The History of History by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

seemed to recognize him either, even after six years in the flat. Yes, she didn’t seem to know him, and although she never withdrew that half-smile, she also never looked at him. Her eyes always found something to rest on off to the side. Perhaps it was for this reason that he continued to say hello: there would be no satisfaction in withholding his friendliness if she wouldn’t notice him doing it.
    Today he watched her. There was something more distressing about her as she locked up her bicycle, more wild-eyed. (Recall: this was the very day the city turned to flesh.)
    Erich said
Guten Tag
and Margaret gave a kind of cry, as though shehad been about to scream but quickly suppressed the noise before it escaped. She turned her head and took a few swaying steps toward her stairwell, paused as if to regain confidence, and then darted away like an animal into its burrow.
    Erich took off his gloves and went in his own ivy-covered house. He opened the file cabinet in the downstairs room that was black with weeks-old cigarette smoke. Without much trouble, he found the heavy notebook he was looking for, thick with several paper clips holding in loose pieces of paper.
    It was a diary. He had found it once in the trash, along with a number of Margaret’s other belongings. He had held on to it only as evidence, should it ever come to that: evidence of the outrage!
Some
people in this building, they threw reams of paper matter thoughtlessly together with the general trash!
    (The irony—that Margaret with her obsessive privacy, her self-isolating ways wanton in their thoroughness, would be hounded by precisely such a busybody as this. She had thrown the journal in the general trash expressly because the paper receptacle was dry-looking and odorless—it seemed a comfortable place to dig through and steal from. The general trash, the foul-smelling option, appeared to be a roiling abyss that swallowed up far more conclusively. Little had she known!)
    Erich thought, now, that he would read the diary. The English would be a struggle. It was the English that had stopped him from perusing it before. There had been, however, reasons to learn English once, reasons having to do with international anarchism. And, Erich told himself consolingly, he liked a challenge.
    And then it happened that Erich the
Hausmeister
read several long passages Margaret Taub had once written. He became quite interested; he encountered a Margaret very different from the Margaret he knew. The American, it seemed, had not always been as she was now.
    February 18, 1999
    (Ah!—Erich thought—an old diary then, from when she first moved in. Not a bad thing at all.)
    My dearest diary,
    Why do I write to you? Why do I write!!! I’m in love, you see. And I’m too proud to really talk to anybody about it (not that I know anyone here anyway) because honestly, I’m afraid I’m inlove in the most terrible way—the way of taking oneself and one’s situation too seriously, of the mind brushing over the same sad fibers of conversation one had with the beloved with such loving repetition that if it were alcohol, I’d have passed out long ago.
    It’s Amadeus. I’m in love in the way I thought only thirteen-year-olds could be and I haven’t felt anything close to it for such a long time and the terrible thing is that I don’t think he loves me back. It’s ridiculous, this kind of full-blown sweet torture, that the poets know so well and is so utterly ridiculous, where one vacillates between intense ecstasy and intense agony throughout the day, because one feels as if one were walking a tightrope where falling one way will mean waves of joy unknown to humankind and falling the other way will mean the darkest hell. Your mood simply depends on which possibility you take most seriously at the time. Meanwhile, you attempt to stay on the tightrope, because that way at least you preserve a chance at the ultimate beauty. For instance, you would never attempt to force the