The History of History Read Online Free PDF Page A

forth.
    Her voice, when it came, sounded like river rocks knocking together. “Something terrible has happened.” She breathed with difficulty.
    “You’ve got the wrong person,” Margaret said.
    “Is that so?” the doctor said. “Where do you live?”
    “Grunewaldstrasse 88.”
    “How many American women by the first name of Margaret live at Grunewaldstrasse 88?”
    Margaret’s fingers were cold, her head was beginning to swim. “I don’t know,” she said. “Only me, I suppose.”
    “The wrong person.” The doctor gave a dry laugh. “Don’t delude yourself. I
know
you, Margaret. You’re the girl that left her family behind in America.” The doctor pointed her finger.
    “Not exactly,” Margaret said. “My father was a German.”
    “What?”
    “I said, my father was a German.”
    “That may be. Whoever he was,” the doctor said, contempt in her voice. She was silent. When she spoke again, her voice was even more hoarse, but the contempt was gone. “What have you been doing these last years? I would assume that for some time now you have been pursuing novelty, am I right? Those lost in a fugue seek novelty instinctively; they can do little else.”
    It was unaccountable, Margaret thought, that the woman immediately made such insinuations. Margaret wanted to get out of the room, but the contraption was still clamped in her. “Doctor—”
    “We must do something.
I
must do something,” the doctor said. “But what am I to do?” The question was not directed at Margaret. The doctor craned her head upward toward the left window.
    “You don’t need to do anything,” Margaret said. “There’s been a mistake. Please explain to me the circumstances of your—your falling-out with this Margaret Täubner.” Margaret thought perhaps this was the best way to clear up the misunderstanding. Find out what had happened, and then explain in a step-by-step manner why none of it could possibly be in accordance with her own identity.
    But the doctor would have none of it. “Do not lure me into rekindling the flames of your punishing wrath!”
    Let us pause and say that in the very broadest sense, the doctor caught Margaret off guard. Margaret Taub was a young woman who had been living for a very long time without certainties. Trying to establish one now, even in the privacy of her own mind, was almost entirely beyond Margaret’s capabilities, like trying to switch into the tongue of a long-deposed tyrant. Her attempts to counter the woman were sclerotic, if not to say completely lame.
    The doctor, meanwhile, was still rising to her full vigor. “Listen tome,” she was saying. “The role I am going to play is neither that of gynecologist nor actually that of mentor. I will act as memory surgeon. I think that is better than going to the police.”
    Margaret’s face went cold. She lay her head back on the table and took several deep breaths. A madwoman. A “memory surgeon” the doctor called herself. Colors swam at Margaret’s eyes. At last she ventured, using her most accent-free German—and it was true that in this moment she did something peculiar: she adopted the problems of someone else, carried the whole situation over onto herself with an aptitude at which she later wondered. “I do not
mind
,” she said, slamming the last word into the room, “that I can’t remember.”
    And the doctor pounced. “So it’s true that you can’t remember?”
    Margaret was breathing with difficulty. She was going to be “cured,” she thought, just as if she were Margaret Täubner. “I’ve had problems with my memory. I admit that,” Margaret said. “But that—that doesn’t mean I’m Margaret Täubner.”
    The doctor was barely listening. “My dear, a patient of your type—the type, that is, I’m assuming you are, since it seems you are clinging to your illness invidiously—is infatuated with the nonexistence of the past. Recovery is like falling out of love.”
    “No,” Margaret said, shaking