the bed and his expression travels from pain to stillness. With stony face he walks by the dying Minnebie. He never looks backward. He tears the gold coin out of his beard. He uses the money to travel to the capital, and there he haggles for a pack of cigarettes, some ladies’ silk stockings, and a sausage. He trades these on the black market, and soon has enough business to live well, and, his integrity unbroken to the end, he lives out his days with a new young wife, and a second set of children. And also his blind daughter, Lonie. She cannot see, and in later years she chooses not to speak either.


However, the opera that night was to be interrupted and the story did not come to an end. It happened that Botuun’s fine, donated skeleton was playing the role of Minnebie. The audience was much taken by the new puppet, and they watched in amazement as the delicate motions of the treasure put the other “actors” to shame. But an extraordinary thing happened. When the skeleton mimed the final words of the play, which happened to be set to music in a long and exquisite aria, with much repetition, the skeleton slowly began to turn to powder. The process was so slow at the beginning (although quickly accelerating) that none of the ducks was sure that the skeleton hadn’t been disintegrating since the first act. By the time the song was ended, half the skeleton lay in dust on the floor of the stage, having fallen away from its crystal suspension strands. The other half of the skeleton, the top portion, widened its jaws and seemed to be laughing at the crowds of whale ducks, those curious, hungry birds with their long necks craned toward the extinct species’ remains, watching them enact their grotesque failures to thrive. The skeleton that was turning to dust, with a twinkling eye, seemed to be asking how much longer she would be made to reenact her humiliation—when would she be released into nonexistence? The whale ducks craned their necks ever further forward, cooing and crying, waiting for catharsis as the infant awaits birth.


Margaret stopped reading. She let the book slide to the floor. Some of the parched and rustling pages of the book fell out—the spine was broken. She could still hear the magpie scratching at the ground out on the balcony. She thought: Minnebie! She didn’t pay heed to the rest, she fell in love with the insane wife, Minnebie. There was more than a strand of nobility in the madwoman’s actions. Would not anyone have felt vindicated—refusing to forgive, refusing to forget, refusing to create in this turpentine world? How much finer than the old soul who clutches at the gold in his beard, grabbing at a life gone squalid. Then she heard a small voice coming from outside on the balcony. The voice was avian, squawking.

“Don’t you want to know about the sheaf of paper?” it said. “The one the skeleton was clutching in the steeple, in the beginning. Do you want to know what was on it?”

Margaret raised her head in surprise. “Who’s there?”

“The question is: don’t you want to know?” the bird said. Margaret settled into the pillow, the Unicum she had drunk taming her alarm. She considered. Now she remembered the pages referred to.

“But I thought the whale ducks were not able to read human script,” she said. “They wouldn’t know.”

“But I know what was on it,” said the voice.

“All right,” said Margaret. “What then?”

“It only had two words written on it, but two words written over and over.”

“Which two?”

“The two of her name.

“I see.”

“Her name, because she did not want to be forgotten after her death.”

“Ah,” said Margaret. She thought of this and laid her head back. She breathed deeply. She slept and woke, and slept again. Then she woke herself with a start.

“Why did Minnebie want her name to be remembered, if she chose to die?”

It was as if the bird had been waiting for her to ask just this question. “The dead do not wish to be forgotten. It is only their suffering they wish to erase. ‘Remember me, but ah, forget my fate.’ That is the creed of the destroyed.”

“I see.”

“But why do you assume the skeleton was Minnebie’s?” the bird asked.

And Margaret saw that she had made a mistake. “Whose was it then?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“The skeleton was that of someone yet to die.”

The magpie on the balcony laughed a screeching, birdy laugh. And then it scratched at the ground twice, rustled its wide wings, flapped frantically, and was gone.


Margaret drifted back into sleep. When she woke up the next morning, Benjamin was still out. Margaret found the story of the whale ducks fresh in her mind, even fresher than when she had read it.

She reached down beside the bed. She thought she would read the story again straight through from the start.

