by Beth Kephart
“Savas’s mom was forced to marry Savas’s dad,” I say, repeating what Arabelle told me. “She was sent here from Anatolia—put on a plane six years ago, married to this guy she’d never met. Second cousin or something. He’s forty-one and she’s twenty, and he beats her whenever he wants to, broke a bone in her face, Henni. She’s had enough of it, you know, and she’s trying to get back home—back to Turkey where her mother is, back to the farms she came from. She’s trying to get home and the Köpi ladies were helping, raising money for her tickets, making arrangements. But the sicko-husband found her suitcase and he beat her. He locked her in a room and by the time she got out, all her clothes were gone, all her papers, her passport, the money that the ladies raised, her tickets. When she started to cry he hit her worse, and Savas was there. Savas was watching. That’s why he ran away. That’s what Arabelle says. That’s what the Köpi ladies told her. One of them saw Savas leave. Another heard his mother running. None of them know where they’ve gone.”
Henni takes in a big long breath, and I do, too. We stand there in the kitchen, watching each other—Henni looking for signs of truth from me, me looking for a real plan from her.
“Bastard,” she says at last.
“Yeah,” I say.
“And Savas saw all this?”
“Love is a bad thing. That’s what he told me, Henni.”
Henni bites the inside of her cheek and closes her eyes. She gets a million lines of worry in her forehead. I can see her playing the story through, trying to imagine, but stuck. In the room beyond us, Ece’s crying, both fists up to her eyes. Aylin’s lost her crown and she can’t find it. Markus has stopped the Pied Piper parade. Meryem is still turned away from it all, her little body perched up on the windowsill, her red shoes dangling out over the edge. She’s got something in her hand, I see, and when I squint I realize what it is: Savas’s playdough dragon.
“So we should call the police,” I say. “We should do something.”
“You know how it is. They won’t get involved. They need hard evidence—a lot of it—before they’ll get involved with a domestic dispute among the Turks.”
“It’s not just some dispute, Henni.”
“What proof do we have? Think about it.”
“Savas isn’t here,” I say. “Isn’t that evidence enough?”
“This is a day care, Ada. Kids come and go.”
“But Savas ran here. By himself. At night.”
“And you’re the only one who saw him, Ada. It’s not enough to save a Turk in Kreuzberg.”
“There are the Köpi ladies. Arabelle’s friends. Maybe—”
“Think about it, Ada. If they talk to the German police they’ll be in trouble at home. They are learning German as a secret, remember? Their husbands haven’t been told.”
“So what’s our plan?” I hear my voice and it’s pleading—too loud and so high that some of the kids in the classroom turn and watch us through the interior window, which is wide and short, its frame painted yellow on one side and left bare and knotted pine on the other.
“I don’t know,” Henni says. “I’m thinking on it.”
The kids are all settled onto the storytelling rug by the time I go in to greet them—Markus made it happen, so I thank him. They watch me, different than before, like I’m a stranger to them, like being gone for a few days means I forgot them. Forgot how one twin sits perfectly still and the other one fidgets. Forgot the high shrug of Brigitte’s shoulders. Forgot who sucks which fingers and who calls out and who has to be invited, every time, to say what she is thinking. I prop myself up on the too-small chair and wrestle the big book up onto my lap. I tell them that they have to come closer to hear, and one by one, on elbows and knees, they scoot forward—the paint in their fingernails, the smell of their playdough, the stain of their juice, the smashed dust bunnies on their sock toes.
“Meryem,” I say, “do you want to come and join us?” Because she hasn’t moved from the window ledge and she’s holding Savas’s dragon like an old-world talisman.
“No thank you, Miss Ada,” she says.
“Are you sure, Meryem?” Normally I would press but today I don’t. Today Meryem is watching the window, looking out, I sense, for all of us. She has her reasons and the other kids don’t mind. They let her be, her back to us, her one ear cocked in our direction.
I turn the big cardboard pages slow—past the thieves in the den, past the dead in the cemetery, past the lonely house and the storm at sea.
“Where is the fear?” I ask the kids, and at every picture they shake their heads no. It’s not here or here or here or here. The boy can’t find his fear. We come to the page where we’d stopped the last time.
“What’s going to happen?” I ask, my voice in a hush.
“Fear’s coming,” Meryem says, from her perch on the ledge. “Fear’s coming, Miss Ada. I know it.”
I turn around and she’s facing forward. Her eyes are big black lakes, wind-rippled. She clutches the dragon close and reaches one arm for me. I lay the book on the floor and stand to catch her. She wraps her arm around my neck and her legs around my waist. Her skin is warm and clammy. “Hey,” I say, but she just clings harder, and now when I sit us both down onto the tiny chair, I feel its silver legs tremble.
“I think it’s juice time,” I say, but the kids don’t move. They stay where they were—quiet, frozen. Finally Daniel raises his hand. “Miss Ada,” he says, “Savas is missing.”
“I know,” I say. “We’re looking for him.”
“Where’s Savas?” Aysel says, twisting her arms up and locking her fingers, rocking back and forth now, and now Daniel’s rocking, too, and even Aylin starts moving—an agitation, a fever.
