by Beth Kephart
Herr Palinski playing is an artist working and I sit alone with this song that slides against itself and rises high inside the echoing caverns. Any movement I make is a mistake, and so I sit with my feet still and my fingers quiet as the Bach goes out in waves and skims the fluted columns, the walls, the tinted light of the arched windows, the dried flowers from weeks ago. The old part of the song crests against the new part, doubling it, restoring it, and it is not until the song is over that I realize that I’m not alone in here with Herr Palinski and his Bach. In the far balcony, the reverend sits, his hands pushed together in prayer. He wears his everyday clothes and his California glasses. He lifts one hand and waves, a sign that I should wait, and now I hear his footsteps on the interior stairs. His footsteps, then nothing, then the reverend again, hurrying down the center aisle on his way to me.
“Ada Piekarz,” he says.
“Reverend Schindler.”
“To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“The Bach,” I say, and he nods.
He sits beside me, presses his fingers to his chin, and waits for the next concerto to begin. “No. 5 in F Minor,” he says. “The second movement.” It’s the wedding song, the processional, and it’s so goddamned beautiful holy.
“Oh, God,” I say, and there’s crying in the word. Reverend Schindler slides his big pale hand over mine and nods and that’s it, because that’s all there has to be when Herr Palinski plays Concerto No. 5. We don’t move until the song is over. We don’t move until Herr Palinski stands and hurries through his sheets of music, his head bowed, his eyes avoiding ours. The door flies open, the cold air blows through. The door bangs shut again. The reverend takes his hand from mine.
“I have heard about Savas,” he says. “And I am sorry.”
FRIEDRICHSHAIN
There are things that you’ll need. There are lies that you’ll tell. That night, in your room, you sketch a thousand different versions of a flying fox. That morning you read gravity and physics. You go through the trunk of your grandfather’s things looking for gadgets or signs. You scope low on the balcony, pursuing breaks in the walls, narrow channels, passable distances, chances. You go back into your room and close the door and practice your posture with arrows.
When you arrive at the park, he’s there, sitting in a crook, a pyramid of dirty snowballs on the ground beneath him, snug against the base of the tree. His feet dangle in their too-big sneaks. He’s got a cup of something steaming in one hand.
“You’re a little late,” he says.
Is it a jab? Is it friendly? You don’t know; how could you know?
He shrugs. Swings his legs, loose and long, knocking the dirty hem of his trench coat and exhaling hard, cold, white breaths. He looks like he’s been here all night, guarding the linden, angling for practice, getting bored and blaming you. You stare at him through the dawn, across the park. You watch him take a long sip from his steaming cup, blow on the naked flesh of his hands, leave the trench coat open to the black T-shirt, the dangle of chains at his neck. He slurps and jumps and the snow splats, and now he’s pulling something out of the ripped lining of his ruined trench coat, all of it hard to see, given the light. He turns back toward the tree, lifts his arms, and curses. He steps aside, and that’s when you see what he’s done. A puny bull’s-eye target, handpainted. Hung by a string from a low branch, but not the lowest.
“What’s that?” you ask.
“You can’t shoot at pom-poms,” he says. “Seriously, man. You just can’t.” He finds more in his cup. He swallows it down.
There’s no waiting this guy out. He’s there, and you’re here, and if you turn back now, walk away, he wins and you lose all the time you gained by coming long before they’ll start looking for you at the Eisfabrik. You ease the quiver to the ground and select an arrow. You unhook the bow from your shoulder, plant your scruffy boots in the slush, nock in.
Click.
“Hook your fingers,” he calls to you. “Ease off the grip.”
You think he shouldn’t stand too close to the target. You think that if he’s smart, if he gets you at all, wants to help himself, even, he’ll back off, but now he leans forward, his free hand on his bony kneecap, like he’s waiting for your best pitch. Like he’s doing you a favor.
“It’s all in your back,” he tells you now. “And in your teeth.”
You lower the arrow, the bow, break the stance. You stare at the skinny kid with his black thatch hair and at the birds that have come in behind him—all of them brown, all of them shivery, taking a dirty-snow bath on the far hedge.
“Consistency is in the teeth,” he says, straightening now, putting his hands on his hips. “Trust me on this.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got medals,” he says. “At home, I do.”
He lowers his mug to the ground, rubs his hands together, and goes off on a tangent you can’t actually follow about frogs and elastic and the principles of physics. Your hand hooks. Your teeth close. You concentrate all your power in the ridge between your shoulder blades. When the arrow flies, it zings, busting a hole straight through the paint-and-cardboard target before it arcs to the ground and sticks, a headless flower. Out of nowhere, the rabbit returns, twitchy and unhappy, leaving a track of panic in the old snow. Beyond the park and the trees there is the sound of kids singing an old schoolyard song. You remember the song. You’re not a kid anymore. But Lukas—the kid—is whistling.
“See that?” he says.
You nod.
“Just checking,” he says.
He fits his big hand inside his torn coat and digs out target number two, which is white and blue, painted on old newsprint with a stiff and reckless brush. It comes out crumpled and bent. He snaps it straight, waves it in front of your eyes, makes sure you’re watching. He thinks you can be dazzled. He waits.
“What else you have in there?” you ask.
“Where?”
“Your pocket? That coat?”
“Oh, that,” he says, his brow crinkling to help him think. “A bar of chocolate, I guess. A pack of pencils. Keys to the bike lock. An old map. My uncle’s compass.” He seems genuinely interested in the answer to this question. Pleased that you would ask. He tips his chin and salutes, Young Pioneers style. Carries target number two over to the far hedge, where the birds had been busy, but now they fly off, distressed. He prepares a ridge and sets the target upright. He stands there, snow in his shoes, trench coat open, black T-shirt stretched across his boy ribs, pointing at the target—a smaller mark, a bigger distance. You raise the bow. You nock. You’re not doing this for him.
“Follow it through,” he calls out. “All right? Relax your wrists. Keep your thumb beneath the line of your jaw.” He’s farther away, so it’s harder to hear. It’s easier to listen. You know the arrow is through the second you release it. You don’t move, don’t even blink, until you hear the paper shred.
“And there we have it,” he says, throwing his arms up, victory style. He hurdles the hedge, and a Trabbi honks. He returns, the arrow high in one hand, his trench coat flapping as he hurdles back into the park. He plucks the other arrow from the ground on his way toward you. Scoops up his coffee cup. Smiles crooked. Only one side of his face, you realize, actually smiles.
“What’s your story, anyway?” you ask, as he slips your arrows back inside the quiver.
“A little of this,” he says. “A little of that.”
“You planning to show up every day, or something?”
“Aren’t you?”
Like you’re really going to answer that.
Like you won’t look for him again, the next day and the day after that, Lukas with his arrow smarts. Lukas with his targets—handpainted, freshly made.
SO36
“MissAdaMissAdaMissAda.”
“Yes, honey.”
“MissAda.”
“She just asks for you,” Henni says. “She won’t tell me a thing.”
Henni in her bunchy sweater dress. M
eryem in the aqua coat with the loose wool weave. I’d heard the crying from down the hall and run. I’d opened the door and found them, one beside the other at the narrow, speckled table, Meryem’s fists to her eyes, Henni’s big arm dragged across Meryem’s delicate shoulders, nobody else around and a pot of oatmeal overcooking on the stove, a tea bag gone cold in a cracked mug.
“What’s happened?” I’d snapped the burner heat off and come. I’d stood here, looking from one to the other, trying to figure it out.
“Don’t know. She was dropped off and she hasn’t stopped crying.”
“Well, what did her father say?”
“It wasn’t her father. Not her mother, either.”
“Who?”
“A woman.”
“A woman?”
“In a maroon burqa, blue sandals, a stack of bangles up her wrist. That’s what I saw, Ada. That’s it. She’d had Meryem by the hand. It was early still, so the door was locked. I’d heard her knocking and when she saw me coming, she left. I’d called to her. She didn’t stop. She was in some massive hurry.”
