like years. Hermannplatz went by, a yellow station. A woman got off the train with difficulty, using a walker. Margaret looked on, from under the brim of her slouch hat. She had pulled it very low over her eyes.
Why did no one help the woman? Margaret did not rise to help her either. She didn’t want to call attention to herself. She was reckless, careless, vengeful, but she knew she must remain inconspicuous.
Since the visit to the doctor, Margaret had become an accordion of ill humor, unfolding, wheezing with heavy, distempered sounds. Now, as the woman stumbled her way out of the train on her own, Margaret wondered darkly whether she would not be reborn after the death of Prell. It seemed doubtful, but then, she had nothing to lose.
Rathaus Neukölln came and went, the ceilings hung low and royal blue. The seconds dragged.
Karl-Marx-Strasse station drew close. The train halted and a man made ready to get off. Before he did, he emptied his pockets—they were full of shreds of paper—and the white and yellow bits fluttered to the floor. How could he throw his trash on the ground so flagrantly? If only she were a man, Margaret thought, she might challenge him physically. For a moment, she riffled through all the ideas of who she might be, if only she were someone else.
Neukölln station followed in its bright yellow tiles. It occurred to Margaret that there was no rebirth, no changing of character, only momentary evasions—and that was never enough.
Grenzallee trickled by. It was painted a stale green color like algae, and Margaret thought she could smell the algae. She was desperate, her head was hot, she could not go on as she had been going. As for the doctor: she wanted never again to think of her.
And then came Blaschkoallee, and it was horrible, the worst of all. On the wall was the graffiti: “The woman maintains the house and the mood of her man.” The station itself was grey, the lights painful to the eyes.
Margaret was in a mood of rage, then, by the time she arrived. She was worked into a lather. She rang the bell at Prell’s house. When he came to the door, he did not recognize her, but Margaret said she had come for a follow-up interview, and he smiled sheepishly, proudly. He let her in.
His house was stuffier than it had been before. It smelled powerfully of old age. On the wall in the hallway was a wooden crucifix. Right away, already then, in that very first twenty seconds, Margaret thought of her grandfather, who had made films, who had taken pride in the film of a boy’s death. When he came to stay with them in New York, he slept through the daytime. Her mother fixed up the back bedroom for him, and he, in the wide guest bed, kept the venetian blinds almost opaque, the sounds of ambulance sirens circling up to the twelfth floor. On the wall across from the bed, he hung an oak crucifix like Prell’s, with a Christ figure carved out of the same dark wood as the cross, spine bucking away from the vertical.
And the old man, he slept under an image of unbelievable suffering, breathing regularly.
Margaret had been small, skulking about. She had found his pictures of naked ladies in a metal box he kept in the closet. She found his reels of black celluloid tape.
Now Margaret looked at Prell’s crucifix.
The icon of the man collapses him into the instrument used for his torture, the means of his death becomes the symbol of his life; the sacrifice is snapped into the flesh. And then Margaret thought, in a wave of hopelessness, that crime was more powerful than tenderness, that death was more memorable than life. She felt a rage rising. She thought of this man who stood next to her now, as he had once stood goat-like outside a room while children were killed.
Prell invited her into the living room. She sat down by a little side table that was dressed in a white linen cloth. He bustled into the kitchen, came back to her, and stooped to serve tea from a pot.
But Margaret caught him by surprise. She raised her arms and took the old man’s face in her hands, her fingers becoming spider’s legs, squeezing vise-like. The loose skin on either side of his face doubled.
“How could you?” Margaret gasped at him, losing control of her voice.
Prell’s giant, horse-like body lurched back;