by Beth Kephart
“Shhhh, Ada. Look who’s come to see you.”
The middle cushion of the couch sinks. I open my eyes to the weight of it, to the wild springs of Arabelle’s wilderness hair, to that little tattoo star that she wears like an apostrophe above one eye and that snake of a scarf at her neck. She stares at me through her wire frames, touches my face with her hand.
“That was some fever,” she says before I fall away again and the only sound is the ping of snow crystals against the window, an argument on the stairs outside, the cry of a zurna. I am flying through the clouds of Berlin, the white cotton fog and wind, the upper lower troposphere. I am flying, and Savas is running. Come back, Savas. But out in the clouds is a balcony, and the balcony’s a cage, and in the cage is Stefan. Something snaps and I lift my head and my head cracks.
“Arabelle?”
The room is gray, the windows are white, the snow pings hard on the glass. On the kitchen table, Omi’s candle has burned down past the nub. On the other end of the couch, Arabelle sleeps upright, her head cocked, her breath coming out like steam through a grate, my feet on her lap. The door to Mutti’s room is open. I see the edge of her bed, the quilt straight and unruffled. I try to read the clock that sits on the kitchen wall between the oven and the box refrigerator, but a shadow fattens its face. When I move the old stuffed bear beneath me squeaks. Arabelle opens one eye, rolls it my way.
“Somebody’s back from the dead,” she says, blotting a yawn with her warm, dark hand.
“God,” I say. “What happened?”
She yawns again, shakes her head. She rubs the wet parts of her eyes dry, pushes her wire frames up the wide hill of her nose. “Flu,” she says. “I guess.”
“How long?”
“Two nights, honey. You’ve been one sick-girl mess. Spiders, Ada? Frogs? You’ve been spending too much time with those paint cans.” She smiles. Her little baby teeth show. I try to count myself into whatever day it is, but I can’t remember what day it was before, and now when I try to remember my dreams it’s a landscape of stills—hyper tints, neon graffs, the color white, wind shears. I remember orange and pink. White sky and gray. I remember Savas. Savas. I think of Stefan.
Two nights?
“Shit.” I sit up again, faster, straighter, ripping a clang through my head.
“Not so fast,” Arabelle says, startling now, upright herself, as if she’s only just remembered why she’s here. “Look.” She takes a glass from the table beside her. “Drink this, all right? You’re dehydrated.” She does a limber, big-rear scoot across the lame couch and helps me upright, lifts the glass to my lips. Swallowing water is swallowing knives. The stuff streams down my chin and neck, Wildstyle. It spills onto my shirt, the same shirt from two days ago, its collar sticky bothered.
“The kids,” I say, choking on the clear stuff. I lean back, struggle with the crocheted quilt, but Arabelle keeps sitting there, anchoring me in. “And Henni.”
“It’s all right,” she says. “We let them know.”
“You did?”
“Your mother did, actually.”
“Mutti?”
“Your Mutti and your Omi. To be one hundred percent honest.”
I glance again toward her room. Nothing stirring. I hear a song from across the courtyard—Gretchen and her lover. Somebody’s banging a pot on a stove upstairs. A couple of little kids are running. “Where is she, anyway?” I ask Arabelle. “Where’s Mutti?”
“She’s out with your Omi right now.”
“Together? In the snow?”
“A miracle,” she says, showing off her teeth again. I think about this, try to picture it. Where they would go. How they would be. Which would take care of the other.
“Where?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “I’m here until they return. Your babysitter—tried and trusted, bona fide. Now what’s all this stuff about Savas? What’s happened?”
“I was talking about him?”
“Yeah, little girl. Like a lot, you were.”
“When I was sleeping?”
“Taking a risk on this one, Ada, but I don’t think you’d call that sleeping.”
“What a mess.”
“I’m waiting on it.”
“How much snow?” I ask.
“Enough. They’re fine.”
“Where’d they go?”
“They’ll be back.”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” I say. “I mean it.” I fight with the quilts again, toss the bear to the floor, pull my fingers through my hair, pat my wet chin with the dry part of my shirt.