“And Meryem isn’t saying?”
“You see how it is.” Henni lets the zigzags crowd into her brow. The floppy charcoal cowl of her dress has swallowed half her chin. She totters on the tiny chair, doesn’t take her arm from Meryem, or her eyes from me.
“Meryem, sweetie, I’m here,” I say, fitting my too-big butt into the half scoop of the chair on her left side. I try to take her hand, but she needs both fists to hide her eyes. I scan her head, her jacket, her yellow plastic boots, looking for trauma signs, scars, but whatever has hurt her is inside and she’s sobbing too hard to try to tell me.
“How early?” I ask Henni.
“Fifteen minutes ago.”
“What did the woman say?”
“Nothing. I told you.”
For half a second, Meryem swipes her fists from her eyes, then swipes them back, like erasers on a chalkboard. In that split half second I see enough to know she’s terrified. There’s a crust of something, I see now, on the tips of her boots. Not old snow. Not mud, exactly.
“Meryem,” I ask, “can you tell me what’s wrong?”
She shakes her head side to side, her long black hair slapping. She kicks her dangling feet. The chair tips. I catch it.
“Would juice help?”
Her hair slaps.
“Will cookies?”
No. She shakes her head.
“I think she needs some privacy,” Henni says. “Before the others come.” The blush on one side of her face is gone, rubbed off. The blue lines beneath her eyes have smeared. Henni’s been watching kids her whole life long. If she knows anything, it’s when to be worried. Henni’s worried.
I check the flag-faced clock on the wall, the time told in our national colors. Ten minutes before school begins. Five minutes before the others come wheeling and squealing, shouting Mine, digging for playdough, bothering Henni for an early cup of something, ignoring Markus and his songs. If Meryem’s here like this when the kids come in, they’ll all be crying by 10:15; sadness in day care is contagious. I crouch close and fit my arms beneath the weave of her coat, the little pair of elastic-waistband jeans. She kicks and twists, but lets me take her. She knots her arms around my neck and cries harder.
“We’re just going to take a little walk,” I say.
“Miss Ada.” She clings to me like a suction cup and warms my neck with her breath.
Markus is heading down the hall when he sees us and stops, asks me with his eyebrows what’s wrong.
“Just a little upset,” I say, and now he turns and follows me to the door, heaves it open to the wind. Beyond, on the outside walk, I see the twins running ahead of their mother, racing each other to the entrance on this side of the administrative wing. They see me headed in the wrong direction and yank up short. Markus waves them in with insistent hands and the promise of hot chocolate.
“Go on with Markus,” I tell the twins. “Everything’s fine.” I walk fast, my coat flapping behind me, Meryem shifting in my arms. Her black hair gusts with the wind.
“Herr Palinski is practicing,” I tell Meryem as we reach the sanctuary door. “Do you want to listen?”
The jug of her chin goes up and down.
“We’ll be his audience,” I say. “He’d really like that.”
“Okay.” She shudders. I hurry us deep into the belly of the church, away from the wind that tumbles in behind, toward Herr Palinski, who is still playing Bach like a four-armed man, like Berlin—both sides—is listening. Slowly Meryem eases in, lets me sit with her in a lonesome pew. She tilts her head and looks up, as if the music is coming from high in the church’s hollows, or from the tenacious stain of the windows. Her ducky-yellow boots flop sideways. Her back scoops my ribs.
She takes a long quivering breath. She sucks a fingertip. She curls in close and I hold her, remembering Stefan and the next time I visited, six months after the attack. This time it was June. He had borrowed a motorbike from a friend, and a pair of banged-up helmets. We waited until after Omi and Grossmutter had put on their tea and settled. We took the steps to the lobby, then went out, silently, to the street, and climbed on the machine. I was wearing a purple peasant skirt and lime-green flip-flops, the brown T-shirt with the sleeves I’d replaced with the lace of a dress I’d grown out of. I sat on the hem of my skirt, front and back, so that it double parachuted up around me. I let the wind skim through my diaphanous sleeves and pressed against the thin white jacket that he wore, faux leather.
