riverbed.
On the Kreuzberg side, the apartment buildings were tenement-like, covered in tattoos. On the Schöneberg side, there were gold rings on the chimney-fingers, but also much crumbling bone. Looking off toward town, Margaret felt a wayward love.
Down in the ravine where the train ran, a wan field opened up on the side. A dilapidated Biergarten, shut for the winter, rested darkly. A narrow stairway led down from the street above. Up on poles, dark lights were strung around the tables and benches, and the dead wires looked skeletal; light too is a kind of flesh. So here: a skeleton of the summertime.
Margaret was drawn to it. She climbed over a low gate, and went down into the empty Biergarten. She sat on a chair and drew her body together for warmth. She closed her eyes.
It was no coincidence, the Biergarten. She had known it from before, from her earliest days in Berlin, her first attempts at independent spring living: people with beer mugs in their hands shivering in outdoor cafés, crowding themselves into blotches of kingfisher sunlight in the prickling early spring air. Margaret tightened her eyes. It was the skeleton of the summer, and she was younger then. She remembered her first days.
Nineteen years old, a fresh arrival from the new world to the old, her eyes flashing. Her first day, she hoisted her suitcase off the baggage belt at Tegel, and already that same afternoon, an electric pulse in her fingers shocked anyone she touched, so great was her sense of possibility.
She was free, her father dead of cancer after years of frightening mental illness, a terrible quarrel with her mother behind her—and her bag hoisted from the belt and it was as simple as that: she was on her own. That first day in Berlin, her back arching, rising toward the sky, she was greeted by an old man in the subway station, a man she had never seen before, with the words, “Mein Liebling! Ich liebe dich!” and then kissed on the neck, on the platform with the train rushing by and the man gone before the train was. People seemed to sense intuitively that any overtures toward her would not only be welcomed but ratcheted up.
Margaret came to Berlin fleeing, but she also came to Berlin running straight into the arms of her dead father. Her father she had loved like some quintessential thing. He had been mentally ill, he had fought his cancer only weakly, but through all this, she had seen him as though he were cradled. Off in the haze, he was miniaturized but not diminished: he was a tiny, perfect figure so small as to be invisible, running back and forth in the palm of her hand.
Now she had come to Germany to study her father’s “soul,” as she called it. She was interested in everything he had been interested in. His paranoid mind shot like an arrow to the Stasi, to the CIA, to the KGB, to the postwar reconstructed Nazi party in South America, and so Margaret too was interested in these things. She did not put any stock in his paranoid fantasies, but her veneration for him coalesced with her estrangement such that his obsessions seemed dignified and only coincidentally wrongheaded. In fact, such organizations became, to Margaret, a form of evil nebulous and mythical, not terrible at all.
In any case, her first Sunday in Berlin, she was already trying to know him. She set off to meet an old friend of his, and she felt, in anticipation of this meeting, almost as if her father would come along with them, return from the dead out of old friendship. Her father had always spoken of this man with moist-eyed fondness: Amadeus Vilnius, Slavist.
The man on the phone, when Margaret heard his voice, did not disappoint, either: he sounded over the wires like pebbles brightly colored under water.
They agreed to meet in Friedrichshain. From there, they would walk to the Soviet Monument in Treptower Park. This destination, too, was chosen meaningfully: Margaret’s father had talked about it once. He spoke of it using both hands, his thickly lensed eyes and hoarse voice becoming emotional.
It was on the platform at Ostkreuz, then, that Margaret Taub first saw the man she would always want to see. Later, not a single thing about that first moment went lost. This was how it was: the station was nothing but a knot of criss-crossing platforms, and on that sunny, first-spring March day, the damp