the windows; suddenly she was full of loathing. Margaret muttered something bitterly, about the archive making nothing, but nothing at all, available to the public, bureaucratically keeping everything, even very old and senseless things, under lock and key. At the end, she even mumbled a phrase that she knew was taking things too far—she said something about the archive “protecting the guilty.”
The archivist set her face. For a moment both she and Margaret were quiet. Finally the woman puffed her blouse out and pointed emphatically to the shelf. The museum, she said, with prim emphasis, recently made the collected Schöneberg police logs available to the public—everything up until and including 1966. Margaret was very welcome to look at that.
This was a shameless non sequitur.
But still, Margaret’s rage dissipated. She had other worries. The shadows she had seen outside, she felt they were pressing against the window glass, beginning to beg her for something. So now, embarrassed and clumsy, Margaret indeed hoisted down a police logbook; she chose the one from 1943.
At first, Margaret only pawed through it without reading it. She thought she would wait until the archivist was in the other room and then quickly leave. But, despite herself, Margaret became involved. She read through January 1943, and already, something of interest caught her eye. There was a letter of complaint from a middle-aged woman who had walked her cat on a leash in the Kleistpark. She was peacefully making a round in the late afternoon when a policeman set upon her and beat her with a stick, merely because cats were forbidden in the park. Was it possible, Margaret thought, for everyone in a society to be variously psychotic, all at the same time? She got out her notebook and pen. She copied the letter of complaint in its entirety into her notebook.
She moved into the records of February and March. These were mostly concerned with the police seizure of apartments recently “abandoned” by Jewish families. There were entries concerning the looting of Jewish homes, many reports of calls from neighbors complaining that the loot had not been equally divided. Also many entries concerning Jewish suicides. The suicides coincided with the mass deportations, the period when Berlin was undergoing its “cleansing” by Goebbels.
Then Margaret came to the log of Police Revier 173, and all of a sudden her breath, which had been even, stopped, and her heart, which had been loping, sped up to a trot. The first entry, on page 143, was this:
March 3, 1943, circa 9:00 p.m., the married couple Franz Strauss, born 11/5/06 in Gross-Strenz, and Regina Sara Strauss née Herzberg, born 11/20/09 in Schwedenhöhe, living in Berlin-Schöneberg, Salzburgerstr. 8, committed suicide by natural gas. They took their three children, Rahel Strauss born 7/5/32 in Berlin, Gerda Strauss born 2/27/39 in Berlin and Beate Strauss born 4/3/42 in Berlin, with them into death.
Margaret froze. She did not think immediately that this entry would bring a revolution to her life, but one of her fingers, which had been winding a strand of hair, went still, and a long, breathless moment passed.
When she came to herself, it was as if she had stepped behind a curtain hitherto hiding the harshest lights in the world. Red spots glowed before her eyes; the lights coming in from the street contained parts of the spectrum that she had never seen before. She felt her chest begin to tighten, and a clever fever, a madness, a vast energy flickered in her.
She stood up. The energy made her nauseous. Standing bent over, she read the passage a second time. Her fingers, controlled from afar, brushed over the print of the logbook; she had a hallucination that the letters were made of loosely strewn sand; sand that could be swept away with reverent fingers. Something told her, whispered to her, that there would be pictures beneath.
She rubbed. She rubbed harder, feeling split into two persons—one who knew this was madness, and one who believed that there were pictures underneath the print. The second person would reveal them. She would expose them come what may.
Margaret was out of control. She felt a keening pity for what she had read, and also a terrible pain. At the same time, she was knocked hard by a sense of tyrannical exclusion. She pushed her chair back with a suffocated gesture. She gathered her books and threw them in her bag. At first she thought she would simply run, but then she looked at the police logbook lying