up into the sky. A dangling rope ladder is nothing if not an invitation. Berlin seemed infinitely expanded—its coordinates recast, a new dimension beckoning.
And now shall be told of an adventure of Margaret’s mind that had the result of making her fright, which until then had been uncertain and porous, become tight—acting as a sealant, as it were. The rope ladders were an invitation, and Margaret did not turn it down.
She looked and wondered why no one was climbing the rope ladders into the sky—such a natural thing to do! Okhan at the Döner bistro, and the tiny woman with her giant husband who ran the bakery, the Armenian woman hanging out her cobwebbed window, and the bushy blue-eyed dogs at the Internet café—all were going about their business. Except, unlike last time, Margaret saw this, took it in quickly, and did not miss a beat. This is what she had come to expect—she and the world would always diverge.
One ladder near her hung alluringly in front of the art supply store, and she let her eyes drift up, let her head flop back. High up, the ladder was lost in the low clouds.
Margaret had a dizzy feeling when she looked up there. She felt herself reflected as in the endless glass world opened by two mirrors facing each other, a sentinel glimpse into the featurelessness of eternity. Margaret took off her felt hat and clapped it over her chest. She wiped her hair away from her face but the wind blew it back into her eyes.
She went upstairs and called her boss at the tour company. Her tours had been irregular lately and with scarce work there was scarce money, but now, despite that, she would cancel her tour that morning. It left her boss in the lurch, he would be put out, but she couldn’t help herself. Margaret would accept the challenge. She would climb out of Berlin.
She went back outside. With the new goal in mind, the ladders seemed to go on even longer before they met the clouds. It seemed an awfully long way up. Wouldn’t it be easier, she thought, if she started from a point already high in the sky?
But there was only one great hill in the flat city of Berlin. This was the Teufelsberg, the mountain in the Grunewald Forest on the outskirts of the city.
She rode to Nollendorfplatz and took the train to Zoo Station. She carried her bicycle into an S-Bahn car and began the ride out into the Western suburbs. Near the Grunewald, already before she got off the train, an unctuous sense of déjà vu laid its fingers on her.
Still on the platform, she knew that below, at the mouth of the station, she would find a small tavern with a gravel garden, outdoor tables, and a black picket fence.
And lo, at the exit to the station, she found a tavern with a graveled terrace, collapsible tables made of wood and iron in obedient rows, and a black picket fence. Just as she had thought of it: the kind of place where you can buy Wurst and beer, an old place, a summer resort for the Wilhelmine petite bourgeoisie. Margaret could feel the women of 1910 in their summer cotton dresses and petticoats, the portly men in waistcoats, dancing to a brass band—she felt it as if she had put her hands near a fire and come upon a wall of heat.
And all the while, the rope ladders swayed above.
She took out her city map, unfolded it to its farthest Western grid, and once again, when she saw the scheme of streets, with the pattern of the encroaching woods and lakes, something about the lay of the land struck her as familiar and terrible. Her aim was the Teufelsberg, Devil’s Mountain, the highest point in Berlin, but her fear was almost too strong to continue. The map grinned up at her in its yellow and blue cover from the bottom of her bag, with cackling, mocking familiarity.
Margaret made her way through the streets of suburban houses, and the gardens of the homes were small here, the dwellings seemed to shoulder up on her—there was an atmosphere of institutionalized eavesdropping.
Margaret’s bad feeling peaked when she neared the end of the road. Here the street quit abruptly and left off for the navy blue of the pine forest. She stopped still. She would not walk forward into the Grunewald Forest. As surely as the seagull with flute-hollow bones cannot fly