by Beth Kephart
By the time you reach the small park on the edge of things, the morning light is coming in. Through a break in the hedge you make your way, snow in your boots, loose snow in your hair. You pace it out. You set your pom-pom target in the nook of the biggest linden tree and measure back. You draw a line with the toe of your boot, slip the bow from your shoulder, your cardboard quiver, and try to remember what your grandfather taught you years and years ago. You were only small. You were only watching. You didn’t know he was going away for good. You didn’t know that someday you’d be here, in the loneliest big park, on winter’s coldest day, trying your luck at shooting arrows straight and free.
Ready now, you remove your gloves. You fit the bow into your left hand and you stand, easy as you can in the mocking brown cold, nocking the arrow into the string. You give the string elbow room as you pull back, all the way back, your right index finger at the line of your jaw and the string near the tip of your nose. When the string is taut, you release, and the string goes snap. The arrow flies off in a wooden wobble—whining away like a misfired missile and waking a bird you hadn’t seen in the tree. The arrow sinks at an angle. It strikes at the snow. The unpierced pom-poms sag in the cradle of the tree.
It was just a first shot, you think. A warm-up. Now, your hands cold, you notch the second arrow in, plant your feet, and put more bend into your knees. You pull, release, and follow through. The arrow flies east of your target, lands on the thick of the hedge.
“Nice shot,” a voice says, and you turn. It’s a tall kid, a punker, his arms crossed and his back slouched up against a smaller linden on the opposite side of the park. He stands there looking disappointed, like you owe him something, like he bought a ticket to see.
“What do you want?” you ask, getting the third arrow into the string and turning your back on the kid.
“You need some help with that?” he asks.
“Not really.”
“You sure?” You can hear the smirk in his voice.
“Yeah. Sure.” You lower the arrow, look up at the trees that circle the park, as if help is there, somewhere. You turn back and stare at the kid who has stubbornly settled in, one big sneaker up on the base of the tree. He wears a long coat that’s way too big, a cheap pair of jeans, and canvas sneakers. He has a black thatch of hair, and you don’t know the face behind it.
“Didn’t know it was regulation, shooting in a park like this,” he says, like he’s looking for some kind of conversation.
“Doing no harm.”
“The way you shoot, you could.”
“What do you want?”
“Name’s Lukas,” he says, pushing away from the tree now and coming toward you with one hand out—long hand, skinny fingers. The snow fills up the loose places in his sneakers. His coat whips around below his knees. You hear the Trabbis out there, in the street. You hear a bus warming its engine. Through the snow, into the snow, the kid tromps, but you’re not shaking his hand, because he’s not invited here. You work the string on the bow and the third arrow instead, but your hands are cold and shaking. If you plant and nock and then release, this arrow’s going nowhere.
“You’re leaning,” the kid says now. “That’s your problem.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s basic,” he says.
“You some kind of expert?”
“Sort of.”
“I guess it’s my lucky day, then.”
“Look,” he says. “It’s easy.”
His eyes are black all the way through. There’s red in his cheeks where the skin is frozen. He’s got a gold ring through the right flare of his nose, a string of leather at his neck, a freckled shell pulled through it. He doesn’t look the bow-and-arrow kind, but when he reaches for the bow, you let him take it.
“Some simple rules,” he says, very deliberate, something like hunger in his eyes or respect for the mechanics of bowstrings and arrows. “Pull straight back but keep your arms a little bent. Put both hands up to your nose. Keep your shoulders calm and low. It’s not your arm that does the pulling. It’s the muscles of your back, your shoulder blades.”
He shoves his hair away from his eyes and sets himself up for a shot. Lays the arrow across the arrow rest and settles it into the bowstring. He draws back across a perfect straight line, rubs at his jaw with his index finger. Finally he lets the arrow fly. It soars toward the tree, into the pom-pom.
“Aim small, miss small,” he says.
You shrug like you don’t believe it, like it doesn’t matter anyhow.
