The History Of History Part 13

The woman tilted her head back and looked up at Margaret. Then she picked up the plant and plopped it back into its pot. "I'll do it when I get to it," she said. "I won't be in Field D for a while yet."

"All right," Margaret said. "That sounds good." Margaret took care to again nestle the pot into the ivy.

The woman hustled away at high speed, bobbing up and down.

Margaret turned and walked out of the cemetery. She thought: Better not make any grand gestures again. She felt tired, and foolish. She rubbed her head. I have no place here, she thought. Again she saw the white daisies on the blue dress of the gardener. It represented something to her, something about the broad world with all its salt and pith getting funneled down into the strings that tie a sausage together. At some point, every person must make a pact with futility.

Her bicycle she had forgotten in town, and the heel of her shoe was coming loose as she walked back to the tram stop. It flapped against the cobblestones, flip-whack. She walked down the cobblestone road. There were sparrows on the ground by a high chapped-flesh wall, little tan and twig-colored nothings, picking at seeds. Margaret felt her chest hardening with pain.

The same day, Margaret returned to the Schoneberg archive. She thought, at the very least, she could find out what Herr Strauss had done for a living, or where the family lived before they moved into the apartment on Salzburgerstra.s.se. Her desire to know more felt like a heavy hunger, a longing for milk and oil, and in any case still desperate.

The archivist with her dancer's body silently took down two heavy address directories from 1939 and 1941. Each listed address and occupation of Berlin residents by name, and together they peered at the Gothic script. There were twenty-three Franz Strausses listed in Berlin in 1939, and sixteen in 1941. None of them resided at Salzburgerstra.s.se 8. Just to be sure, Margaret checked the 1943 directory as well. Nothing.

As Margaret prepared to leave, her heart sinking, she said to the archivist, "The name is so typically German. It hardly seems like a Jewish name at all." The archivist, like most educated Germans scrupulously careful when it came to what sounded and looked Jewish, gave Margaret a glance of feigned incomprehension. After a brief silence, however, she chanced an observation: "It isn't really a Jewish name. What did you say the full name was?"

"Franz Strauss."

"Just listed as Franz? No second given name?"

"None."

"Well then, he most probably wasn't Jewish."

Margaret caught her breath. Her face became hot. She saw what the archivist meant. The police would have recorded him, according to n.a.z.i law, as Franz "Israel" if he were Jewish, just as his wife was listed as Regina "Sara." The family must have been mixed.

Margaret knew she should not be, knew it was nothing more than a detail, but still, she was crushed. When she got home, she looked at her photocopy of the police logbook page where the family's death was registered, and saw confirmation in the margin. A longhand note, so baroque as to be almost illegible, which she had not before even bothered to decipher, read: "Bericht an Stapo mit dem Hinweis, da.s.s Nachla dem A.G. Schb. ubergeben wurde, weil der Haushaltungsvorstand Arier war." So it was even specially noted that the head of house was "Aryan." Margaret had been blind.

In light of this new information, it was unclear why the family would have had to die. She had checked already: mixed couples were not rounded up with the others, not in Berlin. Officially, the decision at the Wannsee Conference was to wait until after the war before considering the eventual extermination of the mixed and the mixed-married, a dangerous position for the Strausses, but not deadly, not in 1943.

How was Margaret to understand their decision?

They could have saved the children, she thought. It went through her mind again and again. Wasn't there anywhere they could have sent the children? It was common, she had found in her reading, for the children of mixed families to be sent to non-Jewish relatives, where they were pa.s.sed off as war orphans, of whom there were in any case so many, particularly after the bombings of cities began.

And then Margaret was reminded of something else. When she was a child, a friend told her at a roller-skating party (this was a friend with eyes like a forest sprite) that she, Margaret, was a "mongrel." When she went home, she told her mother. But her mother did not, would not, tell her what the word meant. But she looked at Margaret and said, "Maybe you are a mongrel."

