tin lid. Another time, on a ferryboat with a wide paddle wheel hauling up the waters of a beef-fed river, and once too, sitting in a darkened theater touching the horsehair seat that lifted her toward the bright, warm beauty of the stage.
Oh, she had felt things, and smelled things, and lived things—all things that had a different feel, a different smell, a different organization, than this cold and forsaken life she was leading here.
The morning sun was burning brightly in the room. Margaret was still sitting on the bed, motionless. In the moments she had been there, her mind had wound around, considering every angle. And now—
She had made a decision. She would fold.
She did not want to find out anything at all. Job was an innocent—an innocent trapped between God and the devil. But she, Margaret—she did not know how or why, but she was guilty.
She must fold. The stakes were too high. Uncertainty was preferable to certainty, and although the peace she would win would be a shallow one, she need not play the dangerous game.
Yes, she would fold her hand. Let the others go on playing without her. Now she wanted to be still.
Because whether or not she found evidence, it did not matter. She could smell it on herself and on the wind, in how her heart raced every day, how her mind craved an escape: she was guilty. The wind came in the open window. The smell of it was nothing but threat.
TEN • The Concubine’s Mind
How to describe what happened next? The historical ones—Magda, but not only Magda—were rising around Margaret like ocean waters filling in cavities. They flowed according to the justifications already written in the land, deep where deep, curved where curved. Margaret’s self-examination was finished now, and the era of the dead Nazis had begun.
Yes, when Margaret awoke the next morning, she went to the window, and the hawk-woman was standing at attention on the balcony across the way, even larger now, hulking and frivolous. The lady pulled a compact out of her kit and made up her face under its heavy, brilliantine waves, her attention directed languidly at Margaret’s three windows, and the sight burned Margaret’s eyes and could not be fled.
Margaret was looking at the hawk-woman through a single rotated slat of the venetian blind. She kept the blinds closed all day and checked after the monster only surreptitiously. The woman perched with a live mouse in her beak sometimes, and in those cases her face was all bird, her head cocking jerkily around, and around, and around, until she seemed to be looking at Margaret from behind. Sometimes she winked at Margaret conspiratorially.
And then, as the days went by, Margaret did not always close the blinds. As she fell asleep, she began to be not frightened but preoccupied—with the question of whether she would find the hawk-woman at her perch on the following morning. She began to develop methods of prediction, ideas halfway between superstition and science: when it rained and the street was empty, the bird was likely to be in attendance (but not always). When it was sunny and the street was full of traffic, the bird was likely missing (but not always).
And then Margaret found herself not afraid—not at all. Instead, when the hawk-woman was not there, she longed for her. She came home in the afternoon and if she did not find the enormous bird preening her feathers on the terra-cotta balcony cattycorner right away, she ran back to the window again and again, to see if the bird had finally come.
She did not like it. She did not like that she was broken in. She said to herself that only a corrupt person could become a friend to a vision at the window of the deceased Magda Goebbels.
Yes. This was patently so.
But for the life of her, she could not arrest her fascination.
And so, seeking to justify herself, she began to study the life of the woman with great seriousness. She was looking to find something. Margaret wanted to find an element in Magda Goebbels’s biography that would make the hawk-woman’s presence outside the window proud and fine, not shameful, not wrong.
And who knows why, but it did not take her very long. Only a few days into her focused studies, Margaret made a crucial discovery regarding Magda Goebbels.
Margaret read what the woman allegedly said to a friend a few months before she killed her children.
For me there are only two possibilities: