had made a mistake. “Whose was it then?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“The skeleton was that of someone yet to die.”
The magpie on the balcony laughed a screeching, birdy laugh. And then it scratched at the ground twice, rustled its wide wings, flapped frantically, and was gone.
Margaret drifted back into sleep. When she woke up the next morning, Benjamin was still out. Margaret found the story of the whale ducks fresh in her mind, even fresher than when she had read it.
She reached down beside the bed. She thought she would read the story again straight through from the start.
She searched, but she didn’t find the book about the whale ducks.
And it was only after she could not find it that she thought how strange it was that Benjamin owned The Whale Ducks, a book in German, a language Benjamin did not speak or understand.
Margaret stayed in Benjamin’s bed for most of the day. She was hung-over and ailing. In the kitchen she found that Benjamin had left her a note with his telephone number written on it in oversized digits, as if she were a child. She waited for him, but he never appeared. Finally she went home when the sun was going down.
For a while after she got back to Schöneberg she sat very still in a chair at the kitchen table. She looked out the window, down into the courtyard as the last of the light disappeared over the orange roofs. She sat, and the silence of the apartment became thicker. “Remember me, but ah, forget my fate.”
The story of the whale ducks wrapped tentacles around her mind. There were two models for how to behave if you were tried like Job. Two models, each one so evangelical that Margaret would have a hard time not making a decisive choice between the two. There was only one trouble: Margaret herself had never been tried like Job. Why did she assume that she had been, with hardly any hesitation? Why did she assume it as a matter of course, that it was for her, too, to make such a choice, between the way of Minnebie and the way of her stubborn husband, the magistrate?
At the edges of everything, there came a whitening, as if some glassy being had drawn a circle in dust around her feet, curbing her thoughts and her world to here and here, but never here.
She was cooperating. If there was an invisible fence that had stunned her once, she only circled the perimeter now, avoiding the shock.
Now Margaret decided to act out. She went into the bedroom. She stood for a while. Then she began to take all of her clothing out of the wardrobe. She laid each piece on the bed, mustered it with her eyes. She fingered the seams; she checked the pockets. She methodically emptied two wooden trunks that sat on top of the wardrobe, also filled with old clothes, books, tennis rackets, and broken this and that, and there too, she looked at every item carefully. She was not looking for anything in particular, no, she was particularly looking for nothing. To prove to herself there was nothing to find—this was her purpose. Every box opened and found to be empty of significance was a little triumph, every half hour that passed in which she saw nothing unsettling was a half hour closer to victory. She went to the desk and reorganized the drawers. She piled and repiled the stacks of books in the hallway, shaking each one to see what loose paper would fall out. She went through the closet: old shoes, a basketball, a Frisbee, screwdrivers of different sizes, an old bag of planting soil. She began to weary, but still, she went through the pantry; she looked at all the canned goods. It occurred to her to look in the bathroom, too. The night drew on; she searched. The dawn broke; she was losing energy.
Finally, about to take apart the commode in the bathroom, jiggling the drawer whose key she had lost but which could easily be broken into, she was stopped by a powerful itch at her temples. She rubbed and rubbed the sides of her face. She felt light-headed. The room rocked back and forth. She went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed.
There, as the itching sensation diminished, dreams began to fly behind her eyes. She saw herself as a child—holding fireflies in a mayonnaise jar with holes for oxygen punched in the