about Jewish families who committed suicide during the war; they must know something real about the Strausses. But the archivists were not answering her queries, and Margaret grew distraught. She could not wait. She would go to the archive in Mitte herself.
Frau Jablonski from the archive greeted Margaret after Margaret came sweating through the metal detectors of security. The young woman was small, spoke with an effervescent flourish. She led Margaret up a dark staircase and into a little office that at first appeared to be a closet.
“I’m not sure what I can tell you,” she said. “You’ve written us six e-mails over the last three days, but you should know that there’s no information about a case like this. Suicides of this type were very common. Hundreds of Jewish families in Berlin committed suicide at exactly that time. What do you want us to tell you?”
Margaret was distracted. “I want photos, or to know what jobs they might have had, whether there was any family that survived, what year they married, if either had any previous marriages, names of siblings, what became of their belongings, whether they had any children other than those who died with them, what synagogue they attended,” Margaret said, all in rush.
“Yes, I understand. But none of those questions can be answered—by this archive at least, with the exception, theoretically, of finding the surviving family. But the unfortunate coincidence here is that both the name Strauss and, let me see your e-mail”—she turned to the computer—“yes, and Regina Strauss’s maiden name, Herzberg, are very common. There are thousands with those names.”
Margaret’s eyes flashed back and forth and all around the room, desperate.
The woman watched her. Margaret caught her doing it. But the woman was kind to her. She said, as though not caring whether Margaret was insane or not: “There is something I can help you with. I can tell you where they are likely buried.”
Margaret shot up from her chair.
“Go up to the Jewish Cemetery at Weissensee, and there, in Field D, you’ll find the graves of Jews who committed suicide in Berlin to escape deportation. There are over a thousand in that cemetery alone.”
“Oh!” said Margaret. “Oh, thank you!” She got out her notebook and wrote in large black letters, Weissensee Friedhof, Feld D.
“Why are you so interested in this family in particular?” asked the archivist, looking at her.
“Oh,” Margaret said. Her cheeks were hot, her mouth dry and hungry. “Who can answer such a question.” She fled toward the door. “Thank you, thank you very much.”
Out on the street, it started to rain. The air smelled of earth and damp granite. Forgetting her bike in her excitement, Margaret ran through the rain down the bottleneck sidewalk to Hackescher Markt. She got onto the Number 4 tram just as the doors closed. The yellow centipede went up the Greifswalder Strasse, passed through Prenzlauer Berg. She cursed herself for not having thought to buy flowers—if she were visiting a grave, she should have bought flowers!
On the tram the passengers were dripping with rainwater, and the air soon became humid. The tram climbed onto higher and higher ground, emerged in Weissensee, where the city’s density unfurled and dissolved. The sun reappeared, and the part of East Berlin that is still so much as it was before the change—it spread its arms.
The tram stopped in the new sun, and someone stood to get off—a young woman. Margaret could only see her from behind, but something about her figure caught Margaret’s eye. The girl was tall, with a narrow back and long hair—the curl of it in the humid weather—Margaret recognized the hair, just as she knew the gait, just as she knew the posture: the way the young woman held one shoulder higher to keep the handles of her bag hooked onto it. It was just like Margaret. Margaret had a sensation of red curtains closing around her head, a sense of light passing through prisms; she felt hopeless and warm at once—the sensation of a story coming to an end, a movie finishing, and she stood up and tried to follow the girl. She wanted to see her face.
But she had recognized her too late. The girl was off the tram and Margaret was still on it as the doors closed. Margaret went all the way to the back of the car and looked out the rear window, and now she could see the girl raise her face into the sun, seeming to float as