about that guy? You were in love with the German guy, right? Not with me, that’s for sure.”
“A German?”
“You’ve got to remember that guy. Even I remember him.”
“Benjamin, I told you, I don’t remember anything.”
“What, not even the German? You were crazy about him.”
“Really?”
Benjamin looked at her and became still for a fraction of an instant. Then he began to chew the inside of his cheek. “Are you sure you’re okay, Margaret?”
“I think so,” she said, but her eyes stung. This seemed to mortify Benjamin, and he pulled on his whiskers.
“Well, all I can tell you is what I know, Margaret. The thing is, you were always secretive. You never introduced me. I thought you were embarrassed of him. I only saw the two of you once, on Weinbergsweg, and it was dark, and you didn’t see me. He was older, I remember that. And then after you didn’t show up to go to Gau-Algesheim, it was like you’d dropped off the face of the earth. You never called, your phone number went out of service. I figured you’d left Germany.”
“You were angry at me.” Margaret rubbed her face. So there had been a man. She looked at the beer in front of her, picked it up, and drank almost the entire thing down in one go, wincing. Her eyes began to water in earnest.
“True enough,” Benjamin said. “Let’s see. You always wore those little dresses back then, didn’t you. Not like now,” and he gestured at her oversized man’s trousers, whose cuffs had lately been dragging behind her in the sod, their hems unraveling, and the broadcloth shirt. “But okay. What happens when you try to remember?”
“I told you, Benny. There’s nothing. Nothing comes to mind at all.”
Benjamin poured her a shot of Unicum.
“I don’t want that,” Margaret said.
“Don’t drink it if you don’t want it.”
Margaret picked up the shot glass and drank it down. Then she began to laugh. “It’s all ridiculous!”
“It’s ridiculous all right.”
Margaret laughed on and on. Benjamin sat with his arms crossed, looking at her with an uncertain smile.
Finally she took a breath. “There’s one thing,” she said, swallowing. “I often see one thing. But it’s not a memory. It’s more of a picture. Maybe even more like a smell than a picture. I think I dreamt it or saw it on TV. It comes to me sometimes when I try.”
“That’s good, Margaret. That’s a clue. What is it?”
Margaret gave a last hysterical peal of laughter. The sound was shrill. “It’s a staircase in an apartment house,” she said, choking on saliva.
“Where?” Benjamin asked.
“I don’t know where. Nowhere I’ve ever been. But I can see it perfectly. The staircase curves in an oval spiral upward around an oval shaft in the middle. At the top there’s a skylight with wedged panes. I can see it all really well. The window is like a wheel with spokes. But oval-shaped, to match the shape of the stairwell. And because of the skylight, the stairwell is bright at the center and shadowy around the edges.”
“Okay,” Benjamin said.
“And the stairs are covered in red flaxen runners, the kind that smell like straw.”
“So it’s probably Berlin.”
“What?”
“Red flaxen runners are mostly a Berlin thing.”
“Oh,” Margaret said. She had not thought of this.
“What else?” Benjamin asked.
“At the bottom, there’s a girl, about my age, walking up the stairs.”
“Bingo, Margaret,” Benjamin said. “That must be you.”
“No, no. Not me at all. She’s wearing a bluish dress. I don’t have a blue dress.” Margaret felt herself sinking in—seeing in her mind the narrow blue stripes of the faded fabric, the brown plastic belt made to look like leather. She let out her breath. “The girl is looking up, and she can see there’s a man up at the top of the stairs. The man doesn’t see her. He’s leaning both arms on the banister way up there under the skylight, he’s smoking a cigarette, almost at the top of the house, maybe four or five stories up, pretty far away from her. She can see the smoke from his cigarette, it’s curling grey against the skylight, and even sometimes next to her, she notices ash fluttering down. She calls up to him, but he doesn’t call back. She’s walking up the stairs, holding on to the banister, and calling. But every time she puts her head over the edge and looks up into the white light in the shaft, he’s never any closer, and she gets blinded by the brightness. When she looks back