“You’re a noodle, Ada. You’re a mess. You’re staying here.”
“Does Peter know where you are?” I ask, giving her the eye. Try to one-up her, gain some arguing ground.
“Chrissake, Ada, will you stop asking questions?” She’s annoyed and she proves it, snatches the bear from the floor, forces it back into the crook of my arm. “Sleep,” she says.
“I’m not your practice child.”
“Thank you very much.”
“And by the way: I don’t like you eavesdropping.”
“Can’t help it if you can’t keep your mouth shut, Ada. Tell me about Savas.”
“He’s a kid.”
“And . . .”
“And he ran away last night. Ended up at the church.”
“And then . . . ?”
“I tried to take him home, but we got lost. Or he got lost. He wouldn’t tell me where he lived.”
Arabelle sits straight up; her wild hair springs free. She’s watching me with a look on her face. I can’t tell what kind of look.
“So then what, Ada?”
“So then we were kind of lost and we were coming home and it was late, almost dawn, I think—really late, but dark still, and snowing, and the bike wasn’t liking the snow—and suddenly this lady appeared out of nowhere, like some big rubber shadow, and it was Savas’s mother, and they were gone.”
“Just like that?”
I snap my fingers, or I try, at least. I didn’t realize that this flu of mine had stolen the strength from my hands.
“How do you know?” Arabelle says, very slowly, like I’m still too sick to understand, like I’m a little kid or someone stupid. “How do you know it was his mother?”
“Savas,” I say. “Savas told me.”
“God,” she says, standing up abruptly. “Goddamn.”
“You’re freaking me out, Arabelle.”
She paces the room, her hands at the small of her back.
“Could you, like, give me a clue?”
“Can’t,” she says. “I’m thinking.”
“Think out loud.”
“That wouldn’t work,” she says. “Wouldn’t work at all.” She plonks down on the couch, a wave bucking through. “We’re forgetting about it,” she says, “for now, okay?” She turns toward the window, and it’s loud out there with snow.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
When it snows your scope is silent. There’s nothing to see but white dust. You stand on the balcony with the stuff to your knees. White then gray. Silent collapsing to hollow.
She calls your name over the test-pattern hum of the TV. She says, “Get back inside, Stefan. You’ll catch your death of cold.” She only says it once. She doesn’t mean it. She doesn’t mean most of what she says. She is afraid of flowerpots and thin umbrellas, formal jackets, new lapels, buttonhole pins, books that rattle when you touch them. “The Stasi are listening,” she whispers. “The inoffizielle Mitarbeiter.” Thrusting her finger at every corner of the room. She looks like a very old man, and not your grandmother. “We will be accused of Hetzschrift,” she says. “Or of that other thing: Schmähschrift.” Any word she can think of for the crimes she might commit: smears, libel, aiding, abetting. They have won their battle against her. She is afraid. She has been voided.
Sometimes you forget and you think that your grandfather is still coming back, and that when he does—when he clomps in from the stree
t and climbs up the stairs and opens the door, takes off his hat, rubs at the shine on his head, puts his roots in and his arms out like a big old chestnut tree—he will not recognize her, will think somebody else moved in. You think that probably he won’t recognize you either; and why should he, what’s to say you’re the same?
You’re eighteen now. Your hair’s grown thick, stayed curly. You’re tall enough and brave enough to look him in the eye, to say, I’m sorry. You think you’ll teach him the stars; that’s how he’ll know it’s you. You’ll show him what you have taught yourself to see. The gas tail of an asteroid. The boot prints on the moon. The razor whisk of arced blue. A distant pulsar. Antique starlight. The twin tricks to the telescope that he entrusted to you: aperture and ratio. You were going to be a cosmonaut, you will tell him. In honor of him, you were. You studied for it. You swam. You leapt. You did everything right, but they wouldn’t let you. There were eyes everywhere, and their eyes accused you. Here are some terms that you’ve heard before: Border jumpers. Deserters of the Republic. Grade one relative.
