The History of History

THIRTY-FIVE • The Glow


The next day, the day everything came into its own, was a sunny day. The sky over Berlin pulsed clear as an unmolested snow globe, with the same magnifying fisheye. All was calm. In the Kleistpark, on her way to buy a liter of milk, Margaret saw a large animal, what may have been a Newfoundland dog.

The buildings around her—it was not clear any longer of what they were made. Sometimes Margaret looked at them and they seemed to shudder slightly as they had in the old days, even blush, and then one or the other might heave a sigh. This seldom happened, however. The architecture of Berlin was more convincingly of stone and stucco and steel than it had been in a very long time.

Had her bicycle chain not fallen off the back gear, Margaret might even have thought that all was coming back into order. She was forced to get down to pull the chain back on, however, and the sun shone hotly on her back. She crouched on the sidewalk, her hands smudging with the dried-out grease, her face twitching, and it was then the thing came.

She nudged the chain around the back gear and there it was. A long, dark, barreling shadow flashed under the ground. The earth was translucent—a two-way mirror. Shadows moved underneath it, and Margaret could see through it.

This is the nature of guilt—foreboding emanates from all things. Everything inexplicable will be understood as a promise of looming punishment. Guilt will change every last aspect of behavior, if you let it.

The chain took to the back gear at last, and Margaret began to ride toward home, but again as she crossed Martin-Luther-Strasse, the shadow passed under the earth from west to east at high speed, and Margaret could see down through the asphalt to the dark thing below.

Even as her heart raced, she was reminded of something. What did this remind her of?

She knew. The way the black shadow revealed the transparency of the earth was the way a mouse running under the ice at Sachsenhausen reveals the transparency of the snow. What might today’s shadow be if not a displacement of time? For a moment, Margaret had a feeling of profluence.

The shape underground was many times larger than a mouse. Margaret considered what it could be. Of course, it should have occurred to her at the start: it was the subway train. The U7 line runs east-west under the Grunewaldstrasse, so it was the train, like the dark mouse, that betrayed the earth’s translucence.


Margaret studied the earth for a while, and then she looked up. When she did, something caught her attention as it moved along the sidewalk in the distance. An enormous form. It came from down along Barbarossastrasse, near the dark, shaded fountain that runs in the middle of the roundabout, so sibilant under the sycamores. The thing was slow on its feet, picking along with head lurching rhythmically forward and back, like a great avian camel.

It held Margaret’s gaze. She recognized it. As it came nearer, all was confirmed: it was that enormous bird of prey, none other than the aquiline Magda Goebbels herself.

The hawk-woman was approaching.

Margaret would have had time to remount her bike and quickly pedal away if she had chosen. But she froze, she froze. She knew she must stay. If she did not face the bird now, the bird would stay with her all her life.

There was the hawk-woman, large and ugly, picking its way down the street, and there was Margaret, ready for her. And now, just as before, the bird began to shrink and molt as it got close to her, leaving a trail of sooty feathers in its wake. By the time Margaret was standing face-to-face with the being, it had become the woman in her moldy, old-fashioned clothes, the long-dead Magda Goebbels.

“Margaret!” the woman screamed in her bird-voice, “You ninny! Have you been avoiding me?”

“No,” Margaret said. “You know I haven’t.”

“What is it then? Are we pals?” Before Margaret could answer, the hawk-woman answered for herself. “Of course we are. We’re thick as thieves. I’ve got somewhere fantastic to take you now. Somewhere I know you’ll like.”

“Well—” Margaret began.

But already the woman was growing and expanding, ballooning back into her bird shape—and next thing Margaret knew, the bird was pushing her giant head into the space between Margaret’s legs. She had come at her from behind—so Margaret was somersaulted onto her wide back, and by the time Margaret was righted, they were rising above the city.

The air struck Margaret’s face not unpleasantly, but the journey did not last long. They came down already on Möckernstrasse, in the weed-strewn vacant lot just behind the Nazi-era post office.

“Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig!” the bird screeched. She dropped Margaret to the ground in the back, by the muddy pool of water—the bomb-crater pond. The side entryway to the building was gaping.

The figure—half bird, half woman now—beckoned to Margaret. It seemed they would enter the ruinous post office through a gaping, windy hole where there had once been a door. Margaret stepped over the high threshold.

Through rotting floorboards, weeds were growing. Slips of light came in the smoked windows. The hawk-woman led Margaret to a large round hole in the floor—it was the beginning of a spiral staircase that was hidden in the twilight. The stairs circled down into the ground.

At first Margaret resisted, but the hawk-woman came up behind her in the gloom and pushed insistently, until finally Margaret went, the hawk-woman close behind. Deeper and deeper they twisted into the underground.

Low and even light came from the walls of the stairwell. These glowed with a soft, green luminescence. Margaret put out her hand and touched the wall to steady herself. She lifted it to her face and saw the hand was covered in dissolved powder—a shimmering green.

Margaret felt weak, unsteady. The farther down the spiral staircase they went, the less clearly she could think. Her thoughts became muddier and muddier, and shortened, too. The underground, it seemed, was the place where long thoughts came to die.

The spiral went on. Margaret’s mind waned. Her feet fell against the stone steps, and she had no prospect or expectation. Something went lax within her.

The stairs opened on a passageway and Margaret’s powers of observation dimmed even as the lights grew brighter. Along the corridor, there were candles in holders that made the green walls shine tacitly, like emeralds in the rough. Margaret was now behind the hawk-woman and followed her through corridor after corridor, turning many times.

At last, the hawk-woman turned into a doorway.

Margaret peeked in. It was a hot, blazing chamber that she saw over the threshold, a small room filled with many burning candles. And not only candles. Floor to ceiling, stacked, were thousands of tin cans. They were piled in giant cubes and pyramids like houses of cards, cans with labels marking sardines, marking green beans, marking coconut milk and olives, and cans of paint too, and bicycle oil, and gesso—and cans without any labels at all. Some cans had labels in styles of ages long past, others were modern, all preserving hermetically everything that can possibly be preserved. On top of the cans sat candles, flames flickering, each one dancing to its private tune. The candles dripped wax liberally—and made a cheaply chemical, floral perfume.

In the very center of the room, there was a railing made of tin cans welded together. Inside was a dais, also built of cans. And finally, on top of this dais was an enormous chair, high-backed and imposing like a throne.

The hawk-woman climbed up and sat down in it.

Perched up there, affectedly, her knees drawn tightly together and toes pointed mincingly side by side, the hawk-woman took a golden cigarette etui out of her alligator-skin pocketbook and also a fine lighter of the same metal. With her manicured hands, she put a cigarette to her lips, struck the lighter’s cap, inhaled, and let out a puff of smoke, the hanging, left side of her face shivering with the effort. She turned her head. Her heavy brow hung low over her eyes. Her grey suit was of a fine moiré (gone was the gabardine), and the waving water patterns of the moiré shook Margaret’s eyes.

The hawk-woman spoke.

“Margaret darling, you pretty little thing.” She inhaled sharply. “You’re to stay with us here now. Congratulations. This is quite the club.”

The cans, the light, the wax—they ate the oxygen in the room, and Margaret thought perhaps this was the reason she could not breathe or think.

Through the cotton of her muffled mind, fear took her.

The hawk-woman pulled out a pair of pince-nez, put them over her half-slack face. She looked up at Margaret. “You’re such an obstinate little gnat. You insist on repressing your merry little life.” She reached into a short cabinet that stood next to her tall chair. “But I’ll help you, Margaret, I’ll help you to be mindful of who you are.” On her crenellated tongue, Margaret’s given name corrupted the air like a curse.

Already now, Margaret began to draw her neck away from the hawk-woman, but the creature’s hands were moving, she was pulling out a glass cylinder of the type used inside of pneumatic tubes. She was checking a long label down its spine; first she rejected one glass tube, and then another, holding each one up to the light. Finally she let out a sharp breath of air.

