by Beth Kephart
I stare at her through the dark, a level stare. “I should have stopped her,” I say. “I should have helped.”
“Nothing to do,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because people who run don’t want to be caught. People who hide don’t want to be found.” She dabs at her chin with her thumb, a bristling sound. She dares me to contradict her, but there’s no point to it. I know what happened at the end of the war, when the Germans had lost and the Russians moved in, and when Omi, more than anything else, did not want to be found.
“Savas is afraid,” I say.
“We don’t need more trouble here,” she says. “We have enough.”
The air is cold. The room is dark. I will write to Stefan tomorrow.
Beneath the quilt on the couch the fever heat runs between my breasts and pools—a hot trickle. I yank at the quilt and the air ices through me. I snatch the quilt back to my chin and the fever runs. The cold is in my bones and the heat is in my skin. I’m between sleeping and dreaming, lost in Berlin.
Sometime, late, I wake to the sound of Omi snoring behind the door to her room. She takes a long, rasping time filling her lungs, then snorts the air out quick, and then it’s silence, then rumbling again. Who knows how she sleeps. People who hide don’t want to be found, she said, and now when I close my eyes it’s her world, the stories she’s told me. The Red Army has made its way in, is crossing the river. There are German traitors—deserters—strung up by their flimsy necks from the lampposts at train stations, and women and children are almost all that is left of Berlin. There will be no virgins standing after everything is done, and the newspapers have stopped, and the phones ring empty, and the trains run two to three to a car while everybody else walks, because no one else, including Omi, can afford the fare; they have all been issued the wrong ration cards. She will wait in many lines. She will fight for rancid butter. She will loot the abandoned bakery for whatever there still is, and at night she will warm her feet by that brick, her legs cold and white beside her mother’s. When the bombs go off she will scramble, her heart high and sick in her throat. She will run, buckets of stolen things in each hand, the buckets clanging. She will run beneath the streets into the shelter.
Omi is hiding. The shelter is dark, but Omi will be found, and her mother, and her best friend, Katja, too, who can trade cigarettes for flour, a used pair of boots for a wool jacket, a tulip bulb for a bird in a cage, and who will grow up and be old, who will become Stefan’s Grossmutter.
People who hide don’t want to be found. But Savas is out there, running. All night long, I crack and sweat, and all night long, he’s running, and what I need is a boy named Stefan. I need Stefan to help me. I feel my way to the kitchen and the book of matches. I strike a light, touch it to the wick. I tear a page from my journal of sketches and write the single word I’ll mail tomorrow:
Now.
I wake to Mutti’s hand on my head, her eyes big in the powdered morning light.
“You were talking in your sleep again.”
“Didn’t mean it.”
She turns her hand the other way, touches my forehead with her knuckles. “So many stories,” she says. She waits. Closes her eyes. Her forehead wrinkles. “Fever’s gone.”
I shrug my shoulders and they don’t hurt. I bring my knees up toward my chin, or as far as I can before Mutti’s weight on the quilt tugs me down. I wonder how long she’s been sitting here, listening to my babble. “I was dreaming about Savas.”
“Savas is a Turkish boy, Ada.”
I give her a funny look.
“You kept saying the Russians were coming.”
I wriggle my arms free of the quilt, push my hair out of my face, try to think myself backward into my dreams, remember what I said out loud that brought Mutti here, beside me. I listen for the sound of sleep behind Omi’s door, look for the page that I’d torn from my book. I hear it crackle beneath my pillow.
“What are you going to do?” Mutti asks.
“About what?”
“I know you, Ada. You’re scheming.”
There are hard lines beneath my mother’s eyes and shadows caught between them. Her hair is thistles. The light from the window glows through it, then storms her face with a seacolored green. Sometimes when I look at my mother’s face I see every man she ever loved and how much loving bruised her.
“I think it’s pretty obvious.”
“What is?”
“That there’s nothing I can do.”
“Nothing?”