Her mother was tired and unpredictable. At least, that was how Margaret remembered it.

That night, Margaret was awoken abruptly from a dream.

There was someone in the bedroom.

She could hear the noise of frantic and uncaught breath.

In a ball of fear, she lay quiet.

It took her some time to realize she herself was the one making the sounds. She was lying in bed, breathing hard. Her fingers were rigid, stuck in claw-like shapes, her body curled.

Sometimes, before he had gone to the hospital and stayed to live there, her father had shut himself in his study and would not come out, even if Margaret beat on the door and called to him. His breathing behind the door-he sounded as though he were on the verge of death, and her mother led her away, and explained to her that her father was panicked and afraid.

Such sounds frightened Margaret badly. She felt her own panic creeping when she heard her father's panic, and in her place under the desk in the long apartment on the Upper East Side, she began to escape.

At first it had been a picture in a book that was the portal. It was a picture of an old woman riding in a basket in the night sky, surrounded by the moon, planets, and creatures with pointed heads. The picture frightened Margaret, but not like life frightened her. Life, when it frightened her, made her feel that all the edges of her body were under attack, a kind of arachnophobia: a sensation of infection and infiltration.

But when the picture frightened her, it was kind. Its terrors had power, and depth, and even scent, yet at the very same time, it all remained far away. And if she looked at it correctly, the picture could be seen to have more than one surface. It was into this picture that Margaret began to disappear, filling in more and more detail of the world beyond the depicted, where the woman hurtled through the night sky-up and up, rising toward the moon, visiting cities made of lapis and alabaster, floating palaces with mile-long hallways and trapdoors. After some practice, Margaret could enter the picture without the book. She closed her eyes and saw the road into the sky. It was very smooth, with a surface like Chinese lacquer. She slid along the colors away from the brown apartment, at first with vague partic.i.p.ation but later much more completely, so that when she came back from the reverie, it was as if she had slept.

And so now, Margaret could feel it: she wanted to ride the rainbow, to again have the sensation of riding through the night in a basket on a band of vivid color.

She knew the story of the Strausses was slowly fading and thinning for her. The mystery was not at work. The mystery should have made the story echo and resonate-mystery is the great enhancement of the unknown-but instead, the mystery was quieting them out. And the problem was this: she could have lived with any element of their story remaining unknown but one-whether they were right. If she did know their location in the moral world, then they would disappear from the physical world.

In the next days, the card game at the kitchen table came to a complete halt. Margaret herself was the one who stopped playing. Her mind was tired, and she thought the story was at an end.

TWENTY

The Violence of Nostalgia The Violence of Nostalgia

The mistake was made: the muscle of her mind had slackened, and all it took was an instant: the beast sidled in. The tent poles fell and the tent too, and there was nothing to block the coming animal.

Restless, uneasy, Margaret went walking in the next weeks. One night she went east, walked away, out of Schoneberg. She crossed the railway lines that form the border with Kreuzberg. She stood on the bridge over the emptiness between the districts. Alexanderplatz sparkled distantly over in the center of town, and under her, the railway cut grooves ever more deeply into the land, like water over centuries chafing deeper into a riverbed.

On the Kreuzberg side, the apartment buildings were tenement-like, covered in tattoos. On the Schoneberg side, there were gold rings on the chimney-fingers, but also much crumbling bone. Looking off toward town, Margaret felt a wayward love.

Down in the ravine where the train ran, a wan field opened up on the side. A dilapidated Biergarten Biergarten, shut for the winter, rested darkly. A narrow stairway led down from the street above. Up on poles, dark lights were strung around the tables and benches, and the dead wires looked skeletal; light too is a kind of flesh. So here: a skeleton of the summertime.

Margaret was drawn to it. She climbed over a low gate, and went down into the empty Biergarten Biergarten. She sat on a chair and drew her body together for warmth. She closed her eyes.

