The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,3

returned to her classes at the university in these weeks, but there she did not speak to anyone either. She rode the U-Bahn down to the dying meadows of the Freie Universität and sat by herself in the library. She wore an assortment of men’s dress clothing: moth-eaten woolen trousers and broadcloth shirts grown brittle with age, and always a particular grease-smeared topcoat that looked to be several decades older than the rest. And she wore a felt hat—perhaps to disguise that she was not in the habit of washing her hair. The effect belonged to no subculture anyone knew of, and gradually rebuffed the other students.

Margaret did not mind. During lectures she sat well away from them, deep in her own thoughts, taking methodical notes from her perch at the back of the hall—notes which, not long after having been made, their blue, reptilian ink already fading, seemed foreign to her, not of her own hand. She memorized dates, causes and effects, uprisings and assassinations, theories and countertheories—this was for the sake of the tours in the city, where, if the customers quizzed her, it was distasteful to be caught out.

But she did not register for examinations that might propel her toward a degree, nor make any other frantic efforts on behalf of semester deadlines. She ignored the early notes she had made for her master’s thesis, which had been on the topic of Karl Liebknecht and the Spartacists.

Margaret was leaving something behind. She no longer suffered from ambition. Information was fodder for the tours, nothing more. She studied avidly but always remaining in place, and the university was large and remote as an unjealous god, and took no notice of her treadmill existence.

And though the calendar appeared to be continuing its slow plod whenever she checked it, Margaret was dogged by a peculiar sensation. She felt that somehow, somewhere along the way when she had not been paying careful attention (and how could she have been so heedless?), time had come to an end. Now it was only a matter of a short interval before the world faded out entirely. Sometimes she was even gripped by a strange suspicion, unlikely as it seemed, that every last thing was already gone. All that now met her ears and eyes was a vestigial flare or after-impression, like the shape of the sun burnt on the retina.

So in that case, the logical (and yet also illogical) conclusion was this: the more she looked, the less there was left to see. To observe was to eat. She had to ration.

This was difficult, as everything burned terribly brightly. The Berlin street came shining to her, whore for attention that it was, offering up this face, that reference, and it was all a magic lantern show, cheap and profligate. She began to feel, in a hallucinatory kind of way, that brightness and time were competing siblings, tugging resentfully at each other’s realms. Brightness was winning. The brighter the city burned, the more time as a linear ray exhausted its last dregs and died. And conversely, the more time narrowed and dropped off for reasons of its own, the brighter everything became.

It all filled Margaret with dread. She tried to control the terror of the conquering brightness. First with the tours in the mornings, in this period of convalescence, the twinkling past was an opiate. But afterward, in the afternoons, the dread returned, and she was forced to distract herself.

Distract herself she did. She bought flowers for the side table in the long hallway of her cavernous, echoing apartment in Schöneberg. She cooked lentils. She went for a beer now and then, sat outside during the last of the lukewarm days, and as it grew colder, in smoky corners of pubs. Sundays, she walked around the Berliner flea markets, buying this or that or anything at all—a chalky pot for the kitchen, a flower box for the sill.

After that strange and terrible night in the Grunewald forest, the weeks went by and became months. And then the months flew by and became two years. Time will pass very quickly, if you are convinced it is already over. Two years rolled away, never to be seen again.

By the time autumn of 2004 pulled around, Margaret was so solitary, she was an almost unrecognizable version of herself.

She had used the purgatory well, however. The dread that had been her constant companion—it was close to gone. At the end of two years, the terror was swaddled and buried;