“Did you really think that they’d let you into the skies?” your grandmother asked you, when you told her what it was you had wanted and what you would never have and how they had chosen your next day for you, your next month, your life: apprenticeship at the ice factory. Pipe fitter for the future. “They won’t let you out of here. What good does dreaming do you? You’re the grandson of . . . You’re the child of . . .” She put her finger to her mouth. She wouldn’t say it.
“She’s just an old fart.” Those were Ada’s words when you told her what your grandmother had said. Two weeks later, you told her. It wasn’t dinner yet, and your grandmothers were inside and you were out on the balcony, behind the curtain, where the old ladies couldn’t see you. Ada was taking apples from her pockets. Pink liverwurst. Quality toothpaste. She was calling your grandmother an old fart and she was promising, planning, scheming:
“You’re getting out of here, Stefan. I swear it.”
“Try harder, Stefan.”
Careful.
It’s crazy, how much you miss Ada. How steel-gray dead the days are, how slow the clock ticks when she’s not standing right here beside you. How easy she fits, under your arm. How large-minded and unsour her hands are. How when she talks about the kids she loves, the streets she walks, the köfte, the bike with the wool parts that fly, you want everything she is, even if there is no one word for it, no vocabulary for her where you live, and hardly any chance. If your grandfather couldn’t make it free and back, then how could you? If your own mother got away and didn’t come home to rescue you, then what’s to say that bad luck doesn’t run in your blood?
Ada will wait, but not forever. She sees hedgehogs, floodlights, trip flares, control strips, signal fences, watchtowers, shoot to kill, and makes her decision: No time like the present.
There’s no seeing through snow. There’s no sound in the street, nothing but static on the TV. Out on the balcony, snow to your knees, the scope is silent. When it’s cold and white like this you remember him and the day they put his box into the ground. It was an empty box because there was no body. There was no body because no matter how many times your grandmother put on her coat and left the flat and walked all the way to the Department of the Interior, no matter how much she begged for an explanation, some information—Where is he? What have you done? I want to see my husband’s body. Please forgive me. Us.—they sent her home with nothing. Empty hands. Bird claws.
You buried the idea of him, put that into the ground. It was 1974 and winter. It was before the slab wall with the smooth-pipe top. You went with your grandmother to the cemetery and stood opposite the pastor, and it was only the three of you and some birds shaking the snow off their wings and out of the trees and the West Berliners who had heard the ringing of the bells and had stopped and stood on their side, chins to their chests, hats off, fists in their pockets, and you could see them; they were right there, almost within reach—the people you didn’t know and the people you did—Ada and her grandmother, Ada and her mother and her grandmother, Ada was so little there, a girl in a red wool coat. They stood where they were, crowded up against the wall, the bell song overhead, and the pastor talking loud so that they could hear his testimony about the man not in the box, the hole dug in the ground.
You tossed the first handful of dirt. You heard the echo splatter through the empty spaces of the empty coffin. Your grandmother offered a single rose. The pastor raised his hands, the birds flew, the snow fell. Later you would wonder what had happened to the rose, but now, standing here on the balcony looking out over the snow, you remember how you couldn’t save him, couldn’t save your grandmother, how two years had gone by since the last time you’d seen him, two years and all your unanswered questions. “Put it to rest,” they had told your grandmother. “Put it to rest,” she had told you. But her eyes were small black fish inside two big oceans, and she could barely keep her hand in yours, and you were the man of the house; you remember.
The bells tolled. The pastor lowered his hands. The birds flew back into the trees. The snow fell. And when you turned around there were only four now on the other side of the wall—Ada and her mother and her grandmother and another woman, too, in a bright blue coat. She had blond hair, long curls, blue eyes. She had a fern pressed to her chest, a shine on her shoes despite the weather.
“Tanja?” your grandmother said. “Tanja?” Her mouth fallen open and her teeth starting to chatter, a goose in her throat.
