a tour-like commentary.
Margaret hummed to herself to keep her mind at rest. She led the tourists a bit farther down wide Stresemannstrasse than she had ever been before, and turned into Möckernstrasse. One side of this street was empty. Bombs had knocked out all the old buildings, one winter day.
In the distance, Margaret caught sight of the abandoned post office; the L-shaped building reared up on the corner. The building was bony, shuttered and prehistoric, as if the street were the hall of a forgotten and half-empty museum, and the building was the skeleton of a Pleistocene beast in a shadowed corner, dusty and massive. Its façade was punched out in looming vertical lines—ribs of massive bones.
No, Margaret saw, leaving the route of the tour, she had not escaped. This building too was a carcass; the smell was enough to throw you down—a mass of bone drawn over with flesh decaying; blackened and bruised, rigid and retracted, a mutilated corpse.
The main entrance on the corner loomed. The opaque glass doors were shattered and covered in graffiti. Looking closely, Margaret could see a tattoo in the rotted flesh—a globe traversed by a banner emblazoned with the word Post—that had been partially eaten away. She turned her back to the building and faced the group. “This was once a post office,” she began unevenly.
The group drew up around. They seemed to sense her uncertainty. Margaret went on in a more brassy tone. “The entire district of Northern Kreuzberg was flattened in a single daytime raid on February 3, 1945. The raid was meant to decommission the train station. It also killed three thousand people. Almost everything was destroyed; only one building in fifteen survived. This building had the most miraculous of escapes: it wasn’t hit, but the land in the crook of its L-shape was. If you look through the window here, clear through to the other side of the building, you’ll see a bomb crater filled with water; it’s as big as a lake.” The tourists craned and peeked, but the windows were opaque as though the smoke of a long-ago fire had left them murky, and there were mutters of dissatisfaction. Margaret beckoned, and they followed her down the road to the far end of one of the arms of the L. On the opposite side of the street there was a mess of heavy trees on the bombed-out land, with a jungle depth to its green—the crush of foliage cast a shadow like a stain.
Here, on this side, beyond the end of the post office, wasteland stretched farther, partitioned off with falling-down sections of barbed-wire fencing. The Queen Anne’s lace sprouted unhindered; nothing had happened here for years. Through the metal grill, the back of the building could be seen. It was an unadorned pink lump of rotting flesh.
And just as Margaret had promised, a bomb crater filled with water, a great pond, sat in the crook of the L, like a welt of saliva before receding gums.
“What does this building have to do with Nazis?” It was the man from Florida.
Margaret grabbed the wire lattice of the fence with both hands, peering through to the back entrance of the building. The door of the back entrance to the post office was missing. The empty hole was alluring to Margaret, like the entrance to a cave: a windy, unprotected void, unbelievably dark. Why did it appear as if wind were blowing from it? A memory came to Margaret of a cave she had once visited in South Dakota as a girl. In that place, there is a vast underground cave, with many miles of subterranean tunnels, but on the surface of the earth, almost no trace: only one tiny hole, no bigger than a rabbit’s burrow. Margaret stared at the dark entrance to the building, where the weeds outside were bobbing, laden with air, bowing and swaying in the artificial wind. Margaret was quiet.
“What does this have to do with anything?”
That was the Floridian again.
“In the basement of this post office was the central bureau of the Berliner pneumatic dispatch,” Margaret said. “Before the war, there was a total of three thousand kilometers of vacuum tunnels connecting every post office in Berlin. A dispatch could be sent through the vacuum tubes from Ruhleben in the south to Hiddensee in the north in twelve minutes.”
“Does it still work?”
Margaret made a descending whistle: a bomb falling. “Almost everything was destroyed,” she said. “But the bureau was connected by a tunnel to