by means of compressed air, then later the same projectile was brought back to its starting point with rarefied air, through suction.
“I’ll show you a map.” With magnets he put it up on the white board and began to point. “The Berliner system was radial. From the main telegraph office a series of tubes branched to the most important post offices throughout the city. At each of these offices the projectiles were then unpacked and sent on their way again to smaller offices, where they were again unpacked, the cards and letters sorted and carried to the homes of the recipients by telegram couriers. Thus if a letter needed to go from one end of the city to the other, it had first to be sent to the central office, and only from there would it travel on to the other side. The exceptions were the direct lines between the main telegraph office and the Reichstag and eventually the chancellery, and this is where the system became important to the press, who could and did, on certain occasions, tamper with the pneumatic lines. Journalists tunneled underground to dig out the receptacles and read the classified contents. Members of the press weren’t the only ones.”
Margaret began to imagine journalists tunneling underground like moles, their eyes bleary and dim. She rested her head. This bright, low-ceilinged room did not face out onto a courtyard as most of the others did, but instead onto the empty land beyond the Rostlaube, land that was filled with scotch pines. The pines crowded up against the windows. As the professor talked on, the pines brushed against the glass. The branches lashed, insistent. Margaret pushed the side of her face against the glass, as if to rest it there, and then she could almost feel the skeletal fingers, the whispering smoke of the pine needles against her face. She turned to look out. Deep in the tree closest to her, near the cloistered trunk, she saw, looming in the darkness, a great bird of prey with legs in pants of feathers. The bird did not have any traces of womanliness, and its talons were yellow and orange against the black tree. It cocked an eye at Margaret, a glint of topaz fire. Margaret looked directly at the bird, then turned and looked at Vitaly behind her, to see if he had seen.
Vitaly saw her looking at him and turned his face to the professor, crossing his long haunches. He did not look at her again.
Margaret turned back and there was the bird—she almost had assumed that just as suddenly it would be gone—but in the meantime it seemed to have gotten much larger, now maybe the size of a ten-year-old boy. Through the heavy shadows of the darkening pine needles, Margaret saw the flutter of falling feathers. The bird was losing its mantle. She saw the sheen of gabardine, and before long, Magda’s heavy-browed face was grinning at her, grinning and winking, her smile broad. Her teeth looked like old piano keys. Margaret turned her head away quickly and tried not to look out the window again, although she could not help but glance back once or twice, and always the bird was there.
After class, Margaret sat down on a bench outside the classroom to summon her strength. She looked the length of the long hallway. It gently sloped down.
She saw a girl come out of an adjoining corridor and turn south, away from Margaret. Margaret watched the young woman’s back. She thought she recognized it. It was Margaret’s own long body, with its awkward calves.
Just then, Margaret felt her light blocked and looked up to see Vitaly Velminski standing before her. He leaned in. Her heart stopped. She waited. But his eyes were not on her. His eyes were on the department’s course listings for the coming semester, inside a glass box above her head. Vitaly leaned in further. Margaret’s excitement boiled to the point that it was no longer pleasurable, it was only painful, the proximity. The pleasure itself was the pain.
After Vitaly moved away, Margaret wanted to slam her fist into the glass box on the wall. She wanted to break her head against it. She wanted to shatter the glass, and shatter her porcelain self into bits. She hated her invisibility and muteness, she hated the attraction, the stimulation. She would flay and beat and destroy the vestiges of desire. She hated Vitaly for attracting her, and she hated him.
At the library, things