him.
“That’s a surprise.”
“It’s not so easy to change,” Margaret said.
“No?” He raised his eyebrows in his burlesque grimace. “Well,” he said, in a falsetto. He brought two beers over to the table and sat down. “Margaret Taub,” he said, still in the falsetto, opening his beer. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Well,” she hesitated. She swept the dust off the unused end of the table. “I wanted to talk to you about something in particular.”
“Oh yeah? I wanted to talk to you about something in particular too,” he said.
Margaret sensed this was not good.
“Do you want to know if I ever went to Gau-Algesheim?” he asked.
“To where?”
“The dumb monkey, eh?”
“What?” Margaret looked at him.
“It was scummy of you, Margaret.”
“Benjamin—”
“Don’t try to Benjamin me. The answer is no. I didn’t go. You said you’d interpret for me, I was on the platform, the train came. No Margaret. No one came. Margaret cut out. Now the old man is dead.”
“The old man?”
“I guess you knew we had to go down there before the asshole died. Now my father won’t ever get the house back.”
“Benjamin, Benjamin,” she said plaintively, trying to buy time. What was he talking about? “Benjamin,” she stuttered. “The thing is, I never leave Berlin. I haven’t gone outside the city limits in years.” She said it, and realized with a start that, except for Sachsenhausen, which was still part of the Berliner public transport network and so hardly an exception, it was true.
“Now I know that. I found out the hard way. You could have told me before I bought the tickets. Three hundred and seventy five euros each, nonrefundable. My father’s sure not coming over to Germany, I can tell you that. You were our chance.”
Margaret tried to mask her confusion. “But you always behave so badly, Benjamin,” she said. It was the only honest statement that occurred to her.
“They did not give me German citizenship for my charm, Margaret, they gave it to me because they killed half my family.”
“Okay,” Margaret said. “Okay.” She swallowed. Something jogged her. She remembered a time—waiting in line with Benjamin at the ticket office at Zoo Station. He was smoking a cigar; she was worried about the smoke, then an altercation with the station police. Of course, she must have been preparing to make a trip with him. A trip to the south, it seemed to her, fuzzily. Why hadn’t she made the trip?
“Do you still want to go?” she asked. “I’ll go,” she said. She wanted terribly to befriend him.
“Now you want to? Well—” He looked at the calendar on the wall next to them. It displayed June 2001; it too was covered in dust. “The bastard is dead now anyway,” he said. “There’s no point. We’d have to sue the state. The fun part would have been tearing it away from the anti-Semite.” He took a bite of sauerkraut. “What did you want to talk to me about, Margaret?”
Margaret drank her beer. The single bulb on the ceiling cast a light that fatigued the eyes. “Benjamin—” she began, but stopped.
The fact was that in this location—with the old, precariously tilting stacks of records around her, the smell of curry and mildew, Benjamin’s kind, impossibly familiar face—the events of the last weeks seemed remote. She wondered if she had really seen any hawk-woman. She wondered if she had not perhaps been inwardly exaggerating about the flesh, the transformation, the bird. Now, picturing everything in her mind, it all seemed unlikely.
But that had been the entire reason for coming—so that Benjamin could bring her back to reality. So Margaret spoke up. “Do you have any idea what I was doing, say, about two or three years ago?” she asked. “Any idea at all?”
“What? You want me to tell you about your own life?”
“Well—” she said, her face starting to itch, “there’s this time I can’t remember. I know it’s odd, but—that’s how it is.” Margaret caught her breath.
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“Well, back when we were friends, for example. After that, there’s a foggy time. It’s like when you think back on your childhood. Sometimes you can remember when you were six years old, but weirdly, not very much from when you were seven.”
Benjamin pulled on his mustache. “Okay,” he said.
Margaret leaned over the table and kissed his cheek, trying to solidify any goodwill he might have toward her. Benjamin put his hands on the table and licked his lips.
“You lived down in Schöneberg,” he said. “What