air was filled with coal dust left over from the winter. Crowds moved toward the ring trains on the overpass above and toward the East-West axis trains in the shadows below, and Amadeus got off the train in these shadows. At first, he too was in shadow. But as he drew closer to Margaret, he came into the light—she remembered it so well—and the world seemed to tilt into wonderful alignment. He was dressed like a student, in dust-covered black corduroy guild pants with two gold zippers, a coarse sailor shirt, androgynously shaggy hair, and a rosy face. Everything around him seemed to instantly become a part of him: on the whitewashed station walls, letters were stenciled—networks of exposed wires filigreed the sky, grids of windows gave a Bauhaus effect, and the world seemed to be smoking its grandfather’s pipe. The station felt as if it were held together with black electrical tape, and Margaret’s spirits rose like a baby’s hand toward the unfamiliar flame, automated beyond reason.
Not long after she picked him out in the crowd (he told her on the phone what he would wear) she waved at him. Amadeus saw her do it. And already then, something strange occurred. He saw her wave, and he recognized her, but he looked away.
As he came closer to her, too, there was something overcharged. The first thing Margaret thought was: What beautiful eyes he has. And the thought was perhaps too simple and pure for their relationship. A single note had been sounded bell-like and left to vibrate a long time on its own.
She moved her mouth and said hello; he nodded and inclined his head away from her. Yes, it was an awkwardness too much for strangers. She filled the silence—babbled about coming to Berlin to study history, and Amadeus laughed quickly, made a derisive comment about the field attracting “the morbid pedants of the world,” although she knew he was himself a history professor and he must know that she knew it, and the second thing she thought about him was, How diffident he is, and how sour, but it did not stop her from following his face with her attention, her body frightfully still.
From Ostkreuz they walked together to Treptower Park. And in some subterranean part of her she began to feel, walking next to him, as though she were attractive and delightful to men. Who knows from what source such feelings well up in some company but not in others.
On that Sunday, the entire population of the Eastern city seemed to have rejoiced at its freedom from the cave of the indoors and taken to the park along the river. They passed Biergartens where the old ones in their polyester were dancing to oompah-pah, small children went by on tricycles at astonishing speed, almost knocking down the lumbering flâneurs in their paths, the ducks were back, and when they stopped, Amadeus festively bought two Currywurst from a stall, claiming Currywurst a great delicacy, and even too, whatever it was between them disappeared for a moment; we should not overstate the initial attraction. A few minutes long, Margaret looked at him and briefly thought him ridiculous; he seemed foreign in a foolish, foppish way.
But finally they came to the Soviet War Memorial, the object of their wanderings, and it was here, beneath the Russian soldier–ogre with German babe in arms, so large that directly beneath it you could not even see it, that everything went irrevocably awry. Specifically, Margaret asked Amadeus to explain the names and platforms of the German political parties, and while he spoke, he looked once into her eyes. It took him a long time to explain, and their eyes met several more times after that as well. Margaret’s entire chest began to expand, and a sense of unbelievable suspense and fear and almost painfully sharp anticipation overtook her. It is only illicit love that causes such gargantuan arousal, and that is a great misfortune.
By the time they were climbing through the bushes and over a fence to get into an abandoned amusement park, Amadeus, a bit out of breath but eager to appear fit, had begun to incandesce toward her, with a bright firefly gleam of attention. Breathlessly he declared that she was “very well read,” although later he would insinuate that she was just good at fluffing.
And then once as she climbed over a barbed-wire fence partially caved in—they were trying to get back out again—she smiled particularly broadly over at him