“You want to try?”
He chooses a fourth arrow from the quiver and hands it to you, like he’s being generous with your own grandfather’s stuff. You leave him standing there and head for the tree, where the pom-pom is a red heart bleeding. Now one by one you collect your things—the target, the arrow that made the mark, the two of them that didn’t, the cardboard quiver.
“What?” he asks.
“I’m late,” you say.
“All it takes,” he says, “is practice.”
SO36
I wake to quiet talk and a broken square of sun, the rattle of the gassy pipes that snake through the walls and beneath the floors of this old building, delivering nothing but noise. Beneath their lids my eyes feel hot with the propellant and the fumes. When I breathe I smell the sweet, harsh smell of paint. It hurts on the right side of my head and at the back of my throat, but if I move I will forfeit my advantage.
It comes to me in pieces—the first voice Mutti’s, the second not Omi nor Arabelle, not even German. It’s the voice of a man who doesn’t know this language well, a man, and my mother is laughing, that soft whisk whisk she does when she thinks no one who’s sleeping can hear her. She is telling him to wait. He is telling her no, look, the sky is up. Not the sky. He means the sun. The sun is up, it’s time to go; he says it right now, with a twist.
I blink and see fumes. I turn on the couch, sly, not enough to pop the soft kernels inside the old velour pillow. His hair is the color of strawberries smashed and preserved, set aside in a jar. His skin is winter. The bones in his cheeks strut up high and hungry, but his eyes sit crooked on their shelves—the left eye a little smaller than the right eye, and neither eye looking at Mutti.
The morning sun is a mirage.
There’s another lover in the kitchen.
So this is the one, I think. The canal one, the heartbreaker. This is the one, and he’s back, and my mother is tender, my mother is wearing that long sea-foam dress she wears when she thinks love is near, when she dares to believe in it; she’s always falling, my mother. Cut wide at the neck, the dress falls haphazard, exposing the bones of her shoulders—so delicate, so hollow. She holds the Garfield mug by its chipped handle and lets it swing back and forth from the crook of her finger. There’s a box of pastries on the table, its string snipped. There’s a trail of powdered sugar—two trails. The smoke I smell is from cigarettes, and not from Omi’s candle.
“Stay,” my mother says again, and the man says no so gently that it sounds like yes. He’s standing and she’s reaching for his hand. He says something about me, the girl on the couch. She says it doesn’t matter.
“I matter,” I say, interrupting my silence.
They turn at once, my mother acting like she’s so surprised to see me, like she didn’t realize until just now that we’re squatters and I sleep on an old found couch. It’s not their privacy that’s been taken; it’s mine. It’s not her smile that hurts so much; it’s her hope.
“Sweetheart,” she says, standing.
“What?”
“This is Sebastien.”
“No shit.”
She glares.
“What?” Her face is flushed, her skin looks wrong in that Valentine dress. She seems surprised (again) that I’m not happy, that I don’t remember all the other men and all the other loves and all the despair that comes after.
“Your manners.”
“Manners, Mutti?”
“Say hello.
”
“Hello, Sebastien.” Between tight lips, I say it.
I sit upright, pull my knees to my chin. I’m wearing my green sweatshirt with the hood, my yellow flannel pants. I’m wearing a blanket around my shoulders, cape style. Some of my hair has fallen over my eyes. When I squeeze my eyes shut I see pink.
“I have a question,” I say, mildly now, a brand-new tactic.
My mother looks hopeful. Please don’t look hopeful. “Ask it,” she says.
“Does Sebastien love you?”
“Ada!” My name like the snap of a whip.
“I was just wondering,” I say.
“Your mother’s lovely,” Sebastien says. “But of course we only just met.”
“What does of course mean?”
“Excuse me?”
“In that sentence. But of course we only just met.”