It was no coincidence, the Biergarten Biergarten. She had known it from before, from her earliest days in Berlin, her first attempts at independent spring living: people with beer mugs in their hands shivering in outdoor cafes, crowding themselves into blotches of kingfisher sunlight in the p.r.i.c.kling early spring air. Margaret tightened her eyes. It was the skeleton of the summer, and she was younger then. She remembered her first days.

Nineteen years old, a fresh arrival from the new world to the old, her eyes flashing. Her first day, she hoisted her suitcase off the baggage belt at Tegel, and already that same afternoon, an electric pulse in her fingers shocked anyone she touched, so great was her sense of possibility.

She was free, her father dead of cancer after years of frightening mental illness, a terrible quarrel with her mother behind her-and her bag hoisted from the belt and it was as simple as that: she was on her own. That first day in Berlin, her back arching, rising toward the sky, she was greeted by an old man in the subway station, a man she had never seen before, with the words, "Mein Liebling! Ich liebe dich!" and then kissed on the neck, on the platform with the train rushing by and the man gone before the train was. People seemed to sense intuitively that any overtures toward her would not only be welcomed but ratcheted up.

Margaret came to Berlin fleeing, but she also came to Berlin running straight into the arms of her dead father. Her father she had loved like some quintessential thing. He had been mentally ill, he had fought his cancer only weakly, but through all this, she had seen him as though he were cradled. Off in the haze, he was miniaturized but not diminished: he was a tiny, perfect figure so small as to be invisible, running back and forth in the palm of her hand.

Now she had come to Germany to study her father's "soul," as she called it. She was interested in everything he had been interested in. His paranoid mind shot like an arrow to the Stasi, to the CIA, to the KGB, to the postwar reconstructed n.a.z.i party in South America, and so Margaret too was interested in these things. She did not put any stock in his paranoid fantasies, but her veneration for him coalesced with her estrangement such that his obsessions seemed dignified and only coincidentally wrongheaded. In fact, such organizations became, to Margaret, a form of evil nebulous and mythical, not terrible at all.

In any case, her first Sunday in Berlin, she was already trying to know him. She set off to meet an old friend of his, and she felt, in antic.i.p.ation of this meeting, almost as if her father would come along with them, return from the dead out of old friendship. Her father had always spoken of this man with moist-eyed fondness: Amadeus Vilnius, Slavist.

The man on the phone, when Margaret heard his voice, did not disappoint, either: he sounded over the wires like pebbles brightly colored under water.

They agreed to meet in Friedrichshain. From there, they would walk to the Soviet Monument in Treptower Park. This destination, too, was chosen meaningfully: Margaret's father had talked about it once. He spoke of it using both hands, his thickly lensed eyes and hoa.r.s.e voice becoming emotional.

It was on the platform at Ostkreuz, then, that Margaret Taub first saw the man she would always want to see. Later, not a single thing about that first moment went lost. This was how it was: the station was nothing but a knot of criss-crossing platforms, and on that sunny, first-spring March day, the damp air was filled with coal dust left over from the winter. Crowds moved toward the ring trains on the overpa.s.s above and toward the East-West axis trains in the shadows below, and Amadeus got off the train in these shadows. At first, he too was in shadow. But as he drew closer to Margaret, he came into the light-she remembered it so well-and the world seemed to tilt into wonderful alignment. He was dressed like a student, in dust-covered black corduroy guild pants with two gold zippers, a coa.r.s.e sailor shirt, androgynously s.h.a.ggy hair, and a rosy face. Everything around him seemed to instantly become a part of him: on the whitewashed station walls, letters were stenciled-networks of exposed wires filigreed the sky, grids of windows gave a Bauhaus effect, and the world seemed to be smoking its grandfather's pipe. The station felt as if it were held together with black electrical tape, and Margaret's spirits rose like a baby's hand toward the unfamiliar flame, automated beyond reason.