And now Meryem starts crying. Henni appears in an instant, like Henni does, calling the kids to the table for juice. They don’t really know what they want to do. They sit there watching each other, looking at me, looking at the table, looking at Henni with her bright red plastic pitcher. One by one, they wrestle themselves up from the floor and onto their stockinged toes and make their way to the table.
“Meryem,” I say, but her grip is growing tighter. “Do you want some juice, sweetheart?”
But her tears trickle down her cheek, onto my neck. They pool above my heart—hot and clotted. “Savas is afraid,” she says, and that’s all she’ll say, the rest of this whole day, until her mother comes to get her.
“We need to find him,” I say to Henni before I leave—when it’s just us again, no kids, no Markus. When we’ve talked it through all over again—the phone that keeps ringing, the father who won’t want us, the mother who has vanished.
“I’m working on a plan,” she says. “Go home, okay? Come back tomorrow. We’re going to do what we can.”
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
In the apartment, Grossmutter plays the TV so loud the neighbors knock at the walls, hit the floor with the stick of a broom: Turn it down. She acts like she can’t hear the complaints, can’t feel the floor shaking, doesn’t know the walls are rattling, the Lenins and Stalins in their picture frames, the photos of you, the former Pioneer. Only when the girl across the hall knocks and says please, offers a glass of cold milk for her troubles, does your Grossmutter snap the TV off, and then she sits in the dark and the silence. Days go by, darkened and silent until one afternoon, late, the sun banked in low with the pan-bottom clouds, she finds you on the balcony and asks to see. She’s wearing her housecoat under her overcoat and her embroidered slippers. She’s wearing sandbags beneath both of her eyes. She’s short, and you adjust your machine. She’s quiet, and you don’t know what she needs. When you tip the scope up, toward where the stars are supposed to be, she shakes her head no, definitely not.
There’s a place out there—a building, a room. She adjusts and she fiddles but she can’t find it. Her mouth works itself into a fever. She claws at the bags beneath her eyes, tries again, exhaling the cold smoke of the weather.
“That’s the one,” she says, fin
ally, moving her head away so you can see. The view comes in big and distorted. It’s an old three-story building on a crooked street. “There was a movie theater,” she says, “to the left of it. There was a baker down on the corner. It was somebody’s house, somebody’s parlor. That was the West, and that was then.”
“Grossmutter?”
“When I think of how we survived,” she says. “And where.” Her words are soft. Her fingers are on her lips. She goes inside, turns the TV on, comes back out, rubbing those sandbags. The old miser in the apartment below starts knocking the floor with his broomstick. Turn it down. She doesn’t. She needs the noise to tell me a story. The ankles above her slippers are turning bruise-blue with the cold.
“We were young,” she says, whispering beneath the newscaster’s baritone. “We protected each other.”
You don’t ask, because you know more’s coming. Because you know that all this time, all these late afternoons and nights while you’ve been sketching, scheming, planning, she’s been working on telling you something true.
“I was one year older than you,” she says. “And my best friend was having a baby.”
She gets tears in her eyes. She looks a thousand years old. She is so tiny.
“We had to do things,” she says. “We had to survive, you understand?”
“It was the war,” you say.
“We were young,” she says. “And the worst was still to come. Divisions,” she says. “Heartbreaks. That goddamned crucifying wall.” She shudders, but there’s no keeping out the cold, no rolling back the clock to August 13, 1961, Stacheldrahtsonntag, Barbed-Wire Sunday. You’ve been told the story so many times it’s like you were there yourself, waking up inside the coil of a cage. Barbed wire like deadly bales between apartment houses. Barbed wire across the S-Bahn. Barbed wire slashing phone lines, sewers, friends, marriages, and families. By sealing the West German border, Comrade Erich Honecker had imprisoned East Berlin. He’d put in the trace of a first wall, and now the wall is what the wall has become—concrete and watchtowers, asparagus grass and dogs, trip flares and tank traps. Grossmutter has lived it all. You have lived a too-long fraction. Her heartbreaks aren’t your heartbreaks, but she knows what aching is. She knows what it would mean to be free.
She yanks both coats across her chest, still feels the cold. She protects herself, and you can’t help her, and this, you think, is what she means to say. That surviving has its costs. That only and merely surviving has its costs, too.
“Look,” you say, “the city’s gone dark.” Because all of a sudden it has—the round lights in the smirking windows, the bit of reflection across the canal, the sharp electric needle of the Fernsehturm. You search the low horizon for a flash of pink.
“Something’s come for you, Stefan,” she says, a whisper.
An envelope in her pocket.
SO36
Arabelle’s waiting for me in the courtyard’s dark—her breath frosty white, her arms folded tight over the long knitted coat that strains at her belly. Her eyes are catching the light of the first-floor TVs. She’s tied the ropes of her hair into a ponytail and wears her glasses high on her forehead, aviator style. Her gloves are bright pink, fresh from the Köpi. There’s a pack of tissues tipping out of one coat pocket, a pair of canvas sneakers on her feet, already splattered with something. She inhales and exhales and the courtyard breathes with her. She opens her mouth and smiles, swings one wide-thighed leg over the seat of her bike, and it’s clear: That machine is going nowhere without her.
