see them but remain hidden. She watched. The men moved strangely. Their pants were belted high, and also unusual for German construction workers, they wore no bright colors. The accent of their Berlinerisch, as they yelled to each other, was somehow unfamiliar, overly stylized. The melody seemed rounder and jauntier than what Margaret knew.
She ducked on tiptoe back into the reception hall and walked back to the other end. Her heels clacked. Margaret tried to bend the sound away with a lithe ankle. It was better, she thought, to avoid running into those construction workers again. But she didn’t know how to get out. Already she was tired of walking, and her fear was dragging heavily behind her.
She went into a stairwell in hopes of finding an exit from the upper floor, which by some vague recollection she thought was at street level on the other side. It was dark in the stairwell and smelled thickly of fresh plaster. She wound round and round, flight after flight. Finally she came to a landing that had a window to the outside. She dashed to it, overcome by claustrophobia. But the window only looked out on a dank, concrete courtyard. She heard shouts and looked down. A group of construction workers were on the paving stones below. Or were they construction workers? Again, there was something wrong. They were in clothing like pajamas; they spoke to one another, and even from this height, Margaret could hear that their language wasn’t German. It sounded Slavic. Margaret’s hair was standing up now, and she slumped down against the ground, her back to the wall. But in another instant she rose again and peeked through the window a second time, her fingers shaking as she heaved herself up on the sill. This time her gaze was focused, seeking. Off to the side, in the courtyard, was a truck, and it wasn’t a model from Margaret’s era. On top of the truck two men lounged, in black uniforms with machine guns slung over their shoulders. And then a thought crossed Margaret’s mind: Organisation Todt. Other than forced labor, Margaret had almost no associations with Hitler’s engineers, and so now she began to be hugely afraid.
The workers were from the East. And if they were slaves from the East, then that would explain the condition of the airport—unfinished.
The men in black uniforms frightened her more than the German construction workers. So back down the stairs she went, all the way through the reception hall and main building, and outside to the wooden scaffolding again. Without giving herself time to become afraid, she clacked her heels loudly so the two elderly construction workers, still up on their scaffolding, would be sure to hear her. From the wide drive where the taxi stand should have been, she yelled up at them. “Hallo? Excuse me!”
The construction workers looked down at her in astonishment. There was a long silence. Finally, one of them, the one with the beard, said to her, “What are you doing here?”
“I hit my head,” Margaret said.
The man looked at his companion. His companion shrugged. He turned back to Margaret. “We don’t like the girls from the BDM.”
“What?”
“Oh—” He left off. “I was just poking fun,” he called out, smiling sheepishly. And his companion gave him a look of despair. Margaret considered—BDM, those were the Hitler girls. The Hitler Youth girls. Feeling so frightened now that she thought she would pass out, she looked down at her feet. She looked down at her shoes. But she was not wearing her shoes. Nor her pants. Nor her shirt. Instead, a dark blue skirt, a white blouse, and a black neckerchief, and over everything, a short jacket with four patch pockets.
Very afraid now, she called up to the two men on the scaffolding, making up a lie: “I’ve been hit on the head. Can you tell me please, I know it’s odd, but what year is it?”
“Why, little ninny (Dummerchen)! It’s 1942.”
And Margaret looked at herself, in her patriotic uniform. She thought, So it’s true about me, and she felt so much hurt that when the black started rising she did nothing to stop it. She only felt a bit of the fall; the last thing she remembered was the smacking of the back of her skull against the concrete.
Margaret woke up, she knew not how much later, back in her bed on the Grunewaldstrasse. She was no longer wearing the BDM uniform. But she had a pounding headache