His hair was longer then, toward his shoulders. We buzzed through the streets, weaving in and out of traffic, breathing sideways through our noses. We stayed close to the wall, skirted the checkpoint, traveled south and west, past bars spilling out onto the street, past ladies in winter coats and sunglasses, beneath lines of clothes hung in the brown air to dry, beside dogs leashed to the stop sign posts, past houses divided, the chainsaw architecture of his Berlin. He was taking us to Treptower, to his side of the River Spree, and I said nothing because there was no hearing anything over the spit of the motorbike.
Over the bridge we went and toward the forest. Through the forest and along the splitting waterways, the hairy grasses, the old, clobbered trees, until, through the fence I could see the endless around of the Ferris wheel and the noses of the floating swans of Plänterwald, the amusement park where the Bloc kids go. Stefan cut the engine on the bike and stopped. He lifted the helmet from his head, turned, unsnapped the strap at my chin. He kissed me like he does. On the thin bridge of my nose first. And after that, on the fat part of my lips.
“It’s your birthday,” he said.
“May is my birthday.”
“You were over there,” he says. “I was over here. So today is the day.”
“If you want,” I said. “Okay.” He’d gotten taller than before. His eyes were more blue. Sometimes I looked at him and knew what he would be when he was old, but that day, when I looked at him, I remembered how he was as a kid. His head too big for his body. His incisor teeth too short for the rest of his smile.
Outside the entrance gate somebody had filled a low plastic pool with soapy water and had attached loops of thick yarn to sticks. A crowd had formed—kids and parents, grandparents; it didn’t matter. They were all standing there with these loopy sticks, moving them around like a conductor until a breeze blew and bubbles threaded through. Long bubbles, the size of sewer pipes. Funny-shaped things like luminescent trombones. Big soap animals with hovering wings. Cloud alphabets. Wet Slinkys. Only one of the kids in the crowd couldn’t be convinced. She was little, stood apart, a pair of leopard-trimmed sunglasses on, a braid attached to her head with a polka-dot bow. She watched the upward drift from an angle, plugged her ears every time one would pop. She was only four or five, but she already knew too much. Or that’s what it seemed like to me.
We were wearing the helmets by their straps around our wrists. We fit our hands together anyhow, and the helmets knocked as
we walked through the gate and into the park. Stefan said it was my day. He said we could do whatever I wanted to do, but all I wanted was to be with him, to hold his hand, to let the helmets clack. It was more like a zoo than an amusement park—the bright cages and the Quik Cup ride, the little train on the tracks, the wood-necked swans down in the bumper-car pit. All the screams from things that moved too fast. It was making me dizzy and my stomach hurt and we walked the park’s edges and across the footbridges until finally I said, “I choose the Ferris wheel,” and Stefan said, “I knew that you would.”
When it was our turn we climbed in, let the guy close the metal door behind us. The little girl with the leopard shades was in the car ahead, knuckling the bar with both fists. When everyone was in and the wheel wound high, I waited, and everything stopped. We could see all of Berlin from there. The churches on both sides. The schools on both sides. The old buildings and the new buildings and the bombed-out places and the barbs and metal and meshes and bricks of everything that divides us.
I leaned toward Stefan. I told him the truth. “Those boys. They hurt me worse than I said.”
We were up there in the brown clouds of East Berlin. He looked at me for a long time, his eyes changing color, the muscles in his neck hardening into cords. It was like he couldn’t speak, like all the words he knew had been snatched from him.
“Say something,” I said. “Why won’t you?” Trembling up there. Afraid not just of what had happened, but of what he would think because he knew.
But he couldn’t talk, or he wouldn’t, and then when he finally did his sentences came out broken, unfinished. “Sons of bitches,” he said. “Sons of . . .” Lifting one fist from the bar, beginning to bang. Bang. Bang. Our seat swaying. Our world, already halved, falling harder apart.