Not long after she picked him out in the crowd (he told her on the phone what he would wear) she waved at him. Amadeus saw her do it. And already then, something strange occurred. He saw her wave, and he recognized her, but he looked away.

As he came closer to her, too, there was something overcharged. The first thing Margaret thought was: What beautiful eyes he has. And the thought was perhaps too simple and pure for their relationship. A single note had been sounded bell-like and left to vibrate a long time on its own.

She moved her mouth and said h.e.l.lo; he nodded and inclined his head away from her. Yes, it was an awkwardness too much for strangers. She filled the silence-babbled about coming to Berlin to study history, and Amadeus laughed quickly, made a derisive comment about the field attracting "the morbid pedants of the world," although she knew he was himself a history professor and he must know that she knew it, and the second thing she thought about him was, How diffident he is, and how sour, but it did not stop her from following his face with her attention, her body frightfully still.

From Ostkreuz they walked together to Treptower Park. And in some subterranean part of her she began to feel, walking next to him, as though she were attractive and delightful to men. Who knows from what source such feelings well up in some company but not in others.

On that Sunday, the entire population of the Eastern city seemed to have rejoiced at its freedom from the cave of the indoors and taken to the park along the river. They pa.s.sed Biergartens Biergartens where the old ones in their polyester were dancing to oompah-pah, small children went by on tricycles at astonishing speed, almost knocking down the lumbering flaneurs in their paths, the ducks were back, and when they stopped, Amadeus festively bought two where the old ones in their polyester were dancing to oompah-pah, small children went by on tricycles at astonishing speed, almost knocking down the lumbering flaneurs in their paths, the ducks were back, and when they stopped, Amadeus festively bought two Currywurst Currywurst from a stall, claiming from a stall, claiming Currywurst Currywurst a great delicacy, and even too, whatever it was between them disappeared for a moment; we should not overstate the initial attraction. A few minutes long, Margaret looked at him and briefly thought him ridiculous; he seemed foreign in a foolish, foppish way. a great delicacy, and even too, whatever it was between them disappeared for a moment; we should not overstate the initial attraction. A few minutes long, Margaret looked at him and briefly thought him ridiculous; he seemed foreign in a foolish, foppish way.

But finally they came to the Soviet War Memorial, the object of their wanderings, and it was here, beneath the Russian soldierogre with German babe in arms, so large that directly beneath it you could not even see it, that everything went irrevocably awry. Specifically, Margaret asked Amadeus to explain the names and platforms of the German political parties, and while he spoke, he looked once into her eyes. It took him a long time to explain, and their eyes met several more times after that as well. Margaret's entire chest began to expand, and a sense of unbelievable suspense and fear and almost painfully sharp antic.i.p.ation overtook her. It is only illicit love that causes such gargantuan arousal, and that is a great misfortune.

By the time they were climbing through the bushes and over a fence to get into an abandoned amus.e.m.e.nt park, Amadeus, a bit out of breath but eager to appear fit, had begun to incandesce toward her, with a bright firefly gleam of attention. Breathlessly he declared that she was "very well read," although later he would insinuate that she was just good at fluffing.

And then once as she climbed over a barbed-wire fence partially caved in-they were trying to get back out again-she smiled particularly broadly over at him and he said, "You know, you look very much like your mother when you smile," and Margaret said, "You don't know my mother," and he said "Doch, once I met her. Before you were born, your father brought her back with him one summer," and Margaret was surprised at this and shivered. She had not known her mother ever made such a trip; her mother had never mentioned it. But it made Margaret feel all the more of a pounding in her chest, that he was no stranger to her history. He had known both her parents in the time before she was born.

