at the high window again. The cold air was blowing through the lace curtains. The hawk-woman was gone.
“The children were given poison, apparently by their mother, and all of them died.”
“Oh.”
Now Margaret looked north and saw something only a few meters away.
The rival walking-tour company, Berlin Hikes, had a group of tourists standing not far off. Picking his way around the back of the group, peering now over this shoulder, now over that, was a tall, gangly old man. He yelled: “Ich bin der Prell! Ich war dabei!” The old bodyguard, Arthur Prell.
“Let’s continue, shall we?” Margaret asked. She felt a wind pick up the back of her coat and move up her spine. And let us admit that within Margaret now, a powerful hatred was growing—a hatred for that spry old man. She despised his saucy, challenging way, his horsey face, his reeking polyester suits.
At the end of the tour, Margaret glanced up from her wallet of tour tickets and change. The German student was still standing before her. The man who said his name was Philipp had punched his chest forward, his boyish face, astonishingly, on the verge of tears. He spoke in a low, intense whisper, his syllables clipped and short, straining with injured pride. “Margaret, why do you insist on continuing this charade?” Philipp breathed in and out through his nose, his mouth pinched in self-conscious valiance. He was like a toy soldier.
Margaret turned her head and looked at him strangely. She smiled, however, with an effort at pacification. “I don’t know what charade you mean. I’m often tired after a tour. I hope you don’t mind—I’ll be going home now.”
“Margaret. Stop. Just stop.” His voice was artificially deep, and he had switched into German.
“Yes, I’ll be going,” Margaret replied in English.
“Margaret. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what? Everything is fine. Just go home. It’s time to go home now,” Margaret said, smiling broadly, although by now her heart was pounding.
“Margaret. It’s possible I was wrong—attacking, the way I did.” Again, he switched into German. “You were right, what you said about it afterward. I made an ass of myself. It was not right to attack Amadeus.”
At the sound of this word, Amadeus, everything changed. Margaret looked at him and would have believed anything at all. Even her hardest certainty disbanded into foam. “From where—how do you know that name?” she asked. Now it was Margaret who switched into German.
“Which name?”
“Which name?” she repeated, aghast. “Amadeus!” she whispered.
“Oh, be quiet!” Philipp said. “Are you trying to humiliate me?” His voice was peevish, precisely staccato.
Margaret looked harder. It was true that he had been showing an unnatural familiarity toward her throughout the tour. Margaret looked directly into his face. Do I know this man? She looked him up and down, regarding his small, glittering eyes, his button-down shirt, his black, high-waisted jeans. Philipp remained before her with his eyes cast down, his brows drawn together, his nostrils flaring with pouting rage. Finally Margaret glanced down at his shoes, which were very stylish, of dark green alligator skin with Cuban heels. She looked at them. Her heart sank slowly. These shoes—she recognized. She had chosen them for him herself.
TWENTY-FIVE •
A Lesson for Hussies Everywhere
She looked at the shoes. Her eyes made haste from the shoes, over the belt, along the chest, and back to Philipp’s face. Now she saw his tight lips. This was Philipp, her Philipp. If she was not very much mistaken, this man had once loved her.
He had loved her and she had scorned him. Instead of loving him in return, she only played at a life with him, and she felt a perspiration of shame, looking at him now. She had eaten his dinners and borrowed his books, meeting Amadeus all the while. Philipp, who tucked his pajama shirt into his pajama pants at the same angle every night; Philipp, who every day waited to eat his morning egg until he had eaten his morning slice of black bread, because otherwise he might get a protein shock; Philipp, who as a man did everything exactly as he had been taught to do it as a boy—she had never loved him. Although she spent far more time with Philipp than she did with Amadeus up in Prenzlauer Berg, she was so entirely swept up in the chaos and power and irregularity of Amadeus that she never noticed her duplicity. Philipp was something that happened to happen to the shell of her, the unfortunate colonization of an underdeveloped