light glowing yellow around her like a sickness. A horrible sensation of fear and misgiving crushed her, a certain knowledge that in choosing this man she had chosen wrongly; that any man who loved such a book, where a cavalier draws all his romance and exultation from the bittersweet moment when he leaves his beloved behind, could only be rotten at his soft core—what she knew from her boarding school days Mary McCarthy would have called a “dangerous neurotic.”
But what did it mean? What was the ailment? She thought that night for a long time about Amadeus. She thought about his tendency to love her more, chase her with greater consistency and desire when she was running away from him. She had wanted to give it a name, to know whether she herself was at fault for having dived into the shallows of a heart such as his.
But at the same time, even after that night—and mark, she never completely forgot the realization of that night—her love for him only grew. That was the contradiction. The love became a world unto itself. It was both the liability and the fallback plan; her undoing but also her reward for bearing up under the undoing, the forest of pain, but also her comfort as she wandered lost in that forest. The itch of it, the painful itch of the love that would not cease; the inability to think of anything else when inside such a circle of longing and incomplete satisfaction and longing again—none of it was capable of coming to an end.
Margaret opened her eyes in the closed-up Biergarten, now returned to herself. Several types of pain snaked through her at once. The day in Treptower Park wavered, the tail of it at least, before her eyes, and then fled. In its place, her eyes filled with a blackness the color of pressure. She was on a folding chair in the cold night air, in the defunct Biergarten by the railway tracks.
Slow on her feet, she walked back to Schöneberg, her mind gone black and old.
She thought: I was wrong to remember. To remember is wrong. Memories—true or not, enactments of any kind, attempts at experience inside the head, playacting with neurons hidden behind the bones of the skull, are the enemy of life. It was the doctor who first taught her that.
On the Hauptstrasse, a 148 bus passed by her in the night, and she looked into its aquarium lights as it passed. In the back of it, she saw a girl sitting in a black overcoat over a sailor-striped shirt. She and the girl had the same wide-set eyes, the same long bones, the same skin dotted with moles. The passenger’s veins had the same streaking presence behind the freckles. Margaret saw with absolute clarity and certainty this time: it was Margaret, another Margaret, it was no one but Margaret herself. She was riding up toward Prenzlauer Berg to visit her lover, the older man, the friend of her father’s. She was still traveling up there! And the bus passed by and the young woman was gone, but Margaret was left on the street shivering and shaken.
Curtains closed around Margaret’s eyes, there on the pavement. Through the diaphanous fabric she could see the alternating shadows, the correspondence between prisms. She heard a radio far away in a high window, playing a tin melody she thought she already knew.
There was something else, Margaret thought, something else she was meant to remember.
TWENTY-ONE • Escape from Berlin
The next day Margaret woke up to another changed city. Even before she went outside, chords at the bottom of her mind—and dark they were, dark and in a minor key—suggested that her memories had wrought shadows. Her insanity was slavishly returning.
It was the sky this time, the sky that was rich, the sky that was moving. Specifically, from the heavens, and all over Berlin, dangled rope ladders. Many thousands of rope ladders, and the day was overcast, so these ladders swayed down from the iron-white sky like silken threads of rain, all through the air, over the rooftops, jangling and swinging with life, coming to a ponderous end several meters above the surface of the earth, although some of them dragged against shingles, dipped into chimneys, obstructed the paths of pedestrians.
The rope ladders had an effect on the city’s flesh. The long, rainy skeins of rope caressed and flicked the rooftops, and there were spasms and convulsions.
The effect on Margaret: the ladders drew her eye