I give her a long, righteous look, as if the bike were mine in the first place. “Did Mutti put you up to this?” I ask.
“Maybe she thinks you could use some company,” Arabelle says.
“I work alone at night,” I say.
“Most of the time, yeah. But not tonight.” She doesn’t budge. She just half sits, half stands there, a patch of the late-night news playing at an angle off her glasses.
“Come on, Arabelle.”
“You’re not winning this one, all right? You’ve been sick and you’ve been acting crazy. Mutti wants you safe, and so I promised.”
She turns and slides her butt back on the banana seat to make room for me up front, rubbing my part of the seat with the palm of one hand as if all that plastic sparkle is a magic lantern. I think of walking to my stretch of the wall, hauling my courier bag and cans of paint and lights the whole cold darkened distance. I think of leaving Arabelle here in the courtyard with her woolly-streamered bike and her glow-bright gloves, where she can choose Mutti’s side all she wants, if that’s how she wants to play it. My best friend acting on behalf of my sad-soaked mother.
“Going or staying?” Arabelle presses.
“Thinking about it.”
“Because we can always stay in.”
“I’ve got things to do.”
“Then take me with you.”
“It’s cold out there,” I say. “Colder than in here.”
“I’m ready for it.”
“It’s dark and you’ll get bored.”
“No more excuses. We’re going.”
“If I wanted a bodyguard, I would have asked you.”
“You can pretend I’m not here,” she says, “if you want to.”
I give her a blast of sour eyeballs. I sigh and the air goes crystal. I strap my bag across my chest and take my place on whatever’s left of Arabelle’s banana-seat bike. She locks her arms around my waist, fits her chin onto my left shoulder, and one foot to the ground, Flintstones style, I get the bike rolling forward. “I promised your mother you wouldn’t go to Kottbusser Tor alone at night,” she says, as if the conspiracy she’s in on is of our own making. “But that doesn’t mean that we’re giving up on Savas.”
“I wasn’t going to the Kottbusser Tor,” I say. “Not tonight.” I don’t have a plan yet. There is no plan. No plan for Savas and no word from Stefan. I am worried. I am angry. I feel hot still, and wet, from Meryem’s crying. I feel nervous: What does the little girl know? What can’t she tell us? Shouldn’t I have known how to ask, somehow? Isn’t there a better way to listen? Am I just going to keep on messing up like this, letting the kids’ confessions pass by me? Letting a boyfriend stay silent?
“Well, then we’re good, right? We’re good? Mutti won’t have to worry.”
“She always worries,” I say, not turning because I’m steering, avoiding the old metal tracks from the courtyard’s factory days and brushing past the piles of snow that Timur shoveled earlier in the day. Timur is what passes for maintenance at our complex. He takes it on himself to keep the basics functioning and the basil growing and everybody else pays him in kind—whatever we have, whatever’s left over. That’s how it works among squatters at a co-op.
“Mutti worries because Mutti’s a mother,” Arabelle is saying.
“Are you going to be like that when you’re a mother?” I grunt. It feels like I’m pedaling an extra two tons, like Arabelle’s baby is a whole third person.
“I’m already a mother,” Arabelle says. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
“I’m noticing, Arabelle. Believe me, I am.”
There are four years between me and Arabelle. Four years and a million things, but end of the day she’s still my best friend and I never can stay mad at her, even when she’s earned it. The snow that melted during the day has slicked. The piles of snow that Timur shoveled to each side are dirty white walls, zigging and crusted. I ride a crooked path across the cobblestones and out of the gates onto the street and turn. St. Thomas Church shines in the distance. There’s mush and ice and cars and music coming from the bar down the alley. Beneath the wide wheels of Arabelle’s bike the ice snaps and the mush goes squish and when a gray cat scampers out from behind a parked truck and I swerve, the belt of Arabelle’s arms around me tightens. I’m yanked back and my boot slips. The front wheel wobbles. I get us going again and look up and back at our complex, and there she is, Mutti in the window, her face in a halo of frosted glass.
“You think Sebastien’s in there?” I ask Arabelle as we push by.
“I don’t know,” Arabelle says, her words coming out in soft puffs, like she’s the one doing the pedaling. “Maybe he is.”
We creak and we wobble. We roll past the old hospital toward the front lawn of St. Thomas, which used to be the back lawn of St. Thomas before the wall went up and cut the church off from most of the people it was serving. I watch the dark places and the snowy places, looking for signs of little feet, or for the heat of an open day care window. Nothing. Savas is not out tonight. He has not come back to find me. Above our heads a big bird flies, and then another, escaping the bell tower, and for a split instant I think I see Meryem, hiding in the shadows.
Behind me Arabelle is quiet, her arms still tight. She fits her chin onto my right shoulder and searches the church grounds, too, her glasses still up high on her forehead. We round the church’s stone face and head for the narrow space between St. Thomas and the wall, wobbling a little but keeping our balance. There’s only the creaking of the wheels and the knocking of the paint cans, the whisk of the air through the wool streamers, the squeak of the three of us on the blue banana seat that sparkles even at night.