The woman’s hands lifted the glass tube in triumph, and her veins, in the heat of the room, were popping out of her skin. They were emerald green veins like the walls in the underground corridor.

The image of the woman’s hands was too much for Margaret. It crossed another image—a ghost image in her mind. In that moment, a gentle minor chord sounded. Two negatives were projected onto the same piece of silver nitrate. The two images crossed, matched, glowed, sang.

“I don’t want it,” Margaret began. “I don’t want to see anything.” But her eyes misted over as if to become one with her misted inner eye and her clouded mind. She could hear the hawk-woman’s voice, but fading now—“Then don’t read it, little ninny, you needn’t read anything you don’t want,” she was saying, but her voice was growing fainter and fainter. The woman’s hands were dancing still in Margaret’s mind, losing all but their lacings of emerald veins. Skeletons they were, skeletons made of arterial vessels carrying blood back to the heart.

And so they carried blood back to the heart of Margaret. They reminded her—a memory floated toward her as though a ship doubling in size astonishingly on the far horizon, growing into a nocturnal glacier before her eyes—they reminded her of a letter from her mother. She had read a letter two years ago, when she, Margaret, was enormous, ready to give birth. She had been so staggered by the thing, she had linked it with the undesired child. She had never wanted to see anyone in her family again after that letter, including, even including, the child—her nearest kin. The letter from her mother—Margaret’s head swam. She remembered, as though it had always been burnt on her retina, the letter of August 2002, when she had been told that she had not always been Margaret Taub.

An envelope, postmarked New York City:

Dear Margaret,

I haven’t heard from you in a long time. I know you’re hurt. I’ve done my best. I’ve really done everything. But you have hurt me too, you know. You can’t imagine what it does to me, that you insist on living in that city.

I found the enclosed letter in his things. I’m sorry I only found it now—perhaps it would have been a consolation to you to have it earlier, but after the funeral I couldn’t bear to go through his papers for a long time, and before that, well you know how he was when he came home from the hospital. Actually, I don’t think I ever told you the worst of it.

Please get in touch. It’s horrible for me that you won’t get in touch.

Love,

Mother



Another sheet of paper, folded into a small, tight triangle at the bottom of the envelope, was recognizable by Margaret’s father’s usual habit. Across the triangle, MAGGIE was written in block script.

Hi there, Girl!

Summer’s winding up. How’s camp been treating you? Your mom says you like it there.

Gas prices are sky-high. I happen to be very familiar with the topic of rising gas prices. Your mother took me on a vacation. Two weeks outside the hospital! Back now from 1½ weeks in Vermont. Great trip. Alphonse is reputedly dead (he was an old dog), not there with us in the flesh, but regardless of that arguable supposition, we routinely get Alphi’s point of view on most everything during the trip. He slept a lot less than usual (as we hear from him at the hospital as well). Some say I shouldn’t tell anyone. But we really experience Alphi with us daily everywhere we are, because he’s really there. But then, you are family, and so I’m sure you understand. Alphi doesn’t really care that gas prices are so high just so long as we get up and go someplace “good.” “Good” he defines as where there’s swimming. He likes to play in the shallows.

Anyway, there I go running off at the mouth, forgetting the subject at hand. Unpardonable given the gravity. I want to tell you about my old dad … your Opa. I found the paperwork.… They had him on trial during the war. They let him go free. But here’s what they wrote about him before they did. This is what the Nazis wrote up about him, just so you know.… Even the Nazis knew what he was … and this is just a sample … although my bad translation.

In Riga the SS-Sturmmann Wüstholz ordered the Jews to beat each other to death, at which time it was promised that the survivors would not be shot. The Jews did knock each other down, but not to death. The defendant [my old dad] got in the fray and beat the Jews and also hit Jewish women in the face with a whip. When a break was taken, he played on the harmonica the song “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind!” [You Are Crazy, My Child].





