by Beth Kephart
“Almost there,” I say, and she says, “I’m ready,” and I think of all the times she has asked me about my graffing and all the times I told her to wait, to give me room to finish. Because maybe there are some artists who like to show off midwork, who like to splatter and dab inside the warm space of a snow globe, but I’m not one of those. A work of art has to speak for itself, and it can only speak when it is finished, and besides, my wall is Stefan’s wall. I was hoping to show it to him first.
I brake the bike, hop off, steady it for Arabelle, who toes around on the walk for ice before she trusts both canvas shoes to the ground. In the thick dark I walk the bike to the base of the church and prop it up against the wall. When I turn back around I see Arabelle rubbing the cement slabs with her pink-mittened fingers as if I’d graffed everything in Braille.
“You going crazy on me again?” I ask.
“No crazier than you out here in the night.”
“You can’t see anything,” I say, “if you stand that close.”
“I can’t see anything anyway,” she says, backing off and coming toward me.
I unstrap my bag, rattle my cans around, dig until I have my lights. I switch them on, the first and the second, then balance them both on the bricked-in ledges. It’s two sprays of bright slamming up against my graffing. It’s the pictures I’ve made, one after the other. The Great Escapes in the order of my delivery. My butanes and my propanes. My Ta Da tag. Arabelle returns to the wall, removes one mitten, traces the big boot of the running soldier with a finger. She stands back to get a better look at the loaf of bread and the toilet. Back and forth she goes, getting the big picture and the details. The ropes of her hair have fallen loose at her face.
“Ada,” she says at last. “Well, Jesus Christ, Ada. You’re brilliant with a spray can.”
“I’m not finished yet,” I say, managing defensiveness and pride at the same time. I feel heat in my face, get down to my business, start pulling my cans out of the bag, my caps, my fingerless gloves, my green bandana. I arrange my colors, dark to light, switch around the caps. It’s cold out here. My fingers feel knotty. Arabelle keeps talking.
“You don’t have to be finished for me to see,” she’s saying. “Nobody graffs likes this. Nobody. It’s like, you know, Michelangelo quality. I mean, if Michelangelo had a spray can, Ada, Michelangelo would graff like that.” Her voice is rising, high on itself. She goes back to the wall, takes her other mitten off, walks the tightrope with her fingers, back and forth, like it’s a real, sustaining line. She starts laughing all of a sudden and I have to cut her off.
“Shhh,” I say. “The guards will hear you.”
She spins quick, like she thinks a uniform with a gun has shown up here beside me. I point to the wall and the places beyond it, where the dogs are sleeping and the guards are on their watch, where the metal spikes of asparagus grass grow underground. In the silence now we hear the rabbits scramble, their bodies too quick and light-boned to be detected by the no-man’s-zone land mines that would blast a human into pieces. It’s tricked up so good on that side.
“So what are we graffing tonight?” she whispers at last.
“We?”
“I’m out here, aren’t I? Put me to work.”
“You’re out here spying is what you’re doing.”
“I’m out here as your protectorate.”
“My protectorate?”
“Whatever. Come on. Don’t be such a nudge.”
“What do you know about writing, Arabelle?”
“I know everything you’re going to teach me.” She smiles her full-wattage smile. When I don’t smile back she changes her tune. “If I don’t do something I’ll freeze out here. There’s got to be something.”
“All right,” I say, considering. “You can fill.”
“Cool,” she says. “How do I fill?”
“Christ,” I say. “How can you live in Kreuzberg and not know how to fill?”
“I do other things,” she says. “Remember?”
“Yeah. Like spy on your best friend.”
I take a can of sky blue and shake it well. I take a can of candy pink and tell her to shake it like I am. The agitator balls go from stuck to rattling free. When the propellant is loose and juiced inside, I tell Arabelle we’re ready.
“Some tips,” I say, matter-of-fact, showing her how to fit her finger over the valve cap. “We’re filling, so we’re staying close, all right? Top to bottom with a third overlap and never a continuous press. We’re going for a fade fill—blue sky with some sunrise pink. A wall like this sucks the paint right up, so we’ll need two coats, maybe three.”
