by Beth Kephart
Who is going to blame you for wanting to believe?
Your grandfather disappeared. Your grandfather left and he didn’t send for you, didn’t finish the job, didn’t get there. No ashes, no ceremony, no news, no proof, nothing. Once the Stasi started showing up, the Stasi were everywhere. Your grandmother went from regular old to ancient. She went from small to the size of a breadcrumb bird. She started hiding photographs beneath her bed, talking to people who weren’t there, tacking posters of Lenin to the dining room wall, crying when she was frying the bologna. She turned the lights out at night and the Black Channel on. She hung your flag and the flag of the Union and grew an ugly old hitch in her neck: too much saluting. “Stop saluting,” you said. Remember? You said it. She said, “Sing me that song,” and you sang it.
Take your hands from your pocket
Do some good, don’t try to stop it.
“Guten Morgen.” To the man in the Lada. “Guten Morgen.” To the gray overcoat across the street. “Guten Morgen.” To the skinny lady behind her Neues Deutschland. “Guten Morgen.” To Lenin on the dining room wall.
Ada brings you Pelikan ink pens and Pop Rocky magazines when she comes—smuggles them in, extra crafty. She traces your constellations with her fingers. She stands close beside you and even in summer, her skin is the perfect kind of weather. You show her the skies, she shows you her city—her Spree, her church spire, the signs on her shops where they sell duplicate versions of the exact same things, and also leather jackets. She shows you Arabelle out there somewhere. She shows you the idea of a boy named Savas. She changes the color of her mole and stares at you hard with her huge mineral eyes. She shakes her head of fluorescent pink. She puts her hand on your hands, her lips on your neck, she breathes and you smell paint.
She says, “I’ll wait, but I won’t wait forever.”
And it absolutely kills you.
SO36
“You’re late,” Henni says.
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re late, and good Jesus Lord, you’re a mess. What happened?”
“Sorry, Henni. Really. I’ll make it up to you.” I stare at her, hurting. Stand there on feet that won’t thaw. My knees hurt and my butt and my arms. My back and my shoulders thanks to the push through the snow. I leave Mutti’s old scarf in a knot at my neck. Keep the knitted cap on my head, my jacket zipped, my hands in my gloves, scanning the room for Savas. I smell like chickpeas to myself, old hummus. I have a spike of hurt in my head, a shiver in my bones, something hot behind my temple. Markus is over by the wide windowsill, looking blown about by wind, staring at the book in his hand. No Savas.
“What the hell is going on?” Henni asks, turning her back to the kids and to Markus.
“I’ll tell you in a second, okay? I promise.” Henni has blue eyes with enormous black pupils. She has fat little lashes that look like broken pencil stubs. She studies me and I half study her, then look past her, once again, toward the long, speckled table. The twins are side by side, four wide crayons in Aysel’s fist, a spot of green on Aylin’s nose. Dominik is sucking his thumb, arranging paint pots. Daniel’s fingers are slimy with glue. Meryem’s thinking, her chin perfectly balanced on the points of her delicate fingertips, and I know that she’s thinking about Savas. The table itself is like some dumped-out bottom drawer—paints, crayons, brushes, markers, triple-wide popsicle sticks, construction paper, felt squares, zigzag scissors, the pipe cleaners that Meryem thinks are caterpillars. “They aren’t alive,” I always tell her. But she screams when they come near her.
There’ll be a show, I realize, of some sort. The kids are making stick versions of themselves. It’s all very abstract, and I don’t understand, and there isn’t time to piece it together.
“You look like you slept in a zoo,” Henni says.
“Savas is missing,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “I called his house. Nobody was at home, I guess. No answer.”
“We have to talk,” I say.
“What’s going on?”
“Not here, all right?” I glance toward the back of the room, the wall of windows, the deep sill, where Markus is hovering. “Markus,” I call out. “Can you cover for us?”
“What,” he asks in his moody best, “do you think that I’ve been doing?”
“You’re sure,” Henni says now, after staring at me for what feels like an hour.