Sebastien takes a minute, smiles. He gets his face rearranged, and his posture, too, like dealing with sleep-deprived, pink-haired, brokenhearted almost-sixteen-year-old squatter kids is his specialty. “I’m from France,” he says.
“I can tell,” I say, “by your German.”
“I hear you paint.”
“I graff,” I say. “Write. With spray paint.”
“Maybe you’ll show me your work.”
“Maybe. If I finish it. If I want to.”
“No pressure,” Sebastien says, and it’s the right thing to say, and I am stumped so I shrug and suddenly I’m not at all interested in the conversation. Suddenly I know—or I remember—that Sebastien will come and Sebastien will go, like all of Mutti’s men, and that this is not something I can protect Mutti from, because I’ve failed every time in the past. Being nice hasn’t worked and being mean doesn’t either, and there are other priorities, as a matter of fact. There are other people in the world who need much more than Mutti does. I have to find out what Meryem knows. I have to find Savas. I have to make sure that Arabelle will be fine. I have to get Omi her bratwurst. I have to get up, take a shower. I have to mail another letter.
“Sebastien,” I say, knocking the hair from my eyes. “It’s very nice to meet you.” Emphasizing the very so he knows I don’t actually mean it, and giving my mother a faux smile. I stand up from the couch, shake sleep fuzz from my foot, rearrange the slack blanket-cape on my shoulders. “You don’t mind if I use the bathroom?” I ask, fake-demure.
Sebastien looks from me to my mom and laughs, so ridiculously handsome. “She’s just like you promised,” he says to Mutti.
My mother isn’t laughing.
Arabelle’s bike was gone, so I walked, my damp hair drying stiff as a board in the winter air. When I turned and looked back, I found my mother in the window, watching, nobody beside her and her eyes too round, and I hated me for the things I’d said. I hated the fact of this fact: I cannot protect Mutti without also hurting Mutti. Or. I have forgotten how that’s done.
In the bell tower of St. Thomas Church the nine o’clock chimes ring, crystal pure, and I wonder if Stefan is listening. I wonder if the machines of the Eisfabrik stop to let the chimes through, and if they don’t, does Stefan hear them anyway, the way that once, he said, he heard me crying. It was back when I was fourteen and still in school, before my job at the day care. It was the afternoon, the bell had rung, and I was walking the narrow strip between the wall and SO36 when I felt a hard, hot knock on the back of my neck. Spinning, angry, I saw twin-looking brothers with identical hooked noses and slits instead of eyes, slacking Os for mouths. The O mouths were laughing as if they’d gotten me good, as if there was nothing they thought I could ever do—just one of me and two of them between the wall and the edge of the Kiez.
“What for?” I’d demanded. One hand on my hip, one hand on the back of my neck, rubbing hard.
“Because of the freak in you,” they’d said. Together, as if they’d rehearsed it.
The chip of steaming coal was at my feet. The heat of its burn was in my skin. In their steamed-up tower beyond the wall, the border guards were watching. Anything could happen in the West, and the guards would let it go. Anything between two boys and a girl, and they’d sit with their feet up and their rifles greased and turn it into a show. I knew that. There were stories. I should have turned and run, shouldn’t have still been there when the dare went down. Five marks to kiss me, one of the ugly boys said. Seven marks for tongue.
I was wearing a pair of shoes with wooden heels, a backpack with everything in it. My hair was orange, long, and wild. They were on me like wolves with their filthy snouts, and I fought with everything I had, but they won. The boys won. Left me on the ground with my jacket broke and my backpack split, and I’ve never walked that part of the Kiez again, and I never told Mutti, but she knew. I wobbled up those stairs and into the flat and she knew, tears in her eyes like she had seen it from her window, like this was history, repeating itself. “Take a shower, love,” she said, and I stayed in the heat until it burned me all over, until I was erased by the steam, and even today there’s a mark where the hot coal struck and shadows where the welts had risen when I let the water burn, but right then, that day, I couldn’t leave the shower, I couldn’t turn the water off, because if I did, they’d hear me crying. I was angry at everyone, not just at the boys. I was angry at the guards who watched, angry at Mutti who knew, angry at Omi for the way she watched me, angry at Stefan for not being in the West where he belongs.
