tour. And even if it were not real, still, it was real to her—how would she behave as if she did not see it?
She mounted her racing bike. She had never missed a tour, and she would not now.
She rode down the Grunewaldstrasse eastward. The Universität der Künste was covered with a light down of hair. The BVG headquarters, a Nazi-era curving giant of a building, had flesh with skin so dry that she recoiled as the wind sprinkled her with dandruff. She curved sparrow-like through the almost empty streets to the S-Bahn station.
At the station, her mind cleared. It was a whiff of sweat suspended in the air—the oily, purring, homely smell of bodies—that led Margaret to connect the change in Berlin to the visit to Dr. Arabscheilis. The sense of some inevitable kinship pressed itself on her. The doctor had shown her a film of “perfect pregnancy,” and in passing had mentioned the possibility of inanimate things awakening—“the eyes and ears of subway trains will open,” and now, as Margaret gazed around her, she felt with a perspiration of intuition that there could not but be a connection. Something had been tampered with, some crucial mechanism’s fine joists thrown out of alignment, and every possible horror was now a latent possibility. She whispered to herself: There is more madness in me than I knew.
Arriving on Wilhelmstrasse to give the tour of Berlin’s Third Reich sites, Margaret found the city center too presented as node after node of humanoid giants, just as it had in Schöneberg.
In the east, in the distance, the spires of majestic Gendarmenmarkt, usually with their twin, gold-plated domes, were today breasts crowned with pinkish-brown nipples—as though a woman lay with her back spread over the kilometers of city space, hair streaming into the morning traffic. The recessed balconies of the apartment houses running up and down Wilhelmstrasse appeared moist and pink-shadowed, mouths, ear canals, nostrils, less sightly orifices as well, all quaking with secrets. The bricks of flesh and the stucco walls of flesh, crowned first by gutters, then by shingles, and finally by chimneys of flesh—brown-, rose-, and parchment-colored, some glowing with health, the older buildings covered in the wrinkled and loose skin of age—rose up into the heavens.
Here in town, Margaret also spotted carcasses—buildings already dead and rotting, or even older ones that were nothing but skeletal remains.
She was late. The customers were already congregated at the meeting point on the corner of Mohrenstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse, in shorts and white cross-trainers, all with sunglasses. British, Brazilian, American, Australian, and Finnish, and an Icelander in the back, dressed in black, peering reed-like out of pessimistic eyes.
And now already Margaret was changing her mind. With the city laid out before her and the suspicious eyes of the people in front of her, how could she believe it was the doctor and her film of perfect pregnancy that had caused the change? What was more believable—the trace memory of the blind doctor of yesterday with her fantastic claims, or the buildings quaking and echoing with breath under Margaret’s very touch? Faced with the testimony of her senses, it was a very thin filament of rationalism that suggested it could all be traceable to Margaret’s mind rather than to the soil and beams of the city itself.
She looked at the tourists, her customers. Didn’t they mind the smell? Of course they did not, she muttered into her own ear. It was only she who minded.
But in the end, Margaret had to stop breathing through her nose. She could not stand to take in the scent of life flowing out of the architecture around her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she began the tour. Selling tickets was a trial. Twice she dropped change on the ground, even dropping the same change more than once from a certain sweaty palm. Straightening up, she saw that an elderly gentleman from Florida had lost faith in her already, just for that.
She rushed forward with the tour, gradually coming into the safety of her usual recitation.
It will be better to set down exactly what she said, for these seemingly vacant recitations concerning the city of Berlin later became the weed—or perhaps it was the flower—that matured to greatness and suppressed other forms of life.
“Although these streets of 1980s Communist blocks,” she began, “dreadful in their uniformity, and the seventies-era Czech Embassy here at my right”—Margaret gestured at what today appeared to be a muscular flesh lump—“might suggest that we have gone far afield of our