Later that day, the two of them still together although night had come-chapters of time fell by so quickly, it was extraordinary-first in the park and then later a friend of his joined them in a cafe: a short, bristle-haired man named Florian. Then in another cafe, then in a restaurant and then in a bar, Amadeus made money quickly appear and fly into the waiters' hands before Margaret could move to pay for herself and like magic, a relationship of dependency sprang up between them. After the comment about her likeness, Amadeus never again mentioned her mother, nor, more strangely, did he ever again mention her father. It became-how can it be explained? It was not even as if he and Margaret had met by chance. At least that would have been mentioned. The reason for their meeting was left so unspoken that it was as if the circ.u.mstances had been some terrible crime.

Margaret misunderstood this. She took it to mean he was uncomfortable talking about her father's troubles: most people did not know how to talk about mental illness, and Margaret was used to that. Also, she sensed Amadeus was the sort of man who could not address death and other stirring things-exile, separation, and betrayal. He was both too soft and too hard for it. When the heat is too high in the oven, the bread becomes stone-hard on the outside while still almost liquid in the middle, and later when she got to know him better, she found this intuition regarding his character had been correct, and so she left it alone. (To her later regret.) That night already it began-the love affair in his freezing, coal-heated second apartment, where Margaret's little envoy of the heart to a world free of advertis.e.m.e.nts found its perch, in those loose, cool, summery years after the end of Communism and before the beginning of true capital; a society breathing out at the end of state control but not yet fighting toward wealth, light-headed, perhaps slightly flaccid and all-embracing, a slacker student of the new, like Margaret herself.

In those early months, Margaret began spending the night with Amadeus regularly. She remembered in particular how very cold his place was, even in the spring, and how he still needed to feed coal into the oven, which he would often forget to do, so the corner room, with its high balcony over the silent street, at the far eastern end of Friedrichshain, gave off an odor of cold, and of unforgiving, oxblood-painted, dusty wooden floors. She remembered that his bookshelf held Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics by Bakhtin, and this book fascinated her. It was also in these months that she began to wear a perfume that smelled like freesia flowers, but ritualistically: she only wore it when she knew she was going to meet him. Then to lie in the coal-smelling room with the book, on the sheets which were cold to the touch but clean-smelling, over the mattress on the floor which was even colder against her bare feet, and lined with coal powder mixed with the smell of freesia, and he would speak to her of his other women, and she felt safe and coddled despite that, or maybe because of it-she thought to hear of his other women drew her into a society with them, and all of them were foreign and hidden and preserved outside of time, like flowers pressed into oil. It is terribly seductive to have a style in which to think of oneself. by Bakhtin, and this book fascinated her. It was also in these months that she began to wear a perfume that smelled like freesia flowers, but ritualistically: she only wore it when she knew she was going to meet him. Then to lie in the coal-smelling room with the book, on the sheets which were cold to the touch but clean-smelling, over the mattress on the floor which was even colder against her bare feet, and lined with coal powder mixed with the smell of freesia, and he would speak to her of his other women, and she felt safe and coddled despite that, or maybe because of it-she thought to hear of his other women drew her into a society with them, and all of them were foreign and hidden and preserved outside of time, like flowers pressed into oil. It is terribly seductive to have a style in which to think of oneself.

Once, she remembered, he told her that his favorite novel was Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time A Hero of Our Time, and gave her his extra copy. She took it home to her much warmer, more modern apartment, and read it through in one afternoon and evening.

She remembered the night after she finished reading this book; it was very late and she was alone, the light glowing yellow around her like a sickness. A horrible sensation of fear and misgiving crushed her, a certain knowledge that in choosing this man she had chosen wrongly; that any man who loved such a book, where a cavalier draws all his romance and exultation from the bittersweet moment when he leaves his beloved behind, could only be rotten at his soft core-what she knew from her boarding school days Mary McCarthy would have called a "dangerous neurotic."

But what did it mean? What was the ailment? She thought that night for a long time about Amadeus. She thought about his tendency to love her more, chase her with greater consistency and desire when she was running away from him. She had wanted to give it a name, to know whether she herself was at fault for having dived into the shallows of a heart such as his.

