The man was in love with Hitler. He used Hitler’s bones—the ones that Zhukov brought back to Moscow—to make combs for his hair, for his moustache, you know. High style, if you ask me.” He gave Margaret a wink. Then quickly he let out a guffaw.
“Really?”
“I’ve always been interested in history. One of my chief interests, I would say.”
Margaret smiled, colored. Without any warning, she darted for the door. She left the man so abruptly he didn’t have time to follow her.
Margaret looked up and down the camp. The man from Norway was outside, smoking a cigarette some distance away. Margaret pretended not to see him. Whether or not Hitler liked cats was the topic in her mind. She had never heard he didn’t. But it made sense to her that he would not. She decided it must be true.
She wandered farther, this thought of cats dangling, distracting, even as she felt a long rope in her head begin to tighten, everything tightening and filling, becoming denser, a feeling of her large body flipping up into her tight, claustrophobic brain like a gymnast on the parallel bars folding into the above.
She focused her eyes with difficulty. Between the trees in the distance was the sibyl swaying in her basket. Her long, dying hair flowed down below her curled body. As Margaret came nearer she could hear the whisper of the sibyl.
Margaret backed away from the trees. But another sound, the rushing sound of scratching, tunneling, running, miniature nails began again below Margaret, only now out here on the great plain.
She walked toward the old laundry building. She saw a forlorn entrance to a tunnel by the door.
A second great, fanning group of barracks had once stood out here on the field. These were all gone now. Margaret could see shadows of movement under the ice-covered snow. Mouse tunnels, invisible when empty, became dark when the mice ran through them, their bodies like smoke.
By the camp prison compound and over at the gallows, the tunnels in the ground were running with darkness. A kaleidoscope of movement began to trickle into her eyes from every direction.
A vast network of mouse tunnels—legions of beasts running just beneath the surface of the sandy, ice-covered, tumbledown, slipshod ruin of a camp. The network was vast, oh, but not nearly vast enough, for each tunnel branched, and then branched again, exponentially expanding into an enormous city of scamperers, yes—but then, just as at the edge of the world, or the edge of life itself—every tunnel dead-ended at the demarcation line of the triangle that was the universe and the humiliation: the tunnels did not run outside the camp. The work of the mice—the suspected rats, the parasitical beasts—their work was dirty, abject, senseless—and the mice, they were filled with motivation as they ferried scraps here, carried a message there. They ran hither and thither full of assurance of reward. Their scampering was wonderfully glittering, the scuttling speed through the tunnels reminded one of vacuum tubes, the mice drawn rocket-like by the sucking emptiness beyond the end walls.
Margaret tried to calm herself. It was the burden of secrets that was making her crazy, she thought. To have all the pictures playing simultaneously in her head, but trying to follow one single string of speech—it would drive anyone mad.
When she got home to the Grunewaldstrasse, the hawk-woman was waiting for her on the balcony above her apartment, standing in the cold, still and glassy-eyed like a piece of taxidermy. Margaret was afraid, more than she had been before.
And she thought, then, that the alliance was crumbling.
She shut all the curtains and covered herself in the bed. There was no way to visit a place like Sachsenhausen and try to be a Nazi at the same time.
It can hardly be a coincidence that later that very night, unable to sleep despite her exhaustion, Margaret found another quotation from Ello Quandt.
In March of 1942, Ello said that Magda complained to her of what Joseph told her. “It’s horrifying, all the things he tells me. I can’t bear it anymore. You can’t imagine the terrible things he burdens me with, and there’s no one to whom I can open my heart.”
And what immediately followed stopped Margaret short. It seemed that not long after she complained to Ello, the right side of Magda’s face became paralyzed. This was verifiable, and not exclusively based on Ello’s testimony. Trigeminal neuralgia, said the doctors. Margaret looked up the diagnosis in the encyclopedia. “The condition can