The History of History - Couverture souple

Hattemer-higgins, Ida

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0307474380 ISBN 13 : 9780307474384

Editeur : Vintage Books, 2023

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Part I

Flesh

The coming awakening stands like the Greeks’ wooden horse in the Troy of dream.

—Walter Benjamin

one · The Persistence of Documents

The oceans rose and the clouds washed over the sky; the tide of humanity came revolving in love and betrayal, in skyscrapers and ruins, through walls breached and children conjured, and soon it was the year 2002. On an early morning in September of that year, in a forest outside Berlin, a young woman woke from a short sleep not knowing where she was. Several months of her life had gone missing from her mind, and she was as fresh as a child.

She sat upright. Her hair was long, her clothes made for a man: stiff trousers, a slouch hat, and a long woolen overcoat, although underneath she wore a pair of high-heeled boots.

South of her chin was the body of a harem girl—a luxurious body moving lithely, ripe with the knowledge of its strength, youth, and loping good health. Her face, on the other hand, was the face of a mandarin, overcome with sensitivity and perpetual nervous fatigue. The dirty postcards of the French fin de siècle sometimes show women of this kind: even while offering their bodies with abandon, such females wear faces charged with the pathos of intellect, growing kittenish with leery, fragile, world-weary grins. All in all, Margaret looked like someone who would find trouble, or in any case already had.

The night hung low. Margaret cast her eyes about and saw the birches. She reached for her bag—a leather briefcase lying slack beside the tree she leaned against—and noticed in the movement that her hand ached. Both her hands hurt, and she did not know why.

For want of a better idea, she stood up and began to walk. Twigs cracked under her high-heeled boots. The sound startled her.

She came to a brook and put the bag on her shoulder and her hands down on the stones and picked her way across on all fours. The woolen overcoat dragged in the water. She saw by the aging moonlight that came through a break in the young pines that her palms and fingers were rubbed deeply with dirt, so deeply it looked as though they were tattooed with it, although the skin of her wrists was clean and shining.

Margaret found the edge of the forest as the day came, as the air turned grey and smoky. The slash of birdcall was shrill; it blotted out her thoughts for a while, and she stopped wondering what had happened in the night.

She found a dirt road, and then asphalt, villas, green awnings, slate roofs, wheelbarrows and hibernating rosebushes, and finally Grune- wald Station.

By the time she was riding the train homeward into the city, Margaret was becoming afraid again, but after a new style. No longer did the threat sit at her throat. Now it lay in the marrow of things. She saw a perfectly miniaturized beech leaf pasted with wetness on her sleeve, and it seemed a souvenir of bad and mysterious things. She looked at her dirt-printed palms and did not know why the dirt. She shifted her body on the plastic seat and felt the drag of wet fabric, pulled aside the overcoat and heavy red scarf. She saw her clothes patched with bluish pine needles sticking to the wetness, and on the hem a displaced ladybug made its slow way, and she did not know why there was evidence of so much nature, of so much disorder.

The roofers, the chimney sweeps, the deliverymen on the early morning train—they looked at Margaret’s windswept face and saw an expression rarely seen. There she was in her heavy wool, her face with its broken parts even heavier, and you could almost see it: she was crushing under the strain, trying to modernize herself to match the day. Some fine imperative had gone missing.

The S-Bahn train pulled into Zoo Station and paused. The cold air rushed through the open doors. With a heave of strength and puffed screech, an intercity train came to a halt on the neighboring track, and a platform clock struck six with an audible spasm of the minute hand. There was a chime over the loudspeaker: the announcement of departures to Lyon, to Trieste, even to Amsterdam, and the crowd on the platform shifted like a hive.

The doors shut and the train slipped into motion. Margaret looked out through the milky graffiti scratched in the window. There was the glory of the morning city, and soon, intermittent through the trees, the gilded angel in the park caught the light. A woman walked under the bridge in the Tiergarten, on cobblestones the same color as the automatic pigeons picking between them. She wore a narrow white scarf and pushed a pram, and her hair blew up toward the sky with the wind.

Margaret looked away. She looked down at her knee. She saw the red and black insect crawling there. She frowned. Her lips turned under. She felt a fury and an envy and a sense of starvation. She reched down, and with two fingers, she lifted the checkered insect and held it in her hand.

She closed her eyes, but there was no escape.

She hauled her eyes open again. Sleep frightened her as well. She looked out the window through smarting eyes, her right hand cradling the crawling beetle, and then she saw, but now in the far distance, the woman with the white scarf, and again the wind lifted the woman’s hair toward the sky, and it was like a scream.

All it took was a tightening—the red and black beetle became a streak of syrup on her hand.

She could not help it: Margaret slept, sinking deeper toward the window, her knees nudging the knees of the woman opposite, the membranes of her eyelids so pale they were translucent to the shock of the sun. She dreamt terrible dreams.

She woke up at the end of the line at Ahrensfelde, in the grasses and trees again, but the morning was no longer in its early tooth, and she was on the eastern edge of Berlin instead of the west. She had slept through her transfer at Friedrichstrasse. It was a train employee who woke her. He asked to see her ticket. Margaret jerked her head up. She reached into the breast pocket of her heavy man’s overcoat and found an American passport, soaked through and reeking. She fingered the pocket on the other side and found a laminated student ID with its semester train ticket.

When she got home to her apartment in Schöneberg, she was so light that, moving toward the bedroom, she hardly had to walk, lifted by a wave and thrown against the surf.

One Margaret, then, a more solid one, pulled herself under the covers and slept hungrily, and another one, a shadow of the sleeping girl, went into the wardrobe and took everything out. She carried it all down to the courtyard and heaved the clumps of clothing indiscriminately into the trash. She came back up to the bedroom, where she slipped in with the sleeping Margaret again, and they were one.

When the reunified Margaret awoke from the third sleep, it was a new planet. On this new planet, she went back to her old life.
TWO · The Glass Globe

Margaret Taub was her name, and she worked at Hello, Berlin! as a walking-tour guide. Every day she marched a gaggle of tourists across the length of Berlin—around Hackescher Markt and over the Museum Island, in single file down Unter den Linden, through the Brandenburg Gate, south beyond the dust-white construction sites, and along the path of the disappeared Wall. Later they cut through vacant lots to the remains of the Nazi ministries, and ended finally sometimes at the buried bunker of Adolf Hitler, sometimes at Checkpoint Charlie. It all depended on the tour’s theme.

Along the way, Margaret told the customers about the comedies and tragedies of Berlin: the erstwhile cabarets on the Friedrichstrasse and the tirades of Honecker; the night in 1989 when the Wall fell and the night in 1938 when the synagogues burned; the afternoon in 1967 when the students came out for the Shah’s visit; the night in 1919 when Freikorps soldiers clubbed Rosa Luxemburg with rifle butts and threw her into the canal to die.

In the weeks after her emergence from the Grunewald forest, Margaret gave the tours as she always had, and in some ways it was like old times. But the days grew colder, the trees wept their leaves, and—who could say why—she grew strange. She no longer made eye contact with her customers. And whereas before, if she had avoided their gaze, it was because she was either cocky or the reverse of cocky, something like a child frightened of its own precocity, now the inner mechanism had changed. When Margaret’s eyes slid off toward the far horizon these days, it was without a trace of flirtation.

The fact was this—she was entering a kind of trance. Walking the city, she encouraged the events she spoke of to crowd up against her eyes, and everything glimmered. Flames blackened the Reichstag when she looked over to it; on Friedrichstrasse there were nothing but dancing girls in nude tableaux; at the Pergamon, day after day, Peter Weiss was creeping in on his way to clandestine meetings with his fellow socialists, and it was all vivid, and it was all a balm.

Even the so-called present was unnaturally animated. On the street once called Hermann-Göring-Strasse, they were clearing a site for a giant memorial during the months of her “convalescence,” and every time she went by it with the tourists, the site had changed a little and seemed to be growing like a garden. All the pictures of the stages of its growth came together as she walked along its flank, and played before her eyes with the whirring breeze of a flip book.

As for her customers—not looking at them, it became possible not to notice a single one. Sometimes a bolder of their number, usually a gregarious Australian, would trot beside Margaret from site to site, and ask what she, Margaret, an American, was doing in Berlin. It was not that Margaret failed to answer, but these days she replied by rote, almost as if it were part of the official tour script. She had moved to Berlin six years...

Revue de presse

Praise for Ida Hattemer-Higgins’s The History of History
 
“Hattemer-Higgins rangy assemblage of narrative voices is virtuosic. . . . The History of History offers persuasive evidence of an erudite and fiercely self-examining writer.”
—Jan Stuart, The Boston Globe
 
“[An] eerie, brilliant novel. . . . Hattemer-Higgins shows her kinship with H. G. Adler. . . . A remarkable achievement.”
—Sam Sacks, San Francisco Chronicle
 
“[A] profound and unsettling first novel.”
—Anna Mundow, The Boston Sunday Globe
 
“[A] bold debut novel . . . full of harrowing twists—and proves a brilliant rumination on trauma and identity.”
—Carmela Ciuraru, More magazine
 
“A multilayered narrative that finally resolves into a tale of personal trauma. . . . compelling, both in its lyrical prose and in the mystery that it lays out.”
—Charlotte Ryland, The Times Literary Supplement
 
“Take note of this novel. . . . An astonishing act of creation, and a remarkable debut. . . . It’s breathtakingly good, passionate writing, but at the same time it’s carefully considered, almost ruthless prose. . . . Hattemer-Higgins’s world building already reads like that of an experienced master. Her corporeal Berlin comes to life on the page. . . . She doffs a postmodern cap to Salman Rushdie, Kafka, and Angela Carter with her magical realism style, and . . . Yann Martel.”
—A. J. Kirby, New York Journal of Books
 
“A stunning portrait of a person sinking deeper into insanity.”
—Michael H. Miller, The New York Observer
 
“With unbridled imagination and exquisite command, Hattemer-Higgins explodes the concept of remembrance. . . . A bewitching and unnerving novel stunning in its artistry, audacity, and insight.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
 
“An impressive creative exploration of the history of Berlin and the Third Reich . . . for adventurous readers.”
—Joy Humphrey, Library Journal
 
“In The History of History, Ida Hattemer-Higgins tells a profound and heartbreaking story about love and identity, but she also accomplishes something even more marvelous and rare: she conjures a world that is entirely her own. Hattemer-Higgins’s Berlin is hallucinatory and intricate dreamscape crafted over the ruins of history, an otherworld in which Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jorge Luis Borges, and W. G. Sebald would all feel right at home. As compulsive, beautiful, and revelatory as your most unforgettable dreams, The History of History is a masterpiece.”
—Stefan Merill Block, author of The Story of Forgetting
 
“Brilliantly disorienting and as pure-pleasure page-turning as any thriller, The History of History renews for us that old wisdom that the past is not dead, it’s not even past. Ida Hattemer-Higgins’s tale and talent will haunt you.”
—Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances
 
“There is a melancholy in strange cities, an absence of anchors that lets an emptiness sift in. In The History of History, Margaret Taub is adrift in Berlin, her friends, family, and the last few years all lost to her, creating a vacuum that the shadows of the city and of her own family rush in to fill. This is a lovely, haunted book.”
—Zachary Mason, author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey
 

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Vintage Books
• Date d'édition: 2023
• ISBN 10: 0307474380
• ISBN 13: 9780307474384
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 336