I nod, gnawing the splattered cuticle around my little finger, where the paint leaked in last night. My gloves are warming on the heater. My jacket’s unzipped. There are heat prickles inside my cap. It still hurts in every bone. I stop my teeth from chattering.
“He ran all the way here, by himself, and climbed through a window.” She tells me what I’ve just told her, in the same order I told it, every word measured and slow, like that will change the percentage of truth. She’s old, Henni, like fifty or something. She has short legs and a wide middle. Her eyes are so blue they’re almost violet. She had a boyfriend once, calls him Ancient History. She wears yellow canvas shoes and brown corduroy pants, that beat-up, rust-colored apron. These kids are her life. She’s never had a runaway. She’s refusing to believe it. I remember something she said to me on the first day I started: The kids are only on loan to us. We screw up, and they vanish.
I give her a steady, unlying look and nod again. “He must have known the window would be open. Must have noticed Markus sitting there smoking. Markus does it, like, every day. Savas is smart. He remembers.”
“Ada, he’s five years old.”
“Henni, he was here. All right? He was here. He was hiding in the closet.” My voice ricochets off the thin kitchen walls, the silver refrigerator, the tiny oven, the two sinks, the faucet, the pantry shelves, the Dixie cups, the tubs of playdough. I start again, quietly, as composed as I can given the way that I feel, which is lousier than ever, and worried. “He was here and he was afraid. He was running away from something.”
“And why were you here again, Ada? In the cold, in the dark, after midnight?”
“I was taking a ride.”
“A ride.”
“On my bike.”
“I didn’t think you had a bike.”
“On my friend’s bike, Henni. What does it matter?” I’ve torn the cuticle down to the flesh, popping a ruby of blood—bright red and wet as polish. I feel Henni’s eyes on me, like I’ve done something wrong, like it is my fault Savas ran away, my fault that I found him. Beneath the cap, my hair is smashed and hot, and on my lip an old yellow mole is melting. I watch Henni through loose strands of sunshine, wonder when Markus will come in here and stare down his thin nose and declare that his shawl has been stolen.
“Are you sure it was his mother—that woman on the street?”
“Who else would she be?”
“I don’t know, Ada. I’m finding this hard to believe.” In the big room around the corner from us the saucer feet on the chairs are squeaking and the kids are growing noisy. Dominik is fighting for a pair of scissors with his favorite word of all time: “Mine.” Markus is telling Aylin that it’s time and Aylin’s turning “No” into a song. Now someone is running—the splat splat splat of their feet across the linoleum floor.
“Savas is missing,” I say. “That’s what I know. And he was afraid. And we should find him. We have to, Henni. You have his address, right?”
“You know how it is, Ada. We’re not exactly welcome guests in their wedge of Little Istanbul. Besides, if she’d wanted your help, she would have asked for it. If this all happened the way you say that it did.”
I brush the pink out of my eyes, give her one of my looks. My eyes blur. I focus. “She doesn’t speak German, Henni. How could she ask me?”
“But she ran. That says enough, doesn’t it?”
The bright pop of blood near my nail has smeared. The kitchen smells like baked wool. Markus has found his guitar and he’s strumming, circling the room. I catch a glimpse of him in the silver face of the refrigerato
r. Dicle, a dark-haired kid who joined the class a month ago, is parading after him, a pipe cleaner up against his mouth like a zurna.
Now Meryem’s up, and Ece with her, and when Markus hits the la-la chorus, the room echoes with the sound of kids singing pop English—German kids and Turkish ones, the wrong words and the right ones, Markus out in front, trailing patchouli instead of his shawl. Savas, I think, should be leading the band. Savas should be here, but he’s not, and I shouldn’t have let him go last night. I should have run after his mother, forced her to explain, with her hands, maybe, with Savas’s help: Who hit you? What’s happened? Where are you taking him?
“They live by their own rules,” Henni says now. “By their own customs.”
“But Savas is our responsibility.”
