Prell! Ich war dabei!”
So his name was Prell. She would look it up. Maybe he was crazy, but maybe he was not. The people on the tour tumbled after her, everyone eager to discuss.
When she got home she took out her books on the topic of Hitler’s last days, and it was not long before she found that there had indeed been a Prell, a certain Arthur Prell, who worked as bodyguard and radio operator in the bunker. She looked for a picture on the Internet and saw a photograph of this Arthur Prell, taken in 1942. He was very different but also very much the same: the long, horse-like face, the exceptionally broad shoulders. Her fingers shook with excitement. She swallowed. Having stumbled upon something entirely real was as good as a draught of air. She breathed deeply, and for a few moments, she felt herself a soldier called to a just war.
NINE • The Whale Ducks
A bird of prey traces a certain kind of line in the sky because it need not flap its wings, and every time Margaret glanced out the window, so this line came into her peripheral vision.
On Saturday afternoon, Margaret opened one of the windows and put her head out. She looked up into the sky. It was a blue sky, shocked out of all clouds, making the slow sound of an airplane. After a squinting perusal, she concluded there were no birds; her peripheral vision must have been mistaken. She drew back and began to pull the window closed. One final glance at the shuddering flesh of the buildings, however, an almost admiring glance at their vivacity, and she saw something move on the balcony of the building catty-corner.
Something flashed in her eyes. She squinted, and saw: the grey-feathered, hunchbacked woman in black gabardine, standing at attention. Not only that: the hawk-woman held a pair of binoculars, and her long eyes were trained on Margaret’s windows. Her perch was one of those ornamental balconies from the 1890s, the kind that are convex from the house, so the woman, with her hair molded in its immaculate water waves and the lenses of her voyeur’s binoculars glinting in the light, caught the full gift of the sun, and the reflection from her telescope eyes blinked into Margaret’s apartment like Morse code signals.
Quickly, Margaret closed the window and drew the curtains. It was the middle of the day, but she climbed into bed.
Under the covers, she whispered to herself violently. She muttered, tossing this way and that. She told herself in a grave voice to pull herself together. She told herself in a grave voice that she was sane, but a fool. She told herself to buck up, to strike down her gullibility. She closed her eyes.
She tried to sleep but then came that old jangling vision she had had once before—of the curving, oval staircase with its red runner. It rose from deep in her skull, bearing its blunt weapon, and pressed against her eyes. She could smell the flaxen runner, taste the chalk of disappointment; she could touch the shadowed walls, flinch at the cold.
She slept, but when she woke up, she was not refreshed. And her heart beat again, and never had it beat faster. She thought of that feathered woman in gabardine, a feathered woman who she believed was a figment of her imagination and yet who made her stomach dive and flip.
If she could not return to the doctor right away, she decided, she would have to talk to someone else.
But Margaret didn’t know anyone. She had managed that—she really had.
She decided to ride her bicycle over to Akazienstrasse and buy a guidebook to European birds.
When she got home from the bookstore she parted the curtain a crack to see if the bird was still there. Indeed. Present and alert. When the nasty beast saw the curtain move, it flew right at her window in full bird form and landed on the wide outer sill. It cocked a topaz eye at her, Margaret the helpless zoo animal, the bird gawking.
Margaret reached for the book. She compared several pictures. The bird had long tail feathers with banded stripes and yellow eyes; this bird must be an enormous version of the Sperber, the sparrow hawk—Accipiter nisus.
The Sperber, according to the book, was “a bird of prey with long, pointed talons that nourishes itself on smaller birds. These it hunts with lightning-quick loops and dives, knowing how to rip them out of the air