too early.
Specifically, then, it was the city of Berlin. It rolled into a new phase all on its own, while everyone slept except the taxi drivers loose on the sun-smeared boulevards. By eight o’clock, it was already done.
The city transformed into flesh. When Margaret awoke, there was no stucco or timber any longer, only human flesh and bone. Pygmalion’s Galatea as Berolina, though the name of the lover who craved the city and wished her living flesh, no one knew.
Emerging from Number 88, Margaret turned her head up to the sky, and there before her eyes were the city apartment houses, all of them made flesh. And how severely the sun cut through the windows! What an effect of blush and glow, the sun purpling through the skin webbing, as through diaphanous alabaster in late afternoon church windows. The external walls of the buildings swelled and contracted, so heavy with life that the skin stretching over the façades seemed to veil a giant fetus or a set of opulent organs: hushed, lush, and enormous. Or was it not a single set of organs, but many millions of individual, quivering muscles?
There on the sidewalk, Margaret gave a cry of the most injured surprise. She put her hand out to touch the wall of Number 88 and found the house soft, like a woman’s cheek.
There was a spectacular quiet. All the natural sounds: the rumble of trucks, crosswalks clicking for the blind, had gone mute. Instead, out of the silence rose a sound like distant thunder: wide, echoing sighs, breeding themselves up from over the crest of the horizon in the west, symphonic as fireworks going off on every New Year’s street corner, but soft enough to be nothing but the shivering anguish of six-story houses. The city was softening; it was pulped; it was breathing.
Margaret touched the building a second time, sure even now that the change would undo itself. But at the stroke, the contrary: the shuddering of the flesh rushed to the core of her; all her emotions flashed into a loop with the dreaming sleep of the building—flesh of her flesh, body of her body, and she drew her hand away in reflexive pain.
Margaret looked off down the street, her eyes unsteady. This street, the Grunewaldstrasse, was a commercial paradeway, assembled during the hustle and razzmatazz of the 1890s; for years now, nothing but an old dog waiting to die. The shops once grand sold junk furniture, chop suey, and lottery tickets. Pigeons nestled undisturbed on the decayed moldings.
Margaret looked hard westward, down the ray of the street, toward what had once been called Jewish Switzerland, and there she could see the spires, high roofs, and art-nouveau windows glinting and winking: the architecture of lost wealth. The endless view was wonderful—it had a trick of simultaneously revealing and concealing the splendor of times lost, a hologram somewhere between a vision and a memory.
Just then she was startled by a sound very close to her. It was Okhan from the Döner bistro, emerging from Number 89 to tend his little restaurant. He began heaving rusty café tables onto the sidewalk for the day’s customers. Margaret breathed hard, waiting for him to lift his head. But Okhan, when he finally did look up, gave only a distracted nod. He appeared convinced he would catch the last of the sun revelers, putting out first tables, then chairs, then plastic flowers, although it was so late in the season. A wind blew dead leaves into spirals, and even with the crush of sun, there was a chill now and again washing across town, leaving goose bumps on the walls of flesh.
Yes, the wind blew, and the buildings exhaled. Margaret looked back into her own apartment house through the carriage entryway and saw Erich, the Hausmeister, delivering in-house mail to the tenants under the arch. He too was going about his business as if nothing were awry.
Margaret began then, with a quiver of uneasiness, to suspect she was alone. The city had changed, but only for her.
She strapped her bike lock onto the rear rack of the bike with a bungee cord; she blinked back loneliness, and a feeling—what was it?—a feeling of having been betrayed.
She was scheduled to give a tour, a three-hour walking tour of Third Reich sites. What made her head feel strange and heavy was this: if the city center were made of flesh as here, then she would have to look at the horrific transformation all through the