“You should teach this stuff.”
“I’m already a teacher.”
“Yeah, but I mean—”
“You’re stalling, Arabelle. I can tell you are.”
“Am not.”
“Then how about you get started. You keep your wrist moving, okay, but your arm and elbow quiet.”
“All right.”
“Wait.” I crouch back down over the bag, pull two bandanas out. One for her and one for the baby she’s carrying. She stoops a little so I can tie the first and then the second. Then I cover my own mouth, and we are ready.
“We look like bandits out here,” Arabelle says, her words muffled.
“Have to work quick,” I say. “Have to work easy.”
She steps back and I show her technique. She steps forward, fits her finger on the valve, and presses down. Color hits the wall and splatters overhead, like one of Stefan’s stars exploding. She stands back and I show her again. She moves the can in her hand, changes the angle of her wrist, lifts her elbow up, like she is dancing. Her color makes an even showing. She lifts her finger, laughs.
“What are we filling for?” she asks, after a while.
“Story of a man,” I say, “named Holzapfel.” I work beside her, a strip of vertical fills. She covers by thirds, working the long horizontals. There’s a rhythm to graffing, and she’s finding the beat, the loosened strands of her hair falling and rising like the streamers on her bike catching a breeze.
“Who’s Holzapfel?” she finally asks.
“A great escapee. The one with the flying fox.”
“Oh, God. What’s a flying fox?”
“Wheels on a wire,” I say, and then I explain. I tell her the story of the night and its rain, of how Heinz Holzapfel sent his son off first, and then his wife, and of how, because of the weather, he took his chances, waited. I tell her what happened when he finally soared himself—how every paper, every proof, every knuckle of everything he’d carried with him—in his pockets, in his suitcase, around his neck—jiggled loose during his flight and fell to the ground in the East. “It was like confetti,” I say, my voice getting loud, my sentences like victory punches. “It was like confetti, raining with the rain. And nobody saw it, can you picture that? The guards didn’t look up because of the rain. They didn’t look up because of weather. Because they were afraid of getting a little wet.” I put my fist up like Holzapfel himself just rode in. Like he just landed here beside me on his homemade flying fox.
“Crazy,” Arabelle says, slow and suddenly wary. “That’s some crazy, crazy story, Ada.” She’s stopped her filling. She’s watching me. Those eyes above her bandit face. Those glasses on her forehead, splattered.
“Not so crazy,” I say, defensive.
“One in a million chance,” she says, “of not getting caught doing something like that.”
“Happened before, could happen again.”
Arabelle pulls the bandanas off of her face—the first and then the second—and drops them to her neck like coiled-cloth jewelry. She rubs at the pink that freckles her skin, the little bits of blue from my can. “You’re scheming, aren’t you?” she says finally. “With that boy of yours.”
“I’m just talking about flying,” I say.
“You’re talking crazy, is what you’re talking.”
“Finish the fill, all right?”
I say. “Fill has got to be perfect.”
She yanks her bandanas back up, hooks them over her nose. She rattles the can. She molds her pressing finger. She does all of this while watching me, then carries on with the fill.
Left to right.
Third over thirds.
Release at the end of each stroke.
Everything, I think, in its time.
When we’re done we’re done: Our arms are shaking; the cans are empty; the agitator balls are spitting nonsense. I pack my bag, cut the lights, kiss Arabelle’s cheek. “Not bad,” I tell her, “for an amateur.”
“Not bad for a spy,” she says, and she laughs, and when she laughs the air turns to crystal, and in the crystal there is pink, but just a little. No one has passed this way all night. The guards have not been bothered. Only now and then have we heard the Alsatian dog in the no-man’s-zone bark at a phantom or a shadow, at one of those mine-defying bunnies. We filled and we confetti’ed. We flying-foxed Mr. Heinz Holzapfel, got him to freedom—fat caps and skinnies.
“Home?” Arabelle asks, headed for the bike.
“Not yet.”
She gives me a but-I’m-tired-and-it’s-so-cold look. I shrug, because it’s not like I asked her to come, and it’s not like I’ve not been accommodating.
“You’re here, right?”
“So?”