He used to play that song to me, Margaret. That’s how I got singing it to you, before I knew any of this. Before I had done “research.” Anyway, this is why your mom and I changed the last name. That asswipe can rot in hell, and I won’t hear his screams. Otherwise, with my special hearing, you know I hear very well. Sometimes I hear the real pine needles in the forest, and the pins and needles as they go into my old dad’s sides. I always hear him screaming down there. Even the devil feels the heat of the fires they’ve got down there, and when it’s your own dad especially, you can hear him scratching and clawing and just trying to get out of the lakes of fires they’ve got down there. But I won’t hear the screams, I haven’t heard them since we changed the name. It was a simple thing. When you were four years old, I guess you were too little to notice, a few days after your birthday, we did it. Just from Täubner to Taub, but doesn’t it fit? We became the Taub family. (You know what Taub means, right? Deaf.) I know it’s hard for you to understand. I thought I was helping you if I didn’t explain. If I didn’t tell Maggie what kind of an old Opa she had, she wouldn’t hear the screams like her dad did. Little Maggie, you were a good girl. We used to have another name but maybe you can accept that and love the new one as I do. Your mom is the one who told me to tell you. She said you were old enough now. Don’t give your mom any trouble, okay?

Well, nice talking to you …

Good luck with your life,

Love you …

Your Dad

P.S. Any misspelled words are stickly (see, I typed strickly …) typos. And grammatical styling is for purposes of camouflage.





Margaret remembered her father’s letter. The hawk-woman on her throne was still murmuring and hissing. The woman made sentences, spinning the chubby glass cylinder around in her emerald fingers like a baton, laughing raucously, although Margaret could barely hear her for the pain.

Margaret closed her eyes. Fear and pain both know how to paralyze. Still and hard, the body careens to a stop; the rabbit’s heart slows its pound. When Margaret opened her eyes again, the white ink of the light in the room pooled around Magda Goebbels on her throne, her mouth flickering. She prattled on, and still that raucous little laugh was tinkling out of her. The light rose up, and her avian eyes were gemstones sitting in wax.

All at once, she leaned in. Margaret’s breath stopped; she felt the hawk-woman nearing. Fear paralyzed her, but she was paralyzed too by what she had remembered—of her father, the spinning cyclone, and her grandfather, the harmonica-player, and of herself—she had carried a little child, and she could not bear it, she could not bear it.

The sensation of the hawk-woman coming closer burnt Margaret’s skin. She had a sense of grand-scale entrapment.


And now shall be told of something else. Now shall be told of how Margaret’s eyes were plucked entirely away from memories of her own kin and flesh, for the sake of the hawk-woman.


It began when the monster spoke a single sentence, a sentence that caused the collapse of an essential support beam. At first, Margaret was sure she had misheard it.

It sounded like the woman said: “Look at you, Margaret—you’re so thin,” in a tone of vain and humbug envy.

Margaret looked up at her. She looked at Magda Goebbels through a veil of despair, but, still, something in this phrase was too familiar.

Magda Goebbels’s antiquated pianola style had thrown Margaret off the scent. But abruptly, Margaret thought she knew her kind.

It was a kind Margaret had run into many times. Always Margaret had associated it with chewing gum, flatulence jokes, and America.

You meet her in every cafeteria, in every extended family, and beside every swimming pool. The woman is jazzy, and probably she’s rich. She makes a show of asking you about your sex life when she first meets you. She pulls you onto her lipstick team further by insinuating half-truths sotto voce about women of mutual acquaintance. Before she knows you, she says, “You and I have more in common than blood relatives, babe,” and if Margaret gropes for the right word, she interrupts to say, in a diction far younger than her years, “Wait, oh my God, are you one of those wicked smart people? You look like one of those.”

But always with this type, soon the good feeling turns. It seems at first coincidental, but it is not: she has a husband. And although this viciously tennis-playing woman might speak irreverently of him to begin with, telling you something hilarious about, most likely, his penis, it invariably turns out she has a pedantic, mulish, pharisaical sense of submission to him. A prim and stiff-necked blackout in her sense of humor slams shut whenever there is discussion of his views. And if the marriage has gone sour, then the devotion will jump seats: to her political candidate, her pastor, maybe her thesis advisor. Whatever his title, tears will spring into her eyes when she speaks of “what he has done for me.”