“Tanja!” She screamed it louder than any word you’d ever heard. She dropped your hand—tossed it away. She ran between the tombstones, beneath the trees, beneath the birds, beneath the snow that was flying again—ran right up to the edge of the first wall, the dividing line. Flying. Falling. Crash. But now Tanja was running, too, running away through West Berlin. The shine on her shoes was running. The bright blue coat. The hair like your hair—blond and curly. When your grandmother reached the wall—the signal fence, the concertina wire, the spaces in between, the division, the watchtower down the way, also above—there was no going on, there was nothing. There was Ada’s grandmother reaching for your grandmother, but their arms couldn’t touch, and there was your mother, running. It was the last time you would ever see her. It was the last time, and after that, the letters stopped, the small things she might send, the birthday cards. Her love.
“But where did she go?” Ada asks all the time.
“Free,” you say. “She’s free.” And you hope Ada understands, takes it all in, does a little math on the bigger picture. You wish that she would. You leave or you stay. You’re free or you’re not.
There are always consequences.
SO36
“It’s good,” Omi says. “We already tried it.”
“She already tried it,” Mutti says. “I said we should wait.”
I look from one to the other, each of them small in their own way and now, each of them glistening with white.
“How are you, Ada?” Mutti asks.
“She’s better,” Arabelle answers.
“Better,” I parrot. Because the truth is that I fell back to sleep, that I’m not even sure what I dreamed and what I didn’t. Maybe Gretchen came and went. There’s noise past the doorway, down the long, dark hall. The black cat crying.
My mother’s eyes are dark. It’s like the storm has clocked her forward forty years. The crystal fur in her hair. The hard lines where the wind blew in. She’s left her boots by the door and there’s a lake of melt beneath them. The tip of her nose is the first edge of a flame. The skin beneath her eyes is purple shadows. She sits at the ridge of the couch with her coat zippered on while Omi, at the table, stirs the pot. Omi uses the splinter of an old wooden spoon—bangs it around like she’s playing a drum. Now she jacks the whole thing up with her tiny hands and brings it to me so that I can see. Cabbage, leeks, potatoes, onions in a chunks-of-parsley vegetable broth.
“Henni made this?”
“
While we waited,” Omi nods. The carrots look like orange eyes. The whole thing smells like pepper. Omi carries the pot back to the table, her elbows out like pointy weapons, her knees a little wobbly with the weight, and I try to picture my mother and grandmother walking through the mess of Kreuzberg, the pot of Henni’s Eintopf between them. The snow falling down and the steam rising up, putting its heat on their faces. I try to think of what they would say to each other. I cannot think of a thing.
Mutti unzips her coat to the halfway mark and stands on the fuzzy rug in her fuzzy socks. Finger by finger she peels away her gloves, then pulls her hands through the crystals of her hair until the color comes back—the black that is almost magenta. Now she turns and helps me up, too, lets me wear the quilt around my shoulders. She leads me to the kitchen table and sits me down. The chair is a Goldilocks chair. It wobbles.
“Arabelle?” Omi pulls out her chair and seats herself, like royalty in a hurry to be served. She pulls the collar of her black turtleneck up past her chin, gives me one quick look, closes her eyes not in prayer but in impatience. Behind her Arabelle is digging. Through the one cabinet, crooked on its hinges. Through the drawer, which sticks when you pull. “Aren’t there bowls?” she asks at last, but there are tea cups and a Garfield mug, three plates, two saucepans, one spaghetti strainer, one rusty cheese grater, five spoons, four forks, two towels, a plastic measuring cup, a garlic press, a bright red ladle, a silver measuring spoon, and three knives that are good for butter, maybe, but only if the butter isn’t cold. It’s all my mother got out alive with—the kitchen stuff and also the bear and a trunk of clothes for us both. It was the second time she’d had to run. “Bad taste in men,” Omi says. “Born unlucky,” Mutti says. I don’t know if my father was luck or not, but I do know this: Mutti’s still walking the canal late at night. Walking too close to the edge.
“All right,” Arabelle decides now. “This is it.” She slides the saucepans onto the table, the Garfield mug, the broadest teacup. She ladles in and we wait, Omi’s eyes too big in her face. Mutti shakes her shoulders out of her jacket and laces the bones of her fingers.