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