Always he has done a great deal. Because for herself, such a woman has no hope. In her own mind, she is as helpless today as she was at her birth. She has pinned her shadow to the wall of him, like a side of ham hung up to dry in a smokehouse.

Yes, Margaret knew this kind very well, it is nothing at all, and the hawk-woman, as Margaret saw her now in a fine mist of bubblegum scent, no longer had the slightest riddle or sharpness or even spook to her venal, bawdy, sanctimonious grasp, and Margaret thought for a blistering instant: I am done with her.


Some things have no meaning at all. The bright flames crested the sardine cans and danced. Margaret looked at the hawk-woman up on her dais. But now, recognized, she was for a moment not frightening at all, and a new energy filled Margaret. The cloud of ink light puddled and pooled, erasing the edges of the woman’s moiré dress. She sat huddled on her throne, crestfallen and poor. Margaret stepped sideways and moved back toward the door. She looked at the chamber and the rout of gleaming, dripping candles, and the still, waxy being—half woman, half hawk; half dead, half alive; half wax, half stone.

Margaret heard a shuffling: a trembling of wings. And then the figure on the throne gave a whimpering sigh, and all at once she was made of stone. She froze into soapstone, and the lower half of her—it began to turn to powder and stream away like sand flowing through the waist of an hourglass.

Margaret’s heart lunged. She was released. She took three heavy steps backward, scraping hard on the stone floor of the cellar, and then she turned on her heels and ran. She ran, hard and fast.

Out of the chamber and down the long hallway she ran. And although the hawk-woman just a moment before had grown shabby and disintegrated, now the figure had a final gasp of power over Margaret’s mind. The hawk-woman might transform herself again and come flying at the back of her, ready to fall on her and take her down from behind, hold her pinned to the ground in her domain. Margaret ran hard; she did not know how to get out, but she took a turn to the west whenever she sensed there was such a turn to take, thinking that in this way she would eventually reach home, through the catacombs reach Schöneberg, although it occurred to her—something—oh so terrible, made her shake: the basement of the old Nazi post office had been built with a tunnel connecting it to Hitler’s New Chancellery and, from there, the tunnel went on and led to the bunker underneath Gertrud-Kolmar-Strasse where Hitler spent his last days and where he died with Eva Braun, with his dog, and with his dog’s puppies. Although now the chancellery, thank God, was destroyed by the Soviets, Margaret thought that without knowing it she could run the wrong way, run underneath Anhalter Station and finally find herself in the collapsed bunker, and there perhaps take a false step and trigger a terrible and complete collapse of the remains, and nothing—nothing could be more terrible than to be buried alive in Hitler’s bunker, suffocating in the old Nazi mess, and she, Magda Goebbels, the hawk-woman, with her manicured talons, would welcome Margaret into the shadow life.

Margaret went up and down short flights of rusted stairs, forced her way over loose rubble, peered into crannies, saw toilet bowls that had overflowed many decades ago.

She ran through other chambers and recognized the walls from photographs—high murals there, depicting prick-legged SS officers with arms in deltoid shields draped like fangs to the ground, standing over voluptuous maids: reclining nudes, amateur renderings of the Venus of Urbino.


Margaret’s spirit was a March river as she ran, and the surface was floating with ice floes, thick as pontoons. Broken apart in a grid the ice was; waters churning and boiling under it; the great, bulky sheets slammed into one another with miraculous antagonism, with a natural hatred—wham, wham and again, and Margaret was afraid and kept running.


Her heart thumped, the waters churned, the ice floes slammed. Finally, Margaret found herself in a basement that was neither the waterworks nor the catacombs, and at long last she saw a staircase going up.

She came out in a crypt—a church basement. She came up even farther and saw where she was—it was the church of St. Matthias, at Winterfeldtplatz, and the nave was a cool breath over her head, a billowing arc. Margaret was panting hard and the stitch in her side had grown iron teeth.