“I know,” she says. “I know. I’m thinking.”
Mutti is waiting. I don’t see her at first, pitch my bag to the floor, scrape out a chair, unwrap my vendor-cart sandwich. I close my eyes and lift the sausage to my face, give my nose a little steam bath. I try to think, but my head’s all cloudy, my bones are hurting, the atmosphere of me is clammy.
“What’s going on?” I hear her now.
She’s thin as she is. She leans against the open door that connects her room to the kitchen. Her tight jeans are too loose. Her red socks are fuzzy. Music bangs in from the flat above—that red balloon song with the war words, Captain Kirk and fireworks. The singer’s voice is high and sweet. The drums are full of echoes. Now from downstairs someone turns the Beatles on. We’re caught in between.
“Nothing’s going on,” I say.
“You didn’t come home,” she says, “until dawn.”
I lift my shoulders, drop them, think of Arabelle in the kitchen, explaining again: She was down by the canal. Think of how we laid her in her bed, the sweet sickness of drink on her breath, the blankets to her chin, her heart all broken again. Sebastien. A painter from France, Omi has said. And now a part of my mother’s ever-tragic history. She’ll get better, everyone says. But I don’t know what better is.
“The art was bitching last night, Mutti,” I say. “I stayed out late to finish a graff.”
“Is that the truth, Ada?”
“Mostly.” Mostly itself is a word that doesn’t lie.
My little finger throbs where the cuticle ripped. There’s a strip of burn on the roof of my mouth. If I tell Mutti about Savas, she’ll flame out like the end of a match. “Protect your mother,” Omi says. My job, since the day I was born.
Mutti leans away from the door and pulls a kitchen chair toward her. It hardly creaks under her weight. The purple question mark on her white T-shirt sits crooked on the small shelf of her breasts. The polish on her nails is chipped. The line of silver-pink scar across her inner wrist glistens like half a bracelet. It’s nothing, she says, when people ask her about it. She’s lying again. That scar is proof that Mutti has what it takes to survive herself.
“You don’t think there will be trouble,” she asks, “living like this?”
I don’t answer; how can I answer? This is Mutti, sad Mutti, who spends half her time not even living. I force my sandwich down, fist up the silver wrap. Downstairs the Beatles are turning over to Bob Dylan, and upstairs the balloons are gone, and I’m here with my secrets and Mutti with hers and Omi behind the brass lock of her hollow-core door.
“Can’t you talk to me?” Mutti says. “Please?” She lifts a hand to my right cheek and then presses it to my forehead and suddenly I’m so extremely tired and much too dizzy and stupid helpless and I’m slipping, wanting to tell her everything. About how it felt to push Savas through the snow at night. About the monster bird that was the kid’s mother. About how much I miss Stefan, how I don’t know for sure what he’ll choose to do, how I’m not really a Professor of Escape, just a girl in love who will not let her own heart break in family style. I’m a girl rejecting my genetic history. I’m a girl who lost a boy in the dark of Kottbusser Tor. I close my eyes and I see snow. I open them and a salty tear makes its way to the corner of my mouth.
“You’re warm,” she says. “You have a fever.”
“No,” I say. “I’m fine.” But my eyes are closing and it’s hard, really hard, sitting here pretending I’m fine. “I just need a minute,” I say, and maybe a minute goes by, or ten, but now I feel Mutti’s arms around me, feel her thinness lift me, her half-strength float me like one of those sad, red balloons.
“Here,” she says.
“I’m fine, Mutti,” I mumble. But I’m not, and she’s here—thin and worried, suffering like she does, leading me away to the couch. She helps me from my jacket, unpeels the cap that is glued to my head. She leaves me and then she comes back, and I feel her lift one of my arms as she tucks in the little bear I slept with when I was a kid. The blind bear with the vest of buttons and the two rectangular teeth. Mutti made the bear, with socks and felt and thread. Mutti made it when she was young, before living like we do became too hard.
