into the storm, she could not go on.
She decided her bicycle was the way to make an effort at proceeding. It was the only way of having more momentum than fear. She mounted the bike and set off precariously. She rode along the brambled path. Her heart beat but her speed was a salvation. She pedaled, and several times her skinny front tire was bested by one of the branches that lay in her path and it skittered off to the side. She did not end up on her back only because she was gripping the handlebars with such force.
The forest broke and a freshly paved road opened up before her. An elderly pair of men were walking down it.
The men were speaking Russian. They were laughing. They were drinking from a shared flask. Margaret asked if they knew where the Teufelsberg was. One of the men, his craw pink and loose, his German broken, laughed at her and gestured toward the west. After she passed them, she looked back over her shoulder and wondered what these two were doing here. It was her first thought outside of fear in a long time, and with it she noticed her misgivings pass. All of a bright sudden she was thinking with optimism.
She turned a bend and there it was, the Teufelsberg, before her, looming like a skyscraper. Right away she knew that she had never been here before, that her sense of déjà vu, too, had fallen away. She had been expecting a hill sloping gradually out of the landscape, covered in trees. Instead, a soaring cliff of land rose before her. It was grand, it suggested the myths of icebergs floating in the night ocean.
Approaching the giant, she saw a zigzagging flight of stairs cut up the side of the vertical wall, and she was sure that her mission to climb out of Berlin was going to succeed, for already beginning to ascend the rough stairs she felt that in some essential way she was escaping, her heart casting off ballast.
She got to the top; she was panting. She had counted sixteen flights.
Up here the land spread around her in a vast plateau, as on the roof of a tower, and this, too, was right and good. As she often recited on her tours, the Teufelsberg, an artificial mountain made of the remains of four hundred thousand bombed-out Berliner buildings, was “the collected works of Adolf Hitler.” Now the great mass clambered toward the skies.
And here, too, the rope ladders were swinging in the heavy wind, filling the air in their locust swarm. The nearest ladder she grabbed hold of and, indeed, the grey sky was much nearer to the ground than it was on Grunewaldstrasse.
She began to climb with an energy that amazed her. The ladder was not pinned to anything below, so it was a jaunty, difficult ascent, the rungs twisting and spinning. But the effort of bringing her feet onto them occupied and emptied out her mind. If she looked down, she was hit by vertigo; if she looked to the side, she was distracted by the sight of Berlin laid out around her, and so she did neither.
Finally, she burst through the clouds. She had a sensation of pure happiness. The sun was bright and warm up here, the freezing early spring air somehow left behind. The smell of the open breeze embraced her, chilling the nostrils only slightly—tenderly. She turned her head up in exultation.
She was not fated to enjoy her happiness long. Just as quickly as the first, another whiff of air gusted toward her on the back of the other. A second scent, horrible and familiar. The smell of bird droppings. They were there, in the clouds. There must have been ten or eleven—nestled among billowing vapor—enormous birds of prey, as big as elephants, most of them a dark, silvery grey, cosied up like smoky jewels in the pillows of cold.
Without a second thought, in a steady panic, Margaret began to lower herself back down the rope ladder again. But this was a more difficult and slower operation than going up. Dangerous slowness, really. Before she could get very far, the bird that was nearest to her began to pick its way across the cloud landscape in a slow approach, its head thrusting forward in repetitive jabs. As it came, it began to change. The head shrank, the shoulders narrowed, and the dark, grey-black feathers molted quickly to reveal black gabardine. Gleaming now