“And I didn’t go off looking for Savas. As promised.”
“I guess not.”
“My reward is your reward. I want to show you something.”
We leave the bike where it is, propped up against the wall. I reach for her hand, her furry pink glove, which is pinker now in places and blue in some spots and crunchy, a little worn through on the index finger. We walk side by side, hand in hand, down the narrow alley between Kreuzberg and the Grenzwall 75, the meter of walking space that the East left to us made even narrower by piles of snow.
When we reach the observation post I put my arm across Arabelle’s shoulder and guide her up the steep flight of planked steps until we’re standing at the guardrail looking out over the wall’s sewer-pipe cap. Past the anti-vehicle ditch, the hedgehogs, the control strips, the light poles, the patrol roads, the watchtower, the trip flares, the dog run, the signal alarms, the signal fence, the barbed wire on the other side. Past the bright glare toward East Berlin, Friedrichshain, where the old buildings are fortified and the new buildings are concrete boxes, one room on top of another, every room exactly the same size, one light still on, the rest of it darkness after so much glaring brightness.
“You think they see us?” Arabelle asks, shivering a little. “The guards, I mean.”
My eyes track back toward the guards in their yellow-lit room, the steam in their windows, their radio antennae spiking up top. They’ve got portholes for firing through. They’ve got a 360-degree view. They’ve got shoot-to-kill orders if anybody flees, but right now, our graffing done, we are not their enemies. We are safe where we are against this splintery rail, safe watching that side from this side, looking for Stefan. He’s out there, somewhere, in the dark. Isn’t he?
Stefan. Please. Answer me.
“Do you think . . . ?” Arabelle asks again, but I pull my left arm tighter around her and lift my right hand, marking that one solitary distant light in Friedrichshain with my spray-can finger. It twinkles on and off, yellow and blue. It looks like a star that has fallen.
“That’s him,” I say, a whisper now.
“Stefan?”
I nod, proud and hurting, but not actually sure, my whole body suddenly electrified with how much I miss him. “He’s gorgeous, isn’t he?” The light goes on and off, bright and chilled, like one of the glitter sparks in Arabelle’s bike seat.
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess he is.” Squinting as she says it, smiling like she sees, because she’s my best friend and because what I have said is true: Stefan is the most beautiful boy in my world. No one can replace him.
“I’m going to need your help,” I tell Arabelle now.
“Help how?” she asks, her voice hushed.
“With Stefan and also with Savas,” I say.
She takes a step back. She stares at me. I see the questions bulge her eyebrows.
“I didn’t know the two were related,” she says.
“Of course they are.”
“How?”
“Two people trapped in two wrong places,” I say, and I’m about to say more, but I stop. Arabelle will understand when I tell her someday. She’s my best friend for a reason.
“You’re going to have to tell your mother,” Arabelle says after a while.
“I will.”
“When?”
“When I know what I’m actually doing,” I say, and suddenly my teeth start to chatter and there’s a clench up in my chest and my knees throb and Arabelle is here, her arms around me.
“Hey,” she says. “Hey. You’ve been sick, you know.”
“That isn’t it,” I say, striking a tear from one eye.
“That’s maybe partly it,” she says. “Come on.” She helps me down the stairs and down the alley. She balances me back onto the bike, takes the seat up front, leans in, and steers. She pedals, steady, all the way home. There are no lights on at the day care. No tiny bootprints in the snow. No letter waiting when I get home. Just the bear on the couch, and the darkness.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
They never gave you your grandfather’s body. You never had proof that he died. Even after they knocked his empty coffin into the frozen ground your grandmother went to the Vopos begging—for the bones of him, for the truth—and every time she came home empty-handed. A welt appeared beneath one of her eyes, like an underground tunnel for the tears that lived inside.
