through other chambers and recognized the walls from photographs—high murals there, depicting prick-legged SS officers with arms in deltoid shields draped like fangs to the ground, standing over voluptuous maids: reclining nudes, amateur renderings of the Venus of Urbino.
Margaret’s spirit was a March river as she ran, and the surface was floating with ice floes, thick as pontoons. Broken apart in a grid the ice was; waters churning and boiling under it; the great, bulky sheets slammed into one another with miraculous antagonism, with a natural hatred—wham, wham and again, and Margaret was afraid and kept running.
Her heart thumped, the waters churned, the ice floes slammed. Finally, Margaret found herself in a basement that was neither the waterworks nor the catacombs, and at long last she saw a staircase going up.
She came out in a crypt—a church basement. She came up even farther and saw where she was—it was the church of St. Matthias, at Winterfeldtplatz, and the nave was a cool breath over her head, a billowing arc. Margaret was panting hard and the stitch in her side had grown iron teeth.
All she knew was this: she wanted to climb up into the cool air, away from the underground. She found the wooden door to the bell tower. It was locked, but Margaret threw her shoulder against it, her lungs burning. Again and again, she slammed herself into it; she was hurt, the pain in her shoulder was terrible, but the lock broke after all and the door flew open, and Margaret fell inward with it. She righted herself and began another long ascent, but this time into the soft sky—up into the tower and the clouds, and already she could smell a fresh wind.
As she climbed the stairs, she looked up.
It is remarkably easy to conflate one kind of guilt with another. Guilt is a quicksilver that loves its brothers; it flows naturally according to its own code of gravity, eager to rejoin its own, and in the final reservoir, there are no distinctions. But Margaret, ferocious now, would not let any hawk draw her into an alliance. If her father’s father had been that sort of man, then it was all the more crucial that she should not be that sort of woman, for strength of identity is the only protection against clannishness, nationalism, and other forms of incest.
Margaret climbed and her mind cleared. And then, as if out from the rising movement in her legs, came the memory of another staircase, to test her newfound strength. The oval staircase. She remembered climbing that one as well.
She was going to see Amadeus, her body not large yet, although already she could feel the child moving. His terrible letter had still not come, but would soon, after this event.
On this day, she had looked up above her and seen him smoking at the top of the stairs, leaning over the banister. His wife did not allow him to smoke in the apartment, and he was not meant to smoke in the stairwell either, but sometimes he did. Margaret could smell his Gauloises Rouges, and the red flax runners, and see the ash fluttering down. She called up to him. He did not answer.
Margaret was almost at the top, and she called to him again. He heard, but the door slammed. He heard her and he was gone.
She was spurned.
The slam of the door. Nothing would ever be the same.
Just when her spleen was most suffocating—when the death of hope was purest—a bird flew into the convex skylight lifting plump out of the roof. The glass shattered and fell in drops of light, oh the solidified rain!, and the bird—it must have died at the moment of impact—it landed all the way on the basement level, coming down softly like crêpe. Margaret saw it fall down to the tiles, defeated at last. She saw it fall all the way down, from high above.
The falling bird marked her mind.
Soon after, Amadeus’s letter came. A green-white mold began in her. Whether or not she was her lover’s child—an affair within the family, that had happened. Ecstasy, submission to a homeland messiah, a pollination between flowers of the same plant, a country slimy with the Heimat semen of its father, rejecting outsiders violently for the sake of a love affair with its own blood—that had happened. It was as unbearable as anything in memory.
So Margaret did not think about Amadeus. She wiped him from her head. His letter about the affair with