Rachel Marker and her Book of Shadows - Excerpt

The Woman with No Memory and the Burning City

She did not, of course, recall when--or why--she had come to the city, but she had been told by G. that she was staying in the heart of what had once been Fast Berlin before the fall of the Wall.

She had rented a room from G., a high-ceilinged room on the second floor above a cobbled courtyard. From her window, she could look down both on the courtyard and across to the building in front of hers. Each day she studied its scarred walls and empty windows and watched the men at work as they mixed wet concrete in barrows and hauled boards up to the roof.

Each day, too, she sat by her window at a long wooden table, her diary and pen to one side, waiting to record a memory.

None came.

She began instead to read volume after volume of the books she had found in a box under her table. At first with no comprehension, but with distinct pleasure, she would turn their pages; slowly, however, she began to read with more understanding.

She read meticulously, voraciously.

One day she read, smiling to herself, Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." Another day was spent with Jorge Luis Borges exploring his circular ruins, gambling in his lottery of Babylon, reading in his library of Babel, and meandering through his garden of forked paths.

She accompanied Borges into his later years (she had discovered in her room's mirror that she, too, was old), musing with him over "Shakespeare's Memory," which he had published three years before his death, and wondering how many years it would be before hers.

She climbed the ladder that evening to her loft bed, where she lay awake for a long time before sleeping fitfully. At first in a dream she saw Paracelsus's rose miraculously revived from its ashes, but later, just before dawn, she entered a burning city.

Each morning after this she would wake up with horrifying memories--hers?--of running through burning streets, around her falling bombs, houses, and bodies.

She filled her once-empty diary with descriptions of the burning city, and on the once-white walls of her room she painted blood-red flames.

Moira Roth, Trefethen Professor of Art History, Mills College, Oakland, California, published her first volume of collected essays in 1998: Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage, with a commentary by Jonathan D. Katz. In addition to the projects mentioned above, she is writing From Far Away, a cycle of poems, and collaborating with composer Pauline Oliveros on The Library of Maps, An Opera in Many Parts.

The Magnifying Glass and the Binoculars

One day, as suddenly as it had seized her, the image of the burning city ceased to haunt her.

For the first time in weeks, she leaned out of her window to look at the empty building opposite.

Calling out instructions almost continuously to one another, the workmen were knocking out walls in the basement and piling up discarded bricks on the cobbled courtyard below her. On the top floor a radio was playing Turkish music. From another nearby building, a crane hovered in the air, alert, like a creature seeking prey.

Startled by all the outside commotion, she began to close her window--only to discover on its ledge a magnifying glass and a pair of binoculars.

She decided to read, but even with the help of the magnifying glass she could decipher neither the handwriting in her diary nor the print in her books.

She waited uncertainly--not panicked, but perplexed as to what to do next.

In the evening after the workmen had gone and the crane was motionless, she left her room and walked up several flights of stairs to the roof. There she stood with her binoculars surveying the city, until finally, laying them aside, she looked up for a long time at the constellations in the night sky.

It was midnight when she left the rooftop to walk down the stairs, past her room, and along the ill-lit corridor to the massive wooden door that opened onto the courtyard.

Here she selected a handful of bricks, gathered them in her arms, took them back to her room, washed them, and tenderly laid them out to dry on the window ledge.

It was still dark when she fell dreamlessly asleep.

It was late in the morning when she woke up, dressed, and walked out to the street, only to discover that she had been living at Schlegelstrasse 9, a block away from Chausseestrasse 12.5, where Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel had finally set tied after World War II.

A few hours later, standing at Brecht's desk, looking out at the Dorotheenstadtischer Friedhof where he and Weigel were buried, she remembered her name, Rachel Marker, and while in Weigel's kitchen, her first blurred memory surfaced.

In the nearby burial ground, Rachel Marker stood beside the grave of Brecht and Weigel with its plain low pebbled wall and green bed of plants, austere except for the surprisingly bright pink-white fuchsia plant in the middle.

Camera absentmindedly in hand, she accidentally pressed the shutter release. It was only later that she discovered the ghostly shadows of the grave that she had mistakenly recorded with her camera--suddenly a wave of sorrow came over her, more intense than her sorrow at the gravesite. Somehow these images were more real to her than her own presence at the cemetery had been.