She’d waited four years to put his coffin in the ground. She waited another two before she dragged an old chest into the middle of the biggest room and asked for your help. He’d left six shirts and three pairs of trousers; you folded them into their smallest versions. He had a watch that worked and a watch that didn’t; you wrapped them both into his flannel scarf, the good one wound and ticking. “Take it,” she said. “Pack it,” and she meant everything—the stiffened shaving brush, the caked cream, the towel that he’d worn around his waist when he was waiting for the shower to lose its steam, the pom-pom hat, the belt with the torn third notch, the black socks with the gold toes, the windup metal monkey with the rusted metal drums that he’d kept on the counter beside the canister of flour for no reason you could remember, the pair of cufflinks, pretty as stars. You were eleven. You were a thief. You stole from his overcoat pockets and his picture frames. You stole the laces from his boots and the leather patch from the elbow of his sweater. You stole his books and his fishhooks, his homemade bow and his arrows, the map of stars that you pasted up to the ceiling above your head. Take it. Pack it.
“Just a few parts and some string,” Ada said. “Just a wheel and a harness.” She was explaining again how the Great Escapee had taken the pieces of one life to build another life. She was talking about courage. She was saying, The longer you wait, the harder it is, and sometimes you can’t know until you decide. She was Professor Ada Piekarz, talking her thoughts over yours, there and not here, basil sprouts and zurna songs in place of interminable brown. “You don’t want to be a plumber,” she said. “You love me,” she said. “Choose.”
She wrote her letter in purple glitter glue.
Her one single word: Now.
“Open it,” Grossmutter had said. Except the seal had already been broken. Maybe it was the Stasi who had read it before me. Maybe it was Grossmutter. Anything could crush a dream. You can’t make promises unless you’re sure you can keep them.
SO36
I sleep inside my own fumes, my hands ironed thin beneath my pillow, my skin too thin for the bones of my hip, which jut into the cushion on this couch like broken sticks. Now, I’d written, and I remember last winter when we crossed and Stefan was there wearing a big bear coat and an old man’s hat and you
could see, even so, his rare boy beauty. He was beside his grandmother, on their side of the wall, and he hadn’t seen me yet in my Köpi sweaters, blowing on my hands. It was threatening to snow, or hail. The skies were a thick woolly gray. Cumulonimbus on our side. Praecipitatio on his. The border guards were taking their time. Every now and then Stefan would bend toward his grandmother and offer her his hairy coat. She would shake her head, insist no, and then he would offer again, draping his bear arm around her shoulders, until she finally laughed. He loves her, I thought, and I felt terrified, because who belongs to whom? Isn’t that what we fear most? Being loved less? Being left out? Being chosen against?
“Hurry, Omi. Please,” I said. But we were caged in that line and Stefan was out there with his own life, keeping his small family warm. I was a fool that day when we finally made it through. Wouldn’t let go of his hand, wouldn’t leave his side, hardly looked at his grandmother, as if what she’d taken was mine. I made Stefan take me out to the balcony and show me the stars.
“It’s cloudy,” he said.
“I don’t care.”
I was wearing the bear coat by then. He was wearing an old sweater. His hands were slightly blue. His teeth were chattering. “What’s gotten into you?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Ada.”
“It’s just . . .”
“What?”
“It’s that I hate how much I love you, Stefan. I hate this.” I pointed behind us to his little room. “I hate that.” I pointed to the wall.
“It’ll work out,” he said, taking me into his arms.
“Not if you don’t leave, it won’t.”
Now, I’d written. Now. Now. And nothing’s come of it.
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
You head west toward the wall and to the idea of her, close. You tilt your head back, exhale your cold-breath cloud, and watch it fold, furl, cut the dark. If she’s there, on the other side, she’ll know it’s you, your hopes rising. Ada. You have your old gloves on, a roll in your pocket. You have an extra pair of socks in your bag, a hunk of cheese and bratwurst, the two pompoms you untied from your grandfather’s cap; he wouldn’t have minded, you’re sure of that. The bow you’ve slung across your shoulder seesaws back and forth whenever the wind picks up, slicing your jacket threads and creaking. Beside it, the cardboard quiver scratches your neck. In the streets the snow is dirtying beneath the tires of the Trabbis. From windows up above icicles snap. It’s early, not yet dawn. The dark hasn’t died but a pale day will come. The lights are on at the Delikat, in the windows of the early risers, in the weak eyes of the Trabbis, but still: You feel all alone and this isn’t a promise. This is you, testing the possible.