If Stefan lived here, it wouldn’t have happened.
If Stefan lived here, I would always be safe.
Safe and nobody’s freak. Not ever. Safe, and somebody’s girlfriend.
Two weeks later, it was our time to visit and Stefan was there, waiting at the crossing as Omi and I exchanged our marks and showed our papers and were finally let through to his side. His wide arms were around me in a second. His words were in my ear.
“I’ve been so worried, Ada.”
I said nothing.
“I thought I heard you crying.”
Don’t make me start, I thought. Don’t make me.
He ran his fingers through my hair. They stopped at the rough patch of the welt where the chip of coal had struck. He stepped back, looked into me, and kissed me on the bad place. Omi was calling, impatient. Stefan wouldn’t hear her, wouldn’t stop.
“What is this?” he asked.
“It’s nothing,” I sniffed.
“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “All right? We promised not to be liars.”
But I couldn’t say, and I couldn’t stop the tears, and suddenly my fists were pounding against his icemaker’s chest, my tears were stains on his thin blue jacket.
“It’s going to be fine,” he finally said. “Whatever it is.”
“It will never be fine, Stefan. Okay?”
There wasn’t time to explain, and I couldn’t.
Stefan crouched down and took Omi’s little white suitcase of long-ago photos into one hand. He kept his other hand on me. We all went forward into the smudged air of the East, none of us talking, Stefan as close as he could be. To his flat and through the door and then he put down that suitcase, and we left the grandmothers together, making tea. Out on the balcony, it was just the two of us, and I was mixed up between love and anger.
“You dyed your hair,” he finally said.
“Pink,” I mumbled.
“You cut it,” he said, “like Cleopatra.”
And we stood there staring, out over the wall, past the asshole guards, toward the church, down the canal, to the place where the boys had been mean. We stood there and we didn’t say a thing. And for a long, long time, that was enough for me.
“It was only a kiss,” I finally said. “And it wasn’t my choice. Believe me.”
There’s nothing but slush on the ground. The boot prints and shoe prints and cart trails and tires are all obliterations. At the Bethaniendamm the artists smoke outside on the steps, they drink their coffees, they stand huddled together, three to a shawl, but not Sebastien, so far as I can see, with his
Frenchified German, his one eye smaller than the other, his first wrong impressions of me. It’s early, too early, and I circle the church, walk around to the back that used to be the front, before the wall went up so close. My graffs are how I left them. My blues are radiant, true. Arabelle’s fill isn’t bad after all. My wall tells a story; it speaks. A boy on a bike sails by behind me, a basket of bread tied to his fender. Two old ladies pass, their chins dipped down, the hems of their aprons dragging beneath the thready edges of their dark wool coats. A skanky dog with mud on its snout takes a big sniff of my ankles, and still I stand here looking at the wall. Bread and Toilet. Tightrope. Boot in the face. I think about Savas and Meryem, about the things they know, have seen. I think about fear, how it sticks. I think, If Stefan doesn’t answer soon . . .
If he actually doesn’t.
The bells above my head are silent.
The guards in their smeary tower are likely asleep.
A rat with an abominable tail scuttles by.
My graffing is good. My graffing is a promise.
Stefan.
I back away and head off in the other direction, round the red drum of the church. There’s much inside—Herr Palinski and his ten-fingered Bach. I walk the distance and lean against the door; it gives. The inside of St. Thomas Church is tall and white and hollow. It feels cratered out by the moon—arched and swollen, ruffling up. Everyone who has ever sung for Herr Palinski has quit, infuriated by his impossible perfectionism. But when he plays his Bach in his black turtleneck all is forgiven, and people say that it’s like Bach himself has been resurrected inside the church that God protected from the bombs.