The History of History Read Online Free

cheekbones pushed up into the area just beneath her eyes, so that her thickly lensed bifocals rested very high on her face.
    She looked up as Margaret entered. Her glasses magnified her eyes out of all proportion to her head—Margaret was faced with eyes as big as golf balls, of a grey-green color, peering out of lashless lids.
    The doctor nodded knowingly and seemed to coo ever so quietly under her breath—the airy tones of a pigeon. The woman was old, improbably old.
    Margaret also realized, as the woman’s utterances began to amplify, that what had seemed to be cooings were in fact the raspings of a pulmonary disease, emphysema perhaps.
    The doctor spoke to Margaret in a voice of croaks and purrs. “My dear, if you’ll undress—we’ll get started. Let’s begin with a general exam. I imagine you haven’t had a Pap smear in a very long time.”
    Margaret stepped back in alarm. The doctor seemed to be focusing on a point in the middle distance and did not look at Margaret at all. Margaret spoke up. “I’m not here for an examination,” she said. She looked at the woman. “I should introduce myself. I’m—”
    “Of course you are, my dear. I have been concerned for you.”
    Now it must be said: these words should have puzzled Margaret, and in any case should almost certainly have been corrected. Instead, Margaret accepted them like a gift.
I have been concerned for you
. Margaret, in her strange state, was so soothed, her loneliness so instantly assuaged, that she was almost willing to go along with the doctor unconditionally from that moment on.
    Still, she tried. “I got your note in the mail.” She cleared her throat in an involuntary expression of sympathy with the doctor’s wheeze. “I believe there has been a mistake. I’m not the intended recipient.”
    “What if I were to tell you that you are free to be anyone you like?” The old woman moved her hands in the air. She was not looking at Margaret.
    “Oh.” Margaret studied her. Secretly, she felt a kind of vindication. Again, it was the choice of phrase: “free to be anyone you like,” that pealed in her ears. She decided she would play as if she were Margaret Täubner for the time being at least. She did not see the harm, except perhaps to the real Margaret Täubner, if that woman could be presumed to desire an appointment with the strange Dr. Arabscheilis.
    “Where shall I undress?” Margaret asked.
    So they would start with the yearly exam, she thought; so be it.
    The sun fell through the muslin curtains inside the heavy, velvet drapes, and lit up the dust motes in the air.
    “You can undress right where you are,” the doctor said.
    “Right here?”
    “You don’t want to?”
    “Well—” Margaret began.
    “Gymnophobia! I remember now. You were always so coy. There is that same screen you used to use, there against the wall. You can unfold it and mask yourself just as before, leave your clothes behind. Then come over here and lie on the table.”
    Now it was true that Margaret had decided to go along with the misunderstanding, and that was all well and good. But by this time, surely, the woman should have sniffed out her mistake. Margaret was not Margaret Täubner. This was plain as a pikestaff, even to a very old woman. “I remain interested in your fate,” the doctor had written, but now any imposter was welcomed greedily. And because Margaret did not know the meaning of the word the doctor had used,
gymnophobia
, she began to thrust on that term all her fantasies of what was going wrong.
Gymnophobia
—perhaps it was a fear of self-revelation. She even began to develop an image of this other Margaret T. in her mind. She would have very short hair, she decided, and a habit when she was sitting of holding her handbag on her lap, rather than letting it rest at her ankles.
    Behind the screen, Margaret pulled off her trousers. She looked down at the floor and saw that the deep burgundy and intricate pattern of the Oriental carpet