All she knew was this: she wanted to climb up into the cool air, away from the underground. She found the wooden door to the bell tower. It was locked, but Margaret threw her shoulder against it, her lungs burning. Again and again, she slammed herself into it; she was hurt, the pain in her shoulder was terrible, but the lock broke after all and the door flew open, and Margaret fell inward with it. She righted herself and began another long ascent, but this time into the soft sky—up into the tower and the clouds, and already she could smell a fresh wind.

As she climbed the stairs, she looked up.


It is remarkably easy to conflate one kind of guilt with another. Guilt is a quicksilver that loves its brothers; it flows naturally according to its own code of gravity, eager to rejoin its own, and in the final reservoir, there are no distinctions. But Margaret, ferocious now, would not let any hawk draw her into an alliance. If her father’s father had been that sort of man, then it was all the more crucial that she should not be that sort of woman, for strength of identity is the only protection against clannishness, nationalism, and other forms of incest.

Margaret climbed and her mind cleared. And then, as if out from the rising movement in her legs, came the memory of another staircase, to test her newfound strength. The oval staircase. She remembered climbing that one as well.



She was going to see Amadeus, her body not large yet, although already she could feel the child moving. His terrible letter had still not come, but would soon, after this event.

On this day, she had looked up above her and seen him smoking at the top of the stairs, leaning over the banister. His wife did not allow him to smoke in the apartment, and he was not meant to smoke in the stairwell either, but sometimes he did. Margaret could smell his Gauloises Rouges, and the red flax runners, and see the ash fluttering down. She called up to him. He did not answer.

Margaret was almost at the top, and she called to him again. He heard, but the door slammed. He heard her and he was gone.

She was spurned.

The slam of the door. Nothing would ever be the same.

Just when her spleen was most suffocating—when the death of hope was purest—a bird flew into the convex skylight lifting plump out of the roof. The glass shattered and fell in drops of light, oh the solidified rain!, and the bird—it must have died at the moment of impact—it landed all the way on the basement level, coming down softly like crêpe. Margaret saw it fall down to the tiles, defeated at last. She saw it fall all the way down, from high above.

The falling bird marked her mind.

Soon after, Amadeus’s letter came. A green-white mold began in her. Whether or not she was her lover’s child—an affair within the family, that had happened. Ecstasy, submission to a homeland messiah, a pollination between flowers of the same plant, a country slimy with the Heimat semen of its father, rejecting outsiders violently for the sake of a love affair with its own blood—that had happened. It was as unbearable as anything in memory.

So Margaret did not think about Amadeus. She wiped him from her head. His letter about the affair with Sarah, her mother—she threw it out, she washed it out.

But the eradication brought a disease. The more Margaret did not think of it, the more she thought of other things—the bird, for one—breaking the glass. Each time she did, her throat went tight. She choked. The birds of Berlin began to twitter in poison-tipped chorus then, truncheoning her, and when she pressed away all memory once and for all, it was the birds that flew into the holes left behind. The pigeons stoppered the pocks on the faces of the houses; the birds of Berlin did not cease their chatter.


Margaret braced herself against the graduated walls of the church stairwell. Yes, the birds had marked her mind, moved in where memories should have been, and holding on to the railing to prevent her dizziness from toppling her, Margaret posited a new idea. “A sleeve of time” she called it, a carousel of amnesia, in which all moments are fixed for eternity as soon as, and precisely because, they are forgotten. Fixed eternally and so eventually, when they do return, as return they always must, swallows from Africa, they will be reincarnated as exotics—flies and trees and monsters and trams.

If meaning cannot be assigned to the things of the heart—the things from which meaning springs and to which it belongs, then it will come unmoored and swim unspecifically. And if it swims unspecifically, it is not only the flies and trams and birds and architecture of Berlin that will be impregnated. The entire general world will become heavy with the structure of the private mind. The ghost enters the inanimate and the inanimate enters the ghost. The doctor had said it long before Margaret had ever wanted to hear it.