But at the same time, even after that night-and mark, she never completely forgot the realization of that night-her love for him only grew. That was the contradiction. The love became a world unto itself. It was both the liability and the fallback plan; her undoing but also her reward for bearing up under the undoing, the forest of pain, but also her comfort as she wandered lost in that forest. The itch of it, the painful itch of the love that would not cease; the inability to think of anything else when inside such a circle of longing and incomplete satisfaction and longing again-none of it was capable of coming to an end.

Margaret opened her eyes in the closed-up her eyes in the closed-up Biergarten Biergarten, now returned to herself. Several types of pain snaked through her at once. The day in Treptower Park wavered, the tail of it at least, before her eyes, and then fled. In its place, her eyes filled with a blackness the color of pressure. She was on a folding chair in the cold night air, in the defunct Biergarten Biergarten by the railway tracks. by the railway tracks.

Slow on her feet, she walked back to Schoneberg, her mind gone black and old.

She thought: I was wrong to remember. To remember is wrong. Memories-true or not, enactments of any kind, attempts at experience inside the head, playacting with neurons hidden behind the bones of the skull, are the enemy of life. It was the doctor who first taught her that.

On the Hauptstra.s.se, a 148 bus pa.s.sed by her in the night, and she looked into its aquarium lights as it pa.s.sed. In the back of it, she saw a girl sitting in a black overcoat over a sailor-striped shirt. She and the girl had the same wide-set eyes, the same long bones, the same skin dotted with moles. The pa.s.senger's veins had the same streaking presence behind the freckles. Margaret saw with absolute clarity and certainty this time: it was Margaret, another Margaret, it was no one but Margaret herself. She was riding up toward Prenzlauer Berg to visit her lover, the older man, the friend of her father's. She was still traveling up there! And the bus pa.s.sed by and the young woman was gone, but Margaret was left on the street shivering and shaken.

Curtains closed around Margaret's eyes, there on the pavement. Through the diaphanous fabric she could see the alternating shadows, the correspondence between prisms. She heard a radio far away in a high window, playing a tin melody she thought she already knew.

There was something else, Margaret thought, something else she was meant to remember.

TWENTY-ONE

Escape from Berlin Escape from Berlin

The next day Margaret woke up to another changed city. Even before she went outside, chords at the bottom of her mind-and dark they were, dark and in a minor key-suggested that her memories had wrought shadows. Her insanity was slavishly returning.

It was the sky this time, the sky that was rich, the sky that was moving. Specifically, from the heavens, and all over Berlin, dangled rope ladders. Many thousands of rope ladders, and the day was overcast, so these ladders swayed down from the iron-white sky like silken threads of rain, all through the air, over the rooftops, jangling and swinging with life, coming to a ponderous end several meters above the surface of the earth, although some of them dragged against shingles, dipped into chimneys, obstructed the paths of pedestrians.

The rope ladders had an effect on the city's flesh. The long, rainy skeins of rope caressed and flicked the rooftops, and there were spasms and convulsions.

The effect on Margaret: the ladders drew her eye up into the sky. A dangling rope ladder is nothing if not an invitation. Berlin seemed infinitely expanded-its coordinates recast, a new dimension beckoning.

And now shall be told of an adventure of Margaret's mind that had the result of making her fright, which until then had been uncertain and porous, become tight-acting as a sealant, as it were. The rope ladders were an invitation, and Margaret did not turn it down.

She looked and wondered why no one was climbing the rope ladders into the sky-such a natural thing to do! Okhan at the Doner bistro, and the tiny woman with her giant husband who ran the bakery, the Armenian woman hanging out her cobwebbed window, and the bushy blue-eyed dogs at the Internet cafe-all were going about their business. Except, unlike last time, Margaret saw this, took it in quickly, and did not miss a beat. This is what she had come to expect-she and the world would always diverge.

One ladder near her hung alluringly in front of the art supply store, and she let her eyes drift up, let her head flop back. High up, the ladder was lost in the low clouds.

