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figure was more distinct now, and it was not a man. It was only a boy, fourteen or fifteen, in costume—a medieval huntsman. Long, waving black hair, and his broad, well-shaped forehead caught the light as he turned it to the side, a forehead that was square and flat and fine, a vein like an
M
pushing from it, and he had as much beauty in that moment as the young Gary Cooper coming toward the camera out of the Moroccan desert.
    The boy took a sword from a sheath hung on a carnival belt slunglow around his narrow hips. He held the sword aloft, his face earnest, his arm extended and utterly convinced. Then, with a helpless, backward gesture, he brought it back down.
    And the lake below continued to burn ever brighter, until abruptly it went black. At the same moment there was a flicker of movement, a neat parabola on the right edge of the frame, and the forest came back into focus and went still.
    For a few seconds the projector continued to tick, and the forest persisted—only a slight rustle of branch now and then; a lonely bird alighting on a twig. And then gracelessly, and yet still with a kind of charm, like a cat lifting its paws out of water, the boy moved out of the frame.
    The film ticked off.
    For a while, Margaret and the doctor sat still: Margaret in one of her trances, and the doctor asleep.
    The doctor finally woke herself with a snort. She said, as though time had not passed, “Treat your memories gently when they return, my dear.”
    Margaret did not reply. The doctor sat for a while longer.
    “Can I trust you will come back to the office?” she asked. “When your memories return, I mean? Your treatment isn’t finished, you know.” There was something much gentler about the doctor now.
    Margaret said she would come, but she spoke in a flat voice.
    “I’ll wager,” the doctor said, “that you believe you’ll never set foot in my office again. Perhaps you have judged me insane, or perhaps you are not as mentally disturbed as you pretend, and even now you are planning your escape to Brazil, or to some other country that has no extradition treaty with Germany.” She sat very still, drumming her fingers against the desk. She sighed. “In any case, I’m willing to take the risk.”
    She felt her way across the room to Margaret, and at last removed the speculum from Margaret’s unfortunate abdomen.
    At the prompt, Margaret rubbed her eyes and sprang off the table. She dressed and went as fast as she could back down to the courtyard and out into the street.
    On the way home, the buildings on the Grunewaldstrasse grew farther into the sky. Margaret’s heart pounded and her cheeks flushed. She felt mysteriously unwell. Not as though the doctor had any rightto her insinuations, but as though Margaret had somehow been complicit in the accusation.
    Another strange thing: the film, for its part, was the very opposite of what the doctor had promised. It offered nothing in the way of pulchritude, pregnant or not. On the contrary. After the viewing, Margaret felt much worse than before. The gentle breathing terror was wending back to life.
    Poor Margaret! That evening, she went to the phone booth on Gleditschstrasse and looked in the Berlin telephone book, and then on the Internet. She found no Margaret Täubners listed in all of Germany, nor Margarethe Täubners, nor Margaretes, nor Margaritas nor Grits nor Gretchens nor Marguerites nor Maggies. She looked over the world, she looked in the U.S. telephone directories online. She tried various alternate spellings of Täubner. She found a record of a Margarethe who married a Taubner (without an
ä
) once in Missouri, but that woman had been dead more than fifty years now. She even did something she could not quite explain to herself. She looked for other Margaret Taubs. But Margaret Taub, too, was a lonely name.
    Why was it Margaret did not chalk the whole thing up to a misunderstanding? Why did she let the doctor trouble her? After all, Margaret was neither crazy