“It’s impossible, Mutti. You know how it is. The Turks are their own country. I can’t save Savas.” I won’t talk about Stefan, because the worry will kill her. She’ll tell Omi and Omi will tell Stefan’s Grossmutter, and every shot I have at happiness will be gone.
Mutti straightens then shivers with the cold, unsatisfied. She pulls her thin sweater across her chest and buttons it up to her chin, knows that I’m lying in multiple dimensions, knows that if I knew how to rescue Savas I would. If I knew where to find him, that’s where I’d be. If I knew Stefan would come, I’d open the door.
She stares at me for a long time. Draws her index finger across the bridge of my nose. “Impossible has never stopped you,” she says, and I wonder how much she knows about everything I’ll always want. I wonder whether, in my dreams, I called out for Stefan.
“You can’t save the world, Ada. You know that, don’t you?”
“Somebody has to try,” I say, and I see the hurt go through her.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
Outside the snow keeps falling—so thick now that soon the buses will stop and the only way around will be by foot, straight up to your knees in the white. Everything is silent. Everything is white. You’re thinking about Heinz Holzapfel again, and how he got free on his own.
“Read it,” Ada had said, when she was here, and you told her you would and she wouldn’t believe you, but the truth is you’ve read Holzapfel’s story every night since the last time she kissed you. You have read it and creased it and uncreased it, whitened the words with your thumb, slipped it back into that tuck of space between your mattress and your bed frame, then pulled it back into the light again, where it smells of the inside of Ada’s boot.
“Do you think your grandmother even loves you?” Ada asked.
“I don’t know,” you said. Because you don’t.
SWOOPS ACROSS WALL:
FAMILY MAKES DARING ESCAPE
Berlin (AP)—In one of the boldest escapes of the cold war, an East German economist, his wife and their 9-year-old son swung themselves in a homemade cable harness from the roof of a heavily guarded Communist government building to the safety of West Berlin.
They came down over the barbed wire-topped wall Wednesday night from the top of the five-story “House of Ministries” where East German Premier Willi Stoph has offices.
“I was 80 percent certain that the plan would succeed, because everything had been well prepared and besides I had helpers in West Berlin.
“Often I had occasion to visit the Ministries building on business but in the building itself I had no help.”
Holzapfel took his family into the building Wednesday and at 5 P.M. they went into an attic room, where they stayed until 10 P.M.
The boy slept most of the time, and when it was time to get ready the father woke him with these words, “Now we are going to uncle. There you will get the bicycle we promised you. But first you must show your courage, because until now you have earned only the [bicycle’s] turn signal and bell.”
The boy remained quiet and “we went out of the room onto the roof. It was pouring rain. We wanted to be across by 11 P.M., but it took much more time.”
Holzapfel had a nylon-type cord about as thick as a tennis racket string tied to a hammer. His preparations were thorough. He had painted the hammer handle with phosphorous so that those waiting in West Berlin would see it when he threw it. So that it would make no noise when it landed, he had padded the hammer head.<
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Those in the West fastened a heavy cable to the hammer and Heinz and Jutta pulled it to them, “taking all our strength.”
“Now we were ready to begin the most dangerous part of our flight.”
“We were all very quiet. Guenter was sent over first.”
Holzapfel explained he had made a pulley out of a bicycle wheel axle, with a shoulder and waist harness slung underneath. They hung on to an attachment and rolled down the cable.
“You see how easy it is,” Ada had said, when she was here the last time. Her weight in your arms. Her smell in your nose. Her hair tickling the soft parts of your neck, where the stubble still doesn’t grow. “Just a few parts and some string,” she said. “Just a wheel and a harness.”
“There’s nothing easy about it,” you said, and she said, “Like there’s anything easy about this.” Meaning her and us. Meaning stuck in time. But leaving is permanent, and failure lasts.
“Stefan,” Grossmutter calls, and you hear the shuffle of her slippered feet toward you.
“Yes?”
