to all appearances, very long ago. It read:
After many years I came upon a report of a comrade about Sachsenhausen, a comrade who unfortunately is only known by his prisoner’s number. It’s the number 12983. Here is his report: A tablemate of mine, a Polish customs official from the area around Bromberg, was taken by the police president for interrogation. In the night after his return he died a horrible death from asphyxiation. He knew that they had poisoned him. I stayed by him throughout the night until he died in the morning hours. He made me promise to bring messages to his wife and children, and also made me promise to take revenge on his cruel murderers. His death inspired the greatest hatred in me against the Gestapo. His name was Arabscheilis.
“I don’t understand,” said Margaret.
“But don’t you see? I found this many years ago. You think I did not react to Albert’s death. But I reacted with every cell in my body. Do you think it meant nothing to me? That’s why I changed my name, in honor of the lost people, in honor of the unknown man, this Arabscheilis. Do you think I could love my brother? Don’t you think I noticed what he was? You—you and your kind—you think nothing has any meaning to people like me, who have failed ourselves morally, but we are the most sentimental people in the world!”
Margaret turned a cold ear. She even kicked over her chair in protest.
“Comrade, my dear! Don’t leave me! I am with you. I—” the doctor stuttered. “I could have betrayed you to your mother! How many times did she contact me, looking for you? But I never did.”
“What are you saying?” Margaret turned her face back around.
“Your phone number, it went out of service two years ago, did it not? And you didn’t answer e-mails, did you? She called me! And I, an exhausted old woman, went on foot looking for you on her behalf. You were willing to meet your great-aunt then, give her obstetrician’s eyes a view of your shame—my vision was going, but I could see enough. But you, you got angry, you spat at me like a snake, just like now. All because I suggested you should contact that trollop of a mother you have!”
Margaret stared at the woman. “But—” Her cheeks were aflame. “Why do you call my mother a trollop?”
“Madness has its reasons which reason cannot know. I’ll give you that, my dear. But the man we call your father, poor Christoph, may he rest in peace—was never the same, not after he found out. It destroyed him, even if he did have, have a—well, a touch of the Greek about him! There are men for whom the unquestioned fidelity of a wife is the vertebrae of all independence!”
“But—” Margaret said. She could not catch her breath. “But you’re wrong. My father—that’s not how it was.” Margaret still could not catch her breath. “Why do you pretend to think our name is Täubner?”
“In good faith! So far as I know, my pet, your name is Täubner. If your name is no longer Täubner, I cannot say why. In any case you were certainly born Margaret Täubner. Just as I was born Gudrun Täubner. Your mother, may she never reenter Germany, did not explain this American turpitude in any of our correspondence. She gave me your address only, and I wonder if it wasn’t a deliberate evasion.”
“But why didn’t you tell me this at the beginning, instead of wasting all this time?” Margaret was coughing and could not catch her breath.
“Do you take me for a fool?” the doctor asked.
“What—?”
“Deranged! Deranged is what you have been, my shining pet, and the first principle in the treatment of the shell-shocked is this: no sudden moves. You were not ready, perhaps you are not ready still.”
Margaret ran out the door and did not look behind her. As she went down the hallway, she heard the doctor’s echoing voice.
“You’ll be back, my dear. You’ll be back to see me. I am not the worst mentor for a girl in your position.”
Margaret ran into the courtyard, her chest caving in.
THIRTY-THREE • The U7
On the U7 line to Rudow, the trains are nearly empty. The unemployed, the weary, the angry, and the immigrants sit only sparsely. It was here, three days later on this subway line to nowhere, that Margaret rode, bound for the home of the aging Herr Prell.
The minutes on the train dragged