the New Reich Chancellery and the Führer’s bunker. If Hitler had made an escape at the end of the war instead of killing himself, as some people believe he did, then he would have come here, to the basement of this post office.”
The tourists nodded, and Margaret turned away sharply. She began to lead the group back toward Potsdamer Platz.
She did not turn around and speak to them the entire way. When they got to the S-Bahn station, she told them simply the tour was over. Some of them muttered within earshot that it had been a disappointment of a tour. No one tipped her.
Later that same day, Margaret went back to Schwäbische Strasse. She went into the courtyard. When she got to the little door in the back leading up to the doctor’s office, there was a note pinned to it. “The practice of Dr. Gudrun Arabscheilis will be closed for the holiday, from 11-11-04 to 11-20-04.”
Today was only the eleventh. And then Margaret thought of something else. There was no holiday to speak of. She ripped the note off the door. And now that she considered, what sort of practice could the old woman possibly have, blind as she was?
SIX • Magda’s Face
The next day it rained. Margaret did not set foot outside. Several times, however, she went to her window and looked down the Grunewaldstrasse, and each time there were the buildings, softly puckered, pink and tan and breathing under the raindrops. She threw open the window as the sun went down; she looked for the cool shadow. The chill, wet, autumn air blew into the apartment. Winter was coming. Some of the younger buildings had become pinker with edges chapped; older buildings—that was the majority—looked red in harsher tones, as if they were bursting into flame. The vague, soft scent of flesh, stronger than the smell of coal dust, had already become easily recognizable.
Yesterday was repeating in a flashing loop in her mind. It was drawing her into a repetitive circle. Instead of swaddling her memory in sleep and slipping it away as was her custom, Margaret was sifting through the day before with both hands.
The hawk-woman with the ax. Margaret knew very well who the woman was. It was Magda Goebbels. Magda Goebbels—Joseph’s wife.
That evening, she began to read a biography of Magda Goebbels. She had read this particular biography once before, but she was reading it now with new eyes.
And it was that evening as well that she had the first of what she would later call an episode.
It began about thirty pages into the book. She had a sensation as if a bright light had been switched on, or as though she were drunk on red wine and a searchlight were coming in through the window. And whereas she usually read with systematic attention, tonight her interest was untamed and frantic, full of desire, like the need to scratch an itch that has already been scratched to blood. She was making some unsteady attempts at note-taking as she read, but again and again she stood up from her chair, went out of the room, brought herself back, and just as soon was ready to run out of the room again. There came a horrible pleasure, a pleasure that was laced with a kind of shame—her heart was overflowing. Even her handwriting changed: it was crabbed, controlled only by its extreme miniaturization and intense pressure of the pen. She came to a description of Magda Goebbels’s corpse when the Russians found it after her suicide, and the thing struck her so—she felt the need to copy the entire passage into her notebook. Each time she tried, however, the gremlin of her gaze went wild: she mangled sentences, unable to concentrate for the time it took to move her eyes from book to notebook. But still she would not, indeed could not, leave off and let well enough alone, and so five times—each time more desperately than the time before—she began to copy the following.
Berlin, May 3, 1945
On May 2, 1945, in the center of Berlin, on the premises of the bunker of the German Reich Chancellery, several meters from the entry door to said bunker, Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko and the Majors Bystrov and Chasin (in the presence of Berlin residents—the German Lange, Wilhelm, cook of the Reich Chancellery, and Schneider, Karl, garage superintendent of the Reich Chancellery) at 17:00 hours found the charred bodies of a man and woman; the body of the man