Margaret was reminded of something else. When she was a child, a friend told her at a roller-skating party (this was a friend with eyes like a forest sprite) that she, Margaret, was a “mongrel.” When she went home, she told her mother. But her mother did not, would not, tell her what the word meant. But she looked at Margaret and said, “Maybe you are a mongrel.”
Her mother was tired and unpredictable. At least, that was how Margaret remembered it.
That night, Margaret was awoken abruptly from a dream.
There was someone in the bedroom.
She could hear the noise of frantic and uncaught breath.
In a ball of fear, she lay quiet.
It took her some time to realize she herself was the one making the sounds. She was lying in bed, breathing hard. Her fingers were rigid, stuck in claw-like shapes, her body curled.
Sometimes, before he had gone to the hospital and stayed to live there, her father had shut himself in his study and would not come out, even if Margaret beat on the door and called to him. His breathing behind the door—he sounded as though he were on the verge of death, and her mother led her away, and explained to her that her father was panicked and afraid.
Such sounds frightened Margaret badly. She felt her own panic creeping when she heard her father’s panic, and in her place under the desk in the long apartment on the Upper East Side, she began to escape.
At first it had been a picture in a book that was the portal. It was a picture of an old woman riding in a basket in the night sky, surrounded by the moon, planets, and creatures with pointed heads. The picture frightened Margaret, but not like life frightened her. Life, when it frightened her, made her feel that all the edges of her body were under attack, a kind of arachnophobia: a sensation of infection and infiltration.
But when the picture frightened her, it was kind. Its terrors had power, and depth, and even scent, yet at the very same time, it all remained far away. And if she looked at it correctly, the picture could be seen to have more than one surface. It was into this picture that Margaret began to disappear, filling in more and more detail of the world beyond the depicted, where the woman hurtled through the night sky—up and up, rising toward the moon, visiting cities made of lapis and alabaster, floating palaces with mile-long hallways and trapdoors. After some practice, Margaret could enter the picture without the book. She closed her eyes and saw the road into the sky. It was very smooth, with a surface like Chinese lacquer. She slid along the colors away from the brown apartment, at first with vague participation but later much more completely, so that when she came back from the reverie, it was as if she had slept.
And so now, Margaret could feel it: she wanted to ride the rainbow, to again have the sensation of riding through the night in a basket on a band of vivid color.
She knew the story of the Strausses was slowly fading and thinning for her. The mystery was not at work. The mystery should have made the story echo and resonate—mystery is the great enhancement of the unknown—but instead, the mystery was quieting them out. And the problem was this: she could have lived with any element of their story remaining unknown but one—whether they were right. If she did know their location in the moral world, then they would disappear from the physical world.
In the next days, the card game at the kitchen table came to a complete halt. Margaret herself was the one who stopped playing. Her mind was tired, and she thought the story was at an end.
TWENTY • The Violence of Nostalgia
The mistake was made: the muscle of her mind had slackened, and all it took was an instant: the beast sidled in. The tent poles fell and the tent too, and there was nothing to block the coming animal.
Restless, uneasy, Margaret went walking in the next weeks. One night she went east, walked away, out of Schöneberg. She crossed the railway lines that form the border with Kreuzberg. She stood on the bridge over the emptiness between the districts. Alexanderplatz sparkled distantly over in the center of town, and under her, the railway cut grooves ever more deeply into the land, like water over centuries chafing deeper into a