“I’m fine,” I insist, but I’m cold inside and hot everywhere else, and when she touches my head again with the tips of her fingers I feel the prickle of it low in my spine.
“Mutti?”
“You need your rest.”
“Can you tell them?”
“What?”
“To stop the music?”
“Oh, honey.”
And now she sits there, on the far end of the old couch, rubbing my feet with her fingers. Everything is upside down and reversed.
“Close your eyes,” she says.
I’m floating.
I dream red balloons and fighter jets, fireworks and squadrons. I hear Omi in the kitchen, talking; feel Mutti get up and sit down and get up and sit down; and here’s John Lennon in a swimsuit and Ringo Starr with a drumstick microphone and Omi tiny, dancing. Omi pressing her hand to my forehead. Omi leaving her hand behind.
“Omi?”
“Shhhhh. Sleep.”
Ninety-nine red balloons. Ninety. Nine. I write the number onto the sky. The sky is smacked with graffiti. “Look,” I say, and Stefan’s here. He has his hand on my head.
“Stefan?”
“Amateur,” he says.
When I open my eyes it’s dark. When I open them again I’m high in the sky in a basket, a plume of fire beside me. Flamethrower. Gas burner. It is working. We’re escaping East Berlin—all of us and Stefan, too, in a hot air balloon as wide as the city’s widest building. We’re high above the silver teeth and spires, the sausage men, the tin can cars. We’re high, and the river is running. The river and a boy with coal-black hair—a purple shawl flying out behind him, trailing the smell of patchouli.
“Ada?”
“Savas?”
“Shhh, Ada. Shhh. It’s just a dream. Please. Have some water.”
“Omi?”
I reach but she’s far. I lean but she’s there—on the fifth floor of a bombed-out building, no walls. The two orange frogs on her shoulders are hiccoughing words; the words are neon. Behind them an orchard grows through the low bowls of lit chandeliers, and past the orchard the city is burning. “You’ll be all right,” Omi is saying to the frogs on her shoulders, to me. “It’s nothing,” she says. “It’s just a fever.”
“Mutti?”
Crackers and soup. “Just a little, Ada. Good.”
My eyes are like fishhooks. My words are like cotton. My city is no walls and neon frogs, chandelier bowls tipping soup. I feel something cool across my face, and then, for a long time: darkness. A thin sheet yanking and pulling. I hold on to my hair. It is pink.
Savas is here, like a spider.
Stefan is coming.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
You have to wait for the right time. You have to wait because you know, because you have done your own research, because you have made your own lists, because there have been failures.
For example:
Roland Hoff, from trying to swim the River Spree with his briefcase at his chest. They shot him as he swam.
Dorit Schmiel, twenty years old, shot in the stomach, treated like a hunter’s catch. By her hands, by her feet, they dragged her bloody. She didn’t finish dying for a while.
Klaus Brueske, from driving his truck across the border at top speed, border guard bullets to his head.
Christel and Eckhard Wehage, who killed themselves after their hijack-a-plane plan failed.
Horst Kutscher, after he’d already slid beneath the barbed-wire fence, after he’d already started along the security trenches, when there were only twenty-five meters left to freedom. Horst Kutscher. They shot him in the head.
Marienetta Jirkowsky, who was only eighteen, who had climbed the ladder, the final obstacle. Who was stepping East to West when they shot her.
Paul Stretz, and do you want to hear this? One hundred seventy-six bullets were fired.
Karl-Heinz Kube, who was in the death strip, who had bought his wire cutters at the Konsum department store.
Dietmar Schwietzer, who was eighteen years old, who was running, who was thirty meters from free. Of the ninety-one shots they fired, one hit him in the back of his head. They couldn’t be worse at what they do, or more effective.
Giuseppe Savoca, six years old, who wasn’t even trying to escape. Giuseppe was a kid playing with a friend. They were looking for the fish along the riverbank and he fell. The guards did nothing; they let him drown. He was six.
You have to wait. You have to be absolutely sure. Love is the biggest thing, of course. But there are other considerations.
SO36