What the doctor had not described, but which gripped Margaret now, was the consequence. When nothing is assigned a specific hook on which to hang itself, nothing is outstripped. The sleeve turns itself inside-out then rolls rightside again, only to go inside-out once more: a merry-go-round world, a world of hyper-meaning, a world of eternal return at once heartbreaking and estranged: a history of ever-returning history.


Margaret ran her hands along the sloped brick walls of the throttling spiral of the church stairwell, narrow and full of dust, its walls leaning toward her as though a traveling and slanting vortex, and felt her dizziness pass. Margaret’s mind opened like a night flower.


She reached the top of the belfry and came out into the air. The day on which her bicycle chain fell from the back gear had not yet died, although she felt as if she had been underground for years. She leaned against the railing and the afternoon sun leaned with her, at an acute angle to the city. In the sharp light, she could see the three-dimensionality of things. She looked down at the palace courthouse in the Kleistpark, looming in shades of bright and dark, and at the high-windowed Gymnasium standing next to it, and the hulking bunker from the Second World War that stood behind them both. She saw the fresh green of the leaves catching fire on the orange light.

Again she thought of the sleeve of time. She had been still, and the city, rich unto itself, had moved inside-out.

She blinked, and it came upon her that now she might have the strength to find out the twist of things. She could begin to discriminate what was horror and what was romance, what was myth and what was life; which were signs of despair and which were signs that the city, polyphonic and great, had become a single, monotonous expression of her yearning for things elusive and lost.

With her gaze draped over the roofs below her, Margaret felt a hidden door, tangled in her mind’s ivy, come free and crack wide. All around her, the city was dancing for her a last time.

Across the quiet, humanity-scrawled land, the steep auburn roofs of the Martin-Gropius-Bau reared up; the Landwehr Canal, winter swans in the crooks of its banks, turned and shifted its course. For Margaret’s inner eye, the swinging afternoon sunlight in the empty upstairs ballroom at Clärchen’s Ballhaus glowed upon something hidden: a parallel life behind mirrors. The faces of the dead rose into the bark of the sycamores along Puschkinallee, and Georg Elser, shot to death in the weedy prison yard of Sachsenhausen, moved gently in the sleep of the grave—as if to tell Margaret he knew it all; the houses on Grosse Hamburger Strasse grew steeper and taller out of their chrysanthemums, and the iron eagle on the Weidendammer Bridge rustled its wings; the Wall fell and fell eternally, the crowds surging through the carnival night; the small, broad body of Rosa Luxemburg landed in the canal with a platsch; and although Margaret could not see him, she could hear him: the Brazilian man who had come to Berlin just to see the Stadtpark where his mother once played under the golden stag as a girl—as he opened his mouth to sing tra-la-la.

Warm curtains closed and opened around her mind. Through the fabric Margaret could see alternating shadows, a correspondence between prisms.

She blinked. The sun was down. Now, only the dusty wooden floor of the belfry porch hissed underfoot in the dark.

But in that moment, a feeling of beauty took hold of Margaret—a feeling so rich it dwarfed death. The door in her mind opened and the narrow glimpse turned a magnet key in her eye; she felt light seeping out from the base of her skull. A heavy stone shifted, and the warm curtains billowed no more than by the breath of an insect, but exposed for a brief instant, in the heart of the city before her: a red jewel with a flame inside it, red at its core, arching corridors raying in every direction, toward every fine thing, every decipherment.


Margaret breathed and was flooded. When she would have to die, it would be remembering this.

The sleeve of amnesia holds a mystery—a shadow, an innuendo—that is a weaponry of beauty; it makes of the mind an arboretum, the inkling of lost and hidden things a wind shaking down all the tears left unshed, like fruit from a storm-rustled tree. For good or ill, whether it be necessary to outgrow it or not, the mystery inside the ever-inverting sleeve is an engine to power the task of living, or conversely, a form of deathlessness.

And a ghost, a ghost is the leftover resonance of a style of being, the intense and prolonged sympathetic vibration, in this world, of a life in the next. Once, caught in the sleeve of time, Margaret split herself in two and released a ghost of herself. The ghost went lost and wandering. But now here it was, coming home again.