“You’ll be late for the Eisfabrik,” she says. And studies you with the pinch of her eyes.
SO36
I’m wearing black patent-leather boots with a zipper up each calf, gray cabled tights, a corduroy jumper, and a long leather coat I borrowed from Gretchen, who stopped by early with a bowl of oatmeal and molasses; news travels fast when you’re squatters. There’s cold in my eyes and winter in my lungs, and when I call for Savas his name scorches through me.
Near the Landwehrkanal the vendor trucks are rutting the snow with their wide wheels, leaving grooves shellacked by the morning sun. Little girls in pink hats and boys with red mittens run the grooves—building speed with quick sprints then boot-tobogganing through. From behind, the mothers nag and warn, their heads wrapped twice in scarves, their jilbabs long over their stockinged feet and winter sandals. The smell is snow and sun but also pumpkin seeds and coffee, gözleme and boiled corn, used batteries and leather. I walk Oranienstrasse toward Heinrichplatz. I walk past buildings that are white, pink, yellow, old with bullet holes, beneath windows where spatulas scrape against pans. Iced sheets are being unclipped from lines above. Someone is crying, but it isn’t Savas. The chill is back in my bones. School starts in an hour and I’ll be late again. I’ve mailed the letter I wrote.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Omi asked before I left.
“I have to find him,” I said.
“What did I tell you?” she said, and her eyes were small as I closed the door.
Savas’s hair is black and in the sun it’s almost blue. There’s a pinch in his brow when he thinks. There’s a way he has of holding your hand—like he’s the one in charge, like he’s protecting. There are other women, Arabelle says, who have tried to leave and who have been found dead later, murdered by husbands angry at them for removing their burqas or looking for a job or hoping to speak German in Germany. There are kids who get lost and no one finds them. I think of Arabelle at the shop with the Turkish women, trading their language for German, their submission for power. I think of Peter, Arabelle’s lover, who says the Turks will not learn to save themselves until the Germans give them protection—give them papers and give them rights, give them police, when they need it. He gives them German words for what has been taken, pounds in about landlords, bosses, teachers, lectures in coffee shops and crowded salons, on street corners and in mosques, sits with the men of the Black Sea and plays their card games and tells them how to make it happen. Workers’ unions. Workers’ rights. You Turks are not outsiders or Gastarbeiter, he tells them. You Turks are not the ghetto. You are the people crowded into lousy housing and paid less than you are worth and tossed to the gutter when your hips give in and your bones shatter and the black factory air you breathe stays permanent in your lungs. You are human beings, Peter tells them. Organize, he insists. Keep yourselves and those among you safe.
Take what you are owed.
Command respect.
Peter’s hair is red fire and his glasses are John Lennon. His skin is so American pale that you can see his thoughts flick through it, and it worries Arabelle, how he’s made himself dangerous with his own agitations, how he signs his name to the proclamations he glues to lampposts and to walls, how he lets nothing get in the way of his idealism. I don’t know what will happen, Arabelle says, because Peter’s time in Germany is almost up; his visa’s running short. He’ll return to the States and to graduate school, finish his thesis, send postcards, unless. And of course we both know what unless means. Unless there’s a wedding in Kreuzberg.
“Tell him about the baby,” I say.
“He has to love me,” she says, “for the right reasons.”
“Savas,” I call. “Savas!” And the cold is straight through to my toes and knees, and my head is still weird from the fever, and when I call again my voice goes short—a word at the end of a wire. The kids tobogganing the grooves are still running, waving their mittened hands like United Nations flags, but none of them are Savas. None are the little boy from St. Thomas Day Care who sits in my lap when I read about fear or holds my hand when I’m missing Stefan or tips down slightly when he says my name, as if I were an actual princess.
People who hide don’t want to be found, Omi says. But Savas is just a little boy, and maybe hiding is not what Savas wants, and maybe what happens next will be my fault: I shouldn’t have let him vanish. And maybe, also, I should confess to this: Mailing a word like now across the border wasn’t exactly Stasi smart.
