there on the table and could not bear the thought of leaving it behind. She quickly searched for change, made a ten-cent Xerox copy, feeling all the while as though she would be sick.
Outside the archive, the headlamps and neon signs cast snakes of light over the Hauptstrasse, striking Margaret’s eyes with lasers menacingly futuristic.
The lay of the land here is very important in what happened next. Precisely: the old villa housing the archive was close up against the road. Behind the villa, a modern annex had been built, which held a small branch library. Farther still, behind the library, was a broad and sloping pasture of a city park, opening out toward the north. The park was reached by a wide and graveled path. It was this path that Margaret turned down now, her legs numb, meaning to cut home in the blessed darkness, for she was in a state of extreme light sensitivity now.
As she moved through the twilight, however, she came to the entrance of the branch library, squat under the sunset and, as she looked over at it, her head bounced in surprise—it seemed to be staring at her with a single glass eye. Above it, the last light of day was a wide yellow stripe on the far horizon. Without knowing why, Margaret pulled the handbrakes of her bicycle, and it skidded. Before she could think, she was lofted into the air.
The back tire’s brake had not been properly able to grip since the late summer, and when the front tire stopped so abruptly on the loose gravel of the path, the rear of the bike kept spinning and swung out.
Margaret’s limbs pumped the air. She tried to heave herself away from the bicycle and land on her feet, but her legs were numb and disobedient as in a dream, and her head was spinning. She went down sideways, falling heavily on her left shoulder and hip.
And then, an entirely marvelous thing happened. Everything began to tilt. Margaret looked into the night sky, and the stripe of yellow seemed to grow three-dimensionally above the low roof of the library. It blew up rhapsodically with color and warmth.
The pain in Margaret’s limbs and the emotion in her heart clasped, coming together like the teeth of a zipper. Margaret’s eyes would not move from that thick, warm stripe of yellow. Now it was beginning to billow like smoke, to represent something terrible and beautiful at once, and she stood up. The hurt in her body, the inflammation, ballooned—she was on fire, and she began to yaw toward the dimensionalizing yellow stripe. Three uncertain, swaying steps toward the giant color that was bleaching now, losing its heat—and Margaret felt convinced that before the yellow light disappeared, it would let her float into the center of it. She put her arms up high and wide—she felt her arms lengthening and strengthening around the entire earth. All the way around, her arms might reach, all the way to the hidden yellow sun. If only the night sky, that bleachworks, would not destroy the yellow king! And then as though possessed—she startled herself terribly—her lower jaw dropped open, and like water from a tipped bucket, sound came glistening out. Which is to say that she began to yell, and simultaneously she began an almost comical clenching and unclenching of her fingers—she was both surprised and amazed—the grasping had a frightened, unnatural quality to its rhythm, and she gave a series of high and imploring cries.
On the slate staircase leading up to the library’s blind eye, she threw herself down, in sudden and total capitulation.
But the new position did not put an end to it. With her eyes closed, the black letters in the police log, telling her of the Family Strauss, came swimming to Margaret. The letters gushed closer, lost some of their darkness, and soon melted into the shape of a strange man, it looked like a monk, a monk dressed in hay-colored robes. Margaret could see him. His hair was like transistors and his earlobes dangled pendulous. He too was falling down before the setting sun, and this was all at once vivid: the monk in his hay-colored robes and swinging earlobes, prostrated before a sun that was as red as an animal’s heart, beating and loping.
Here was Margaret in Berlin, where only the last, pale yellow stripe smarted against the bleachworks of the sky, and there was the monk in some world far away—he saw it all burn,