They moved quickly and their faces were closed, so beautiful and unknowable they looked like goblins. They flowed with certainty—no, it was more than certainty: with style. They had so much style that they were alarming to Margaret, who thought—looking at them now as though she herself were an inert rubber doll in their midst—that the purpose of style was to release reference into its natural habitat, that good style had a jubilant, horrifying freedom to it, at once attractive and repellent, like a jungle cat liberated from a concrete zoo loping back toward the forest, returning to itself; style was as monolithic as character.
Margaret was afraid she would see the wizard of the students, the king of the Berliner panther style: Vitaly Velminski. Vitaly had been studying philosophy and history at the university for ten years. It was known that if Vitaly ever finished his Magister—he was a dawdler in the intellectual bath like everyone else—since he was both a brilliant mind and an adequate politician, he would become the heir to Meitler, Wolfgang Meitler, founder of Meitlerian metaphysics, center of a buzzing hive. Vitaly had achieved a closeness with all his professors, but with Meitler in particular, that was reflected in Vitaly’s ancient leather shoes, his dark three-piece suits, his cat-like eyes, his cutting, staccato voice that he barely raised above a whisper of precision when he spoke in class. There was excellent loose tobacco in his breast pocket along with rolling paper, and this he feinted into cigarettes when standing outside talking with one of his friends in intimate, casual tones.
For that was the point about Vitaly—he had many friends. He was a friend to anyone of any stylistic note; his human aesthetic was impeccable. He knew, and sometimes flung an arm around, the long-haired professor of philosophy who swept in on the wings of a great black cape and streaming green scarves; he was friends with the stiff man from the south, the one with curling, fleshy red lips and fiercely enunciated accent, whose trench coat was starchily belted and whose knowledge of Hegel seemed to be in his bones. Vitaly was friends with the icy and diminutive Frau Beitsch, who wore nothing but black lace and looked to weigh no more than ninety pounds, painting her skin white and her lips scarlet, but who had the broadest and deepest familiarity with Deleuze this side of the Rhine. Yes, Vitaly knew and inclined his tall head toward all of them. And yet he was also at ease with the run-of-the-mill boys of certainty, who were not noticeable, but who would still go far, because knowledge gave them no trouble—no trouble at all.
Vitaly—there he was: she had spotted him a level above her, outside the doorway to Koerfer’s classroom, standing in conversation with a man who looked like a rabbinical student. Margaret felt hungry when she came into Vitaly’s orbit. But she felt this hunger as though she were also on morphine. The students, Vitaly included, seemed so distant from her that if she were ever to open her mouth and speak to them, they would disappear. And in point of fact, whenever someone in class asked Margaret if she had an extra pen, say—or if she had the time, or the handout—her voice always became so hoarse, her German so stilted, that it was assumed she was on an Erasmus exchange and did not know the language. Over time, Margaret thought, her aura had become clear even to the naïve, and they had left off trying to speak to her.
The class was on media and assassinations in Weimar Germany, and after they were all sitting down—Koerfer was a celebrity, so the “seminar” had over ninety people smashed into a room meant for no more than fifty—Koerfer began to talk about the Berliner pneumatic dispatch, the Rohrpost.
There was something nightmarish about this to Margaret.
Also making the hair stand up on the back of her neck was the presence of Vitaly. She and he were among the last students to enter the classroom, and so now, in the crunch, he was directly behind her, his body smelling of sea salt and hills. She could not see him, but every breath he took made her feel something.
“Does anyone know how it worked? So far as I understand a dual propellant system was used,” Koerfer was saying, warming them up with facts before the theory. “The projectiles containing the letters or cards to be transported were pulled in one direction