the kind of eyes that grow like lichen if a street knows no heavy winds.
Even an abbreviated inventory must include the eyes of the old lady from Armenia with bottle-black hair, who leaned permanently from the window of a half-height flat that was squeezed under the airy belétage at Number 89. She folded her arms across the cobwebbed ledge and watched, especially at night. Although it was not unheard of that a pedestrian’s eyes wandered up and met the old lady’s by accident, something about the way her eyelids squared with her brow seemed to suggest a lack of involvement: “have no fear” they seemed to say—“we will not tell a soul if we see you hot-wire a 1986 Mercedes.” Meanwhile, across the street, two glossy dogs were on standby behind the door at the Internet café. They had eyes as blue as forget-me-nots, with the same yellow center, and roused themselves for the man in a neon orange traffic cop’s uniform, who passed several times each day, bicycling up and down the Grunewaldstrasse without once touching the handlebars, yelling his head off. Everyone called him Loud Guy, or sometimes only The Loud One.
So if Erich, the Hausmeister at Number 88, where Margaret Taub lived, was watching everyone and everything, who could blame him? He told himself it was a defensive stance—he lived in a neighborhood of ghouls.
Erich was the hero of his own story. In the courtyard of Margaret’s building he lived, in a little ivy-covered house. He was unusually fleshless, his skull easily visible through the skin of his face, and already the night when Margaret returned from the Grunewald Forest, he had seen her while she was heaving clumps of clothing into the trash. And he had observed her long before that as well.
Erich was old. He seemed stern but in fact he was kindly; he was blindingly efficient, and he was knowledgeable about all matters literal and very few matters figurative. He was one of those men who think simply but are politically resolute, much like the plain-spoken Georg Elser, the carpenter who built cabinets and clocks, kept his own counsel, and in 1938 almost managed to assassinate Hitler singlehandedly.
Erich was an Autonomer, an old one—he had been part of the ’68 generation before there was a ’68 generation to be a part of, one of those West Berliner anti-warriors who use the informal du to one and all, even to plumbers and bank tellers, and the plumbers and bank tellers almost fall to the floor with a heart attack at the audacity if they are new to the quarter and he hasn’t broken them in yet, although around here, almost everyone was broken in long ago.
Now it happens that Erich’s story must be told as well, for through no fault of his own (almost no fault of his own, that is), he was destined to betray Margaret Taub.
The very same morning the city turned to flesh, Erich was wearing his black leather pants and matching vest, busying himself eagerly, delivering mail from the co-op management to the tenants. This was a practice he had thought up himself, officially so that the management could save the cost of postage, but he was also (although he would deny it if accused) using the opportunity to peek at the contents of each letter box—no real reason and it was certainly not mean-spirited, but he was interested. To see who had letters from the tax office, who had letters from collection agencies, and by Jove, if he saw a letter from abroad, perhaps from a lover! These were his great pleasures. Erich, who as a young man had been an anarchist, was, in his old age, something he would never have expected. His anarchism had taken a turn for the officious, his native kindness had twisted into rodent-like curiosity.
After the letters, he would check the trash. Here too, he had been active: Erich had introduced a new system of trash sorting which would save the building co-op forty euros each month. It meant the recycling was far stricter than in other living communities. A relatively low rate of compliance concerned him. Certain tenants insisted on throwing trash into improper receptacles, and thus he found himself required to sort through the trash thoroughly every week, reorganizing, rescuing treasures here and there. Today he pulled various letters and even a couple of books out of the slimy heat of the decomposing biodegradables, also a glass jar full of pickles! The letters,