She searched, but she didn’t find the book about the whale ducks.

And it was only after she could not find it that she thought how strange it was that Benjamin owned The Whale Ducks, a book in German, a language Benjamin did not speak or understand.


Margaret stayed in Benjamin’s bed for most of the day. She was hung-over and ailing. In the kitchen she found that Benjamin had left her a note with his telephone number written on it in oversized digits, as if she were a child. She waited for him, but he never appeared. Finally she went home when the sun was going down.

For a while after she got back to Schöneberg she sat very still in a chair at the kitchen table. She looked out the window, down into the courtyard as the last of the light disappeared over the orange roofs. She sat, and the silence of the apartment became thicker. “Remember me, but ah, forget my fate.”

The story of the whale ducks wrapped tentacles around her mind. There were two models for how to behave if you were tried like Job. Two models, each one so evangelical that Margaret would have a hard time not making a decisive choice between the two. There was only one trouble: Margaret herself had never been tried like Job. Why did she assume that she had been, with hardly any hesitation? Why did she assume it as a matter of course, that it was for her, too, to make such a choice, between the way of Minnebie and the way of her stubborn husband, the magistrate?

At the edges of everything, there came a whitening, as if some glassy being had drawn a circle in dust around her feet, curbing her thoughts and her world to here and here, but never here.

She was cooperating. If there was an invisible fence that had stunned her once, she only circled the perimeter now, avoiding the shock.

Now Margaret decided to act out. She went into the bedroom. She stood for a while. Then she began to take all of her clothing out of the wardrobe. She laid each piece on the bed, mustered it with her eyes. She fingered the seams; she checked the pockets. She methodically emptied two wooden trunks that sat on top of the wardrobe, also filled with old clothes, books, tennis rackets, and broken this and that, and there too, she looked at every item carefully. She was not looking for anything in particular, no, she was particularly looking for nothing. To prove to herself there was nothing to find—this was her purpose. Every box opened and found to be empty of significance was a little triumph, every half hour that passed in which she saw nothing unsettling was a half hour closer to victory. She went to the desk and reorganized the drawers. She piled and repiled the stacks of books in the hallway, shaking each one to see what loose paper would fall out. She went through the closet: old shoes, a basketball, a Frisbee, screwdrivers of different sizes, an old bag of planting soil. She began to weary, but still, she went through the pantry; she looked at all the canned goods. It occurred to her to look in the bathroom, too. The night drew on; she searched. The dawn broke; she was losing energy.

Finally, about to take apart the commode in the bathroom, jiggling the drawer whose key she had lost but which could easily be broken into, she was stopped by a powerful itch at her temples. She rubbed and rubbed the sides of her face. She felt light-headed. The room rocked back and forth. She went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed.

There, as the itching sensation diminished, dreams began to fly behind her eyes. She saw herself as a child—holding fireflies in a mayonnaise jar with holes for oxygen punched in the tin lid. Another time, on a ferryboat with a wide paddle wheel hauling up the waters of a beef-fed river, and once too, sitting in a darkened theater touching the horsehair seat that lifted her toward the bright, warm beauty of the stage.

Oh, she had felt things, and smelled things, and lived things—all things that had a different feel, a different smell, a different organization, than this cold and forsaken life she was leading here.


The morning sun was burning brightly in the room. Margaret was still sitting on the bed, motionless. In the moments she had been there, her mind had wound around, considering every angle. And now—

She had made a decision. She would fold.

She did not want to find out anything at all. Job was an innocent—an innocent trapped between God and the devil. But she, Margaret—she did not know how or why, but she was guilty.

She must fold. The stakes were too high. Uncertainty was preferable to certainty, and although the peace she would win would be a shallow one, she need not play the dangerous game.

Yes, she would fold her hand. Let the others go on playing without her. Now she wanted to be still.

Because whether or not she found evidence, it did not matter. She could smell it on herself and on the wind, in how her heart raced every day, how her mind craved an escape: she was guilty. The wind came in the open window. The smell of it was nothing but threat.