Margaret had a dizzy feeling when she looked up there. She felt herself reflected as in the endless gla.s.s world opened by two mirrors facing each other, a sentinel glimpse into the featurelessness of eternity. Margaret took off her felt hat and clapped it over her chest. She wiped her hair away from her face but the wind blew it back into her eyes.

She went upstairs and called her boss at the tour company. Her tours had been irregular lately and with scarce work there was scarce money, but now, despite that, she would cancel her tour that morning. It left her boss in the lurch, he would be put out, but she couldn't help herself. Margaret would accept the challenge. She would climb out of Berlin.

She went back outside. With the new goal in mind, the ladders seemed to go on even longer before they met the clouds. It seemed an awfully long way up. Wouldn't it be easier, she thought, if she started from a point already high in the sky?

But there was only one great hill in the flat city of Berlin. This was the Teufelsberg, the mountain in the Grunewald Forest on the outskirts of the city.

She rode to Nollendorfplatz and took the train to Zoo Station. She carried her bicycle into an S-Bahn car and began the ride out into the Western suburbs. Near the Grunewald, already before she got off the train, an unctuous sense of deja vu laid its fingers on her.

Still on the platform, she knew that below, at the mouth of the station, she would find a small tavern with a gravel garden, outdoor tables, and a black picket fence.

And lo, at the exit to the station, she found a tavern with a graveled terrace, collapsible tables made of wood and iron in obedient rows, and a black picket fence. Just as she had thought of it: the kind of place where you can buy Wurst Wurst and beer, an old place, a summer resort for the Wilhelmine pet.i.te bourgeoisie. Margaret could feel the women of 1910 in their summer cotton dresses and petticoats, the portly men in waistcoats, dancing to a bra.s.s band-she felt it as if she had put her hands near a fire and come upon a wall of heat. and beer, an old place, a summer resort for the Wilhelmine pet.i.te bourgeoisie. Margaret could feel the women of 1910 in their summer cotton dresses and petticoats, the portly men in waistcoats, dancing to a bra.s.s band-she felt it as if she had put her hands near a fire and come upon a wall of heat.

And all the while, the rope ladders swayed above.

She took out her city map, unfolded it to its farthest Western grid, and once again, when she saw the scheme of streets, with the pattern of the encroaching woods and lakes, something about the lay of the land struck her as familiar and terrible. Her aim was the Teufelsberg, Devil's Mountain, the highest point in Berlin, but her fear was almost too strong to continue. The map grinned up at her in its yellow and blue cover from the bottom of her bag, with cackling, mocking familiarity.

Margaret made her way through the streets of suburban houses, and the gardens of the homes were small here, the dwellings seemed to shoulder up on her-there was an atmosphere of inst.i.tutionalized eavesdropping.

Margaret's bad feeling peaked when she neared the end of the road. Here the street quit abruptly and left off for the navy blue of the pine forest. She stopped still. She would not walk forward into the Grunewald Forest. As surely as the seagull with flute-hollow bones cannot fly into the storm, she could not go on.

She decided her bicycle was the way to make an effort at proceeding. It was the only way of having more momentum than fear. She mounted the bike and set off precariously. She rode along the brambled path. Her heart beat but her speed was a salvation. She pedaled, and several times her skinny front tire was bested by one of the branches that lay in her path and it skittered off to the side. She did not end up on her back only because she was gripping the handlebars with such force.

The forest broke and a freshly paved road opened up before her. An elderly pair of men were walking down it.

The men were speaking Russian. They were laughing. They were drinking from a shared flask. Margaret asked if they knew where the Teufelsberg was. One of the men, his craw pink and loose, his German broken, laughed at her and gestured toward the west. After she pa.s.sed them, she looked back over her shoulder and wondered what these two were doing here. It was her first thought outside of fear in a long time, and with it she noticed her misgivings pa.s.s. All of a bright sudden she was thinking with optimism.