“Just walking around,” Henni says now, arching the pencil line of her left eyebrow and smudging the fringes of her lashes with an incredulous finger. “Looking?”
“Yeah,” I say, feeling stupid. “Looking for Savas.”
On the other side of the kitchen wall, the kids are playing a game of Pied Piper, Markus in the lead being his skinny, tall self. Through the cutout window above the sink I watch him prancing in his green felt cap. The kids swarm Markus, forgetting their places in the line. They toot through their fingers and their plastic zurnas, Brigitte sucking her three fingers and Aylin wearing a paper crown. They finished their puppets and put on their show when I was gone. They made finger paintings that hang now, dry, from the clothesline that shimmies over their heads in the room. The church bells ring the eleven o’clock hour, but Markus keeps prancing and the kids keep following, all except Meryem, who stands at the window looking out onto the snow that’s been flattened, browned, and yellowed.
Through the bank of windows along the exterior wall the sun throws down a white line. Henni stands with her clogs toeing up to one side and I stand in the socks she pulled out of the dryer, some fuzzy lost-and-founds, one of them lime green and the other olive-colored. Deep inside I’m starting to thaw. My knees and my ankles feel crunchy. We watch the kids through the cutout window. Chaos could hit at any second.
“Did you really think he’d just appear, Ada? That walking for hours in the cold after you’ve been home sick for days was the best use of your time?”
“Sorry, Henni.”
“You’ve missed several days of work after a lot of coming in late, you get your mother and your grandmother so worried they come out to find me, to ask me questions, to see where you’ve been, what you’ve been saying—in a blizzard, no less, Ada—and the first thing you do when you’re well enough is go walking around in Little Istanbul thinking maybe, just maybe, you’ll see Savas.”
“The Eintopf was really good, by the way.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
I bite the speckled cuticles of my little pinky. “I didn’t have a better plan.”
Henni throws both arms up, flabby and unhappy, like it’s just one more stupid thing I’ve said.
“Arabelle says—”
“Who’s Arabelle?”
“The one with the bike.”
Henni’s eyes track side to side, back and forth, trying to remember. Out behind Markus the kids are spinning and hidi
ng, yelping and giggling, and if they don’t back down soon the minister will open the door to his office and walk down the hall and step in among us, ask if everything’s fine. He’ll rub at the bald place beneath his hair and shake his head like he still can’t decide whether having a multicultural day care in an empty room in his administrative wing is the smartest thing for St. Thomas.
“Go on,” Henni tells me.
“Shouldn’t we help Markus?” I say, because I don’t know how to go on, because I want to, but I can’t.
“Finish your story.”
I try to think of where to start. I feel a little clutch in my heart. “Arabelle says Savas’s mother is in really big trouble,” I start. “She says people like her can die in Little Istanbul and nobody will know and their children could die, too. I don’t know how to find them, do you? I don’t know what to do. But, Henni: It’s Savas.”
The Pied Piper’s still marching, but the kids have lost the song. They’re jumping on the table now, hiding under the chairs, chasing each other into the closet, all except for Meryem, who has climbed up onto the windowsill. I watch the kids through the interior window; Henni does, too. My job is out there with them. My knees are still crunchy. I look ridiculous in these lost-and-found socks, my legs so bare, my cabled tights spinning in the dryer. I look ridiculous, and Savas is missing. He should be out there with the others, leader of the band.
“And Arabelle knows this because . . . ?” Henni asks now, her voice measured and her blue eyes bright on me.
“Because of her job. She works at the Köpi, the co-op where the Turkish ladies knit.”
Henni blinks twice. Pauses. “This is your friend with the bike.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of trouble does she say Savas is in?” she finally asks, her eyes steady on me, the fat fringes of her lashes smudged. In the big room the twins are banging on the table. Brigitte has glue in her hair. Any second, I think, and the day care will explode. The minister will show his head. Someone will be planning to come and shut us down.